Earth Day Workshop Report 2024

We launched a new collaborative game-based workshop tentatively titled “Crisis Origins” that uses the same format as the Climate Fresk. By all accounts it went down well although there are still some rough edges.

The game demands players to lay out the causes of the crisis by order of importance, according to the players’ opinions. It identifies 27 separate reasons why we are in crisis now, both the ones that put us here, and the ones that are stopping us resolving it.

We held it in the Islington Climate Centre in Angel, which is a cool space, currently with a climate change photo exhibition by Gideon Mendel on display.

The idea is to work with participants who are already familiar with the worrying climate facts like the ones in these charts:

Everyone discussed the causes of the climate crisis intensely and dealt with all the personal, psychological, social, cultural, political, economic and business-related issues.

After the game, the challenge was to discuss and come up with ways forward that took into account the post-workshop frustration that many people feel after a decent climate workshop when they feel the optimism and sense of action starting to slip away under the imperative of everyday life.

Here’s the material we used to inform the discussion some more:

This links to our manifesto, created in partnership with EcoCore: Don’t Wait for the Cavalry

By Adam Hardy

Zoologist at heart. Environmentalist by necessity. Stage hand, financial trader, secretary, card payments designer, software developer, fossil fuel big data warehouse consultant. Amateur psychologist. Now climate change salvage engineer.