Hello.
My name is John Holmes.
I'm Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham and
Deputy Director of the Institute for Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Maths
in Culture and Society.
I'm here at Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, about 20 miles from the University of Birmingham.
At universities, we do a lot of research into the science of our changing environments.
At the University of Birmingham, we have the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research for
example, which is running one of the biggest climate change experiments in the world.
But we've also realised that we need the arts and the humanities as well as the science
to help us to understand climate change and how to respond to climate change.
We need, for instance, to understand the history of our relationship to the natural world.
We need to learn from other cultures and other societies that have different ways of existing
in nature.
And we need to be able to imagine alternative futures where we can live sustainably with
the rest of the planet.
It's because we're interested in pursuing that work that we're keen to work with Ruskin
Land and the Guild of St George in a forest site, thinking through how those questions
of the humanities and the arts can help us to engage with climate change.
We were looking to partner with an academic institution that would give a real time-depth
to the work here.
The Guild is an educational charity and we feel we've got a fantastic asset here that
really would benefit from more involvement with an organisation such as Birmingham University,
where you've got this multi-disciplinary team bringing in literature, as well as the more
scientific aspects of the study.
The Guild of St George own Ruskin Land.
This area of woodland was given by George Baker to Ruskin's Guild of St George in the
1870s.
Ruskin Land as been a bit of a sleepy hollow for most of the 20th Century.
And when my wife and I moved here in 2004, we set to about regenerating Uncllys Farm
by replanting orchards, getting the house sorted and then building the Ruskin Studio
and we then started to turn our attention with Jenny Robbins to looking at the woodland,
which again had basically been through a policy of laissez-faire - just leave it, let nature
take its course.
Hello, I'm Dion Dobrzynski.
And my research project combines two of my great loves - literature and the natural environment.
And it uses the literary imagination and thinks about the literary imagination in a way that
addresses the greatest challenges of our century.
I've been working collaboratively in partnership with Ruskin Land, running immersive woodland
walks and interactive workshops, with a group of undergraduate students.
My doctoral research is investigating the way forests and forest ecology is represented
in fantasy literature.
And what I've found is fascinating is the way these imaginary forests are sharpening
the students' perception and enrichening their understanding of the real forest environment
around them here at Ruskin Land.
Here in the Dragons Nest, which is a sculpture built out of found dead wood here in the forest
and it's slowly going to decay and fall back into the forest floor, but it's a wonderful
space because it opens your eyes up into the canopy and then we've been having some stimulating
discussions and doing the readings from the fantasy texts.
We've worked with various different architecture schools and so on.
I think the new aspect to all this, is that rather than just working with the materials
as we have been, working through people like Dion coming here as PhD students and working
much more through the arts.
We're starting work now, building up a new project on John Ruskin himself.
Reconnecting Ruskin Land as a site with the city of Birmingham.
John Ruskin was one of the most influential Victorians.
He was an artist and intimately drew the natural world.
He was a writer.
He was a social critic.
And above all, he was a teacher.
Through looking closely at nature, John Ruskin came to realise that it was essential to all
of us to have that intimate connection with the natural world.
That social justice depended as much as anything on environmental justice.
Ruskin saw the damage that the industrial revolution was wreaking.
He saw the pollution but he also, way back in the 1870s, realised that climate change
was happening, realised that animals and birds and plants were going extinct.
Ruskin's idea was that the working man should have access to beautiful things - to art and
nature and that the workers would be able to come out into this beautiful place and
see beautiful things.
In my lifetime, I will likely witness radical changes in the way we live.
So, what we're doing in this project is trying to remobilise Ruskin's insights.
Trying to return to his books but also trying to build up that connection between Ruskin
Land and the city of Birmingham, which is at the origin of this site - because Ruskin
Land was first given to Ruskin by the Mayor of Birmingham.
So, to build up that connection again we're going to be working with artists from Birmingham,
with inner-city schools from Birmingham.
We're going to bring them to Ruskin Land.
We're going to think through how a site like this - a forest like this can enable you to
think about and respond to environmental justice.
And those artworks and those educational materials that we're going to create together with these
artists and with these schools are going to go back to Birmingham and we're going to put
them into the school curriculum, we're going to put them into galleries and reconnect Ruskin
Land with Birmingham itself.
It's a slightly scary place for those who live in an urban environment who are from
different backgrounds.
Encouraging more people to come here to enjoy this natural beauty is very important to us.
We're not just reading about forests and seeking to understand ecological issues associated
with forests in the library, we're bringing the texts out into a real forest environment.
So the value added from people coming here and learning about things, writing about things,
that's really important to the Guild of St George.
We're standing at a crossroads in our history around our relationship to the environment.
The choices we've been making over the last 100 years, 150 years since Ruskin himself
was alive, have put us in a perilous position in relation to climate change and environmental
destruction.
We now need to think about how we're going to address that problem and the arts and humanities
are crucial to doing that and Ruskin himself is crucial too.
And I want to share with you just a few words from Ruskin on that predicament which stand
today on a testimony to where we are.
Ruskin wrote "Change must come.
But it ours to determine whether change of growth or change of death".
Those are the predicaments that we're facing.
Those are the questions that we're trying to answer, here at Ruskin Land, in the University
of Birmingham.