How can art address climate crisis?
December 03, 2025
What’s the point of art during a climate crisis?
UVic Master’s student Braedon Lowey found himself stuck on this question while studying literature. In the face of climate catastrophe with ever-more-visible impacts on human and non-human life, why bother doing art at all?
The question led him first to contract wildland firefighting, and then to his Master’s project, a documentary film titled A Fire to Last Until Morning. The answer, Lowey found, was not just in talking to climate-engaged artists about their work, but in creating art himself.
“Film was a much more accessible medium for people to encounter this research,” he says. Because the film was the first graduate project in the English department to take this form, Lowey was excited to find a different way to express knowledge and research. Just as importantly, film allowed Lowey to visually depict the landscapes that featured artists were engaging with, bringing viewers directly onto the frontlines of climate crisis.
The content, too, was interdisciplinary—Lowey interviewed poets and novelists, but also journalists, theatre artists and musicians.
The film begins in the village of Lytton, BC. On June 30, 2021—the day after Lytton set a Canadian all-time temperature high during the heat dome with a temperature of 49.6 °C—a wildfire swept through the community, destroying most structures. Lowey travelled to the village, where he interviewed poet Megan Fandrich, author of Burning Sage (Caitlin Press, 2023). In her words, her work “puts words on the experience [of climate catastrophe] for others.”
For Lowey, the arts are a way to unite people with a shared experience and narrative—a crucial aspect of coping with climate catastrophe that he witnessed in Lytton, a small, tight-knit community of about 250 residents.
“The art that we make and the research that we do is empowering people to cope with climate change and to change their actions in ways that facilitate better outcomes.”
But beyond working as an avenue to handle the very real trauma of living through climate crisis, Lowey argues that art can also lead to policy change. In an interview with UVic Writing Professor Sean Holman, who works on the Climate Disaster Project, Lowey delved into the ways that personal testimony about the impacts of climate crisis can, through journalistic investigations, instigate policy change and awareness-building.
Off-campus, Lowey’s research took him much further afield—all the way to Iceland, where receding glaciers are a starkly visual indicator of a changing climate. Funded by the Richard and Margaret Beck Student Travel Award, he visited the corpse of the world’s first glacier to be declared dead due to climate change: Okjökull. Declared dead in 2014, Okjökull’s loss prompted both a documentary film, Not Ok, and the installation of a plaque with an inscription by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, titled “A letter to the future.”
Okjökull is an eerie glimpse into the future for Canada, where glaciers continue to recede at an accelerated rate due to warming temperatures. Okjökull’s memorial plaque, installed in August 2019, includes the global atmospheric carbon dioxide reading for that month: 415 ppm. In November 2025, that number has increased to 426 ppm.
Lowey interviewed Magnason, who is also the author of On Time and Water (Biblioasis, 2021), a book on climate change.
“I got to speak to these artists who are working with the geological features of the country before they’re gone,” Lowey said. “There’s an impending grief that they’re dialling into that we’re experiencing here too, as we lose so much of our old growth or towns and forests that we love to climate change or resource extraction. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia:’ grief for something we expect to lose.”
For Lowey, the most crucial role of art in climate crisis is to move people—artists and the public alike—through that space of grief, into action. Converting people to the cause doesn't have to always be the goal, either — for environmentalists who are already in the thick of that action, art can also raise awareness about their work and empower them to do more, which is just as impactful. Looking forward, he’s hoping to go back to wildland firefighting, and to keep making films that engage critically with climate crisis.
“For many years, I was in that state of paralysis, feeling that there’s nothing we can do. The more we engage with those feelings of anxiety and grief and nihilism, the more we can process them and then move forward with them into action.”