LILY COLE

COP26 marks a time to take action

In recent weeks, I have found myself navigating the past century as both an activist and an actor. At the COP26 climate summit, I have been staring down the stark realities of our moment; meanwhile I have also been playing Mathilda Nilsson (1844–1923), a spiritualist and editor, in director Lasse Hallström’s biopic Hilma, about the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint who helped pioneer western abstract art. Hilma’s art was born out of 10 years’ work with four women — a group who nicknamed themselves “The Five” — Mathilda among them. The Five explored art, spiritualism and sexuality in weekly seances at the turn of the 20th century. It was a time of ferment: the Church was losing power, trade was bringing eastern ideas to the west, and women were soon to win political advances.

And yet even the intellectual elites of the day generally failed to question the idea of “civilising” the world. Take the educator Rudolf Steiner, a contemporary of Hilma’s, who asked in 1906: “To what extent are uncivilised peoples capable of becoming civilised? . . . And in what way ought we to deal with them?” A little over a century later the scientific consensus, as UN secretary-general António Guterres states, is that humanity is at the “edge of an abyss”. Can we halt what many scientists call the beginning of the Sixth Mass Extinction? To answer this question, we must now look to the communities that colonisers sought to “civilise.”

I recently wrote a book, Who Cares Wins, which explored a thousand diverse solutions to the climate crisis: for me, indigenous wisdom is at the top of the list. Indigenous wisdom is often tens of thousands of years old; and while comprising less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, indigenous peoples protect 80 per cent of global biodiversity.

This article was published by the FT on November 20th 2021. The rest of the article is available here, on the Financial Times website