Wider influence of the fossil fuel industry on culture and charities
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Version 0 of 1. Natural history museums are not the only US cultural institutions influenced by climate change deniers (Report, 24 March). US theatre is doing a good job of censorship of plays that attempt a new aesthetic reaction to our planetary emergency. The Sloane Foundation has a special grant to sponsor development of plays “about science”, but it is General Motors money and has yet to fund one play about global warming. The Edgerton Fund for New Plays is money from coal, ditto on its record. The artistic director of New York’s premiere not-for-profit theatre told me had already done one play on “the subject”. But that play arrived at his theatre endowed with $600,000 in funding from the National Institutes of Health and was attacked by deniers. It seems likely that on every board of directors of every major not-for-profit cultural institution sit influential members whose money comes from extractive energy investments. My play Extreme Whether had to be funded by contributions from our audience. It is based on the stories of Drs James Hansen and Jennifer Francis, whose research earned them vicious attacks at the hands of the deniers. Hansen and Francis have seen the play and praised it highly. They thought this play would impact a wide audience, reigniting in Hansen’s words “their love of nature”. We were selling out, but could not find one producer to take on the play. A production at one theatre in Boston seemed certain until a professor who monitors its science plays got hold of the script and forbade it.Karen MalpedeTheater Three Collaborative, New York • Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust (Opinion, 26 March), says “fossil fuels are essential to the economy, life and health, and remain so for decades”. Yet, aggressive exploration to locate even more unburnable stocks is wrecking nature by causing insect-borne diseases to become ever more widespread. If we have a real hope for the Paris climate conference to come to an effective result, then the Wellcome Trust had better divest while these investments are still saleable. Aart HeestermanBirmingham |