The Art, Biodiversity & Climate (ABC) Network is a new Network within TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, launched in 2021.

The climate crisis, the collapse of our planet’s biodiversity and growing social inequality are crises that are inherently and inextricably linked. As social awareness of the interdependency of human culture and natural systems grows, new urgency is added to our efforts to extricate ourselves from extractivist habits and mind-sets that have led us to this ecological dead-end. While we have long recognized the need to change the way we think about and relate to our environments, in practice, the shift has proven difficult.

​

 Not only does policy lag behind the science, but our cosmologies, stories and “picturings” of the natural world have struggled to catch up and provide us with alternative ways to perceive and therefore act in the world. This challenge calls for a radical collective effort: no one field can claim to hold the solutions to a crisis that is as much cultural and spiritual as it is environmental.

​

 The Art, Biodiversity, and Climate Network (ABC Network) brings together members of the Oxford ONE network, the Biodiversity Network, the Oxford Climate Research Network and ​The Flute & Bowl: Oxford Art and Science to bridge the gap that separates the Humanities Division (and, more specifically, the arts, music, performance and dance) from the crucial research into conserving our planetary support systems taking place in the MPLS Division. This network engages creative practitioners and researchers to build a new common imaginarium of the world as-it-could-be, transcending academic disciplinary boundaries and short-term political incentives.

​

Bringing together a heterogeneous community of practitioners from diverse fields across the divisions (Social science, Humanities and MPLS), the ABC Network facilitates joint-projects, collaborations, and discussions between the arts, sciences and the humanities, that do not only aim to illustrate new research, but to integrate creative methods into the process of knowledge-making itself. The ABC Network was created to develop visionary approaches to protect and advocate for the More-than-Human World.