“A closer relationship between humanity and the seas can save the communities most at risk of the human-caused impact on the oceans, as well as the seas themselves.” [Kate Wolstenholme, Norwich Evening News]
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Back in March, the Sidmouth Beach Management Plan’s smaller steering group met up with the consultant engineers and new service shared with Dorset. The larger Sidmouth & East Beach BMP Advisory Group is due to meet up later this month.
For general info, go to the VGS page on the Beach Management Plan, look at the reports from the BMP Advisory Group or do a search for beach management on the website; plus, there is the rather out-of-date ‘official’ page from the council on the Sidmouth and East Beach Management Plan and Scheme.
Otherwise there is something from this time last year: a press release from the council on managing flood & coastal erosion risk across the South West when it introduced to the public the new shared service of “South West Flood and Coastal”.
The plans are fairly well-advanced, and there is not much room at this stage for major re-designing.
However, there might still be space for better communication – to go beyond the confines of the engineers’ drawings and the various committees’ jargon.
Later on this month, we’ll be seeing the Sidmouth Sea Fest hoist its sails once again. It has been going for over a decade now, with the first looking at Creativity on the Coast – a collaboration with other English Channel communities and initiatives.
Perhaps, then, we need more culture and creativity to enhance, inspire and engage.
And this is what’s happening in East Anglia, with a new set of exhibitions asking: Can the Seas Survive Us?
In part, this has been due to positive collaboration, with the Dutch government lending an experienced hand in this Exhibition ‘Can the seas survive us?’.
And there’s been some good solid communication, with the wider public from the Norwich Evening News as it asks: Are we obsessed with the sea and can it survive us?
Throughout history, humanity has been completely enraptured by the sea, so why is it we cannot seem to be able to limit the harm we cause to it? Themes of the ocean span myth, legend, art, theatre, literature and more in a constant and largely unchanged manner throughout history.
Can the Seas Survive Us? is the latest in an innovative series of investigative exhibitions by the Sainsbury Centre following its radical relaunch in 2023, when it became the first museum in the world to formally recognise the living life force of art, enabling people to build relationships with art across its dynamic museum landscape.
A World of Water, Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara and Sea Inside explore this fundamental question and bring together works and objects which span great distances, both chronologically and geographically, to address critical contemporary issues around our connection to our planet, our seas, and each other.
The exhibition foregrounds how a closer relationship between humanity and the seas can save the communities most at risk of the human-caused impact on the oceans, as well as the seas themselves.
In its review of this art show looking at the rising seas, the Guardian asks us how we are going to keep our heads above water:
One of the most striking things that will be on display at an exhibition in Norfolk this weekend is an oak chair. Ordinary enough, except that it is elevated high in the air. Why? Because this is where it will need to be in 2100, given rising sea levels in the Netherlands, where it was made by the artist Boris Maas.
Entitled The Urge to Sit Dry (2018), there is another like it in the office of the Dutch environment minister in The Hague, a constant reminder of the real and immediate threat posed to the country by rising sea levels. The chair is part of Can the Seas Survive Us?, which opens this weekend in the Sainsbury Centre, a Norwich art gallery and museum. The location is significant: Norfolk is one of the areas of the UK most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Visitors will take a metaphorical dive into the murky complexities of an ecosystem we all know is at risk, but often find hard to decipher, still less to work out what we can do to change things.
“As with so many of the big, thorny questions around climate and the future of the planet, people don’t know where to start,” says Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre. “ We can project people’s imaginations and realities to places and spaces they would never otherwise have access to – they can be transported to melting Arctic ice floes, to the Pacific hundreds of years ago, to underneath the sea today.”
The show explores the mysterious territory known as Doggerland, which 7,000 years ago connected what are now Norfolk and the Netherlands. It would have been possible to walk from one to the other, encountering mammoths, bears and woolly rhinoceroses along the way.
The Strangers Case (In The Age Of Meltdown), a film made last year by Nabuurs&VanDoorn, imagines this prehistoric land lost to the rising sea, prompting the realisation that this is the same fate now facing Pacific nations such as the Cook Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati.
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