Skip to main content

Twitter campaign gives voice to crowdsourced climate poem

Date

Tweets from a social media campaign run by the Priestley International Centre for Climate have been brought together in a poem that creates a heartfelt call for action on climate change.

The poem was written by Dr Sam Illingworth, who created it using responses from the #MyClimate Twitter campaign run by the Priestley Centre and Leeds Climate Commission during Green GB Week in Leeds 15-19 October 2018.

During this campaign, members of the public tweeted using the #MyClimate with their responses to the question, “What does climate change mean to you?”. The words were displayed in a digital installation in 2m high LED letters from the windows of the Platform building in Leeds, adjacent to the train station – spelling out a collective vision of what the climate meant to people, what it was now, and what it could potentially be in the future.

Word cloud of tweets from the #MyClimate Twitter campaign (James Norman)

The poem contains both the words and phrases that appeared on the board (which was limited to nine characters), and those that were contained within some of the longer tweets as well. The tweets were curated by members of the Priestley Society at the University of Leeds and the digital display was the work of Leeds creative producer Suzie Cross and University of Leeds Cultural Fellow Dave Lynch.

Science communicator and poet Dr Sam Illingworth is a member of the NERC funded Climate Communication Project, led by Priestley Centre director Professor Piers Forster. Sam took part in Green GB Week with the Priestley Centre, co-presenting a sold out workshop on climate communication, Don’t mention the “C” word: How to talk about climate change.

Read the poem, and listen to an audio file of Sam reading it.

Watch a video of the tweets

Image: James Norman