Surrounding the political interventions that refresh and enliven environmentalism, or push beyond environmentalism into new framings, we notice creative interventions within artistic, activist and scientific fields. In terms of cultivating resonance, as we will argue in Chapter 6, these interventions are able to stir up questions and surprise us, by combining and juxtaposing different sites, historical events, objects and practices. A vital part of resonance is thus the ‘shimmer’ of difference and distance between bodies – the sense of connection emerging between disparate things and collectives, as opposed to forms of thought that work by implying sameness (for example, recognition). We come to notice how people and places are indebted to one another or are intimately associated in ways we do not necessarily appreciate.

The artists recounted here, and in this book generally, do not simplify these connections, or flatten the differences between geographies and contexts. The Syrian War was not caused by the Svalbard Seed Vault (see Chapter 5); the struggle in County Mayo against Shell is not the same as that experienced in the Niger Delta. But just as they are careful to avoid oversimplification, these works do not fall victim to overcomplexification. Climate change; the Anthropocene; the sixth mass extinction: these are vast processes which, when considered at the planetary scale, tend towards the evasion of responsibility and the exhaustion of meaningful agency. For the artists we collate here, as with many activists involved in everyday organising and making of alternatives, agency lies in experimental practice and the construction of new collectives.

The following examples are not exhaustive (see also Gray and Sheikh [2018] and the associated special issue, as well as Demos [2013] for other important examples) but are the work of several artists that have inspired the work of this book and are mentioned in its chapters. We include references to sources to allow readers to find out more about these artists and their projects in their own terms.

Seeds of change: a floating ballast seed garden (Bristol), 2012– 2016 (Maria Theresa Alves)

‘Seeds of change’ was a migratory project that was created anew in a number of port cities by artist Maria Theresa Alves in collaboration with archaeologists and other local artists, academics and storytellers.