HERE IS NO WATER
Climate Change Poetry Campaign with Google Fonts
The campaign brief was to use a poem to raise awareness for a global issue, utilising a Google Font.
This project takes its title and inspiration from T.S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, section V, ‘What the Thunder Said’, with a focus on the stanza:
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
Water scarcity impacts 40% of the world’s population, and as many as 700 million people are at risk of being displaced as a result of drought by 2030.*
With every merciless heatwave, forest fire and drought, the barren, dystopian world depicted by Eliot rings closer to home. This campaign uses his words as a final cry, a plea, a desperate warning of what awaits us in a world without climate action.
The objective of the campaign is to encourage sensible water consumption, and to highlight the devastating impact of drought in a tangible, sombre way.
* Sourced from the WHO
The futuristic, industrial stylings of Google’s ‘Orbitron’ font which ‘dries out’ across each line of the stanza feels essential, urgent and pleading, reading like a war-time SOS.
The campaign proposal is in affiliation with Water UK, encouraging the public to ‘water wisely’ - to be conscious of consumption - with the excerpt from 'The Waste Land' highlighting the potentially devastating consequences.
Billboards mark where water once was - now concrete jungles or bleached, barren landscapes.
‘Here is no water...’ is carved into stone, marking the ‘graves’ of ex-rivers, reservoirs and other bodies of water.
The tombstones start their lives submerged under water. The natural process of stone erosion races against human-caused climate change - who will win? Will drought make the water evaporate and the message reveal itself? Or will nature be able to run its course, the words disintegrating, the rock cycling back into sediment in the comfort of the murky depths..
If we see it, we have failed.
‘Here is no water...’ plaques act in memoriam of bodies of water when they cease to exist.
They are uncomfortable reminders of human impact on the natural world, and leave us with difficult questions: What if we mourned the death of nature the way we mourn the death of humans? What do we do with former areas of natural beauty? Do humans move on? Does the earth move on?
QR codes on the touchpoints lead you to a website, showing you the site in its former glory - an abundance of life - vibrant, fertile and joyful. A memory.
What do we call these places now? What’s a reservoir no longer sating the thirst of the nation? What’s a lake no longer teeming with swimmers? What’s a river no longer running? Do we rename them? Do we mark their lives? Do we mark their deaths?
