Imagine this. You go from the cool summer night into a sweltering, booming marquee, and strip off a layer or two as you squeeze your way forward through the rocking crowd. Looking up, you can make out the DJs on stage and, nice touch, a string quartet complementing the electric montage of familiar, found and obscure music. Suddenly there’s a flash of lightning and your eyes are drawn to a huge screen showing crashing waves, whirlpools, tornados, molten lava, mushrooming clouds, bleak craters, vast dunes…

Then the word ‘SOLUTIONS’ blinks on the screen, and you find yourself on a stunning high-speed journey that takes you past floating cities, along high-speed train lines, over majestic windfarms perched high on plateaus…

From KT Tunstall’s biofuel tour bus and Jack Johnson’s solar-powered recordings, to Radiohead’s promotion of urban gigs to reduce the flow of camping cars to faraway festival fields – artists are using their sway over fans to promote climate-conscious behaviour. But some are doing much more – putting climate change at the core of their art.

The pioneering example of audiovisual montage in the marquee was Coldcut’s ‘Energy Union’ tour – just finished for 2009, but being extended into 2010. You leave it wide-eyed, buzzing with the drama of imminent catastrophe and, even more, with a “whole new world” sense of possible futures. There’s something about climate change – you’re thinking – which makes it the perfect subject for high drama: the edge-of-your-seat is-it-already-too-late life or death scenario, the likely fall from the peaks of over-consumerism, oil, and around-the-world-in-a-weekend travel…  

For those of us who are not losing our homes to floods and our food supplies to drought, those who will go back to work tomorrow, our headphones gently but firmly cushioning our senses from our surroundings – art can offer a way to engage, bringing the reality of climate change into our lives.       

The importance of this engagement is recognised by organisations like Artists Project Earth (APE) – which recruits internationally recognised musicians to raise awareness of climate change – and through exhibitions like ‘Earth: Art of a changing world’, due to open at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in December.

Artists have always engaged with the natural world, mimicking its rhythms and cycles, exploring its precarious beauty, standing up for its rights. See Gerald Manley Hopkins’ heart-felt cry: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!”.

What’s new is the potential for this engagement to bring about real change, and the urgent need for it. Artists trade in visions and inspiration, revolutionary stuff. Good on those who are making incremental lifestyle changes, hoping that fans will follow. But hats off to those who are taking the climate and making it their raw material and muse.