Bob Dylan’s powerful, prophetic song, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, is set to become the unofficial soundtrack to the Copenhagen climate talks.
Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature by Mark Edwards and Bob Dylan will be released on DVD at the opening of the Hard Rain exhibition in Copenhagen on 6 December – the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference. It combines a rare live recording of Bob Dylan performing A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall with the photographs from Hard Rain and an extended illustrated commentary, in a moving and unforgettable exploration of the state of our planet and its people at this critical time.
The global issues highlighted in Hard Rain are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that define the 21st century. While each problem is understood to some degree by decision-makers, they are typically addressed as separate issues. Hard Rain puts the pieces together and shows that the world has little chance to solve any one of them until we understand how they all connect by cause and effect.
The film is accompanied by a specially commissioned essay by Lloyd Timberlake. The Urgency of Now cuts through the muddled thinking and failed policies that have delayed a radically new worldwide approach to climate change, poverty, the wasteful use of resources, population expansion, habitat destruction and species loss. The essay title was inspired by a response to Hard Rain from the British Prime Minister.
“If Hard Rain is a photographic elegy,” said Gordon Brown, “it is also an impassioned cry for change. Forceful, dramatic and disturbing, it is driven by what Martin Luther King called ‘the fierce urgency of now’ – and I believe the call for a truly global response to climate change is an idea whose time has finally come.”
Lloyd Timberlake’s essay focuses on a key dilemma facing the climate negotiators. “Right now,” he writes, “we have two huge challenges to life on earth. One is living and consuming within planetary means. The other is helping billions of people toward safe, fulfilled and dignified lives, meaning that many people need to consume more, not less, to have a reasonable standard of living. These would seem to be contradictory goals. Yet we must manage both, and we cannot manage one without managing the other. Poor countries will not accept a climate change treaty that prevents them from developing.”
"We have to give governments a constituency to reinvent the modern world so that it’s compatible with nature and human nature,” says Mark Edwards. "Political change comes only when people form a movement so large and inclusive that governments have no choice but to listen – and act. The last verse of Dylan’s song begins ‘What’ll you do now?’ It’s a question that cannot be left hanging when the Copenhagen talks come to a close.”
Reinvent the modern world so
it’s compatible with nature
and human nature
www.hardrainproject.com
To speak to Mark Edwards, or to request a review copy or press images for Hard Rain, contact:
MarkEdwards[at]hardrainproject.com
+44 (0)208 858 8307
Mobile: +44 (0)7710 099818
Special note:
You are invited to attend a Hard Rain presentation by Mark Edwards at 5pm on Monday 7 December
at Salen, Politikens Hus, Vestergade 28, Copenhagen K.
Introduced by environmental writer and explorer Hjalte Tin.
Free entry – all welcome. The event is followed by questions and discussion.
Notes to editors:
• Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature
Mark Edwards
• A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (live version)
Bob Dylan
• The Urgency of Now
Lloyd Timberlake
DVD and booklet release 6 December 2009
£10 (100 Danish Kroner)
A Still Pictures Moving Words production for Hard Rain Project
View clip
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall live at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 26 October 1963 previously released on Bob Dylan – No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, The Bootleg Series Volume 7
© Bob Dylan/Sony BMG Music Entertainment 2005
Hard Rain exhibition at COP15
Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen
6 to 19 December 2009
presented by the United Nations Environment Programme and Hard Rain Project
Mark Edwards is one of the few environmental communicators to have personally witnessed the global issues that are defining the 21st century. His photographs are published worldwide. In 1985 he founded Still Pictures, the leading photo agency specializing in the environment, social issues and nature. He has written several bestselling books on photography and co-authored Changing Consciousness with experimental physicist Professor David Bohm. In 2009, the Royal Photographic Society awarded Mark Edwards and Bob Dylan the Terence Donovan Award for their achievement with the Hard Rain Project.
The book and photo exhibition Hard Rain was launched at the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK in mid-2006 to huge public and critical acclaim, attracting the support and endorsement of political and environmental leaders across the world. It has been exhibited at the United Nations Building in New York and been shown at outdoor locations in principal cities on every continent to over 12 million people.
Lloyd Timberlake has reported on environment and development issues from more than 60 countries, and his articles have appeared in most of the world’s major newspapers. He has worked as science editor for Reuters and writer-in-residence at the International Institute for Environment and Development. He has written prizewinning books (Africa in Crisis, Only One Earth, When the Bough Breaks) and been a visiting academic fellow at Imperial College, London, and at New York University Law School. He is building a solar-powered house on the Chesapeake Bay, USA, where he kayaks.
The United Nations Climate Conference, COP15, runs from 7 to 18 December 2009.
