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Pure Being: the new Change Makers podcast track from Beatie Wolfe

4 June 2021

“So much of the magic of life is around us but we’re blind to it. Nature is simultaneously imagination itself, inspiring our greatest art, but it’s also the greatest technology of all. We could learn so much from looking at ecosystems and how species have evolved over millions of years.” These are the words of Beatie Wolfe, expanding on her relationship with the natural world as part of her Change Makers interview with Michael Hayman, less than a month after she graced the virtual Main Stage at the Nobel Prize Summit. Before her were former US Vice President Al Gore and Sir David Attenborough. 

These speakers, and everyone else tuned in, had the opportunity to see and hear Beatie’s latest work From Green to Red, an environmental protest about the human impact on the planet; using 800,000 years of historic NASA data, Beatie created a visualisation of the CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere and was “beyond honoured” to be invited to speak and perform. The summit, themed One Planet, One Future, asked questions about how humankind’s future on Earth will be achieved and shaped; as Beatie explained in her conversation with Michael, these are topics about which she is passionate: “Music and art and nature are these wonderful instant connectors that make us present, that make us aware and keep us alive inside”.

The name of Beatie’s protest art piece was taken from the title of a song she wrote in 2006 after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and asks the question: is it too late to turn back? With From Green to Red, Beatie reimagines the music video format (and protest song), taking the audience on a journey through our planet’s timeline. “This piece is about re-presenting data in a way that people can literally see differently, using the power of art and music to make it evocative and relatable, so that people can really get a sense of where we are right now.”

Beatie, recognised by WIRED as someone who is “changing the world” and by the UN as an innovat