Additional Information On Science In Our Script

In our script we aim for our audience to understand:

What has happened in the past – Primarily in Norse Greenland in 1408: an environment whose carrying capacity is abruptly reduced due to the start of the “little ice age” and to a degraded environment caused by man.  Audiences understand the end of Norse society and experience it through the characters. Elsewhere in the script we also reference 17^th century Tikopia.

What is happening all around us in the present – and what choices people in the UK and the world must engage with right now (China sits along side the UK in our story because we believe the Chinese perspective is essential to the population debate).

What could happen in the future if carrying capacity is further impacted by current trends (in demographics, food production, resource management, water management, birth and death policy& climate change).  We look at 2060 – future Greenland/Hong Kong/UK.  We model a future world where:

• The global population has grown exponentially - many more mouths to feed;
• Environments are degraded. Resource wars are erupting.  Border controls are much more stringent, major powers struggle to control resources outside their borders;

We explore policy scenarios extrapolating out from current policies on immigration & sterilisation both in the UK and China to create a future where:

• People must earn family privileges to have children.
• Governments have moved from “nudging behaviour” economics on birth control and end of life choices to direct intervention.

Our three scientific themes are manifest in the core production at both the personal and societal levels:

In the past:

1. Sigrid and Thornbjorn struggle in a Greenlandic environment whose carrying capacity is being rapidly reduced due to the man-made degradation of the environment and abrupt climate change. Malnutrition, disease and death decimate their society and Thornbjorn forces Sigrid onto the last boat whilst choosing to sacrifice himself.

In the present day:

1. Claire, our central character, a mature student who works for a fictional UK population control charity and believes passionately in the need for government intervention in population management on the Chinese model meets and falls in love with:
2. Adam Chan, a Hong Kong activist seeking to improve human rights in China by campaigning for direct government intervention to be replaced by education and “nudge” economics.
3. Claire is supervised by James O’Kane, an archaeologist studying historic societies who managed, or failed to manage, issues of carrying capacity (15^th century Norse Greenland and 17^th century Polynesian Tikopia) who battles with his inappropriate feelings for his student.
4. James identifies Claire with Sigrid, and through mirrored live action and filmed scenes we are able to show matches in the young women’s concerns about sustainability in their societies.
5. Adam seizes on James’s work on Tikopia and makes the islanders’ slaughter of their pigs to manage their island environment a powerful story for change in his global campaign.
6. Adam, Claire and James find their theoretical stances challenged and their emotions powerfully engaged when Claire accidentally falls pregnant after sleeping with Adam at a conference all three are attending.
7. Adam’s death in kettling-type incident during our imagined “first EU meeting on government population control” is the act three climax of our play, and forces everyone to take a stand.

In the future:

1. James (in Greenland) and Claire (in Hong Kong) are part of the working elderly in 2060.
2. Resources are scarce, the population has reached 10+ billion and humanity is experiencing the problems of reduced carrying capacity (lack of food, lack of clean water, degraded environment, pressure on the natural world, climate change, resource based unrest, and increasingly strict government control as a result).  More of the global population are living “developed” lifestyles, creating increasing strain on resources. Assuming longer healthy life spans, some governments have responded with a system in which people must earn “family points” to have children and an “exit ceremony” has been developed to allow the elderly to remove themselves in order to pass on their space to allow for a child to be born.  We also explore how sterilisation might be used to control or limit groups or even whole populations during political unrest and resource grabs, playing this out in an imagined conflict in Greenland.
3. Claire’s grandson Sam has participated in anti-government protest, dropped out of the system and is sheltering with James in Greenland.  His cover is blown when a Jin, a young scientist from Hong Kong turns up on site.  Unrest in Greenland, including a fertilisation round up, force James and Claire back together after many years, and James offers to take the exit ceremony in order to save the boy from sterilisation.

We provide additional context in a number of ways: an on-stage population “counter” allows the audience to see the relentless growth of the human population on earth, and we suggest the dwindling of biodiversity across the centuries through bird puppets. Although Sam and Jin do survive, the audience faces the loss of characters, of wildlife and of environments with whom they have powerfully engaged. 

As they leave the auditorium, understanding the social and personal consequences of our three themes; asking “would it really end that way?” we will capitalise on their interest.  Foyer exhibits create immediate engagement, and on-going engagement continues through website interactives, education packs, and the phone app. Our animation workshops allow them to create stories of their own based on the play.  All supplementary aspects of our project focus on putting the future results of our three key themes into the hands of our audience & participants, in both English and Chinese. We will refine the exact content with our science advisors but are already looking at:

• the way the human population is growing, and how personal choice and tiny changes in demographics could have powerful impacts on our possible future - building on the modelling done by experts such as Professor Hans Rosling, (his TED talk) explain how trends in resource use in different parts of the world interact
• Opportunities for audiences to model UK policy and watch the consequences of those changes across time.
• Role-play around issues of end of life choices, with increasingly complicated moral interactions testing their opinions and thinking.
• Role-play around the UK’s carrying capacity and the opportunity to engage in complex decisions around food sustainability, space for wild life, water use etc.

Our interactives aim to give audience members opportunities to control variables across time and to try to create more positive outcomes. Throughout the project, by showcasing a bleak future scenario but providing engaging characters we encourage our audiences to act in order to ensure that the bleak future does not happen.