About Hard Rain
Each line of Bob Dylan’s poetic masterpiece, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, is illustrated by leading photographers in this startlingly original book by Mark Edwards. Hard Rain brings alive our global problems and shows how they are all connected by cause and effect. Poverty, the wasteful use of resources, pollution, the loss of habitats and species, and the summation of our problems, climate change, are all understood by decision-makers but they typically continue to be addressed as separate issues. Hard Rain shows that we need to tackle all our problems together if we are to solve any one of them.
A copy of Hard Rain has been sent to every prime minister and president. Gordon Brown’s heartfelt reply sums up readers’ comments to the first two editions of the book.
Hard Rain is both a tremendous achievement and an incredibly troubling book to read – an unrelenting catalogue of burnt and barren landscapes, shrunken ice caps and devastated, dislocated lives.
Page by page it conjures up the terrible consequences of unchecked climate change – a human catastrophe that is quite unprecedented in our history, but one that we can no longer afford to deny.
Already, climate change and the competition for natural resources are destroying livelihoods, creating refugees and stoking conflicts right around the world. To allow this disaster to deepen further would be an unforgivable injustice - for whilst it is the richest countries that have caused this degradation, it is the poorest who are suffering its worst effects.
So if Hard Rain is a photographic elegy 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.
Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP
