Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature
at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London WC2
Outdoor exhibition – Sunday 25 October to Thursday 31 December 2009
Documentary presentation – Monday 16 November 2009, 7.00–8.30pm – free entry
Climate change, poverty, habitat loss, human rights… Hard Rain explores the issues that are defining the 21st century.
The Hard Rain exhibition is on display in the St Martin’s courtyard from Sunday 25 October to Thursday 31 December as the world’s attention focuses on the critical Copenhagen round of climate talks. Mark Edwards reinterprets Bob Dylan’s prophetic song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall through photographs from around the world, to bring alive our global problems and show how they are all connected by cause and effect.
The exhibition is sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
Hard Rain documentary presentation
Monday 16 November 2009 7.00-8.30pm – free entry with retiring collection
Photographer, author and environmental campaigner Mark Edwards delivers his startlingly original presentation examining the issues he illustrates in the Hard Rain exhibition. A moving and unforgettable exploration of the state of our planet at this critical time, Hard Rain shows that the world has little chance to solve poverty, the wasteful use of resources, habitat and species loss, and the summation of our problems, climate change, unless we tackle all of them together.
Malcolm Preston and Leo Johnson from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, sponsors of the exhibition, and Brother Clark Berge will also speak at the event, which is part of the St Martin’s Education Programme.
Leo Johnson is Partner in PwC’s sustainability and climate change practice As co-founder of Sustainable Finance Limited, a subsidiary of the global professional services firm PwC, he led the rollout of the Equator Principles and with the Financial Times and the IFC, established the FT Sustainable Banking Awards. Malcolm Preston is global leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Sustainability and Climate Change network, a team of 800 specialists worldwide.
Brother Clark Berge, the Minister General of the worldwide Society of St Francis and chaplain at the Copenhagen summit, examines how the faith community is responding to the ecological crisis and highlights the choices that have become fundamental to our future lives.
The event is followed by questions and discussion.
Hard Rain is one of the most powerful presentations I have ever seen – and it has a huge impact on audiences. It forces them to dig deep into their own personal, emotional responses to the state of the world and its people, an experience which can often be uncomfortable as well as very challenging.
Jonathon Porritt, Founding Director, Forum for the Future
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 unforgiveable injustice – for whilst it is the richest countries that have caused this degradation, it is the poorest who are suffering its worst effects.
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
A preview of the documentary presentation is also on display downstairs in the foyer at St Martin’s.
Hard Rain book
A new edition of the Hard Rain book by Mark Edwards and Bob Dylan is published on 25 October and is available in the St Martin-in-the-Fields shop.
St Martin’s Autumn Education Programme is a series of presentations that focus on aspects of living in London – and the wider world. A dynamic mix of speakers looks at different aspects of community – church, art, relationship, business, multiracial citizenship and the environment – as they seek to challenge and inspire our modern living. All presentations take place in the church at 7.00pm. Entry is free, with a retiring collection to help finance the series. 
For more information, to request press pictures, or to speak to Mark Edwards, contact:
Hard Rain Project
199 Shooters Hill Road
London SE3 8UL
+44 (0)20 8858 8307
email (mail [at] hardrainproject.com)
St Martin's exhibition, presentation & book launch
