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Travelling in reverse through the Â鶹ԼÅÄ archives to trace some of the present problems and oblique antecedents of the environmental crisis.

Backwards Catastrophe is the latest in an occasional series of Archive on 4 programmes which journey through their subjects in reverse chronology.

It’s not a current affairs programme – and it doesn’t focus primarily on the scientific or political debates.

It’s an elegy: part polemic, part satire, part lyrical collage.

It begins from the uncontroversial acceptance that man-made climate change is real and that the consequent cascading problems affecting the earth’s life-sustaining systems are exacerbated by the apparent difficulty of collective action in a deeply unequal world. The effects of climate change are projected to be felt everywhere and are also projected to fall disproportionately on the poor and vulnerable – and on those historically least responsible for the problem.

The programme is broken into five sections.

The first section is introduced by Jo Dodds, who has first-hand experience of the now regular and devastating bush fires in New South Wales, Australia. It begins with the poem A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz and covers some of the debates of the present day, ending with the resolutions of the 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

The second section is introduced by Marinel Ubaldo, a climate activist from the Philippines. It begins with the poem Fire and Ice by Robert Frost and proceeds from the time of the Millennium back to the Kyoto Conference in 1997.

The third section is introduced by Hilda Nakabuye, the founder of Uganda’s Fridays for Future movement. It begins with the poem Estuary by Ian Hamilton Finlay and moves between 1988 – when Dr James Hansen testified to the US Senate that ‘climate change has begun’ – and 1992, when the UN Earth Summit was held in Rio.

The fourth section is introduced by Eleanor Terrelonge, who founded the Jamaica Climate Change Youth Council. It begins with The World is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth, read by Tony Harrison, and centres around some pre-climate change catastrophising from the early 1970s.

The fifth section begins with the poem Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith. It is introduced by Nemonte Nenquimo, a member of the Waorani people from the Ecuadorean Amazon, a recent winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. She takes us further back in time – to an island in the southern Pacific which might have something to say about our future.

It made sense to bring the natural world into the programme, and so as the archive spools backwards in time it is accompanied by a variety of recordings by Peter Cusack, BJ Nilsen, Chris Watson and Martin Williams.

The programme rolls along to variations on a melody whose title goes some way to encapsulating things: Mad World.

Thanks to Emma Lewis, Sophie Pinchetti of Amazon Frontlines, Abid Hossan Raju, and Cam Walker of Friends of the Earth.

Reading by Diana Almeida.

Producer: Martin Williams.

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