Knitting the Climate Crisis: Verena Winiwarter Uses Handicraft to Make Complex Science Tangible

By Patricia McAllister-Käfer

As she arrives on this summer morning in a café in Vienna’s Wieden district, Verena Winiwarter is not in a good mood. The environmental historian is just back from visiting the ski resort Galtür in Tyrol, along with journalists. There, the 59-year-old says, you can see the Jamtalferner – one of the few remaining glaciers in the eastern Alps – melting before your eyes. Disappearing glaciers, species going extinct, catastrophic forest fires – researchers like Winiwarter are recording these huge losses, which affect all of humanity, in their local environments. “I am one of those people who feel emotionally caught up,” Winiwarter says.

Verena Winiwarter is one of the most acclaimed scholars in the country and a pioneer of interdisciplinarity, of teaching and researching across academic disciplines. Born in Vienna, she has degrees in history and chemistry, a researcher of both culture and nature – two broad fields that most academics regard as discrete. As an environmental historian, she has been working for decades on the relationship between society and environment: the causes and effects of the climate crisis are increasingly dominant topics. Winiwarter has published articles, written books, spoken on podiums about the importance of protecting the environment – and has had to stand by and watch as politicians hesitate and the glaciers melt. This has left traces.

Recounting her trip to Tyrolean Paznaun, she is analytical and composed. But nevertheless, she says she still feels “environmental grief”, which is common amongst those studying sustainability. The phenomenon describes the psychological impact of environmental destruction, which climate scientists of Winiwarter’s generation have seen gradually advancing over the course of their careers. Some of them are suffering from anxiety, grief, or burnout as a consequence.

But Winiwarter has found her own vent for her environmental grief – a distraction that is perhaps not just good for her own mental health, but also for the climate. Even if at first glance it seems like she must be joking.  Winiwarter is enlisting handicraft – as an academic approach to the climate crisis.

Just recently she published a study in the Opinion Series of the renowned Austrian Academy of Sciences, together with two German colleagues, the philosopher and mathematician Ellen Harlizius-Klück and the textile conservator Charlotte Holzer. The title: “Weaving the SDGs: A reflection on quadrangles and embodied practices.” Put simply, Winiwarter argues in the study that the United Nations’ sustainability development goals (SDGs) would be easier for people to understand if they were… woven. Is handicraft a new tool in academic practice? This would be a rather unconventional hypothesis for a scholar of her status.

When Winiwarter looks out of the Café in the direction of the Wien River, she doesn’t just see the urban street scene, but also the view as it was two hundred years earlier. “The Wien River was a stinking brown stew back then” she says, “but people used to bathe in it in the summer anyway.” Winiwarter recounts how the abattoir at Margartengürtel used to empty its waste into the Vienna river in the nineteenth century, while the carters used it to water their horses and the tanners to rinse their hides. The river foamed and stank. “Tanneries are still a massive environmental problem today,” she says. But nowadays that problem is in India or Bangladesh. Globalisation, Winiwarter tells me, also means that the negative impact of production is felt elsewhere, while we skim off the products, many of which are made under terrible conditions and without any consideration of the environmental effects.

The United Nations set out its sustainable development goals in 2015 in part to address this imbalance. The 17 goals – including world peace, food security, ecological protection – are the first attempt to set out a global agenda for development. They are not legally binding however, and whether and how they can be realised by 2030 is a question for each state to decide. Progress thus far has been underwhelming, and the SDGs have scarcely made a ripple in the public imagination.

Winiwarter is convinced that one problem is the official communication of the agenda. She has studied the SDGs intensively, in 2019 she organised an international conference on this topic at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She disputes that the 17 goals each stand alone, in their own square, each bearing a number and their own colour-code. A “catastrophic separation,” according to Winiwarter, “the agenda should be a web!” Moreover, the SDGs have been promoted with cheap items made of plastic and metal, for keyrings and the like. “And I just think, how can they produce SDG trash?” Winiwarter says, “but they do…”

Winiwarter takes two slender multicoloured cotton bands out of her rucksack and smooths them out on the table. This is her version, a different, woven interpretation of the SDGs. Over the course of her summer holiday in 2019 she immersed herself in tablet weaving, a three-dimensional weaving technique that can be produced using simple materials and without a loom. At least in theory. “The first time I tried to do it, I realised that I hadn’t grasped a single thing.” Grasping something new is both a mental and a physical process, Winiwarter is convinced of that. She tries to feed thread through one of the punched cards from her rucksack – and fails. She smiles and says, “you see, it’s the resistance of the material that fascinates me.”

Verena Winiwarter in one of her knitted hats, later sold at one of ICEHO’s auctions.