The artist proposing cannibalism as a climate change solution

Interdisciplinary artist Spike Dennis works across digital, textile and web-based projects, each united by “an underlying streak of dark, absurdist humour and gently persistent questioning of the world around us,” as he puts it.

This latest project, Eat Me, is a response to the 2011 paper Cool Dudes, published by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, which concluded that conservative white males were the most likely demographic to deny climate change.

As such, this piece identified primmest climate change deniers (Trump, Jeremy Clarkson, and Jacob Rees Mogg all make an appearance) as some of those within the “capitalist and political elite who, either directly, or indirectly through their inaction, are contributing to the problem.”

Dennis’s Eat Me project proposes this rather radical solution to the problem. “It has been well reported that two of the biggest contributing factors to the current climate crisis are animal agriculture and overpopulation, so why not kill two birds with one stone and eat people?” he says.

“After all cannibalism has occurred throughout the history of humanity from the Upper Palaeolithic period until the late twentieth century. In some instances, these practices took place for cultural reasons, but in many, such as during the Russian Cultural Revolution or following the crash of flight 571, it was simply a matter of survival.

“The current climate crisis is the biggest threat that humanity has ever faced. If we don’t take radical action now our survival might be left hanging in the balance.”