EXHIBITION:AS INSPIRATIONAL MOMENTS go, it was a pretty mind-blowing one. In July 1969, English photographer Mark Edwards was lost in the Sahara desert. Suddenly, a Tuareg nomad came to his rescue.
"This guy, an Omar Sharif lookalike, rode out of the mirage - real life imitating the opening sequence of Lawrence of Arabia," says Edwards. "I was taken off to his people and he sat me down, reappeared from a tiny little hut with a rolled-up umbrella, two bits of wood and a cassette player. He rubbed the wood together, made a fire, boiled some water and we had a nice cup of tea." The nomad then turned the cassette player on and Bob Dylan sang A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, an end-of-world prophesy written at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
"I was sitting there surrounded by these dignified, ancient people from another age, and Bob Dylan was singing while two men were on the moon planting a flag in a lunar crater," recalls Edwards. "It was extraordinary to be caught between the ancient and modern world, a very formative, canonical experience." As Dylan's lines tumbled out into the Sahara, Edwards felt compelled to illustrate each line of the song as a way of highlighting what was happening to human society.
Finding images to match the song's words became a sideline to the young photographer's career. As he developed from a cash-strapped adventurer stowing away on jumbo jets in the 1970s to an established professional with his own agency, he saw Dylan's lyrics about dead oceans and sad forests become ever more relevant as the nuclear threat was eclipsed by climate change.
"Over the years I just added pictures. Initially they were all mine, but if I could replace them with a better one I did so," he says. "I had never had any thought of a book or exhibition, it was just a personal project."
In 2005 he showed the collection to a friend who knew Bob Dylan's manager and who suggested Edwards let him know about the initiative. Edwards dispatched an e-mail and promptly forgot about it, but within days he had a response: "I got this charming letter back and I was given to understand that Dylan had seen and liked it, that it was fine and that you have approval for this." Three years on, the Hard Rainexhibition has been seen by 10 million people, and this month it sets up camp at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin.
A hard-hitting series of poignant, unsettling and often downright disturbing images, the collection chronicles the global and very human impact of living unsustainably. "I didn't want to do just climate change. It's not one single problem, it's a summation of our problems," says Edwards. "Poverty and climate change are handcuffed together, and we will be conscripted into poverty as climate change kicks in."
To prompt politicians into action, he sent the exhibition's accompanying book to leaders around the world. "We got a very good reply from Bertie Ahern. One of the more perceptive," he says.
Al Gore also had a memorable reaction when he saw the exhibition's picture of a naked detainee being intimidated by an unmuzzled dog at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Edwards recalls. "I handed him a copy of the book and he sang the whole song very loudly while turning the pages. Then he came to this picture and he stopped and just burst into tears."
However, Gore's fellow countryman George W Bush was more difficult to pin down: "We sent a copy to him care of the American embassy in London. It came back three days later marked 'Not known at this address'," says Edwards, laughing. "I figure that we didn't have too long to wait until we have the next president there, so we could tackle them instead."
Political heavyweights aside, Edwards says the main aim is to raise general awareness about climate change and how its impact filters through to every facet of society. "We just really wanted to bring across the seriousness," he says. "The key point about this is that we are all aware. There's a widespread acknowledgement that we are changing the climate, but we are still in denial. We accept in one part of our thinking that climate change is happening, but the implications of climate change hover just outside the grasp of our imaginations."
He hopes the exhibition's arresting images will shake up the current apathy around the worsening crisis. So far in the UK only two people have officially complained, out of the roughly two million who saw the displays at Eden in Cornwall and in Edinburgh's botanic gardens. Edwards believes others may have been angered too, but sees that as a good thing.
"The softly, softly approach has not worked. It hasn't led to action. The environmental movement has failed. Why aren't young people angry about what's happening to their future?" he asks. "I'm going to be dead and out of the way by the time it happens. But we are headed for a cataclysm, most scientists will privately agree on this.
"Humans are squeezing nature off the planet, but we are nature's dependent offspring. We are totally dependent on nature. We have to admit it. Human is a word for a species of animal and our cultural and scientific achievements have made us forget that. And now we have to reinvent the modern world so it is compatible with nature. These are the tumble of messages that we want to bring across in Hard Rain. Not to point everything out, but to leave people to discover these in the words and the pictures themselves."
In the song, Dylan asks "What'll you do now?" So what can we do now? As well as treading lightly on the Earth as individuals, we need to lobby politicians, industry, the media, anyone with the power to act on a wider level, according to Edwards.
"What's required is unprecedented international co-operation," he says. "It's already too late to avoid some kind of disaster, but can we mitigate that disaster? Or do we carry on as we are doing and say we don't care about the kids who are alive now?"
It's a gloomy prospect. But even among the disasters - the photographs of dead and starving bodies, of shorn and choked habitats - are images with sparks of hope. Edwards now wants to highlight these embers, and is talking with Dr Peter Wyse Jackson, director of Ireland's Botanic Gardens, about a project on remaking a world gone wrong.
"We want to show where solutions are around the world," says Edwards. "You find these solutions all over the place and they urgently need to be scaled up and adopted."
Meanwhile, the exhibition in Glasnevin is already hitting home, according to Wyse Jacskon, who reports that visitors are commenting on the need for these images to raise awareness, and of the truth they contain.
Hard Rain - Our Headlong Collision with Nature is on outdoor display at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, until August. The accompanying book of photographs and commentaries is available at the gardens, price €12, or through the website www.hardrainproject.com
