The Free Range Network –
‘The Travelling Exhibition’:

About the Exhibition

The ‘Travelling Exhibition’ exists to circumvent conventional media, and the subvert the dominant message of consumerism and its ‘bright green’ distractions by showcasing the best data and academic research on the ecological crisis.

“Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.” {George Orwell, 1949}

In a time when the ‘legacy’ media makes no money, rendering it the plaything of corporate sponsors and billionaires; where the fantasy consumer message dominates to the exclusion of any message critical of that ‘cult of consumption’; and where the ‘new media’ is mediated by platforms and algorithms that filter and censor with little discernment – being able to communicate the basic facts about the world we live in has never been more important.
This is the purpose of The Free Range ‘Travelling Exhibition’.

What does the ‘Travelling Exhibition’ do?

So much of the information in the world today is, “seen to be produced, but not produced to be seen”. It is there to be waved at, or referred to, but not actually read or widely discussed outside of the closed-door world of ‘experts’.

So much of the data produced by governments and academics, describing our world in detail, is so-often ignored or mined for a few unrepresentative nuggets of information by politicians and the media – which often gives a misleading view of what it says to the public.

And rarely does information which casts doubt on the core of our modern society – of economic growth and consumerism – ever get investigated or explained in detail.

This is what the ‘Travelling Exhibition’ seeks to do: Take all that ‘official’ information, and lay it out in a format where we can explain it to people, so that they might perceive the world around them in more detail.

The ‘deeper’ perspective…

At the heart of what the ‘Travelling Exhibition’, and the Free Range Network generally, promote in our work is the idea of a deeper ecological truth at the heart of modern society.

Contemporary environmentalism works within the norms and expectations of consumerism – and rarely ever challenges those assumptions. When you look at the data available, though, these ideas do not stand-up to detailed investigation.

The outlook is clear: “We are not in a situation of having ‘problems’ with ‘possible solutions’; we are in a ‘predicament’ with only a few, mostly unwelcome ‘outcomes’ to choose from.”

Rather than tackle that reality head-on – which in most cases would mean people would never enter our stall – instead we wrap that message up within the presentation of the best academic research and official statistical data we can source; which, if you probe its significance, makes this point.

Then we invite people in to the stall to discuss the data, and by explaining its significance, allow them to make their own way towards this deeper truth (at which point we give them some reading material to take away).

In this way, the ‘Travelling Exhibition’ has proved a very useful way of holding a most unwelcome debate in public, and helping people to see the deep historical roots of the ecological crisis – and just how significant the change ahead will be, whether human society reacts to that truth or not.

Using the resources from the exhibition

The purpose of this microsite is not simply to highlight the world of the Travelling Exhibition; we actively encourage people to take our information away and use it in their own work.

The resources created for the Travelling Exhibition are distributed under an open license – see the copyright page for full details.

This means:

• Open license – you are free to download, share that file, and from it print-off as many copies as you wish to give to others under the terms if the open license;
• Attribution – if you extract parts of the text for your own work/use, you need to acknowledge the source of the work;
• Non-commercial – you can recover reasonable costs for giving someone a copy but not on a commercial basis (as a business) and not for profit;
• Share-alike – if you copy and extract sections of the publication, you then have to circulate that material under the same license.

If you've any queries about re-using our content, or you are a commercial publication seeking permission to use our content, then please get in touch with us for further details.