The hard rain project

The Hard Rain Project was established as a charity in 2009 to support educational programmes for schools, universities and colleges, and public exhibitions that campaign for realistic solutions to the interlinked problems of climate change, poverty, the wasteful use of resources, population expansion, habitat destruction and species loss.

One of the Charity’s first outputs was an exhibition of hard-hitting photographs that illustrated Bob Dylan’s powerful, prophetic song, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, which became the unofficial soundtrack to the Copenhagen climate talks.

The film ‘Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature’ by Mark Edwards and Bob Dylan was released on the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December. It combines a rare live recording of Bob with the photographs from Hard Rain and an extended illustrated commentary, in a moving exploration of the current state of our planet and its people.

The global issues highlighted in Hard Rain are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that define the 21st century. While each problem is understood to some degree by decision-makers, they are typically addressed as separate issues. Hard Rain puts the pieces together and shows that the world has little chance to solve any one of them until we understand how they all connect by cause and effect.