KEELING DRESS TARTAN
“All the stuff of mainstream history — wars, revolutions, economies — is becoming a subset of the engulfing, elemental question: the fate of the earth; what humans have done to it and what they may yet do to repair and redeem the damage,” says Simon Schama. “We are running out of time. But what we have not yet exhausted is what, in the end, makes us human: the great storehouse of visionary imagination. If, at the eleventh hour, we have what it takes to pull off the greatest escape act in the human story, it will not be data-banks or algorithms that will have got us there, but something like a poem, a novel, a painting or a song.” How about a tartan?
Our climate change tartan is available in two versions: red background (Keeling tartan) and a green background (Keeling Dress tartan, shown here).
Named in honour of Dr. Charles Keeling, the climate scientist who alerted the world to the danger of rising CO2 emissions, the colours and lines of the Keeling Dress tartan symbolise the urgently needed transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Drawing on tartan's long and glorious history as a badge of identity, our aim was to create a unifying aesthetic with a positive message that any individual or group can adopt to stand in solidarity for climate action. We're thrilled that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the world's largest conservation organisation, embraced the Keeling Dress tartan as part of its COP26 uniform.
“The Keeling Dress tartan symbolises a wholesale shift in the energy basis of civilisation, from fossil fuels (grey and black track) to 100 per cent clean energy (white and yellow track). It is named in honour of the late Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose measurements from 1958 onwards supplied the first concrete evidence of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, commonly known as the ‘Keeling Curve’. Today, ninety-seven percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that man-made climate change is for real. Permission to adopt the Keeling name was graciously granted by his son, Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 Program that continues the vital measurement series to this day.”
