Venue: Quaker Meeting House 7 Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh,EH1 2JLUnited Kingdom
Being the sole Green Champion in any organisation can be a big job. Are you running out of ideas? Feeling like you are fighting a losing battle? Perhaps you have limited knowledge of how all the other departments work within the company?
Now is the time to form a Green Team. This FREE workshop will give you ideas on how to:
Build cooperation from the whole of your organisation
Include senior management of the organisation
Arrange dates and agendas for your green team meeings
Create a tailored environmental policy for your organisation
Report back on your work to your board and build support for your work
Bring along your ideas and questions. Refreshments supplied. Feel free to bring a packed lunch
Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.
In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.
We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.
Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:
Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.
Venue: MANY Studios: 3 Ross Street Glasgow ,G1 5AR (Google Map)
Being the sole Green Champion in any organisation can be a big job. Are you running out of ideas? Feeling like you are fighting a losing battle? Perhaps you have limited knowledge of how all the other departments work within the company?
Now is the time to form a Green Team. This FREE workshop will give you ideas on how to:
Build cooperation from the whole of your organisation
Include senior management of the organisation
Arrange dates and agendas for your green team meeings
Create a tailored environmental policy for your organisation
Report back on your work to your board and build support for your work
Bring along your ideas and questions. Refreshments supplied. Feel free to bring a packed lunch
Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.
In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.
We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.
Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:
Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.
I grew up on a farm near woods and streams in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nature was all around me. As a child observing nature, I focused on the macro and the micro worlds – veins and galls on leaves, organisms swimming in puddles, tree bark, a bird’s nest on the windowsill, stars in the Milky Way, and an eclipse of the sun. With wonder and awe, when I was around 7 years old, I witnessed the Aurora Borealis from the porch outside my house. The Sun’s activity and the Earth’s magnetic field were lined up in such a way that we could see it in Pennsylvania. The phenomenon of nature was a treasured part of my life then, as it is now. As a resident of Chicago, I like to go to Lake Michigan and nature preserves nearby, to commune with nature.
The beauty of the world’s creatures and plants brings me joy, sustenance, and wonderment so I am devastated by what is happening to our planet. Animals are going extinct from poaching and human encroachment; we are polluting oceans and depleting them of sea life (and the Fukushima Daiichi plant continues to spew nuclear radiation into the Pacific Ocean); our ground water is being used up or contaminated; and, toxins are poisoning our air. As the planet heats up from human CO2 emissions, coral reefs are dying and glaciers are melting.
Shortsighted policies fail to recognize that we need insects, plants, and animals. Ant tunneling aids in decomposition, soil aeration and nutrient recycling. Bees pollinate fruits and vegetables. Bats eat pest insects, and fruit bat guano plays a role in seed dispersal. Birds aid in forest decomposition, pest control, nutrient recycling, plant pollination, and seed dispersal. Plants are a major source of medicine, with many lost forever through rainforest destruction. Plant roots prevent soil erosion, and rainforests produce and hold moisture, preventing drought and desert conditions. These are just a few examples of how we benefit from natural habitats.
I have always admired drawings in biology and science books, with close-ups, cutaways, and instructive illustrations depicting nature accurately and scientifically. After pursuing my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I enrolled in natural science illustration classes and became a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. I loved making watercolor illustrations. While illustrating organisms, I learned about them so in a sense I became a kind of scientist studying nature.
My interest in natural organisms lead to the development of a body of work influenced by dioramas and displays in natural history museums. In one of my works, titled Deep Down (pictured above), I have created a cutaway in a cube that shows a chipmunk (covered with fur) living underground along with a worm, rock, and plant roots. A second side of the cube shows a snake, above and underground. The third side reveals an anthill above ground, and the colony tunnels underground. And the fourth side has a plant, cicada, plant roots, and a worm underground.
In another work, titled In My Backyard (pictured below), I have created a reproduction of a log made from epoxy clay, a reproduction of a wild beehive and bees, and a garden hose, all connected with industrial gas piping. On the right side of a pipe is a cube, with paintings of a housing development, a microscopic close-up of red blood cells, and a Japanese beetle on a leaf. A globe covered in mushrooms hangs from a chain from the cube. In this work, I am exploring systems impacted by man’s activity.
In My Back Yard, 45†x 32†x 13â€, epoxy clay, wooden cube, gas pipe, garden hose, paper, wire, acrylic, Mylar, flocking.
Other works such as Factory Farm (pictured below) and Fracking point to systems of man that are wreaking havoc on the environment. Runoff from factory farms is creating algae blooms in the ocean, GMO crops are killing helpful insects and creating super weeds, and fracking is polluting water wells with natural gas and causing earthquakes. Bees are being sickened and disrupted as they are trucked all around the country to pollinate fruit trees.
Factory Farm, 45†x 34†x 17â€,  wood, epoxy clay, wooden cube, gas pipe, acrylic, resin, found objects, paper, metal tube.
Spelling Bee imagines a larger than life genetically modified bee that can spell and is making a hive in the shape of the letter B.
Spelling Bee, 33 3/8†x 19†x 2 ½,″ craft fur, epoxy clay, acrylic, resin, Mylar, chloroplast.
As an artist, it is important to me to make work that addresses these issues. My work celebrates the beauty of nature, while at the same time pointing out the impacts of human activity. My hope is that by connecting with my art, others will realize how important the continued existence of all manifestations of life is for the survival of our planet and its people.
(Top image: Deep Down, 16†x 8†x 8â€, carved wood, mixed media.)
______________________________
Chicago artist Victoria Fuller has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and fellowship awards from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities, and the Illinois Arts Council. She also received an Illinois Arts Council CAAP Grant, and was a resident artist at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY and Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL. Her large-scale public sculpture “Shoe of Shoes†is in the collection of Caleres Shoes in St. Louis. Sound Transit in Seattle commissioned another large-scale sculpture, “Global Garden Shovel,†and she was commissioned by Comed to create the sculpture “Peas and Quiet.†In 2016 she was featured in Sculpture Magazine’s May issue, as part of the show “Disruption†at Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. Her most recent large-scale public sculpture, titled â€Canoe Fan,†is installed along the Huron River in Ann Arbor, MI.
About Artists and Climate Change:
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
The Scottish Government’s Draft Climate Change Plan places increased emphasis on climate change adaptation, but it still plays second fiddle to carbon emissions reduction. But CCS is already taking its first steps into working on adaptation with partners Adaptation Scotland and Aberdeen City Council.
One of the many differences between the international climate change talks in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP15) and those in Paris in 2015 (COP21) was that the latter genuinely incorporated adaptation to the impacts of climate change, whilst in 2009 the focus was all on reducing carbon emissions (mitigation, in the language of climate change).
Indeed, although COP15 was widely considered a failure for not achieving the global deal on reducing emissions that it was meant to, it’s arguable that this was always an unrealistic aim and that without the crisis of 2009 we wouldn’t be where we are today with the comprehensive Paris Agreement, flawed though it may be.
In the summer of 2010 I wrote a dissertation for my MSc in Carbon Management which argued that COP15 had fallen apart partly because the minority world was focused on reducing carbon emissions whilst the majority world wanted support for dealing with climate change and finding a low-carbon pathway to raising standards of living for its people.
The ‘failure’ of COP15 meant that the mitigation bubble burst and from COP16 onwards adaptation began to be seriously included in the negotiations.
Adaptation playing second fiddle
Adaptation was included in the Scottish Government’s Climate Change Act of 2009, but comes a clear second to mitigation in the way the Act is laid out. The emphasis is very much on mitigation, with emissions reduction targets highlighted and the first full mention of Adaptation in part 5 (of 6): ‘Other climate change provisions’.
There are reasons for this.
Back in the noughties climate change NGOs – which had quite a strong impact on the Scottish Parliament’s debates about the Act – worried that allowing too much discussion of adaptation would weaken the resolve of governments and others to grasp the very painful nettle of carbon reduction, so it took a back seat. And it’s fair to say that we are much clearer now about how the impacts of climate change are being felt now across the world.
(The majority world would argue correctly that they knew that back in 2009, but that the minority world wasn’t listening. This climate injustice was what fed the disputes at COP15. I found myself in a side-meeting at the COP with dozens of majority world delegates lambasting the Australian consultant who had been hired to represent some Pacific Island states. They felt that he – a minority world carbon expert – had betrayed their countries by conceding a crucial point in the negotiations. As the only other minority world person in the room it was a sobering experience.)
So things are on the move, but up to now adaptation has certainly been in the shadow of its big sister mitigation.
But what is adaptation?
The usual interpretation of adaptation in this area is adaptation to the impacts of climate change, such as changes in weather patterns leading to flooding, heat waves and severe weather events; changes in plant and animal life, such as the success of different crops or the increased incidence of pests.
At a meeting the other week I was amazed to learn that the growing season (ie the period when it is warm enough for plants to grow rather than just hunker down for the winter) in Scotland is nearly 5 weeks longer now than in 1961.
But there is another area that isn’t spoken about as much: adaptation to living and working in a low carbon environment. As I have written about in other blogs, this is something that we are interested in at CCS.
Culture in its widest sense is the varying ways in which we live in the world; culture in the narrower sense of what the Mexico City Declaration calls ‘the arts and letters’ expresses, reflects and ultimately shapes that wider culture. The wider culture will need to, and undoubtedly will, change in response to both the mitigation efforts and the impacts of climate change.
We all need to think about what this will mean for our lifestyles, our organisations’ business models and so on. For example, in a society where energy is abundant when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing but scarce at others, our relationship with energy will be different to today’s when we are used to unlimited energy at the flick of a switch. Our use of water would change greatly if, like many women in the majority world, we had to carry every drop even a few hundred metres.
Adaptation isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it’s something we are all doing all the time anyway. And climate change brings into focus a number of choices. We can worry and close things down, or we can choose to build a better, fairer society.
CCS – always adapting!
We at CCS have just written a new business plan for the next four financial years and one of our five strategic outcomes is ‘Adaptation: Increasing numbers of Cultural Sector organisations & practitioners include climate change adaptation into their planning’. During 2017/18 we will be developing our own understanding of what this means for cultural SMEs.
But we have started already with a project with Adaptation Scotland/SNIFFER, Aberdeen Adapts and Robert Gordon University. We’ll be working with four artists (musician Simon Gall; theatre artist Alice Cooper and public artists Jo Hodges and Robbie Coleman) to explore the potential of their different artistic practices for engaging a wider public with the impacts of climate change, specifically in the suburb of Middlefield in Aberdeen.
In the meantime, a big thank you to our colleagues at Adaptation Scotland for asking us to join this project, which is part of our culture/SHIFT programme. It’s an experiment for all of us and has already been illuminating as artists and non-cultural partners have got together to understand each others’ work and aims and to collaborate on addressing wicked problems.
Our ‘Arts and Climate Change mini-festival’ is very much a pilot project and we’ll be running Green Teases and other events over the coming months to discuss what we learn. We’ll also be developing our knowledge so that we can help cultural sector organisations understand what adaptation means for them and how they can contribute to Scotland’s wider aims.
Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.
In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.
We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.
Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:
Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.
At HowlRound, we continue our exploration of Theatre in the Age of Climate Change with more urgency than ever. With the looming eradication of climate science data from US government websites and the appointment of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump has indicated in no uncertain terms that the health of the planet and its inhabitants are of no concern to him. As theatre artists, how do we respond? Writer and director Katie Pearl discusses how theatre, climate, and politics are inevitably linked, and asks whether artists should bring more of their artistry into citizenry. —Chantal Bilodeau
The task here is to look at theatre and climate change within the context of the current administration. Yep, that administration. The one that is attempting to eliminate climate consciousness from the national narrative by removing the climate page from the White House website, threatening to slash the EPA by one-third, and green-lighting the Keystone Pipeline project in the face of enormous coordinated dissent. Yep, the one that favors entertainment—heck, the one that is entertainment—but is not at all interested in artworks activating complex, nuanced conversation around current issues, and proposed to eradicate the NEA and the NEH completely from the federal budget. Yep, that administration.
Well, shall we start the way we often do? Theatre is a storytelling, community-based phenomenon that manages to survive, if not thrive, on next to nothing and is the perfect means to effectively counter the current administration’s “alternative facts†and erasure, especially in these divisive times…blah, blah climate blah f*cking Trump blah Pruitt EPA zzz blah NEA slashed z zzzz Betsy DeVos zz zzz education zzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzz.
I’m sorry, I fell asleep.
It’s not the argument that’s wrong. It’s just exhausting. Theatre may be the perfect vehicle to keep necessary counter-narratives alive, but has never, under any administration I’ve ever known, been well-positioned to do so. Embedded in the familiar argument about theatre’s potential is the deeper argument about theatre’s worth. I’m tired of endlessly justifying on grant applications, in marketing campaigns, and in fundraising letters the relevance of what we do. On a federal level, our country just doesn’t believe in theatre’s worth. This feels especially true now under Trump, but even under administrations more friendly to liberal creative causes, theatre is rarely considered necessary to our national well-being. For a time, the NEA’s tagline was “Because a great country deserves great artâ€â€”an assertion I find problematic because it makes art seem like dessert, rather than something with actual value, like grains, meat, and vegetables.
The conversation amongst the theatre community about ways to keep (or make) our theatre relevant, equitable, and inclusive is ongoing. There is rigorous debate and concrete action, including the way so many of us—regional theatres, and independent artists, and companies—are putting more resources towards building relationships with the communities we work with and for. I’m also thinking of nation-wide actions like The Jubilee, The Ghostlight Project, and the wave of support for projects in Creative Placemaking, and other socially engaged work. But in light of the ongoing global climate crisis and the Trump administration’s policies, the conversation is ready to take another giant step, brought to a head, like it or not, by the sheer, audacious rebuttal of things that we artists and citizens know to be true and important.
Let’s talk about climate.
At the end of eight hours, the build team for HOW TO BUILD A FOREST (PearlDamour + Shawn Hall) extracts the last bit of breath from their forest ecosystem. Photo by Paula Court.
New Allies: Theatre and Climate
Imagine this: Theatre and Climate as allies, thrown together by the Trump administration as being two things it discredits, discounts, and largely disregards. Well of course! Both have power beyond the control of a single man or administration. Interestingly enough, both have that power because they’re situated outside the administration’s market-based lexicon. Environmental issues don’t sit easily within a profit-based model. Creativity—like theatremaking—doesn’t either. When the environment is forced to bend in order to “produce,†the effect can be similar to when theatre artists are pressured to produce—and when humans are seen only in terms of their use. The soul gets squished. Language gets co-opted and compressed.
When my company  PearlDamour was researching our piece HOW TO BUILD A FOREST, we met with people in the timber industry. They spoke to us of “product†instead of “trees.†On our tours, we often saw a field of trees planted around the same time in regular, mathematical rows just to be cut down for profit as soon as they matured, therefore, “product.†But calling trees product shifted both my perception of them and my relationship to them. It severed our connection as fellow living things. Words matter. What changes in our country when, as Toni Morrison notes, we go from being called “citizens†to being called “taxpayersâ€? When the new administration took down Obama’s climate policy page on the White House site and replaced it with the America First Energy Plan, a friend posted on Facebook: “Since when does ‘Energy’ mean ‘Fossil Fuel’?â€
That word is being shut down, actually enervated, by being forced into a one-to-one relationship with oil. What does “Energy†really mean? So much more than solar versus petroleum. If we look at the word through a Theatre Lens, energy means: connections, interactions, and reactions. It’s powerful to remember that the only meaningful way to really understand climate and environmental systems is this way as well, via connection, interactions, and reactions. Energy in both the theatre and the climate is its dynamism, its process, its transformation. Energy is story.
Storytelling
I watch Trump as a storyteller and for the first time, I really understand storytelling’s power as a market-driving medium. Trump is a professional entertainer and racketeer, a storyteller who knows his audience and knows how to play to them. Where the climate is concerned, his stories affect the entire planet. He boils complex issues down to sound bites that sway mass markets, sell tickets, cement opinions, erase experiences, and win elections. And they have the advantage of being carried by every media outlet into living rooms, kitchens, car stereos, and ear buds across the country—an advantage our plays and performance works don’t have.
Can we compete? Our storytelling offers a different kind of narrative, driven by a different kind of energy—one that deepens thinking, expands empathy, introduces new worlds, explores imaginative possibilities, and rebuts current conditions. We could take it as our responsibility, our mandate, to keep using our storytelling to keep the realities of our climate in front of audiences, even as Trump’s cabinet is doing everything it can to make those same audiences believe those stories don’t matter.
Sure. We could do that. But the focus can no longer be on impactful storytelling. We can’t stop there because those stories aren’t reaching enough people. We can’t stop there because our current metrics of success, including getting reviewed in major publications, keep us from heading towards different kinds of performance work that might have a different kind of impact, and affect more change. We can’t stop there because as theatre artists, our power doesn’t merely exist in the plays we create and the stories we tell. It also exists in our creativity itself. It also exists in the way we move through and think about the world, as people, as artists, and as citizens.
In Lost in the Meadow (PearlDamour + Mimi Lien),climbers get ready to hoist a giant megaphone up a 60-foot towerso the meadow can speak directly to the audience. Photo by Katie Pearl.
The Artist Citizen is also a Citizen Artist
For years, I’ve responded to current events by making theatre about it. It made sense that as a theatre artist, I would do that: “Oh, I’ll do a performance about Hurricane Katrina…†or “I’ll write a play about the Dakota Pipeline, or building a wall, or the BP Oil Spill…†It was how I brought my citizenry into my artistry, and it led to some good work that many people saw and were affected by. But lately I’ve been thinking about those two words “artist†and “citizen†and wondering if I haven’t been giving myself—ourselves—enough credit. We spend so much time arguing about the power of theatre, and the importance of our product, that we’ve neglected the fact that we as theatre artists have power too. My provocation here is: how can we bring our artistry into our citizenry, rather than the other way around? How can our creative minds, our ability to make imaginative leaps, envision futures, and empathize and connect with others serve the communities that live outside of our theatremaking?
Perhaps we need to start showing up not only as people who make plays and performances about issues, but also as people who think deeply and have smart things to say and know how to say them well. We know how to tell a good story—do we only need to tell it on a stage? What about in board rooms? In Town Halls? At the Parent Teacher Association?
Inviting versus Welcoming
I’ve spent the past four years working in small towns named Milton across the US. One thing The Milton Project has taught me is the difference between “inviting†and “welcoming.†Over and over I hear, particularly from one racial community regarding another, “we invited them, but they didn’t come.†The lesson is this: inviting is very different than welcoming. Ironically, to welcome someone into a relationship with you, you often have to invite yourself to where they are. To their space. As theatre artists, a quality many of us share is a sense of adventure. We can use this quality to propel us not just towards new projects but towards new people. Towards new issues, new places. As this administration seeks to divide us both from one another and from our relationship to the natural world, we cannot wait to be invited to connect. Let’s welcome ourselves into civic, policy-making conversations about the climate and otherwise. Let’s welcome ourselves into conversations with political leaders, neighbors, disenfranchised communities, small town conservative communities, and business executives. And then, bam! Suddenly, our expansive, imaginative, and creative thinking is right in there, opening up possibility, creating connection, and making space.
Intersectionality
At the Women’s March in Washington, DC, California Senator Kamela Harris described a time when she arrived at a meeting and someone said, “Oh good, you’re here, we’d like to talk about women’s issues.” Kamela responded, “Oh good. Let’s talk about immigration. Oh good, let’s talk about climate. Oh good, let’s talk about race relations, about civil rights, about education, about health care, about poverty. These are all women’s issues because they are all issues.”
The Women’s Marches empowered us by shifting the idea of multiplicity from being something that diffused power to intersectionality—something that increases it. I started this essay proposing the alliance between theatre and climate, but as I finish, I want to widen our gaze. Alongside theatre and climate, there is an extensive network of phenomena sharing a debased status under the Trump administration. Rather than feeling drained by the fight to assert our relevance and importance, let’s feel empowered and energized by the new collaborations and cross-currents of our intersectionality! Here’s a partial list:
The dangers of climate change
The importance of theatre
The systems of racism
The realities of classism
The saturation of white privilege
The pervasiveness of xenophobia
The prevalence of misogyny
These phenomena aren’t just aligned by being maligned by the Trump administration. More interestingly, in terms of storytelling, they are deeply, dramatically linked. Issues of climate cannot be extracted from economics; economics cannot be separated from race and class; issues of race and class cannot be untied from white privilege, xenophobia, and misogyny. Can you tell a story about any one of these issues without involving the rest? Sure you could—many of us have. But the final provocation is: let’s not. Let’s welcome this intersectionality into our stories, performance structures, collaborative models, and visions of where we make work and who we work with. Let’s keep the climate foregrounded in both our artistic and our civic lives (and perhaps there will be less and less of a difference between them) by seeking out and acknowledging its connection to, and influence on every story we tell.
There is no us versus them when it comes to our climate because we aren’t just in relationship to the climate, we are the climate. And if that’s the case, then every story is about climate—no matter how loudly the administration argues otherwise.
During the weekend of April 21st, CCS co-ran an Arts & Climate Change mini-festival in Middlefield, Aberdeen, as part of a new initiative exploring how the arts can contribute to community engagement in climate change adaptation. Sociologist and collaborator, Dr Leslie Mabon, shares some initial reflections on the day – re-posted from the Urban Green Adaptation Diary.
Early Saturday morning I was pedaling furiously across Aberdeen in a north-westerly direction, through the grounds of the Royal Cornhill Hospital (pleasant), over North Anderson Drive (scary), and along Provost Rust Drive (downhill and therefore fun). The destination was the Middlefield Community Hub, where I joined Creative Carbon Scotland, Adaptation Scotland, Sniffer and Aberdeen City Council for a one-day mini-festival on Arts and Climate Change. The purpose of the festival was to engage with the community on climate change adaptation through the lens of art.
Where people have come from and why they are here
By way of background, Aberdeen is currently strengthening its climate change adaptation thinking via the Aberdeen Adapts initiative, run jointly between Aberdeen City Council and University of Aberdeen. One of the main purposes of the day was to develop understanding of what Aberdeen Adapts is doing and how citizens can get involved. The community we were holding the festival in – Middlefield – is also about to see quite significant investment in greenspace development, supported by the European Regional Development Fund. Hence this is a good time to be thinking about what climate change adaptation means in the context of daily living, and how we can develop decision-making processes that engage communities and deliver climate adaptation benefits equitably across the city.
Over the course of the day we had three workshops. First, musician Simon Gall used old Doric (the local language in Aberdeen) rhymes and songs to get us to think about how we represent trends, events and processes in society and culture, which led into us writing short lyrics of our own about how we might understand changes in the climate. Then, Jo Hodges and Robbie Coleman brought us the Museum of Future Middlefield, where we were given objects, a year, and a bit of social context, and worked in teams to write a narrative as to what that object did in relation to climate change that led to it being in the Museum of Future Middlefield in the Year 3000. Lastly, Alice Mary Cooper led a theatre-based session, in which we used the metaphor of a suitcase to imagine not only what possessions we would take in an evacuation emergency, but also what personal and community qualities Middlefield could offer to Aberdeen more widely in a climate event.
Museum of Future Middlefield – what did this whistle do for climate change adaptation?
Our role at RGU was to be involved in this process to evaluate its potential in sparking discussions on climate change adaptation. Rather than an in-depth report of the day, I’d therefore like to offer just a few initial thoughts that struck me over the course of the workshops:
-people intuitively know a lot about where they live, both in terms of climate and the physical environment (where risk is, what the effects are) and also the social dynamics (who is vulnerable, how community is organised etc). There is still a bit of an assumption out there – I think – that the public need to be ‘educated’ about climate change. Yet the contributions from the workshop participants show there is a lot of knowledge there about Middlefield as a place, and that this knowledge helps imagine what climate change might mean for the local area in a more contextualised way than I ever could. Art can be a very powerful and effective way of drawing this out;
-related to the above is the value of art in facilitating discussion between sectors. What I found very motivating about the day was that the ‘experts’ (as Simon called us!) participated fully in all the sessions, making personal and creative contributions of their own. Especially in the last session, we got some excellent discussion going across the whole room as a result. The artists were brilliant at facilitating this – and it also helped that the ‘experts’ were perhaps prepared to step outside their comfort zone a bit and participate as individual people rather than representatives of their organisations!
-third, we often don’t pay enough attention to the fact that societal engagement is a messy process. Not literally, but in terms of all the ‘behind the scenes’ work that goes on – the improvisation on the day, the out-of-hours and weekend working, the way we adapt to the spaces we work in on the hoof. It is important that we embrace this messiness and acknowledge it as an inevitable part of community work rather than trying to create standardised, one-size-fits-all solutions for community engagement;
-lastly, when it comes to climate change, art isn’t just a way of visualising ‘the science’. Rather, it brings a whole different way of thinking about what the problems are, what the potential solutions might be and – crucially in my view – helps us to think about how we might get there. All three sessions really played on this idea of art as a stimulus for thinking about the future, in a much more engaging way than the kind of scenario-based exercises with maps and worksheets that I would have done could ever do!
Middlefield Community Hub, and some greenspace in the regeneration plan
Although the mini-festival itself was a one-day event, we see this as the start rather than the end of thinking about the implications of climate change on daily living in Middlefield and Aberdeen more widely. The next steps are to formally evaluate the event, and for RGU to undertake some follow-up interviews. We will have more to report in due course!
More information on the climate change adaptation in Aberdeen can be found here.
Thanks to Leslie for sharing his blog on the CCS site! Interested in learning more about climate change adaptation? Have a read of CCS Director, Ben Twist’s, most recent Stategy Blog.
The Arts &Â Adaptation project in Aberdeen is delivered as part of the Adaptation Scotland programme, funded by Scottish Government and is run in partnership with Sniffer, Aberdeen Adapts/Aberdeen City Council and Robert Gordon University.
Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.
In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.
We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.
Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:
Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.
London, 14 JUNE 2017- 7.30pm. An evening of imagining possible futures in light of climate change predictions.  #2DegreesFestivalÂ
A climate scenario is a collective act of imagining a possible future in systems involving both humans and nature. They have played a prominent role in climate research, policy and communication. However they tend to be dominated by the natural sciences and economics.
The Paris Agreement set a target of limiting average global temperature increases to 1.5°C. What does a climate scenario look like which takes this ambitious goal into consideration?
Join us for an evening dedicated to imaginative responses to Future Scenarios. Hear from the team who have developed the Climate Change in Residence programme and the four artists who embarked on the first experimental year-long networked residency on the topic of Future Scenarios. They are: Emma Critchley, Lena Dobrowolska, Teo Ormond-Skeaping and Zoë Svendsen.
You’ll be invited to consider a range of climate-changed futures and create your own best-case or worst-case future scenario.
This event is supported by The Open University OpenSpace Research Centre, The University of Sheffield School of Architecture, The Ashden Trust, Jerwood Charitable Foundation and the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.
We are almost four full months into 2017, and already there have been multiple large-scale international public demonstrations, starting most notably with the Women’s March in January. And we’re between two major international marches this week – the March for Science, and the People’s Climate March. In my installment this month, I highlight a particular creative effort for the March for Science, as well as a powerful new documentary from Standing Rock, amidst the unprecedented political situation in the United States.
There is power in the rallies and marches of these past months, in the convening of individuals around shared values. I relish in the humanness – the connections, creativity, compassion. I am also thrilled by the offers of alternatives: public forums to practice alternatives to the oppressive status quo that leaves out and strips the power of people that do not fit the “dominant†type. In these imagined alternatives, there is room for nonhuman beings and forces. This past weekend’s March for Science was such a space, where those who work with data and study forces on all scales could come together in solidarity with one another, and with public supporters. My group of fellow artists and I marched to stand with the discipline of science, with the people who put the scientific method into practice, collate data to relearn our histories, and uncover our future potential as human life on Earth.
My colleagues at Artists Rise Up New York hosted pre-march workshops to construct puppets of animals with endangered status. We wanted to bring these puppets to the March for Science – which landed on Earth Day – in solidarity with the humans who study these animals and their (our) ecosystems. These puppets, fashioned out of repurposed materials, were a way to show up for our friends in science and across species. We gathered under overcast skies with our puppets in hand, amongst thousands of fellow science allies, many of whom touted posters summarizing their reasons for showing up.
Members of Artists Rise Up with sea turtle and golden eagle puppets, March for Science 2017.
The puppets, with their playful, cartoon-like appearance, caught the attention of other marchers, particularly those under the age of 10, and their families. Young children, strapped to their parents’ bodies, had a front row seat to a non-fiction puppet show. Many were eager to engage tactically with the characters: a sea turtle and a golden eagle. The three-dimensional animal puppets inserted a level of joy and playfulness into the march, complementing the posters of scientific and Earth-based puns. Despite the rain that greeted us NYC marchers, our energy flourished down Broadway, past Trump Hotel, until dispersing near Times Square. There is a performative aspect to these marches; they offer a forum for forces, elements and species – otherwise marginalized, silenced, voiceless groups – to be seen on a large public scale, a way to more closely speak to power.
Members of Artists Rise Up with golden eagle, eye of the whale, and sea turtle puppets, March for Science 2017.
In this week between two major marches, in the spirit of Earth Day, anti-fracking activist and documentarian Josh Fox’s latest documentary, Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock, has been released. I would be remiss if I did not wave the flag for this film (it’s streamable online and less than ninety minutes!). A collaboration with filmmakers Myron Dewey and James Spione, Awake compiles a series of stories from the peaceful resistance at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, on the edge of Dakota Access Pipeline construction. The film is an education, for those who were not at the Standing Rock camp, in the way that the Indigenous perspective comes to the fore. This film and its makers deserve a dedicated post, and that will come. In the meantime, I wanted to call attention to the way Awake writes the history of this moment in time, as well as offers tangible actions to take toward climate justice – to resist fracking and Big Oil, educate, and support those presently at Standing Rock and at reservations around the country. I will be taking the peaceful, passionate, urgent energy of Awake with me to the People’s Climate March in DC.
Poster for Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock.
As I reflect on the inaugural March for Science, look forward to the Climate March, and consider the themes from Awake that propel me to action, I see the role of arts in this current historical moment: the creativity of constructions at international marches, the framing of stories from Standing Rock in film, the performance of coming together in a public space, as documented for the world to see. My art-activism connections are only examples, and by offering them, I seek to keep the momentum going. We can all keep the momentum going by taking action that suits us: find a Climate March near you; support Indigenous communities; defund DAPL.
About Artists and Climate Change:
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
Where people have come from and why they are here
Museum of Future Middlefield – what did this whistle do for climate change adaptation?
Middlefield Community Hub, and some greenspace in the regeneration plan
