Yearly Archives: 2019

Guest Blog: Developing a Carbon Neutral Fringe Show

Pigfoot Theatre was the winning company in our 2019 Sustainable Fringe Awards. In this guest blog, Bea Udale-Smith (director and performer) and Conky Kampfner (writer and dramaturg) explain the ongoing development and evolution of their production.

A few weeks ago, I read an interview with a writer of a show about climate change (I’ve been trying to track the article down ever since – but I can’t find it!). In it, the writer suggested that all art is now climate art. The idea has stuck with me. At this Edinburgh Festival Fringe , the amount of specifically climate-focused shows is greater than ever before. And even shows which don’t explicitly reference climate breakdown are being made in the consciousness of the climate emergency. The article’s point which at first seemed far fetched is becoming more and more real to me.

This developing consciousness can sometimes feel paralysing. Up until the last couple of years, climate theatre had largely been defined by work like Katie Mitchell & Duncan Macmillan’s 2071, which turned climate scientist Chris Rapley into a performer, delivering a scientific lecture which left its audience with one emotion: mass panic. Relaying facts and conveying the grim reality of the climate crisis is crucial. But maybe there’s another emotion which is more important right now: hope.

We decided the show needed to be carbon neutral long before we knew what it was going to be about. Our lighting is powered by a bicycle, which we cycle live on stage, and by solar-powered lights which we operate while performing the show. Our sound is created live, by our voices, a piano, and objects we’ve found along the way – old tins are megaphones, a broken snare-drum is the sound of a train hitting the tracks, and so on! Finally, all of our production materials – our set, props, costumes – are made from re-purposed materials, built from objects we’d otherwise be throwing away.

It’s taken us almost a year to figure out what the show’s about. Renewable energy, protests, peat bogs, having hope in the face of rising eco-anxiety. We also had to confront (in our personal lives as well as our practice) the urge to hide behind our smaller actions. Using Keepcups, mooncups, tote bags, are all things which are worth doing, but are so often applied as band aids on an open and growing wound. What are the things staring us in the face like the need to divest pensions, like the fact that Shell is only putting 5% of it’s budget into renewable energy?

The most enjoyable side of taking almost a year to figure out what we were trying to do is how much has changed in just 12 months. Greta Thunberg sat outside the Swedish parliament last August. School strikes began internationally in November, and hit the UK by December. By February, an estimated 15,000 British school children were striking for the climate. Extinction Rebellion officially publicly assembled for the first time on 31stOctober – the day we finalised the first version of our script. 18 days later, 6000 people blocked five main London bridges. By the time we were performing the play for the second time in April, they’d protested naked in the House of Commons, and shut down traffic on Oxford Circus. And now, a year has gone by, and we’ve experienced the hottest temperatures recorded in UK history.

Removing the option to use pretty much every conventional piece of tech, which we previously would not have thought twice about using, has definitely been a challenge. For the Fringe, we’ve re-developed the play and added a lot of music, which we sing (or sometimes hum!), accompanied by our unfazeable composer, Sarah Spencer, on piano. But for most scenes, one of us is also on the bicycle, so we’ve had to get used to singing while cycling. In an early song, all three of us have to jump on and off the bike – we’re all singing at different points, two of us have a dance-break in the middle… We end up quite out of breath, but I actually think that’s great. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to seeing someone cycling while also acting – after a while, you forget they’re even doing something unusual! So some of my favourite moments in the play come when you suddenly remember that one of the actors has actually been cycling non-stop for the last 15 minutes.

The other limitation of using a bike to power our lighting is that its lights only have two states (on or off!). But, luckily, these days solar lighting comes in pretty much every shape or size you might want, and – unlike our bike’s lights – we can move it around, and play with it while performing. For a scene which takes place in Blackpool, for example, we have to create the effect of the Blackpool Illuminations. We use solar-powered, multi-coloured lightbulbs, which are very sweet and simple, but definitely don’t do the Illuminations justice. But then again, I guess that’s the fun of theatre – your job is to create the idea of things. Being carbon-neutral has meant we’ve had to strip everything back – we need the audience, their imagination, and belief, to finish the picture.

This play has always been incredibly regional. The characters travel up the country, through London, Blackpool, Walney, Glasgow and up to Forsinard. What’s been incredible about performing it this time round is that the characters end up where we are – in Scotland. So when the characters end up at a protest in the middle George Square in Glasgow we’re hopefully conjuring up an image that is imaginable for a lot of people in the room.

After the Fringe, we’ll have to re-develop the show. Partly because we are always interested in understanding how different audiences respond to our theatre and adapting around that, but mainly because climate change is an issue which is always – well – changing. The most exciting part of making this show has been responding to developments in the world around us. Not just reports which fill us with fear, but to the news of reform, of protest, of uproar, and of hope.

The post Guest Blog: Developing a Carbon Neutral Fringe Show appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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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.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Painting to Represent the Changing of the Seasons

By Rosie Jones

Some of my fondest memories come from visiting galleries and museums and walking around in admiration. I first took an interest in art when I saw impressionist paintings on the walls, capturing nature in a way I hadn’t imagined before.

Art from that era made me increasingly aware of the beauty of the environment. This was expressed through colors, the use of which in impressionism, makes paintings seem very real. The sky in Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry looked like one I’d seen on a March afternoon, and her In a Villa at the Seaside pictured a seascape I felt I’d photographed once, on a holiday maybe. I started to take notice of fields, parks, stretches of woodland and sky, looking to see if they reminded me of the paintings. What actually began was a profound love for the natural world.

Around this time, I started to paint, inspired by the art I liked. I read more into the movement, learning that the name came from Claude Monet’s 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise. To me, the scene of a boat heading out to sea immediately defined the era as nature-focused. Monet’s work became synonymous with enchanting depictions of gardens, rivers, countryside and coast. As one of the leading figures of impressionism, he created paintings that garnered a new respect for the environment.

 Île de la Jatte

Paris at the time acted as the heart of impressionism, and the Île de la Jatte, a small island and serene haven for wildlife near the capital, provided inspiration for many established painters. Artists like Camille Pissarro understood the need to portray nature as something to be treasured, and came to the island to practice the technique of painting outdoors or en plein air. Impressionists used the setting to create some of the best examples of artwork today, including Georges Seurat’s most famous piece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

I visited the island back in May to find inspiration for my own work. I have written about global warming and the environment in articles online, though for the past few months, I’ve instead been making art, focused on the threat of the climate catastrophe. I wanted to make paintings about a subject I felt strongly about.

I set out to paint in a way that showed one of the key ways rising temperatures are altering ecosystems and their dynamic equilibrium. The current climate emergency is disrupting seasons and changing species’ life cycles, which have been stabilized over millennia.

Birds are migrating earlier, causing them to miss out on vital resources for the season ahead, outcompeted for food and nesting places. This is made worse by other environmental pressures that continue to damage habitats and make supplies scarcer. Hibernation is cut short and species are using up energy faster than they can replace it, relying on food sources that are no longer available.

Whereas before I had been learning to trace Levitan’s careful saplings in Autumn Day and master blooms like in Vonnoh’s Poppies, I started to realize that in my new project, I could paint to communicate how climate change is throwing the features in these wonderful landscapes out of balance.

My first painting for this project was a snowscape, taking inspiration from Monet’s The Magpie. I traced trees and walls covered in snow on the canvas, then brushed on traditionally spring synonyms – bluebells and daffodils. My aim was to paint an impossible picture, to act as a take on the consequences of temperature rise and its role in species decline. I used the techniques I had learnt in the impressionist style but always completed the painting in a way that portrayed the message.

All of my paintings follow in this trompe l’oeil format. One painting is modeled after a photograph I took the previous year. Increases in temperature are causing some animals to come out of hibernation earlier than others, only to be met with another cold front. This year, news outlets have covered the phenomenon of earlier and hotter summers, causing flowers to bloom at sporadic times, some plants relying on certain factors that are lost or delayed due to the changing climate.

My favourite painting is based on another photo I took, where I tried to replicate the great colors of the sky. In the shadows of dried wetlands, I put sunflowers and early spring snowdrops side by side – environmental cues that never usually coincide.

After completing the project, I tried to find information about what was happening during these crucial changes of seasons. I found many stories, notably about birds and their need for accurate weather as a reliable indicator for all activities.

There are thousands of visual artists putting grave concerns about our climate into context through their work. These artists are pioneers in helping us build a new relationship with nature, based on respect and a willingness to protect all that is made possible by the environment, especially an environment that is healthy and thriving.

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Rosie Alice is an English painter and writer whose work focuses on the changing global climate. First writing about endangered wildlife as a contributor for an online publication, she started to paint in order to explore more mediums. She wanted to create art that is reminiscent of what helped people appreciate how beautiful and precious our environment is.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Elizabeth Doud and the Mermaid Tear Factory

By Peterson Toscano

Elizabeth Doud takes on the role of Siren Jones in her one-person performance, The Mermaid Tear Factory. Based in Miami, Florida, she has been a catalyst in engaging other artists in conversations around climate change. Each year she helps organize Climakaze Miami.

Elizabeth explains why she sees Miami as the city of the future – both with its changing demographics and the many ways climate change is reshaping the city. She also shares why artists need to break away from telling the story of climate science and instead dig deep into the hard emotions around climate change.

Judith Ann Isaacs writes,

Elizabeth Doud was born to a tree-hugger momma from the Midwest (that’s me), and grew up in Seattle with the sight and smell and sound of salt water as her daily companions. She channeled her family’s passion for protecting the environment into a devotion to the sea. From Seattle to Miami, where she’s lived for 20 years, to an island in the Bay of Salvador, Brazil, where she currently studies, the ocean has been a constant familiar backdrop. And it has been her great sorrow to witness the ocean’s rapidly accelerating degradation. With her poetry – and her intellect – with her very body she has made climate change her mission. No one who has known Elizabeth (even for a short while) was surprised when years of passionate commitment to environmental issues evolved into the first Climakaze Miami in 2015.

Coming up next month,  Sean Dague walks us through a powerful thought experiment that helps us envision a world without fossil fuels. We hope this vision will help you in creating your own art that reveals what climate action success looks like.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Wild Authors: Brian Adams

By Mary Woodbury

In this spotlight on climate change authors I talk with Brian Adams, who has become a prolific fiction writer covering various environmental themes for teens and young adults. I first talked with Brian in November 2014 after the publication of his novel Love in the Time of Climate Change. 

Meet Casey, a community college professor with OCD (Obsessive Climate Disorder). While navigating the zaniness of teaching, he leads a rag-tag bunch of climate activists, lusts after one of his students, and smokes a little too much pot. Quirky, socially awkward and adolescent-acting, our climate change-obsessed hero muddles his way through saving the world while desperately searching for true love. Teaching isn’t easy with an incredibly hot woman in class, students either texting or comatose, condoms strewn everywhere, attack geese on field trips, and a dean who shows up at exactly the wrong moments. What’s a guy to do? Kidnap the neighbor’s inflatable Halloween ghost?  Channel Santa Claus’s rage at the melting polar ice caps? Shoplift at Walmart? How about all of the above!

Who would have thought climate change could be so funny!  Actually, it really isn’t, but Love in the Time of Climate Change, a romantic comedy about global warming, is guaranteed to keep you laughing. Laughing and thinking.

After our previous chat – a portion of which follows – Love in the Time of Climate Change won the 2014 Gold Medal INDIEFAB Book of the Year in the Humor category.

You are a professor of Environmental Science at Greenfield Community College in western Massachusetts, you are active in the climate change movement, and now you have written a romantic comedy about something similar involving a climate change activist teacher. How did your real life experiences inspire your novel? Any funny anecdotes to share?

As a professor I have struggled for years with how to present the issue of climate change to students without them resorting to substance abuse, slipping into profound depression, sending me poisoned chocolates, or, worse case scenario, doing absolutely nothing. The teacher in my novel undergoes the same sorts of struggles, many of which are based on my real life teaching experiences. The process of guiding students to the abyss and then gently pulling them back, giving them hope, and motivating them to get off their asses and do something, is incredibly challenging. If anyone has figured out how to do this please contact me!

Funny anecdotes…being the awkward fool that I am, I have so many I could share! One of the scenes in the novel takes place during a field trip to a solar home, and the love interest (Samantha) is attacked by geese and falls into a farm pond. Her teacher (Casey, our hero) lends her dry clothes, which makes for an awkward moment when the dean shows up. This is based on an incident I had when teaching and I had my students in the Green River doing aquatic insect sampling. One of my students fell in, I loaned her dry clothes, which led to, wait for it, awkward moments. I have a great deal of awkward embarrassing teaching experiences that I embellished (or not!) and used in my novel.

Can you tell us more about your background in climate change action and environmental science teaching?

I have been an activist all of my life around energy-related issues, and a teacher most of my professional life. This is my 20th year at the community college where I teach. I’ve found activism to be an effective and productive way to deal with climate change angst. There is great joy to be found in the struggle, and to be surrounded by active young folk who want to change the world is incredibly inspirational. On campus, I am active with our Green Campus Committee as we work to reduce our carbon footprint. Off campus, I am increasing my activism with Climate Action Now, a local western Massachusetts node of 350.org.

Love in the Time of Climate Change is about a serious subject – climate change – yet you use humor to address it. I think comedy is a great way to tackle dire subjects because laughing is good for the soul and helps us put this overwhelming crisis into an identifiable and human perspective, which might be more motivating than the scary facts. Yet it takes a special skill to treat subjects like this with humor – without making light of the facts – and you seem to have succeeded. How did you accomplish this?

I’ve attempted something that I think is rather unique in that I’ve tackled potential world catastrophe in a fictionalized form through humor, drugs, social awkwardness and sex while being uncompromising about the science of climate change. I have found that many people avoid climate change nonfiction given how depressing and absolutely paralyzing it can be. I mean, seriously, how many people read climate change nonfiction? It can be an incredible downer! Extreme weather, food insecurity, drought, famine, melting glaciers, drowning polar bears, out of control wildfires, rising sea levels… My thought is that humor, silliness and love present an ideal opening not just to climate activists but to a larger audience as well. I love awkward romance and relationship angst, so it was a lot of fun to write.

Quite a few novels are being written today about climate change. How do you think fiction can address this subject in ways that other literature cannot?

Fiction can clearly go where non-fiction can’t, and draw readers deeply into stories and drama and relationships where they get hooked while getting educated. My novel is very didactic and quite preachy, and I make no apologies about it. But if it wasn’t for the awkward romance and silly adolescent antics, I’m not sure people would stick it out. I love stories where you’re laughing while saving the world!

Are there any inspirational authors you grew up with who inspired you to tackle environmental issues through fiction? And, I have to ask, are you a big fan of Gabriel García Márquez?

I love Edward Abbey (all of his writing) but particularly his The Monkey Wrench Gang. That was a great revelation to me. Activism can be fun! And that’s the take away here: How do we bring humor into the most serious of topics without trivializing the gravity of the situation? How do we make climate change an issue people want to take on and have a good time doing it? How do we foster the sentiment of the great anarchist activist Emma Goldman who supposedly said “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”  How can we dance while saving the world?

And yes – Gabriel Garcia Marquez rocks!

Back to your book, the teacher in your novel suffers from OCD, or Obsessive Climate Disorder. Can you describe this?

There is a scene in the novel where the hero is in the midst of “fooling around” with a very attractive woman who is clearly interested in him, and he is simply unable to free his tortured self from the energy no-nos in her apartment: inefficient light bulbs that are all turned on; the open windows and the cranked heat; recyclables in the trash can, etc. I can’t tell you what happens (read the book!) but, when climate change rears its ugly head in the midst of foreplay, that is clearly and unmistakably obsessive climate disorder!

Well, I just got your book in the mail, and can’t wait for this scene! Your book audience is probably all ages to an extent, but your main characters consist of a youngish teacher and his young, college-aged adult students. Young adult fiction is growing by leaps and bounds, even in climate novels. Why is this audience so important?

Youth will save the world! My goal was to promote activism among younger folks and get them psyched and motivated to get out there and make change. For anything good to happen, the younger generation must be active! I’m working on a novel now that features a 15 year-old protagonist battling mountain top removal in West Virginia, sort of a coming-of-age to activism novel.

Bill McKibben, of 350.org, said that you are “funnier than most of us environmental types” and that it was a pleasure to meet you. How did that feel to be acknowledged by such a well-known activist and author?

I was SO flattered to be blurbed by him! I believe, however, that he meant it was a pleasure to meet the main character in my novel, not me. If I met Bill McKibben, I’d probably do something really awkward and make a complete fool of myself! Bill is a hero to so many of us in the climate change movement, but his dig at those “environmental types” is quite revealing. While there is absolutely nothing funny about climate change, we do need activists to take joy in the struggle and have fun in their activism. My goal was to bring humor and hope into a genre that is noted for dystopian despair.


Since then, Brian has come out with KABOOM!, and his third novel, Offline, came out April 22, 2019. Brian recently told me about his second novel:

KABOOM!, my second novel, is the story of Cyndie and Ashley, two spirited and spunky teenage girls living in the heart of coal country, West Virginia, who discover that their beloved mountain is to be blown sky high by the coal company. It’s a young adult romantic comedy that focuses on first love and finding your voice through environmental activism. While KABOOM! (Kids Against Blowing Off Our Mountaintops) is fictional, mountaintop removal is definitely not. It’s a horrendously destructive and extreme method of coal extraction and it’s heartening to know that there are many true-to-life committed activists in Appalachia intent on fighting it. The times we live in are tough, so rather than dwell in dystopian nightmares, I try to use humor and romance as tools to promote environmental issues and move my story along. KABOOM! won gold medals at the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the Literary Classics Book Awards.

It’s great to see youth activists taking on fossil fuels, one of the leading contributors to global warming. Brian’s stories are an example of how humor can be used to shed light on serious issues, without demeaning those issues, and how youth can be empowered to take on Big Things.

He also was excited to discuss Offline, coming soon:

Offline is a young adult romantic comedy about two spirited and spunky teenage girls. The novel’s focus this time is on cell phone and online addiction. Meagan, the heroine, is banished by her parents to her gay grandfather’s farm to deal with her “netaholism,” and a lot of the novel’s humor is Meagan and her bestie’s bumbling forays into the offline natural world. The inability for so many people to disconnect from their laptops and phones and get outside is driving me crazy, so I wrote a novel about it. It’s timely, it’s funny, and I hope it gets people (not just kids!) thinking about going offline.

Brian and I also talked about what’s been going on in the five years since Love in the Time of Climate Change.

Feedback from my first novel, Love in theTime of Climate Change, has been very positive. Published in 2014, the novel chronicles one semester in the life of my community college professor hero (mot me!) as he muddles his way through saving the world while desperately searching for true love. I tried to tackle potential world catastrophe in a fictionalized form through humor, social awkwardness and sex while driving home the essential science of climate change. Once again, silliness and a love story can hopefully entice readers into picking up my novel who might otherwise shy away from reading anything to do with such a paralyzing, mind-numbing issue.

In my non-literary life, my wife and I have inherited quite a bit of money, which we are using to install photovoltaics on non-profits whose mission we agree with. It’s an exciting project that allows us to put our money where our mouth is and help tackle climate change on the local level while allowing wonderful organizations to use more of their resources to do good work in the world. Climate action now!

I appreciate Brian doing the good work he does and taking the time to chat with me again about his novels. He tells me he is also working on another…stay tuned!

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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AQUARIUM OF THE PACIFIC PRESENTS ART EXHIBIT, OCEAN RESILIENCY: THE EXPEDITIONS OF DANIELLE EUBANK

The Aquarium will display art by painter Danielle Eubank resulting from her twenty-year quest to capture all the world’s oceans

The Aquarium of the Pacific will display an exhibit of paintings by artist Danielle Eubank from November 5, 2019, to January 5, 2020. Eubank is exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. For her One Artist Five Oceans project, she has sailed and painted all of the oceans on the planet. Her process of documenting the world’s oceans has included expeditions aboard replica historic ships. In the exhibit at the Aquarium, Eubank’s paintings will be paired with messages about what people can do to help the environment. On November 5 at 7:00 p.m., Eubank will present a lecture as part of the Aquarium’s Guest Speaker Series. She will discuss the process of documenting the world’s oceans and her travels.

Eubank holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and exhibits widely in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia. She is a former director of the Women’s Caucus for Art, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant awardee, a member of The Explorer’s Club, a 2018 Creative Climate Awards nominee, and the awardee of the 2018 WCA/United Nations Program Honor Roll. Her paintings are on exhibit at C Gallery Fine Art in Long Beach.

WHEN:            November 5, 2019 – January 5, 2020, 9:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

WHERE:         Aquarium of the Pacific, 100 Aquarium Way, Long Beach, CA 90802

COST:             Free to Aquarium members and included with general admission for the public – General admission: $34.95 adult (12+), $31.95 senior (62+), and $24.95 child (3-11)

INFO:              (562) 590-3100 or aquariumofpacific.org/events/info/one_artist_five_oceans/

AQUARIUM:   The nonprofit Aquarium of the Pacific is a community gathering place where diverse cultures and the arts are celebrated and where important challenges facing our planet are explored by scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders in search of sustainable solutions. The Aquarium is dedicated to conserving and building nature and nature’s services by building the interactions between and among peoples. Home to more than 12,000 animals, Aquarium exhibits include the new Pacific Visions wing, Ocean Science Center, Molina Animal Care Center, and the Tentacles and Ink and FROGS: Dazzling & Disappearing exhibits. Beyond its animal exhibits, the Aquarium offers educational programs for people of all ages, from hands-on activities to lectures by leading scientists. Field trips for schoolchildren are offered at a heavily discounted rate, from $7 to $8.50 per student. The Aquarium offers memberships with unlimited FREE admission for 12 months, VIP Entrance, and other special benefits. Convenient parking is available for $8 with Aquarium validation.

Opportunity: Adopt an Early Warning Sign

Calling arts venues concerned about climate change! Adopt an Early Warning Sign in 2020!

Since 2011, Ellie Harrison‘s four rotating ‘climate change’ signs have been touring arts venues across the UK under the mantra ‘reduce, reuse, recycle your art!’ for a project called Early Warning Signs.

Every autumn, the search begins to find four host venues to ‘adopt’ the signs to display outside their venue for the following year. 32 venues across the UK have now taken part including CCA Glasgow, Eastside Projects, ACCA Sussex, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Aspex and Artsadmin and many more. Read about the history of this project.

Deadline for applications from interested venues to host a sign in 2020 is 31 October 2019.
It takes 2-5 minutes to apply via the website.

See more information on Facebook and Instagram.

The post Opportunity: Adopt an Early Warning Sign appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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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.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Q18 DESCRIBED: WALKING INTERCONNECTIONS

Lead Editor’s note: We will be publishing excerpts from Q18: dis/sustain/ability, guest edited by Bronwyn Preece, in order to make the content accessible to blind readers with audio screen readers. We’ll also be including audio descriptions of the Quarterly’s original layout designed by Stephanie Plenner, described by Katie Murphy. Please stay tuned for future posts and share widely.

In this our fourth chapter, Dee Heddon and Sue Porter discuss the reframing of walking practices for wheelchair-bound participants, along with ideas of interdependency.

Audio Description of images in Walking Interconnections

CONNECTIONS

It is the summer of 2012 and Dee is walking across Belgium with The Walking Library, a library filled with books considered good to take for a walk and carried on foot. The Walking Library is an artwork created for Sideways festival, a month- long peripatetic festival aiming to renew attention to the ‘slow paths’ – the underused and thus endangered network of footpaths crossing the country – by walking some 334 km along them. 1

In a tent in a field somewhere in the Flanders region Dee’s phone accesses wifi and emails are downloaded. One of them is from Alison Parfitt, a collaborator with Dee in a 2010 research network which explored site-specific performances’ relationship with environmental change. Alison introduces Dee to her friend and colleague, Dr. Sue Porter, a researcher at the University of Bristol. Sue is in the process of putting together an interdisciplinary research grant application for a project which would explore disabled people’s everyday experiences of landscape and environment to surface everyday wisdoms and expertise. Sue’s interest in using walking as a research method had prompted Alison to connect then, given Dee’s enduring interest in walking art. 2 From the tent in the field in Belgium, battling the erratic internet connection, Dee sends Sue an email, signalling her enthusiasm.


WALKING


In 2014, the project Walking Interconnections: Researching the Lived Experience of Disabled People for a Sustainable Society was launched. Walking Interconnections, led by Sue Porter, was a year-long interdisciplinary study that responded to the demonstrable lack of connection between disability and environmental movements. More pointedly, it was motivated by the marginalization of disabled people within and by environmentalist discourse, which most often presumes, figures and reiterates a normative, undifferentiated and able-bodied subject, revealing what Sarah Jacquette Ray identifies as a “corporeal unconscious”. The ‘environmental subject’ is one who is independent, self-sufficient, fit and healthy. 3 Walking Interconnections took walking as its primary methodology in part because it is immersive and fosters convivial exchanges, 4 but more importantly because placing walking at the centre challenged a corporeal unconscious which figured the ‘walking’ body as a body walking upright on two feet. As one of our co-researchers, Liz Crow – a wheelchair user – commented on the Walking Interconnections blog in June 2013, she bit her ‘tongue at the word walking (because I’m not, am I?)’. Notably, six months further into the project, Crow’s use of the word walking, though still hesitant, indicates an importantly expanded signification:

Speaking personally, so many years of medical history have been of
doctors telling me I should walk – that is, functionally, place one foot in
front of the other in order to move from one point to another. In almost 30 years of using a wheelchair, I’ve never yet seen a doctor who understood that that’s not what walking ever represented to me. It was moving through space, connecting with natural and social environments, relationships, meditation, relaxation, pleasure, mental health, tactility, and more. Those are the really important features of walking and it remains all of those things when I ‘walk’ with wheels. 5

Walking Interconnections emerged from an earlier scoping essay by Porter and her academic colleague David Abbott. 6 In this, the authors asked whether physically disabled peoples’ experiences might enable them to become valuable contributors to planning initiatives directed towards environmental hazard, rather than marginalized by the dominant perception of disabled people as singularly vulnerable. The authors didn’t deny that disabled people were vulnerable – that is, ‘disproportionately affected by the consequences of all kinds of natural and human made hazards’ 7 – but their contention was that such vulnerability is a product of neglect (for example, structural attitudes position disabled people as the least worth saving) and also by design (the needs – and skills – of disabled people are not fully acknowledged – for example, planning responses are often ablest in their assumptions, privileging normative notions of bodily abilities).

Seeking to problematize the perception of vulnerability, Abbott & Porter
proposed an alternative hypothesis, one paying attention to disabled people’s ‘intricate, daily negotiations with risk, hazard and barriers’. 8 As they argue, ‘disabled people may have lived experiences which bestow expertise which could significantly contribute to discussions about and planning for environmental risk’. 9 Walking Interconnections aimed to identify such expertise in order that it could be recognized and valued and could contribute to wider discussions around sustainability.

Over the course of a year, a research team worked with 19 co-researchers
from Bristol who self-identified as either physically disabled or environmental activist – tellingly, only one co-researcher self-identified as both. Each co-researcher was asked to invite another co-researcher to accompany them on a walk of their choice. Walking pairs were often also accompanied by Personal Assistants and/or assistance dogs. A variety of walking aids were used, from a trike, to scooters and sticks. Each walking pair carried a digital voice recorder. More than 20 hours of audio material, mostly recorded on the move, was transcribed and edited and re-recorded into a 30-minute verbatim audio play-reading, ‘Going for a Walk’. This can be downloaded from the project’s website; here, I offer just a few extracts taken from across different scenes. 10

SCENE 2: PLANNING
Jane: Have you got a walk in mind?
Hayley: Yes, Baydock Woods. There’s quite a few little walks round there, but there is one on the level up round the top, which you can basically just go round in a circle.
Neil: I was thinking about walking round my allotment site.
Hayley: Are there places to sit?
Neil: Good question. Not readily, no, there are not.
Jane: Has it got a path?
Neil: Yes, there’s a path.
Jane: Tarmacked?
Neil: Not tarmacked, ehm, a combination of sort of hard sort of gravel and grass.
Hayley: And level?
Neil: There’s a very slight incline, as you go up, but nothing.
Hayley: Nothing major. Neil: Yeah, pretty much level.
Sue: Well what you find with disabled people is that they have to plan very
meticulously if they don’t want to get caught out. This is why I chose this
walk today. We came and reccied it after our meeting and made sure I
could see where I could get on.
Sharon: So from the bridge if you go up the hill it takes you somewhere else. But it’s a bit steep and I don’t think the buggy will manage it very well, and it’s a bit rockety so I don’t think we will go up there.
Tony: There’s this bridge, that’s a footbridge, so these are all footpaths, these purple colored things on the map, so we could maybe investigate that?
Sue: As long as we’ve got some options in case it doesn’t work.


SCENE 4: MAKING CHOICES
Julie: The reason I’ve chosen this walk today is, one, they’ve got good facilities. Obviously you’ve got the café, and the toilets for disabled which you can access them with a radar key, most of the footpaths are quite level, and obviously it’s good for Billie to run around and there’s various walks to do with Blaise Castle. I’ve chosen this walk because we can go, almost complete it.
Dale: I like walking around the dock area. It’s a big, wide open space and there’s lots of different things to look at, like boats, and ships and the harbor side. And for me it expresses the freedom of walking. Because you don’t get a lot of traffic down there, it’s much easier and accessible for people like myself.
Sharon: I chose this one because I’d been there before. It’s quite a nice walk. It’s not too far, and they have loads of lovely trees and there’s always people in there walking their dogs and it’s just very peaceful in there.
Sue: I think I chose it because I knew it was flat. And you’ve chosen it to
accommodate me, really.
Tony: Partly, but I just like somewhere near water. I think anywhere near water I quite like.


SCENE 6: THE STEPS GOT US
Glenise: Ah, there’s steps up here. […]
Julie: Sometimes, people take things for granted. All the walks here aren’t fully accessible.
Anais: Clearly you wouldn’t go through there?
Julie: You wouldn’t, because of the dip. […] We couldn’t go up to the mill. That’s one of the things that we couldn’t access. There’s going to be other things.
Anais: For example, going to the path on the left, which is too steep.
Julie: Yes, too steep.
Liz: Ok, so we’ve come past the nature reserve and got onto a track that we were both getting really quite enthusiastic about, it’s one of those very sustainable tracks, tramped down earth and my trike has coped just about with the loose gravel surface on it. And beyond this gate we’ve come to what looks lovely, real potential for open countryside but we’ve
come to one of those kissing gates which is impassable. I would probably
get stuck in and left there because I think I would get wedged. And
there’s a lovely big gate next to it – but unfortunately that’s padlocked – so
that’s the end of this route. So – now we are going to backtrack.

SUSTAINING INTERDEPENDENCY

Key aspects of the transformation towards sustainability are the abilities to cope with and adapt to new challenges arising from changing environments. 11 Going for a Walk reveals repeated practices of planning, mitigation, risk taking, deviation, adaptability, problem solving, persistence, commitment, attentiveness and creativity and interdependency. The dominant discourse of ‘independence’, particularly as this is attached to the field of disability policy and practices, belies the reality and necessity of interdependence – interdependence offering alternative and useful conceptions of ‘sustainable living’. Repeatedly observed in our project were interdependencies’ attendant practices, including trust, negotiation, collaboration, reciprocity, mutuality, and co-operation. The inter, we suggest, is surely part of an environmental ethic, contesting as it does the story of the subject as self-sufficient and singular. Whilst interdependency is perhaps more apparent because more explicit in the relationships of (some) disabled people (some of the time), Judith Butler has insisted that as ‘socially constituted bodies’, ‘we are fundamentally dependent on others’. 12 Vulnerability and interdependency are two sides of the same ontological coin, far removed from the idea of the ‘masterful’, omnipotent subject. Borrowing from Butler again, greater recognition of our ‘inevitable interdependency’ might very well provide the sustaining grounds for what she calls a ‘global political community’. 13 Such sustaining grounds are surely the foundations for sustainability? Acknowledging our vulnerability might just allow all of us to practice our interdependency better, a process of resilience necessary to sustaining a diversity of assembled lives, human ones included.


POST-SCRIPT

Dr. Sue Porter died suddenly on 11 January 2017. Nevertheless, this piece of
writing is interdependent, the product of conjoined labor, written and rewritten as a collaborative act. The ‘I’ is a ‘we’. I last saw Sue in July 2016. She gifted me a book for The Walking Library for Women Walking. The book was Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers. 14 Sue wrote:

The reason I chose the Examined Life book was particularly for the
chapter that is the walk Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler take in San
Francisco – where we hear what makes a city inclusive and therefore
accessible, in city planning terms and, more importantly for me, the
exchange between these walkers on the ideas of ‘what a body does’. They speak to me of the importance of ‘belonging’ and the value of asking again and again, ‘who is it that belongs here?’ I also love hearing the relationship that evolves between them, the gaze, the touching, the making of a shared pace.


Dee Heddon holds the James Arnott Chair in Drama at the University of
Glasgow. She is the author of numerous books, essays and articles, many of
which engage with walking as an aesthetic practice.

Sue Porter was a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Policy Studies,
University of Bristol. Sue wrote widely about disability, justice and equality. She lived her life as a scholar, an activist and an artist.

FOOTNOTES

Beltane Fire Society receives funding to explore a ‘Green’ Fire Festival

Beltane Fire Society has been awarded £500 from the Climate Challenge Fund

Beltane Fire Society has been awarded £500 from the Climate Challenge Fund, part of Keep Scotland Beautiful, to explore creating a ‘Green’ Fire Festival.

The charity’s board applied to the Climate Challenge Fund for a small development grant of £500 to assist in hosting conversations with its volunteers to find ways to reduce the environmental impact of hosting the festivals. The idea came about after the recent environmental focus at the Beltane Fire Festival 2019*.

As a result of the successful application, Beltane Fire Society will host several conversations with its volunteers to understand what action they would like to see the charity take and how it can better support volunteers to be more environmentally friendly in their activities. The conversations will encompass what volunteers can do individually, what they can do when involved in their festival groups, and then finally how Beltane Fire Society can do more from an organisational standpoint.

Volunteers make up a vital part of the festivals, with almost 300 involved every time. The board is very pleased that this funding will enable Beltane to include their voices to help shape the charity and ensure it creates a community the volunteers are proud to be part of.

Although aimed at the charity’s volunteers, the meetings will be open to members of the public to share ideas. Beltane wants to generate ideas with locals to ensure everyone can enjoy the activities that take place in their city.

More information about the discussion events coming soon, so please keep an eye out if you are interested in taking part of the conversation of creating a ‘Green’ Fire Festival in the run up to Samhuinn Fire Festival 2019, which will take place on 31st October on Calton Hill.

*This year at the Beltane Fire Festival 2019, the volunteer who held the role of May Queen, a key character on the night that represents part of the Triple Goddess at the festival, had chosen to take a more environmental approach with the role they played on the night. This was done to highlight the damage that is happening to the Earth every day and got quite a bit of media attention as other environmental groups were being very vocal around the UK as well. Read more on the specific issues that were discussed in April can be found here.

The post Beltane Fire Society receives funding to explore a ‘Green’ Fire Festival appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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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.

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