Drought

30 November: xSpecies Dinner Party « Carbon Arts

DROUGHT AND FLOODING RAINS: THE DINNER

Artist Natalie Jeremijenko and chefs Mihir Desai and Pierre Roelofs create a sensory experience of edible artworks from a fragile land(scape).

Running for over a year in New York and Boston, the celebrated Cross(x)Species Adventure Club Supper Club, comes to Australia for the first time. Five+ paired courses will be served to adventurous palates exploring the unique properties of Australian ecology through modern cuisine techniques and inspired ingredients.

Wednesday 30 November 2011

7:00 – 9:30 PM

Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000

$140 I Limited seats available

via 30 November: xSpecies Dinner Party « Carbon Arts.

Publication: Harvest in Times of Drought

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Harvest in Times of Drought – cultivating pedagogies of life for sustainable communities

Voices of the country

In the following lines, the book Harvest in Times of Drought is presented and offered for download (please find the download link at the bottom of the post). This publication is about creative education in Brasil that can generate social transformation and sustainability.

Brasil is one of the countries that is hit hard by the consequences of the industrialization in form of sharp inequalities, uprooting communicide and ecological upheaval. It has reached a threshold between a terrifying drought and a reflexive dawn. The task is to create on time a global project capable of cultivating a new paradigm of cooperation and sustainable community instead of competition.

Children and young people are seriously affected, because it is their future that is at stake. They already seek refuge in industrialized foods, virtual communities and paradises of self-consumption. Their parents feel powerless and can not point out alternative, aware that these will not resolve our crisis of civilization. A way must be found in order to create a new human performance of care, co-responsibility and solidarity, not just with others, but with ourselves, and with the future.

Every intervention and learning method must be based on pluricultural respect and transcultural care. Alternative experiences of social beauty and ethical self-respect can be offered and inspired by new as well as ancient pedagogies.

The aim is to create self-confidence to intervene in all human spaces and enable people to read and transform our cultural reflexes and political imagination. In order to avoid the reproduction of the violating past in the future, Harvest in Times of Drought roots the educative and transformative potentials of the artistic languages in the wisdoms of the land, the forest and the rivers of the Amazon to contribute to a proposal adaptable to any neighborhood, school and social organization.

The outcome after a seven years collaboration of Dan Baron (author of Cultural Literacy and co-founder of the World Alliance for Arts Education) and Manoela Souza (co-founder of the Brazilian Network of Arteducators) is this  pedagogic resource and collective artwork. Fifty rural pedagogues and community leaders from the Federal University of Pará, Marabá, contributed their share to book in form of life stories, poems, songs and visual as well as pedagogic narratives.
The book is dedicated to Maria do Espirito Santo da Silva, eco-pedagogue, popular educator, extractor, grandmother and co-author of this collective book, who was assassinated with her partner, José Ribeiro da Silva near their forest settlement in northern Brazil, where they were fighting for the protection of the forest and cultures of the Amazon.

Outline

Part 1 is a collection of poems and short-stories. This collection introduces and contextualizes the book’s pedagogic proposal.

Part 2 presents this proposal, based on a dialogue between knowledges, accompanied by a photo-narrative, and includes reflections from the participants who tested, refined and developed the proposal.

Part 3 records a dual process of transition. It dramatizes the challenge of sustaining this pedagogic proposal inside a university, in response to the key questions about complicity and resistance to the new. It lays the foundations of an artistic-pedagogic (aesthetic) project.

Part 4 is the pedagogic proposal in action, education as a transformational aesthetic project and it also contains a pedagogic Charter of Principles.

The final Part 5 contains the lyrics of the CD that accompanies this book.

Download the online version of the book (PDF file) for free:

Harvest in Times of Drought – Colheita em Tempos de Seca

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

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Six degrees: Mark Lynas’s book visualised in new magazine

ecomag

EcoLabs, a network of designers and artists who are looking to create what they call “ecological literacy” has an excellent new magazine out EcoMag, which puts their ideas into practice. It’s available via as a low res download or as an online purchase for £10.

It leads off with a feature in which six artists visualise Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees. For anyone who hasn’t read it Six Degrees is about six different climate warming scenarios, each marked by a single degree increase in the earth’s temperature. This is Jody Barton’s rendition of Five Degrees. The accompanying text reads:

With five degrees of global warming, an entirely new planet is coming into being- one largely unrecognisable from the Earth we know today… Humans are herded into shrinking zones of habitability by the twin crises of drought and flood.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

What if?… James Lovelock and the five in six

This week James Lovelock was in conversation with the journalist and writer Tim Radford in front of a packed audience at the RSA. His latest book The Vanishing Face of Gaia is currently 22 on Amazon – a remarkable achievement for a book which is not exactly a laugh a page.

In fact both James and Tim were full of humour at the RSA event, so it’s a moment before some of the facts sink in. People next to me suck in their breath at Jim’s prediction of one billion people on earth by the end of the century. We are around six billion at the moment. I join the breath suckers. Five in six of us. I’m pretty sure I heard him say that India will pretty much be gone entirely. If he’s right.

If he’s right – this is left hanging in the air and hanging in the balance.

Today a headline in The Guardian reads “Obama pulls back on early climate change legislation”. I see this just as I’m trying to write a positive statement for the Business Council for Sustainable Development, ten years focusing on the practical implementation of sustainable development values. There’s so much progress that has been made and now is the time to build on that, rather than gloom up on the worst case scenario. But nor should we forget it. Just as apathy had terrible consequences for so many in the Second World War, so could complacency in the face of this century’s challenges.

Note to self, get on WattzOn.com and see how you’re shaping up Crimmin before tub thumping any further.

Photo: Gansu Province, China, 2007 by Susannah Sayler, used courtesy of The Canary Project. Photo taken following the 2006 drought, China’s worst in 50 years. This is the former site of Qin Tu Hu Lake.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog