A new collaboration between Creative Carbon Scotland and Good Energy will support Scotland’s cultural sector to go green.

Match-funded by the Culture & Business Fund Scotland (CBFS) programme, Creative Carbon Scotland is pleased to announce a new partnership with 100% renewable electricity supplier Good Energy to develop knowledge, resources and green energy opportunities for the Scottish Green Arts community.

Transforming Scotland’s Cultural Sector

Creative Carbon Scotland has been working with the Scottish cultural sector since 2011 to reduce the environmental impact of the arts and to explore innovative approaches to enable Scotland’s cultural sector to bring about the transformational change needed to address climate change. Its Green Arts Initiative is a growing collaborative community of over 225 cultural organisations committed to environmental sustainability.  

The climate crisis is an urgent issue and cultural organisations are aware of how they can make a difference.  Through changing their energy consumption, cultural venues can dramatically reduce their overall greenhouse gas emissions. 

Creating New Knowledge for a Greener Cultural Sector

The new partnership with Good Energy follows recent ground–breaking work by Creative Carbon Scotland to help arts and cultural organisations reduce their energy demand through improved energy efficiency and buildings management and positive behaviour change. Matched pound-for-pound by the Culture & Business Fund Scotland, Good Energy’s partnership will enable the design and creation of skills workshops and new online resources for the sector to empower and support Green Champions working across theatre, dance, music, literature, visual arts, screen, and the creative industries, helping to upskill the Scottish cultural sector to tackle the climate crisis.  

The Culture & Business Fund Scotland programme is funded by the Scottish Government via Creative Scotland. Managed by independent charity Arts & Business Scotland, it seeks to encourage closer collaboration between business and the cultural sector by match funding business sponsorship of cultural projects throughout Scotland.   

Commenting on the partnership, Helen Franks, Partnerships & Business Development Manager at Good Energy said: “This exciting new partnership with Creative Carbon Scotland will build on our successful track record in the arts sector. We look forward to working with Scotland’s thriving cultural community as it makes the transition to sustainable, clean energy.” 

Ben Twist, Director and Founder, Creative Carbon Scotland, said: “Ethically-sourced renewable energy is one of the best ways through which our sector and wider society can shape a cleaner, greener future. With match-funding from the Culture & Business Fund Scotland, our partnership with Good Energy aims to build up knowledge and awareness to help those working in the cultural sector to make more sustainable energy choices.”

Carl Watt, Head of Programmes at Arts & Business Scotland, said: “Via match-funding from the Culture & Business Fund Scotland, we’re delighted to be supporting Creative Carbon Scotland’s partnership with Good Energy. Like all sectors of the economy, the cultural sector needs to be doing what it can to help reduce Scotland’s carbon footprint. With that in mind, this partnership aims to share the knowledge cultural organisations throughout Scotland need to make more informed decisions about their energy use and supply.”

Upcoming Workshops and Green Energy Questionnaire and Prize Draw for Scottish Cultural Organisations

To celebrate and shape this new partnership for a greener cultural sector, we are hosting a questionnaire for all Scottish cultural organisations on their choices around energy, with the opportunity to win a £100 voucher for John Lewis & Partners (online and instore)!

• The questionnaire should take around 10 minutes and can be found here. 

We’ll be using the insights gained from this questionnaire to inform the content of two free workshops we’ll be hosting in mid-June:

• Glasgow: Wednesday 12th June, 2pm-4pm. Find out more and register!
• Edinburgh: Thursday 13th June, 10am – 12pm. Find out more and register!

The post Good Energy partnership to help Scottish cultural sector ‘go green’ 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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Our second podcast looks at how ‘Climate Fiction’ or ‘Cli-Fi’ can help us to experience and connect with the climate crisis in new ways.

The latest episode “Can experiencing fiction and the unfamiliar help to change the way humans act and relate to the climate crisis?” comes from our Green Tease ‘Cli-Fi: The New Weird’. It’s available on Itunes, Google Podcasts (on your phone), Spotify and a bunch of other platforms. We welcome your feedback on the podcast as we’re aiming to produce recordings of more of our events, to allow a wider audience to benefit from the information and to ensure that there’s a means of participating when environmental or other considerations mean people choose not to travel.

This event was the A+E’s Collective’s eclectic and thought provoking response to the Green Tease Open Call, in collaboration with UNFIX Festival. The festival audience were taken to space and the far flung corners of their imaginations, through a multimedia exploration of the genre Cl-Fi (Climate Fiction) – as a way to rethink how we engage with the climate crisis.

Cli-Fi: The New Weird

A+E have provided an overview of what the session covered, and what can heard in the podcast:

Titled Cli-Fi: The New Weird, our special edition of BIOSYSTEMS aimed to explore the problems, pleasures and potentials of using speculative genres to help understand our positioning as human subjects in the context of the climate crisis. We began the two-hour session in Glasgow’s CCA with an exclusive screening of our film, From Mull to Mars, developed in collaboration with local filmmaker Winnie Brook Young. Drawing on new materialist philosophies and the eerie aesthetics of novels like Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, From Mull to Mars challenges what ‘presence’ means in the context of an unknown world within our world, which we are calling the Zone, after Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

After the film, Dr Rhys Williams from the University of Glasgow gave a presentation on the history of Cli-Fi (climate change fiction) and the New Weird and the challenges these genres pose to familiar understandings of ‘nature’. Glasgow-based science-fiction novelist/poet Oliver Langmead performed extracts from his recent publications and gave an overview of the environmental themes within them, including terraforming and posthumanism.

A+E member Maria Sledmere then joined Rhys and Ollie to deliver an original visualisation script, designed to help workshop participants ‘enter the Zone’. Following the meditation, participants were asked to respond with writing or drawing. Questions asked of the groups included ‘were you human or did you adopt a nonhuman form at any point in the Zone?’ and ‘What is the value of ‘slow’ forms of attention in the context of ecological crisis?’

Individual groups then fed back their discussion to the room with verbal, written and visual descriptions – touching on ecological ethics, emotional reactions, empathy and storytelling, the difference between reality and fiction, dreams and film. We are collating some of these responses and intend to create a publication, as a companion to the film.

You can find out more about A+E Collective here: www.instagram.com/a.e.collective

The post #GreenTease Podcast: Can experiencing fiction and the unfamiliar help to change the way humans act and relate to the climate crisis? 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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It has felt a funny couple of weeks here at Creative Carbon Scotland HQ. For the first time in our eight-year existence the climate crisis has been top of the agenda in the news: everyone’s been talking about Extinction Rebellion and the idea of the UK getting to zero-carbon by 2025. Meanwhile I’ve been stuck in the office.

Instead of gluing myself to North Bridge, I’ve been working on long-term, slow stuff: developing strategic relationships, planning training for later in the year, discussing projects about adaptation to flooding. I’ve found it a bit discombobulating: is Creative Carbon Scotland on the right track or should we be advocating direct (cultural?) action?

I think I have to hold my nerve. Addressing climate change is a long game as well as a fast one. We need all of the above, not the fast stuff or the slow and steady, but both.

The Overton Window

One reason for this was mentioned by Chris Stark, the Chief Executive of the UK Government’s Committee on Climate Change, in a good speech he gave back in March:

‘It is worth reflecting on how the public discourse has shifted to permit these moments. It feels very much that the ‘Overton Window’ has moved – and rapidly in recent months.’

Richard Dixon, Director at Friends of the Earth Scotland, mentioned the Overton Window the other week at an event I was at. I hadn’t heard the term before but my understanding (thanks Wikipedia, amongst others) is that it refers to the realities of policy making and politics. Policy options within the Overton Window are those that are considered within the bounds of legitimacy: those outwith it are options that just aren’t considered publicly acceptable. Chris Stark is suggesting that ideas and policies that would have been considered outlandish a couple of years ago are now in the realm of the possible.

So what exactly is this window everyone’s on about?

A note of caution here: Joseph P Overton, who invented the term, was a Senior Vice President of the Mackinac Center, which is a free-market think tank in the US. Such right-wing pressure groups have been very successful at applying the concept and deliberately shifting the window so that previously unthinkable policies (marketisation of the health service in the UK, privatising prisons in both the US and UK, Brexit etc) have become areas that are considered acceptable for discussion. It’s important that the climate crisis is not perceived as a left/right issue and perhaps it’s good to see a successful approach being applied to what in my view are more useful areas. But I do find myself a mite uncomfortable about adopting techniques associated with the Koch brothers.

Richard Dixon used the term to argue that Friends of the Earth Scotland welcomed the more radical Extinction Rebellion’s existence and demands, even if FoE didn’t necessarily espouse them. XR made what might have previously been considered FoE’s unreasonable views more mainstream, so when Richard is arguing for the Climate Change Bill to be more ambitious, politicians are more likely to listen.

Is it an age thing? I just had my 57th birthday!

I think I’m in the same camp – and I’m aware here that I have a history of working from within existing structures which are arguably the establishment, but trying to change things from the inside. As a Board member of the Scottish Arts Council I was certainly an insider, but succeeded I think in arguing for some different approaches. (I didn’t succeed with everyone: I was once told that I was the second most unpopular person in Scottish theatre – which was a bit of a worry since that was precisely where I was trying to earn a living.)

I’ve long been quite interested in change and, because at the Scottish Arts Council I was chairing the committee that distributed National Lottery funds, and there was a requirement that the funded activity was ‘additional’ (whatever that meant), we were always working with the future, rather than continuing the past, and that meant that we could explore new ideas, some of which became mainstream. I think something similar can be said for working on climate change and sustainability in the arts: because it’s a new topic and no-one’s particular responsibility, you aren’t dealing so much with existing stuff, you are constantly breaking new ground.

So although I find it a bit uncomfortable not to have joined the protesters, we can benefit from it while continuing to work in slower and steadier way. I’m currently planning some workshops for cultural organisations and the officers from the main distributor of Government funds to the arts in Scotland, Creative Scotland, and it’s clear (viz Chris Stark and others) that I can make the case for much more ambitious plans than would have been thinkable even a year ago. The window has moved and perhaps particularly in the last few weeks.

Some examples: while you might expect us to have Declared Emergency along with many other cultural organisations across the UK (including Jerwood Arts, the Royal Court Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre, even not particularly radical Theatr Clwyd, for goodness’ sake ), perhaps more unexpectedly, Aberdeen Performing Arts and the Traverse joined in the Letters to the Earth project and the Edinburgh International Festival this summer is hosting the Royal Court in an International Climate Crisis Residency (note that’s a ‘climate crisis residency’, not even just a plain old ‘climate change’ one!). None of these projects would have happened, or been so overtly focused on climate change, even a year ago. The slow and steady stuff is working.

Main image: Diagram of The Overton Window, taken from https://voxeu.org/content/moving-overton-window-let-debate-continue

The post Ben’s Strategy Blog: What exactly is the Overton Window? 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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Waste collected from a new RiverRubbish initiative puts the pollution of the river in the frame.

Waste collected from a new RiverRubbish initiative puts the pollution of the River Almond in the frame. Artist Annie Lord has transformed a small portion of the river waste gathered by local volunteers into an artwork that will serve as a reminder of the impact rubbish has on our rivers.

Unveiled at Almondell and Calderwood Country Park on the 8th March 2019, River Series: Almond has been created by Annie using everything from Tennent’s cans to wet wipes and more to create a striking piece encased in resin. What at first appears to be a depiction of riverbank nature is on closer inspection revealed to be reclaimed rubbish in disguise. Set to be displayed at the Almondell and Calderwood Country Park Centre, River Series: Almond hopes to encourage visitors to think twice when it comes to dealing with our rubbish.

Join us in the toilet block at the park’s visitor centre to have look and meet some of those involved in its production or visit at any point to see the art work.

The post News: New river pollution artwork unveiled at Almondell Park 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

Powered by WPeMatico

How could £50 help your organisation’s Green Arts work? Send in your ideas for the chance to win in our Green Arts Competition!

Creative Carbon Scotland came joint-1st (once more!) in the Sustrans Scotland â€˜Scottish Workplace Journey Challenge‘, with everyone in the organisation logging a low carbon journey – as well as a few of our friends from Festivals Edinburgh. For our efforts we’ve got a new proudly-displayed certificate and a count of how many donuts our exercise was equivalent to (63!) but we also won the opportunity to donate £50 to a charity of our choice: could this be you? We discussed it as team, and decided we wanted to use the donation to help support the fantastic Green Arts community’s work.

We weren’t the only ones in the sector riding (and walking, taking the bus etc) high, a big congratulations to Green Arts Initiative member National Galleries of Scotland who were top of the category of organisations with 250-499 employees!

Win £50 towards your Green Arts work

Now we’re on the hunt for the best sustainability idea from our Green Arts community. We’re running a competition over the course of May 2019: anyone from the Green Arts Initiative can submit an idea, and we’ll pick a winner to announce at the end of the month!

We know £50 won’t cover the costs of all your sustainability ambitions, but we hope it’ll help you get the ball rolling on something in your wish-list. Perhaps you want to invest in a bicycle pump and puncture repair kits to support your staff using active travel to get to work; reward your green team with some sustainable treats or pay for (sustainable) transport to Green Champion training. Anything goes, as long as it contributes to your environmental sustainability efforts!

Last year’s winner

The Green Team at Edinburgh International Book Festival, had the winning idea in last year’s competition of sending out letters to their donors using seeded/plantable paper – to remind the donors of the setting of the Book Festival’s settings in Charlotte Square Gardens, whilst spreading wildflowers throughout the UK to support pollinator populations.

Key Information/Tips

• Submit your idea by 5pm on Friday 31st of May 2019.
• Keep it simple: try to keep your idea to three sentences or less.
• Your organisation has to be a Scottish-based cultural organisation, and a member of the Green Arts Initiative (join, if you’re not already a member!).
• You can submit as many ideas as you want, and different people from the same organisation can submit different ideas.
• It can contribute to an existing sustainability project, act as seed-funding for something new, or cover the costs of something small.
• The winning idea will be selected by the Creative Carbon Scotland team for its creativity/originality/effectiveness/quality.
• We’ll share our favourite ideas on our website, through our social media, and in our monthly Green Arts Round-Up to members.

The post Green Arts Competition: Win £50 to help your green work! 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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Artists are invited to apply for one of a number of paid commissions for this project, responding to the urban environment to devise mapped walks or cycles for the local community.

‘FOOTPRINT’ is a walking and cycling map + guide planned for East Edinburgh (Portobello, Leith) & Musselburgh  with artist-led routes that intersect the urban with nature through lesser used habitats, encouraging everyday physical activity as a way to improve well being.

We will be holding a number of public drop-in sessions at local markets and street locations during April-May from which a range of artist initiated walking & cycling routes will be based. A map + guide will be produced by December 2019 that presents around 6 routes for cycling and walking, and highlighting relevant sites that local communities have mapped within each of their neighbourhoods.

Two distinct opportunities are available for this project:

• multiple commissions for devised and led walks and sessions with the local community
• one commission for an artist to design and create the final map

ARTIST COMMISSIONS

The project will involve the developing of mapped routes working with local participants from each area alongside Art Walk Projects, leading a number of walks or cycles during June to October 2019. A finalised printed map will be produced by Dec 2019, in which each artist will be profiled alongside their mapped route.

Commission Details

We invite imaginative proposals that engage with local neighbourhoods, mark out the local, and intersect the three areas through lesser used habitats. Improving well being for participants is also an important element of this project, working to increase regular activity.

Each selected artist will be expected to:

• Devise 1 route involving one or more of the areas – Leith, Portobello, Musselburgh;
• Attend in the region of 2 public sessions meeting with participants;
• Lead 2 walks or cycle journeys during the period June to Oct (including Art Walk Porty Festival 7-15 September).

Fee

In the region of 4 commissions are available – each receiving a bursary of £1000.

How to Apply

We are keen to hear from artists whose practice involves walking, mapping, journeying through lost urban landscape, or involving the study of the living urban environment. Ideally with a knowledge of one or more of the areas: Leith, Portobello, Musselburgh.

Please apply by emailing Rosy Naylor: rosy@artwalkporty.co.uk, with the following information (maximum 2 pages of A4):

• Reasons for your interest in this project and how it relates to your current practice;
• A description of the type of route or ideas you would be interested in exploring, including the area/s of most interest.

Please also include:

• Your CV/artist statement
• 4 examples of your recent work
• Website/online links to view your work

Deadline for applications 1st May 2019 

ARTIST/ILLUSTRATOR

We also are seeking an illustrator to work with us to draw out the A2 folded map and provide graphics that are relevant to the project.

Fee

Fee in region of £1000.

How to Apply

Please apply by emailing Rosy Naylor: rosy@artwalkporty.co.uk, with the following information:

• Details of what you believe you would bring to the project and your areas of interest/ or ideas you would seek to explore (maximum: 2 pages)
• CV/artist statement
• 4 examples of your recent work
• Website/online links to view your work

Deadline for applications 1st May 2019 

Art Walk Projects are a member of our Green Arts Initiative: a networked community of practice for Scottish cultural organisations committed to reducing their environmental impact. It is free to become part of the community, and there are lots of resources and case studies (like this one!) to support #GreenArts organisations. Take a look at our Green Arts Initiative page for more information.

All images are from Art Walk Projects. Find more on their Instagram page.

The post Opportunity: Artist Commissions for Art Walk Project’s ‘Footprint’ project 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

Powered by WPeMatico

On Tuesday (26 February), Primary 6 students of Fernielea Primary School performed two co-created songs about flooding as part of a project to connect local residents with flood risk and their environment through the medium of music as part of ‘Creative Approaches to Engaging Flood Risk Communities’.

“The Den Burn is flooding, don’t panic” was the key message of the first song, “The Burnie Journey”, sung by Mrs Leslie’s class to their fellow pupils and representatives from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), the Scottish Flood Forum and the Dee Catchment Partnership. The song aims to reassure students and local residents about flooding in their local burn and creatively inform them of some of the flood management schemes the council have set up including at the Den of Maidencraig and Stronsay Park, both of which are designed to store floodwater upstream, protecting roads and properties further downstream in the heart of Aberdeen.

As part of the project, Simon took the class on a walk of the Den Burn pointing out some of the flooding and flood management issues. The pupils took recordings of the sounds they heard and learned verses of the Burnie Journey song along the way

The second song, “The Flood Kit”, is a memory song to the tune of “Rattlin’ Bog”, and was written with the class to remind them what useful items to include in a flood or emergency kit.

On working with the Primary 6 class, Simon Gall said:

“It’s been heartening to see the children engaging so enthusiastically with the Den Burn and flooding issues more generally. I think our hands-on, creative learning approach to the topic is key. The children use their creative skills to process and convert fairly pedestrian information – gathered first-hand – into something unique and memorable. I hope the experience leaves a lasting impression on them while also leaving some lovely creative work for others to use and enjoy.”

The project has been developed in partnership by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and Scotland’s culture and sustainability charity Creative Carbon Scotland. The project explores how creative approaches could be used by Scotland’s flooding authorities to engage with communities vulnerable to future flooding and raise levels of flood awareness and preparedness in a way that is meaningful and relevant to the community.

Some of the primary 6 student musical stars.

SEPA is Scotland’s national authority for flood forecasting and warning and works with communities to help them be more flood resilient. Recently, SEPA has significantly enhanced its existing warning service in north east Scotland with the addition of a new coastal flood warning scheme, covering 2033 properties in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Angus, giving people time to take preparatory action against the impact of flood events.

Stewart Prodger, from SEPA’s Flooding team, said:

“Every day SEPA works to protect and enhance Scotland’s environment, including helping Scotland prepare more powerfully for future increased flooding. Getting the next generation involved in understanding how flooding happens is a vital part of how we do that, helping local communities become more resilient. More traditional engagement will always have its place, but making learning more fun and the message memorable can be a far more effective way to get young people interested and spreading the word to their friends and families on how they can be flood-prepared. This could include encouraging their parents to sign up to SEPA’s free public flood warning service, so free messages for home and travel areas can be delivered direct to their phone. Register online at https://floodline.sepa.org.uk/floodupdates/ or call 0345 988 1188.”

Director of Creative Carbon Scotland, Ben Twist, said:

“We’re thrilled to be working on this project with SEPA. As a charity which promotes, supports and harnesses the role of culture in addressing the climate crisis, we see a key role for creative practitioners, such as musicians, to help draw out the creativity and imagination of communities in their response to climate change and offer different skills and approaches to contribute to the work of organisations like SEPA.”

Councillor John Wheeler, Education Operational Delivery Convener, said:

“Our schools have a great record of getting involved in environmental projects across the city and in getting the local community involved. Only last week Orchard Brae School earned a prestigious Green Flag from Eco-Schools Scotland and it’s great to Fernielea School involved in a project like this with SEPA. I’m sure all the pupils and staff involved will find the day really rewarding”.

Creative Approaches to Engaging Flood Risk Communities is a partnership between SEPA and Creative Carbon Scotland support from Aberdeen City Council, has been commissioned by SEPA with via SEPA’s Research and Development Fund.

Creative Carbon Scotland’s involvement is part of its Culture/SHIFT programme which supports cultural and sustainability practitioners to explore new ways of working together to address complex problems and bring about transformational change.

The post “The Den Burn is flooding, don’t panic!” appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

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

Powered by WPeMatico

The fourth in a series of blogs from playwright Lewis Hetherington about his work with Glasgow cycling charity Bike for Good and Creative Carbon Scotland.

We’re all just back from a cycle ride. exhausted, smiling, happy, we’re already talking about where we might cycle tomorrow. We start to chat about other things…

him:     you know what it’s only six years ’til I get my driving licence!!!

me:      Are you excited about that?

him:     YES!

me:      how come?

him:     cos I can DRIVE A CAR!

me:      Maybe in five years there’ll be no cars!

him:     Looks at me in complete confusion

me:      So no one will need a driving licence because there’ll be no cars!

him:     continues to stare as his disbelief grows… as though I’ve just started making bizarre and incomprehensible wailing sounds.

There I was, on a glorious sunny afternoon the other week, having ridden through the park with some of the brilliant youngsters who regularly attend the after school bike club. We were all buzzing, from feeling the sunshine stream down as we free wheeled our bikes around the park. Not to mention some exhilarating games of ‘Sardines’ and ‘Find the Cones’, I did very well in the first and was terrible in the latter, but we all had a great time. Back at the hub, the conversation turned to cars and a number of the group expressed mega excitement about learning to drive.

him:     but you couldn’t have no cars. how would anyone get anywhere? how could you do that? how would anyone get to work?

Pavements are for people, train tracks are for trains, roads are for cars

This isn’t the first time these ideas have come up, I chatted to some of the same youngsters before Christmas around the same idea. It was a much needed jolt to my naive thinking that these young cyclists might not be interested in cars. I remember looking out at the streaming traffic on Victoria Road behind them as we chatted and it hit me like a brick that of course they want to drive. As much as they love cycling, car usage is the model of transport that is presented to them all day, every day. Pavements are for people, train tracks are for trains, roads are for cars, and our cities are built around roads. It’s the model we all take part in everyday.

me:      but imagine the whole of Victoria Road didn’t have cars, we could all cycle, or skateboard!?

Now, I have a car. I am very much part of this problem. Myself, my partner and our two dogs rely on it to get us round the country to visit family and friends, he uses it for his work which takes him all over Scotland. Doing any of those things would be much harder (not impossible!) without a car. We avoid using it wherever we can. But still here I was, trying to sell the idea of a car-less city.

him:     I want to drive so I can get places, go wherever I want, get to work, drive to Romania.

Towards beautiful acts

I’m reminded of an Arne Naess quote I read recently:

“the extensive moralising within environmentalism has given the public the false impression that we primarily ask them to sacrifice, to show more responsibility, to show more concern, better morals”

Now of course this is all connected to an urgent discussion which is happening about the (in?)significance of individual action which we won’t go into in length here, other than to say that for the shift to active transport to be meaningful requires change on a civic scale where going by a car is the least preferable option for travel within our urban areas at the very least. Cleaner air, healthier and cheaper travel is what we are aiming towards, not people feeling they have to ‘sacrifice’  their right to drive a car.

There’s another Arne Naess quote where he wonders if

“perhaps we should primarily try to influence people towards beautiful acts“

which seems to capture a lot of what I’m trying to capture at Bike For Good. It feels to me like a pleasingly poetic encapsulation of what they’re doing. It almost feels uncomfortably lofty and wide eyed, but I think that’s why I like it, we need to be wide eyed and giddy and lean into the profound beauty of this living planet we are part of.

Face the terror that is imminent

Planet not profit! Credit: Geraldine Heaney

Now I can feel certain people flinching at their screens – we don’t just need wafty sentiment about the beauty of the earth – we need to face the terror that is imminent! We need to be shocked into action at the catastrophic damage we’re doing to our planet! We need to get out on the streets and make our resistance seen and heard where we can!

Plural and abundant and wildly variant

Sunset on the park. Credit: Lewis Hetherington

But I suppose something I’m trying to resist is the binary framing that sometimes frames contemporary debates, I don’t find it helpful to think in terms of hope or fear, individual or societal action. Those sorts of dualities are not an honest reflection of the world we’re part of. Nature is plural and abundant and wildly variant and diverse, and we are part of nature.

Trees like skyscrapers and housing as many. Grass the height of hedges, nuts the swell of pumpkins. Sardines that would take two men to land them. Eggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe. And underneath, mushrooms soft and small as a mouse ear. A crack like a cut, and inside a million million microbes wondering what to do next. Spores that wait for the wind and never look back. Moss that is concentrating on being green.^[1]

We must be terrified, joyful, patient, demanding, thoughtful, hopeful, optimistic, sceptical, generous, angry, rebellious, mindful and instinctive… sometimes all at once.

him:                 how would it work with no cars?

me:                  I don’t know. How do you think it would work?

we don’t finish the conversation at this moment, as it’s time to huddle together for a group photo.

her:                  ok everyone in position? We’re going to take ten photos and try and make a GIF. So just keep moving the whole time ok? Let’s go!

Bike excitement! Credit: Geraldine Heaney

^[1] from Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson

Lewis is working embedded with Bike for Good for two years in their VeloCommunities project to contribute to their activities widening access to cycling and helping Glasgow to become a more sustainable city.

This artist in residence is part of Bike for Good’s VeloCommunities Project, which is funded by the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund. We’ll keep you posted of updates and developments on this blog, and please get in touch with any questions or ideas!

The post Guest Blog: I CAN’T WAIT TO DRIVE A CAR! appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

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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Road vehicles such as cars, trucks and buses are Scotland’s largest – and growing – source of carbon emissions but what role can artists play in increasing  active travel and contributing to a more sustainable Scotland? Listen to the podcast from Green Tease: Arts and Active Travel, a collaboration between Sustrans Scotland and Creative Carbon Scotland. 

Can art get people travelling more sustainably?

To allow you to hear the full presentations and a summary of discussions we have created Creative Carbon Scotland first ever podcast “Can art get people travelling more sustainably?”! 

The podcast is available on Itunes, Google Podcasts (on your phone), Spotify and a bunch of other platforms. We welcome your feedback on the podcast as we’re aiming to produce recordings of more of our events, to allow a wider audience to benefit from the information and to ensure that there’s a means of participating when environmental or other considerations mean people choose not to travel.

You can also get the visuals from the presentations by taking a look at the slides, linked to in the section below.

In brief

Cosmo Blake, Arts and Diversity Officer at Sustrans Scotland, kicked off the event by showing diverse examples of public art works commissioned on Scotland’s cycle paths. He also gave an update on the ArtRoots Fund which offers grants to communities for artistic and aesthetic improvements to the National Cycle Network.

• Cosmo’s Green Tease presentation slides

Arts producer and consultant Ben Spencer then gave a presentation on how artistic practices and projects have sought to affect social change.

• Ben’s Green Tease presentation slides
  

Freshly inspired, Green Teasers then discussed how artists can influence the different stages of active travel projects (Inception, Design, Construction, Completion), as well as the potential challenges and opportunities. Questions were raised and explored such as;

• If an artist was involved from the very start of projects (for example path building), could they be more visual and appealing?
• How can health and safety requirements be managed while also encouraging the creative flair of an artist?
• And how can you evaluate the impact of public artwork on cycle ways?

Green Tease

This event was part of Green Tease, a network and ongoing informal events programme, connecting creative practices and environmental sustainability across Scotland.  Creative Carbon Scotland runs the Green Tease Open Call, which is a funded opportunity supporting sustainability practitioners and artists to exchange ideas, knowledge and practices with the aim of building connections and widening understanding of the role of arts in influencing a more sustainable society.

For more information please click on the links above or email gemma.lawrence@creativecarbonscotland.com 

Image: Slow Down C Jacqueline Donachie (2014)

The post Green Tease Podcast: Can art get people travelling more sustainably? appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

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

Powered by WPeMatico