This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Tuesday 30 May 2017, 14:00-16:00

Venue: Quaker Meeting House 7 Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh, EH1 2JL United Kingdom

Being the sole Green Champion in any organisation can be a big job. Are you running out of ideas? Feeling like you are fighting a losing battle? Perhaps you have limited knowledge of how all the other departments work within the company?

Now is the time to form a Green Team. This FREE workshop will give you ideas on how to:

• Build cooperation from the whole of your organisation
• Include senior management of the organisation
• Arrange dates and agendas for your green team meeings
• Create a tailored environmental policy for your organisation
• Report back on your work to your board and build support for your work

Bring along your ideas and questions. Refreshments supplied. Feel free to bring a packed lunch

This workshop will also run in Glasgow on Tuesday 16 May
Register Here

The post Create a Green Team: Edinburgh Workshop appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

About 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The Scottish Government’s Draft Climate Change Plan places increased emphasis on climate change adaptation, but it still plays second fiddle to carbon emissions reduction. But CCS is already taking its first steps into working on adaptation with partners Adaptation Scotland and Aberdeen City Council.

One of the many differences between the international climate change talks in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP15) and those in Paris in 2015 (COP21) was that the latter genuinely incorporated adaptation to the impacts of climate change, whilst in 2009 the focus was all on reducing carbon emissions (mitigation, in the language of climate change).

Indeed, although COP15 was widely considered a failure for not achieving the global deal on reducing emissions that it was meant to, it’s arguable that this was always an unrealistic aim and that without the crisis of 2009 we wouldn’t be where we are today with the comprehensive Paris Agreement, flawed though it may be.

In the summer of 2010 I wrote a dissertation for my MSc in Carbon Management which argued that COP15 had fallen apart partly because the minority world was focused on reducing carbon emissions whilst the majority world wanted support for dealing with climate change and finding a low-carbon pathway to raising standards of living for its people.

The ‘failure’ of COP15 meant that the mitigation bubble burst and from COP16 onwards adaptation began to be seriously included in the negotiations.

Adaptation playing second fiddle

Adaptation was included in the Scottish Government’s Climate Change Act of 2009, but comes a clear second to mitigation in the way the Act is laid out. The emphasis is very much on mitigation, with emissions reduction targets highlighted and the first full mention of Adaptation in part 5 (of 6): ‘Other climate change provisions’.

There are reasons for this.

Back in the noughties climate change NGOs – which had quite a strong impact on the Scottish Parliament’s debates about the Act – worried that allowing too much discussion of adaptation would weaken the resolve of governments and others to grasp the very painful nettle of carbon reduction, so it took a back seat. And it’s fair to say that we are much clearer now about how the impacts of climate change are being felt now across the world.

(The majority world would argue correctly that they knew that back in 2009, but that the minority world wasn’t listening. This climate injustice was what fed the disputes at COP15. I found myself in a side-meeting at the COP with dozens of majority world delegates lambasting the Australian consultant who had been hired to represent some Pacific Island states. They felt that he – a minority world carbon expert – had betrayed their countries by conceding a crucial point in the negotiations. As the only other minority world person in the room it was a sobering experience.)

And in Scotland, like everywhere else, adaptation slowly has been moving to the centre of attention. Scotland’s Climate Change Adaptation Programme was published in May 2014. Adaptation Scotland has been going since 2010, and is managed by SNIFFER. Climate Ready Clyde, Aberdeen Adapts and Edinburgh Adapts are three of their key projects – there are more here.

So things are on the move, but up to now adaptation has certainly been in the shadow of its big sister mitigation.

But what is adaptation?

The usual interpretation of adaptation in this area is adaptation to the impacts of climate change, such as changes in weather patterns leading to flooding, heat waves and severe weather events; changes in plant and animal life, such as the success of different crops or the increased incidence of pests.

At a meeting the other week I was amazed to learn that the growing season (ie the period when it is warm enough for plants to grow rather than just hunker down for the winter) in Scotland is nearly 5 weeks longer now than in 1961.

But there is another area that isn’t spoken about as much: adaptation to living and working in a low carbon environment. As I have written about in other blogs, this is something that we are interested in at CCS.

Culture in its widest sense is the varying ways in which we live in the world; culture in the narrower sense of what the Mexico City Declaration calls ‘the arts and letters’ expresses, reflects and ultimately shapes that wider culture. The wider culture will need to, and undoubtedly will, change in response to both the mitigation efforts and the impacts of climate change.

We all need to think about what this will mean for our lifestyles, our organisations’ business models and so on. For example, in a society where energy is abundant when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing but scarce at others, our relationship with energy will be different to today’s when we are used to unlimited energy at the flick of a switch. Our use of water would change greatly if, like many women in the majority world, we had to carry every drop even a few hundred metres.

Adaptation isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it’s something we are all doing all the time anyway. And climate change brings into focus a number of choices. We can worry and close things down, or we can choose to build a better, fairer  society.

CCS – always adapting!

We at CCS have just written a new business plan for the next four financial years and one of our five strategic outcomes is ‘Adaptation: Increasing numbers of Cultural Sector organisations & practitioners include climate change adaptation into their planning’. During 2017/18 we will be developing our own understanding of what this means for cultural SMEs.

But we have started already with a project with Adaptation Scotland/SNIFFER, Aberdeen Adapts and Robert Gordon University. We’ll be working with four artists (musician Simon Gall; theatre artist Alice Cooper and public artists Jo Hodges and Robbie Coleman) to explore the potential of their different artistic practices for engaging a wider public with the impacts of climate change, specifically in the suburb of Middlefield in Aberdeen.

For more information, feel free to get in touch.

In the meantime, a big thank you to our colleagues at Adaptation Scotland for asking us to join this project, which is part of our culture/SHIFT programme. It’s an experiment for all of us and has already been illuminating as artists and non-cultural partners have got together to understand each others’ work and aims and to collaborate on addressing wicked problems.

Our ‘Arts and Climate Change mini-festival’ is very much a pilot project and we’ll be running Green Teases and other events over the coming months to discuss what we learn. We’ll also be developing our knowledge so that we can help cultural sector organisations understand what adaptation means for them and how they can contribute to Scotland’s wider aims.

Ben Twist
Director, Creative Carbon Scotland

The post Ben’s Strategy Blog: Arts and Adaptation – a cultural shift? appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

About 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

During the weekend of April 21st, CCS co-ran an Arts & Climate Change mini-festival in Middlefield, Aberdeen, as part of a new initiative exploring how the arts can contribute to community engagement in climate change adaptation. Sociologist and collaborator, Dr Leslie Mabon, shares some initial reflections on the day – re-posted from the Urban Green Adaptation Diary.

Early Saturday morning I was pedaling furiously across Aberdeen in a north-westerly direction, through the grounds of the Royal Cornhill Hospital (pleasant), over North Anderson Drive (scary), and along Provost Rust Drive (downhill and therefore fun). The destination was the Middlefield Community Hub, where I joined Creative Carbon Scotland, Adaptation Scotland, Sniffer and Aberdeen City Council for a one-day mini-festival on Arts and Climate Change. The purpose of the festival was to engage with the community on climate change adaptation through the lens of art.

Where people have come from and why they are here

By way of background, Aberdeen is currently strengthening its climate change adaptation thinking via the Aberdeen Adapts initiative, run jointly between Aberdeen City Council and University of Aberdeen. One of the main purposes of the day was to develop understanding of what Aberdeen Adapts is doing and how citizens can get involved. The community we were holding the festival in – Middlefield – is also about to see quite significant investment in greenspace development, supported by the European Regional Development Fund. Hence this is a good time to be thinking about what climate change adaptation means in the context of daily living, and how we can develop decision-making processes that engage communities and deliver climate adaptation benefits equitably across the city.

Over the course of the day we had three workshops. First, musician Simon Gall used old Doric (the local language in Aberdeen) rhymes and songs to get us to think about how we represent trends, events and processes in society and culture, which led into us writing short lyrics of our own about how we might understand changes in the climate. Then, Jo Hodges and Robbie Coleman brought us the Museum of Future Middlefield, where we were given objects, a year, and a bit of social context, and worked in teams to write a narrative as to what that object did in relation to climate change that led to it being in the Museum of Future Middlefield in the Year 3000. Lastly, Alice Mary Cooper led a theatre-based session, in which we used the metaphor of a suitcase to imagine not only what possessions we would take in an evacuation emergency, but also what personal and community qualities Middlefield could offer to Aberdeen more widely in a climate event.

Museum of Future Middlefield – what did this whistle do for climate change adaptation?

Our role at RGU was to be involved in this process to evaluate its potential in sparking discussions on climate change adaptation. Rather than an in-depth report of the day, I’d therefore like to offer just a few initial thoughts that struck me over the course of the workshops:

-people intuitively know a lot about where they live, both in terms of climate and the physical environment (where risk is, what the effects are) and also the social dynamics (who is vulnerable, how community is organised etc). There is still a bit of an assumption out there – I think – that the public need to be ‘educated’ about climate change. Yet the contributions from the workshop participants show there is a lot of knowledge there about Middlefield as a place, and that this knowledge helps imagine what climate change might mean for the local area in a more contextualised way than I ever could. Art can be a very powerful and effective way of drawing this out;

-related to the above is the value of art in facilitating discussion between sectors. What I found very motivating about the day was that the ‘experts’ (as Simon called us!) participated fully in all the sessions, making personal and creative contributions of their own. Especially in the last session, we got some excellent discussion going across the whole room as a result. The artists were brilliant at facilitating this – and it also helped that the ‘experts’ were perhaps prepared to step outside their comfort zone a bit and participate as individual people rather than representatives of their organisations!

-third, we often don’t pay enough attention to the fact that societal engagement is a messy process. Not literally, but in terms of all the ‘behind the scenes’ work that goes on – the improvisation on the day, the out-of-hours and weekend working, the way we adapt to the spaces we work in on the hoof. It is important that we embrace this messiness and acknowledge it as an inevitable part of community work rather than trying to create standardised, one-size-fits-all solutions for community engagement;

-lastly, when it comes to climate change, art isn’t just a way of visualising ‘the science’. Rather, it brings a whole different way of thinking about what the problems are, what the potential solutions might be and – crucially in my view – helps us to think about how we might get there. All three sessions really played on this idea of art as a stimulus for thinking about the future, in a much more engaging way than the kind of scenario-based exercises with maps and worksheets that I would have done could ever do!

Middlefield Community Hub, and some greenspace in the regeneration plan

Although the mini-festival itself was a one-day event, we see this as the start rather than the end of thinking about the implications of climate change on daily living in Middlefield and Aberdeen more widely. The next steps are to formally evaluate the event, and for RGU to undertake some follow-up interviews. We will have more to report in due course!

More information on the climate change adaptation in Aberdeen can be found here.

Thanks to Leslie for sharing his blog on the CCS site! Interested in learning more about climate change adaptation? Have a read of CCS Director, Ben Twist’s, most recent Stategy Blog.

The Arts & Adaptation project in Aberdeen is delivered as part of the Adaptation Scotland programme, funded by Scottish Government and is run in partnership with Sniffer, Aberdeen Adapts/Aberdeen City Council and Robert Gordon University.

The post Engaging Communities on Climate Adaptation Through Art appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

About 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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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Two weeks ago, the Green Tease network gathered at the Edinburgh Printmakers for a discussion of their most recent exhibition Firedamp: Revisiting the Flood by Canadian artist Sean Caulfield.

Joined by Sean remotely over Skype, and Emily Brady, Professor of Environment and Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, we entered into a discussion provoked by the exhibition around themes of changing relationships to energy production and consumption, and the means by which artistic practices can open up new spaces for dialogue around the complex issues of environmental sustainability and climate change. 

Following the event, we’re very pleased to publish Emily Brady’s response to the Firedamp exhibition as delivered on the evening.

Reflections on Sean Caulfield’s Firedamp, Edinburgh Printmakers 
Emily Brady, Professor of Environment and Philosophy, University of Edinburgh

As I see it, the Firedamp exhibition potentially creates a ‘culture/SHIFT’ ‘making the invisible visible, revealing hidden and underlying structures which impact upon environmental sustainability of current and future societies’ (www.creativecarbonscotland.com/project/cultureshift/).

The term ‘firedamp’ refers to an explosive gas emitted in coalmines and oil gas fields. In the 1800s, it was referred to as ‘bags of foulness’. ‘Foulness’ is a rich term. It describes things that are unpleasant, and bags of foulness suggest lots of it, dissipated, with the potential to foul the air completely. Foulness refers to bad things, but perhaps not to things that are awful to the core, terrible, or horrific.

Foulness is a sensory experience; to find something foul is mostly through touch, smell and taste. Of course, we can find things foul just by looking at them – say, when disgusted by a carcass (but even here, other sensory modes may be engaged, even if by imagination).

The themes of Sean Caulfield’s Firedamp that come to mind for me are: oil – black, rich, thick oil (floods too, but are these floods of water, or floods of oil oozing with a foul texture; viscous)? Looking at it and imagining getting stuck in it, drowning in it, clawing one’s way out of it before being crudely swallowed up.

There is also water. Is the Japanese-looking house floating in a great pool, the flood from Fukushima, from the huge wall of water that is the tsunami? Or is the fragile structure of the Firedamp piece, floating, even at risk of sinking, into a pool of thick black oil?

These themes crisscross two places on the earth, each with a different story. The first: Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan. Prior to the disaster, the Fukushima nuclear power plant would be, for some, a symbol of the greatness of human technology – the ability to split large atoms to produce vast amounts of energy. For others, it was a natural and human disaster that was waiting to happen; the plant situated vulnerably, at a single point in time, in the path of an earthquake and a great wall of water.

The second place is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean in Canada, the tar sands of northeastern Alberta. The technology and devastation of tar extraction and conversion to crude oil affects vast places. We know that oil is foul, creating a world dependent on this energy source and its production, with the unpleasant – no – dire consequences being anthropogenic climate change.

Fukushima is a natural and multispecies disaster which killed thousands. As a disaster, Fukushima had both human and natural causes at its center. Tar sands and the production of oil in places like Alberta is controversial: oil production secures jobs and economic progress, while at the same time destroying environments, other creatures and species, and contributing along the causal chain to climate change.

In turn, this process threatens the livelihoods of humans in parts of the world spatially distant from the sources of the greatest consumption of oil – largely the Global North, remembering again that it is not just people who are affected by climate change, but also the more-than-human world. Crude oil is also a natural and human technological co-production; the sources of oil lie in the tar sands just under the skin of the earth. This is a disaster happening now, and only set to get much worse.

Sean’s work conveys to me themes of this human-natural engagement, co-production, co-creation, human-natural entanglements, crimes committed together – intended or unintended – with consequences for human and beyond. The organic forms in these artworks move between human technology and leaf forms, leaf shapes, dead, defoliated trees, odd stump-like branches; growth coming out of the ground pushing through the surface of the earth. Some of the forms seem organic, of the natural world, but morphing into or somehow like human-made technology (the snake-like fire hose of Souffleur). Are they becoming artifacts?

Perhaps you’re thinking: humans are natural too; what’s the difference? Sure, humans are biological creatures. We humans grow; we need sustenance, food, water, to flourish, like plants. Like other mammals, humans reproduce and give birth to offspring; we play; we age; we die. And humans are not the only species, one might say, that possess technology. Crows and other corvids use tools; beavers make lodges and dams; many birds and insects create incredible, complex nests.

But to say that humans possess technology is to say that they intentionally, through choice, through a clear kind of agency, create particular kinds of infrastructure on a grand scale to extract resources from the earth or to manipulate physical phenomena such as the atom.

It is through these kinds of choices – which involve the ability to decide whether these forms of energy production are good or bad – that give you or me the capacity to judge that technology, to judge those actions, and to say within the culture of the human species, or within a particular human community, that such things may be right or wrong.

In judging the tar sands or the Fukushima disaster, do we blame nature for what has happened? No.  It would be odd, would it not, to blame hydrocarbons and the bitumen from the sand for climate change? It is the uses of oil that are blamed – the stinking emissions of cars and human practices that have created dependence on oil across the globe. We consider a tsunami a natural occurrence caused by another, that is, an earthquake deep in the earth’s crust (even if there may be some human cause in some dissipated kind of way, as we find with human effects on weather). But that is not enough for us to say that the tsunami is caused by humans.

Similarly, consider the new geological age of the Anthropocene, in which stratigraphers have determined that humans have now affected the earth in a pervasive way. I would argue that this does not mean that the human imprint on the earth runs through all the things that we have previously considered to be natural. To be sure there is no such thing as pristine wilderness. We know that a Spam tin has been found in the Mariana trench, that deepest part of the world’s oceans, at 10 or 11,000 metres deep. Humans have affected the earth, the atmosphere, and space, certainly, but these effects are stronger and weaker. There remain natural organisms and processes which are autonomous, operating independently of human intentionality and technology, and continuing to be most extraordinary.

So, I would say that we can continue to embrace both continuity between human and more than human natures, as well as difference.

That is what I find fascinating about Firedamp. The works consider human-nature entanglements and raise questions about those entanglements (especially the foul), and worse, the consequences of them.

These woodcuts are not, however, apocalyptic. Not really, for me. They are not deeply negative renderings of apocalyptic landscapes or futures. There are traces, to be sure, of the landscapes of nuclear disasters throughout history. I’m not sure that I see hope in Sean’s work, something that I hold dearly in these really difficult political and moral times. Perhaps the boat carrying the tree stump in Cargoship is hopeful, carrying the tree stump to safety? I don’t know. But I do see the uncanny, the strange, the foul, the tragic, the death of the natural world and the precarity of human life and structures, like the home. These artworks remind me of Paul Nash’s landscapes of war, with trees stripped of life, of leaves, branches, greenery, fullness – but also of artist Edward Gorey’s whimsical, strange, uncanny characters, the pen-and-ink drawings themselves behaving like little woodcuts. The black-and-white of Sean’s woodcuts certainly contribute to a light sense of doom.

There is also fire flaming out, the glow of fire, and forms reminiscent of bellows, among the many biological–organic–earthy things which populate the artworks. I do not see the promise of life revitalizing itself – which is where hope might lie – except perhaps that these stumps and branch fragments have at least a few leaves on them. If there is hope, maybe we can find it through imagination; through imagining not that we can escape or overcome the flood of water and oil or the darkness of natural-human disasters, but in recognizing the entwining of humans with the rest of the natural world, and learning better ways of coexistence.

Thank you to everyone for joining us at this event.

Green Tease is an ongoing informal events programme which connects creative practices and environmental sustainability. Since 2013 Green Tease has offered a platform for those interested building links between the arts and sustainability through the exchange of ideas, knowledge and practices.

Interested in finding out more about Green Tease?

Or running your own Green Tease event?

Images:

1st: Sean Caulfield, Detail from The Flood, carved wood relief, approximately 20 x 30ft, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, 2016, (Photo Credit: Blaine Campbell)

2nd: Installation view of The Flood, carved wood relief, approximately 20 x 30ft, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, 2016. (Photo Credit: Blaine Campbell)

3rd: Public installation of section of The Flood, printed gampi pasted on wall with starch glue, Churchill LRT Station, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2016. (Photo Credit: Blaine Campbell)

4th: Installation view of Firedamp exhibition, dc3 Art Projects, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2016. (Photo Credit: Blaine Campbell)

See more of Sean’s work

The post April 2017 Green Tease Reflections appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

About 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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