Climate Change

10 Days of Climate Action – Call for Artists

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10 Days of Climate Action is an initiative of the Human Impacts Institute  to bring together artists, musicians and performers to install climate-inspired public works throughout New York City. In an effort to inspire New Yorkers to think more critically about our actions and their impacts, each day of 10 Days of Climate Action will present a climate theme and creatively engage the public in positive action around issues of climate change.

They´re looking  forward to submissions that push audience members to “think outside the box”, submissions from artists who intend to attack current and pressing climate issues through the creation of their work for a public setting and encourage them to find diverse sites and unique public settings. Each selected artist will be assigned a specific date to showcase their work during a ten day period in late September (21st-29th), as a part of the 4th Climate Week NYC, the annual global summit that takes place in New York City aiming to mobilize climate action.

Cash Prizes: 1st place – $500; 2nd place – $300; and 3rd place – $200

Submittal Deadline: 10am, Monday, August 13th, 2012

For more information, please visit http://www.humanimpactsinstitute.org/

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

Go to Cultura21

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2° Celsius = 565 gigatons but 2,795 gigatons = $27 trillion

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

I normally criticise environmentalists using financial numbers, but Bill McKibben’s argument in August’s Rolling Stone is based on really interesting numbers:

167 countries are signed up to the 2° target (keep the impact of climate change within this range).

565 gigatons is the amount of carbon we can release into the atmosphere (roughly speaking) before we cross the 2° threshold (maybe).  That’s just 16 years on current projections.

2,795 gigatons is what the current reserves of coal and oil based on fossil fuel industry reporting.

$27 trillion is what this represents on the balance sheets of the fossil fuel companies.

Read on here.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

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Greening Shakespeare

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The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa. Jun 6 – October 13 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Kellie Gutman writes:

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival was founded in 1935 and is one of the oldest and largest non-profit theatres in the United States.  They operate over an eight-and-a-half-month schedule, with eleven plays, three theaters and 780 performances.  Approximately 400,000 persons are in attendance at their facility in Ashland, Oregon.  The OSF has an operating budget of $26 million.

Katie Gomez, Physical Plant Assistant, is the Green Task Force Coordinator. When asked how the OSF promotes ‘greening’ their operations, she writes:

OSF has a long list of things we do to be more sustainably aware and green.  Besides recycling paper, one of the easiest things to do here, we are now recycling batteries, some plastics, and a multitude of items used in building sets.  Many costumes are reworked from many made before, from our vast warehouse of costumes.  We do not sell plastic bottles of water anymore – a container given or purchased is filled from fountains.  The Scene Shop uses denim insulation.  We use CFL whenever possible.  As soon as LED’s are more affordable, we will switch to those.  In some instances we do use them now.  This is just the tip of what we do here.  We are constantly trying to do more.

Katie added that although they have not done a production that is specifically “green”, the Green Task Force is working on promoting this idea to the Artistic Staff.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Sense of Planet: The Arts and Ecology at Earth Magnitude

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NIEA Symposium

Saturday, 25 August 2012, 9:30–6:30pm

The acceleration of climate change, species extinction, and other ecological crises enjoins us to find ways of grasping historical and evolving circumstances at earth magnitude. The Sense of Planet symposium concentrates together an international array of artists, eco-theorists, and scholars to address the issues and activities of representing the earth in its entirety, and of representing and self-representing regions or localities amid the complex global systems in which they are enmeshed. The symposium follows the lead taken by Ursula Heise in her book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global to investigate the possibilities and difficulties of sensing the planet, in all senses of sense.

Invited speakers

Ursula Heise, Professor of English and Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature,

Stanford University

The Database and the Ecological Imagination of the Planet

Marko Peljhan, Professor in Art and Media Arts & Technology, University of California at Santa Barbara, Co-director of Arctic Perspective Initiative

One Degree At A Time – Creating Systems of Systems for Interpolar Constructiv(ist)e Engagement

Jennifer Gabrys, Convener of the MA Design and Environment at Goldsmiths, University of London

Environmental Sensor Technologies and the Arts

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University

Anthropocene Aesthetics

Timothy Morton, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University

Of Planet-Sense

Panel discussion

Terry Smith (Professor at Pittsburgh and NIEA, UNSW), Douglas Kahn (Professor of Media & Innovation, NIEA, UNSW), Jill Bennett (Professor and Director, NIEA, UNSW), and others. Convened by Douglas Kahn and Jill Bennett.

Click here to go to the Registration page.

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

Go to Cultura21

Speedier spring

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‘Progress of Spring’ final report

Kellie Gutman writes:

The  fourth and fifth grade class at the Paideia School in Atlanta, Georgia, has completed their year-long project documenting the progress of spring, as defined by the first blooming daffodil reported along the length of Route 1, from Florida to Maine.  Their results confirm the general impression that this was a very warm spring on the eastern seaboard.  At the northernmost point, Fort Kent, Maine, daffodils were spotted on April 4, 2012 – nearly a month earlier than last year, and the earliest in the twenty-two years that the class has been keeping records.  The rate that spring advanced, 1570 miles in 93 days, was approximately 17 miles a day, or .7 miles per hour, which is about average.

See also: our report on daffodil spotting

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Creating climate change parks – greenspace scotland

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

A new e-resource launched today by greenspace scotland, in partnership with Scottish Natural Heritage, will help park and greenspace managers respond to the challenges of climate change by creating ‘climate change parks’.  Full story at creating climate change parks – greenspace scotland. 

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Funded PhD: theatre and learning for sustainability

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

‘Sustaining the imagination: theatre and learning for sustainability’

3 year funded PhD hosted by the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow in partnership with Catherine Wheels Theatre Company – Further information – Closing date 9th July 2012.

Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow is seeking to award one fully funded PhD studentship to commence 1 October 2012.

The studentship, which will support three years of full-time study, is funded through the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme. Within the wider School of Culture and Creative Arts, the studentship will be based in the Theatre Studies’ subject group. The studentship is with non-academic partners Catherine Wheels.

The student will undertake a critically informed and contextualised practice-based doctoral thesis exploring how site-orientated theatre can facilitate children’s engagement with sustainability learning. Reviewing the landscape of theatre that connects with environmental and climate change agendas, the research will suggest original ways in which place-based rather than issue-based performance can engage children in developing everyday sustainability practices. Through the partnership with Catherine Wheels Theatre Company, the student will have an opportunity to acquire a range of creative industry skills and knowledges whilst developing critically-informed work which aims to respond to one of the greatest and most pressing challenges of our time. Working directly with Catherine Wheels, and supported by its Artistic Director Gill Robertson and Company Producer Paul Fitzpatrick, the student’s practice-led research will be developed at and respond to two contrasting sites: a primary school located in an urban context (Glasgow) and another in a rural context (East Lothian). 

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Eden and the overburden

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This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes: 

The partnership between the Eden Project and Rio Tinto has been billed as supporting education projects about sustainability and research into post-mining regeneration. This was a working partnership, not merely a “social license to operate” – the creating of a benevolent public image for corporations such as BP, Shell, Rio Tinto, through their association with cultural institutions, and now the Olympics.

One of the education projects of this partnership is a pop-up children’s book, Earthly Treasure, full of pictures of dazzling jewels and brightly coloured pages showing how modern life can only exist through minerals that must be mined.

There’s a page showing a huge open pit mine, a sombre, near-monochrome dug-out bowl. You can slide trucks to take away the “surface layer” and “pull down the tab and blast away the top layer of earth, called the overburden”.

The “overburden”. The infinitely complex soil that makes life possible is merely a weight, a waste to remove to get to the riches below. The phrasing harks back to Francis Bacon who wrote in his Novum Organum in 1620 that miners were the new class of man who would interrogate and alter nature. Nature could be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded”.

But now, the soil holds no more secrets. It’s only the burdensome surface layer.

This normalizing of open cast mining and mountain top removal is given to children as if a game, one more gem to absorb in their education. Many reasons may lie behind using that phrasing, but the license it condones is not merely cultural benevolence.

h/t: Robert Newman in the Guardian

 

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Edinburgh’s greener Fringe

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Fukushima – A Silent Prayer of Poetry

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

Among the bevy of shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe about Hitler, adolescence, Macbeth and stage spiritualists, there is a remarkable number of dance and physical theatre pieces with ecological themes. Consumerism and happiness, oil and politics, the Japanese earthquake, undercover policing, urban architecture and fear of the woods are among the ideas and sensibilities these shows are expressing.

Theatre shows number highly this year, too, with around 70 that have ecological themes varying from the strongly activist to the bucolic. Shows about animals, food and an apocalypse always feature. This year, there are three shows walking to Edinburgh; shows about abattoirs, about the Deepwater oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear leak; and shows about a swamp, plastics, population and the price of milk.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Alternative Conference for the Rio Summit

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

Taking place on June 16th and 17th, 2012 in London, UK.  At the central London Universities – SOAS, the Institute of Education (IOE) and University College London (UCL).

Organised by the Campaign against Climate Change with the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Department for Development Studies. Opening plenary in IOE, Thornhaugh Street off Russell Square, Russell Square Tube.

 Rio to Rio: 20 wasted years?

  •  Between 1992 and 2012:
  • The global surface temperature has risen by 0.38C.
  • The Arctic sea ice has decreased by 2.94 million square kilometres.
  • The CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by 35.19 PPM.
  • 30 661 900 hectares of Brazilian forest have been lost.
  • More than 431,215.08 million tonnes of CO2 have been emitted.
  • The amount of CO2 emitted per year has risen from 21,421.45 to 30,398.42 million tonnes.

A wide range of workshops and seminars – and an exciting main plenary – are planned. Titles include :

  • “Food Security how can we stop a tragedy unfolding?”
  • “Green Energy versus ‘Extreme’ Energy”
  • “One Million Climate Jobs”
  • “Inequity is not only bad for society but a barrier to dealing effectively with the ecological crisis”
  • “Renewing Political Commitment to win the global battle against eco-calamity: a lost cause or is there a way forward?”
  • “We will not achieve environmental justice without a fundamental shift in values”
  • “New legal frameworks for a new era of environmental progress and justice”
  • “Can London lead the way in the fight against climate meltdown?”

and more workshops on: Green growth vs De-growth; bioenergy and land grabs; forests and biodiversity; aviation; geo-engineering; oceans; Zero Carbon Britain by 2030; arctic methane time bomb; generational justice; climate refugees;civil disobedience; “fracking”; population, gender and climate change; false solutions; TREC: energy from the deserts…and more.

To register a place at the conference click here.

This is a free event but donations to help the campaign would be appreciated.

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

Go to Cultura21