Extinctions

Dr Astrov blogs

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Astrov (Laurence Olivier) and Elena (Rosemary Harris)
in Uncle Vanya

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

Dr Astrov is a new blog on ‘arts / culture and environmental sustainability’. Ian Rimington is the writer. He works as a Relationship Manager specialising in environmental sustainability and theatre at Arts Council England, but the blog expresses his personal views.

In his opening blog, Ian visits the BritishMuseum with his son, fascinated by the dominating sculptural figure of the Easter Islandstatue Hoa Hakananai’a (Hidden Friend). The Ancestor Cult that produced these figures gave way during a time of environmental devastation and extinctions to the Birdman Cult. On the back of the sculpture, marks have been added from that newer cult, more like graffiti than the monumental face. In the differences between these carvings, Ian finds evidence of the changing relations of art and culture to the environment.

Another Pacific island features in a second blog, as Ian attends a read-through of Pitcairn, a new play by Richard Bean. The play tells of the events following the mutiny on the Bounty after Christian Fletcher and the sailors tried to set up a paradise republic there at the end of the 18th Century. This leads on to how the reason beloved of the Enlightenment falls short against the forces of values, beliefs and intuition, and to how art might produce behavioural changes.

The blog is aptly named. Dr Astrov is the visionary physician-philosopher in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, who presciently grasped the principles of ecology and the ethical relations of humans to nature. His worry that the forests were disappearing forever, rivers drying up and the climate ruined was assuaged by his own planting of sapling birches. In Act III, he shows Elena, who neither understands nor is interested, his maps of the changes in the landscape, the losses of farms, animals, forests. “(Man) destroys everything with no thought for the morrow. And now pretty well everything has been destroyed, but so far nothing new has been put in its place”.

We look forward to following Dr Astrov.

Here is a clip of that Act III scene with Astrov (Laurence Olivier) and Elena (Rosemary Harris) in the 1943 film.

Chekhov, a proto-environmentalist, is one of our playwrights revisited.

“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.

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OPEN CALL FOR MAMMUT MAGAZINE #3

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Submission Deadline: August 15
Submit to: mammutmag@gmail.com
Anticipated release date: Mid-October, 2009

The first two issues of Mammut focused on various topics related to art and the environment. For our third issue we will focus on megafauna, one of the original inspirations for this magazine, which was named after the extinct American Mastodon or Mammut americanum.

We are looking for essays, artwork and other proposals about megafauna, such as how to co-exist, preserve or even how to define them. We welcome contributions from all fields, while keeping in mind the magazine’s general focus on art and the environment.

In addition, we are working with the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles to cosponsor Megafauna Awareness Day and a subsequent conference, to take place at some point in winter/spring 2010. The publication of this issue will most likely precede the conference and the date for Megafauna Awareness Day, which is yet to be determined.

BACKGROUND

At the end of the last ice age (about 11,000 years ago), humans shared the Americas with a wide variety of megafauna (very large mammals), including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, giant armadillos and the dire wolf. These animals all went extinct in a relatively short period of time and though the causes are still debated, many agree that human-caused habitat destruction along with hunting caused the extinctions. Now we are facing another wave of extinction caused by human development that affects flora and fauna of all sizes. Ours being the anthropocene (epoch of man) or homogenocene (epoch of diminished and similar ecosystems worldwide) the most likely reality is that we will share the planet with generalist species (like us) in a scenario science writer David Quammen has called “The Planet of the Weeds.” Megafauna—such as elephants, rhinos, hippos, moose, and whales—reproduce slowly and may not make it through the bottleneck of human development without our help.

Some of the earliest art—cave paintings—depicted bison, horses and aurochs, illustrating the interrelated history of humans and other large animals. What can artists and those in creative fields do today about megafauna and the associated habitats they represent? It is our belief that artists have plenty to contribute to this discussion and by working with scientists and politicians, we can all help prevent further habitat destruction and preserve species.

Megafauna Awareness Day, initially proposed by scientist Paul S. Martin in his 2005 book, Twilight of the Mammoths, is necessary because every schoolkid knows about the long-extinct dinosaurs, but not about animals that lived until very recently. To support the inauguration of the Megafauna Awareness Day, we plan on launching a website and hosting a conference in Los Angeles to bring together artists, scientists, museums workers and others interested in the topic of megafauna.

Finally, we acknowledge that it is not just megafauna that are worth preserving. But like the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest, megafauna are often charismatic emblems of the habitat they  populate. Preserve the megafauna and we preserve the habitat for all.