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Six films on culture and climate change

About Water - 2007 a film about our precarious relationship with water

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes:

Filmbase, in Dublin, is presenting climate.culture.change,  a series of films from six European countries, and discussions, through 12 June on culture and climate change. A collaboration between Cultivate and the EUNIC European cultural partners: Goethe Institut, British Council, Austrian Embassy, Alliance Française and the Italian Institute of Culture, with additional funding from the European Commission, this film and discussion series is a lead-up to Rio +20, the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Information on the program available here

 

“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

Carbon-lite touring

The Last Polar Bears on tour

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Wallace Heim writes: 

The carbon footprint of a production meets the content of the play in the National Theatre of Scotland’s tour of their climate change play The Last Polar Bears. For the 350-mile tour, everything needed for the show will be carried by the cast and crew on bicycles made from reclaimed bikes. The vinyl panniers are made from recycled National Theatre of Scotland banners.

As part of the production’s legacy, the National Theatre of Scotland will donate to the World Wildlife Fund’s Adopt a polar bear project on behalf of the 18 primary schools on the tour.

Alongside the production, director Joe Douglas will use the tour to interview people, ‘taking the temperature of how people are feeling about climate change.’

 

“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

Floating platforms

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A new study shows that plastic in the Pacific Ocean has increased 100 times over the last 40 years.The only beneficiary, reports The Economist, is Halobates sericeus, “a small insect that now has lots of nice little floating platforms on which to lay its eggs”.

 

“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

Soap operas for social change

The Archers, courtesy BBC

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes;

The BBC have looked into soap operas as agents for social change and have discovered in some cases they have changed the world.  From the longest-running program, The Archers, which encouraged farmers in the 1950s to increase production by trying out new techniques, to a BBC radio program in Afghanistan, calledNew Home, on women’s rights, which taught listeners how to avoid land mines, the soap opera has had a significant influence.

A two-part programme on Your World (part 1, 21 April; part 2, 28 April) can be heard here.

“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

The Sustainability Review’s 2012 Spring Issue

The Spring issue of The Sustainability Review (TSR) is now available for you to peruse at thesustainabilityreview.org. TSR is an online journal edited and published by graduate students at Arizona State University and hosted by the university’s School of Sustainability.

Current Publications

Opinion: Sonatas for Sustainability: How Musical Training Imparts Important Qualities and Skills for Sustainability by Chrissie Bausch

Feature: New Moral Problems and New Approaches: Millennials Compared to Baby Boomers and Generation X by Jathan Sadowski, Thomas P. Seager, and Evan Selinger

We will publish a variety of art, feature, research and opinion pieces in a rolling format over the next two weeks. We urge you to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for updated content. We look forward to your comments – enjoy!

Warmly,

The 2011-2012 Editorial Staff

P.S. For those of you in Tempe, we hope you will join us for our year-end event tomorrow afternoon (4/17): Seeds for Conversation: Land-Use Change in Art and Sustainability.

Warm winter, early blooms

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes:

Our yearly collaboration with the Paideia School, in Atlanta Georgia has just wrapped up.  Each year they send a pre-written postcard, ready to be filled in with a date, for the first spotting of a blooming daffodil.  All of those who receive cards are within 5 miles of U.S. Route 1, which stretches from the southern tip of Florida to the northern tip of Maine.  As the cards return to the school, they are used by the  9- and 10-year olds to plot the advance of spring on a map.  When all the cards are in they use their maths skills to figure out the rate at which spring advances.

This year the winter was unseasonably warm on the east coast. In Boston, where the snowfall average is 41.3 inches, we have received only 9.1 inches.  This is only a tenth of an inch more than the least snowiest winter on record.

Last year the first daffodil was spotted on April 5th.  This year it was three and a half weeks earlier on March 12.  We will have to wait until all the cards have been returned to see if spring in general was much earlier this year.

See also:

 

“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

Climate is culture

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory
Kellie Gutman writes:

The feature article in the March issue of Nature Climate Change is written by Cape Farewell‘s David Buckland, and is titled Climate is Culture.

A pioneering project that was set up to bridge a perceived communication gap between the science of climate change and the deep societal changes required to avoid dangerous impacts is explained by its creator in Nature Climate Change this week.  In 2001, British artist David Buckland founded the Cape Farewell project, which he feels attempts to address one of the most pressing social issues of our time.

Read the full article here.

“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

Island at the National Theatre

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Abandoned whaling settlement at Pauline Cove, Herschel Island

Kellie Gutman reports:

A new play for children ages 8 and up runs at the Cottesloe Theatre 15-25 February.  Island, by award-winning author Nicky Singer (Feather Boy), has been commissioned by the National Theatre’s Learning programme.  The play is set on the remote Arctic island of Herschel.

[It] raises questions about the effects of climate change on the island.  the play centres on a London schoolboy, Cameron, forced to spend his school holiday without computer, phone or Facebook with his scientist mother on the remote Herschel Island, where he encounters an indigenous girl whose stories open up this different world.

Along with the performances and workshops for family audiences at the Cottesloe Theatre, Island will tour to primary schools in London throughout the spring term.

“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

State of the Arts gets the environment

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes: 

At the most recent State of the Arts (SOTA) conference hosted by Arts Council England in Salford had, for the first time, two sessions on ‘Artists and our future environment’, with speakers James Marriott from PLATFORM; the writer Jay Griffiths; Mojisola Adebayo, writer, performer, director; and Andy Field, co-director of Forest Fringe.

All of SOTA’s sessions – on the creative economy, changing society, imagination, fundraising – touch on environmental themes. But these two drew out specific questions of the relations between artists and environments, of the material effects of artistic practices on the Earth, and of the importance of artistic expression of environmental themes.

This interest by SOTA in the environment comes about, in part, from talks between ACE London and arts organisations with an environmental focus in the London region – organisations who had lost their Regularly Funded Organisation status, and questioned ACE’s policies on the environment and climate.

James Marriott’s session, transcribed on the PLATFORM blog, sets out how this collaboration between disparate organisations has worked, and how substantial shifts in ACE’s environmental directions are taking shape.

“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

Following spring’s advance

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

For several years we have been following the advance of spring on the East Coast of the United States by participating in the Paideia School’s science project.  Our editor, Kellie Gutman, writes:

The letter arrived on January 7th, the address printed in a 9 or 10 year-old’s hand, with an accompanying postcard carrying this message:

I saw the first blooming daffodil on:__________, 2012
Kellie and Richard Gutman
West Roxbury, MA

The fourth and fifth grade classes track the speed of spring by documenting daffodil sightings along U. S. Route 1, from Florida to Maine.  It will be interesting to see how quickly spring arrives this year.  Here in Boston we have  had only one snowstorm, and that one freakishly early before Halloween.  Last year the school’s letter arrived on a day that Boston got 8 inches of snow; this year it was a record 60 degrees fahrenheit.

In 2010, spring advanced at the speed of 1 mile an hour; in 2011 it was clocked at 1.3 miles an hour.

While waiting for the first bloom, you might want to re-read our ‘flowers on stage’ postings, to get into the springtime mode.

“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