Speedier spring

'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

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Taking a book for a walk

Wallace Heim writes, with thanks to Dee Heddon

What book would you take for a walk...?

In 1794, John Hucks and Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked to North Wales. Hucks carried with him the poems of Thomas Churchyard.

In 1802, Coleridge walked through Cumberland, carrying with him 'a shirt, a cravat, two pairs of stockings, tea, sugar, pens and paper, his night-cap, and a book of German poetry wrapped in green oilskin.' He apparently read the Book of Revelations in Buttermere.

In 1818, John Keats travelled the Lake District and up to Scotland with his friend Charles Brown. Keats' carried Dante's Divine Comedy, Brown the works of John Milton.

In 2012, during August and September, Dee Heddon and Misha Myers are joining the Sideways Festival, walking from the west to the east of Belgium. For the length of the walk, they will carry a walking library - rucksacks filled with books that are good to take on a walk. The library will support a peripatetic reading and writing group.

Dee and Misha are in the process of building the library. So far, they will be carrying Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost and more.

They welcome suggestions of books to take on a walk, including details of books taken on a walk by illustrious walkers/writers.

Email suggestions to Dee Heddon.

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New on our news page

'Subsidy, patronage and sponsorship' at the V&A

In London, the V & A will host a 3-day discussion on 'Subsidy, patronage and sponsorship: Theatre and Performance Culture in Uncertain Times'.

A bundle of opportunities are coming up.

In Glasgow, there's the offer of a funded PhD in theatre and learning for sustainability.
In London, a DIY training project for artists on performance, oil and sponsorship is offered by the Live Art Development Agency.
On the Isle of Wight, the Bestival Festival is looking for a short film on clearing the mess.
And there's the chance to walk across Belgium carrying books.

Online, there's TJ Demos' essay 'Art After Nature, the post-natural condition'.

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New on our news page

from 66 Minutes in Damascus / LIFT

In Leeds, the Performance Studies International conference, a combination of performance academics and artists, has at least 14 panel sessions with ecological themes -  like theorising eco-performance; performing environmental risk; sex, meat and ecology; and performing fluidity in watery places.

Alongside the PSi conference is the Ludus Festival, which includes Lo Monstre, a large animatronic insect-like animal walking through the streets of Leeds, and A Meadow Meander, immersing audiences in an ecological labyrinth.

On the streets of London, Lucian Bourjeily's work 66 Minutes in Damascus, during which the audience members are placed as a group of tourists visiting the Syrian capital and are arrested by the Syrian secret service, will be studied for its carbon efficiency.

The Edinburgh Film Festival starts on Wednesday. Dr. Seuss' Lorax, Paul the Psychic Octopus, animals in captivity, the coal roads of China and the landscape of Fukushima all feature.

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Eden and the overburden

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 

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Buildings, energy and culture

Wallace Heim writes: 

The Theatres Trust and Julie's Bicycle today publish Energising Culture, a guide to planning a sustainable energy future for cultural buildings. The guide is intended to help arts companies make informed decisions about a long-term energy strategy for their buildings. It sets out the issues around energy demand, energy supply and the implications of these for an organisation's business models.

The 48 venues in The Theatres Trust's Ecovenue project contributed to developing the ideas of how theatres and small venues can manage their energy better.

This is the first of a two-part publication. The second part, to follow, will take a more comprehensive long-term vision of environmental sustainability and how the cultural sector intersects with it, ranging across new technologies and emerging cultural values.

The guide is a free download from both Julie's Bicycle and The Theatres Trust.

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Edinburgh's greener Fringe

from Fukushima - A Silent Prayer of Poetry

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.

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Indie-theatre take on Deepwater spill

Wallace Heim writes: 

During April and May, The Way of Water, Caridad Svich’s play about the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill toured over fifty venues in North America and Brazil, and in Berlin, Aberystwyth, Glasgow and London. The play toured not as a production but as script-in-hand readings by actors in each place.

The play, marking the two-year anniversary of the spill, traveled quickly, more like an indie-music event than a theatre tour. This new kind of theatrical experience is low-budget, international, tied in with social media and carbon-light.

The play deals with the toxic effects of the spill on four people, on their health, livelihoods and sense of community. The play’s impetus is towards taking action against corporate malfeasance, a revision of the plotline of An Enemy of the People.

Seeing the reading in Aberystwyth, Carl Lavery, Senior Lecturer in Drama, blogged 'Ten Thoughts on The Way of Water'. Here are three:

When I think of The Way of Water, I think of its linguistic rhythms and poetic beats - its politics of voice.

When I think of The Way of Water, I think of 4 young actors in Wales finding its meanings, walking its lines, tracing its shapes.

When I think of The Way of Water, I think of my Dad who died from a lifetime of exposure to the toxic fuel tanks of Phantom fighter jets.

photo: Encyclopedia Britannica online

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HeatWave in Los Angeles

Kellie Gutman writes:

HeatWave, a project of the Los Angeles Theatre Community, is hosting a conference on 9 June, 2012, at TreePeople's Conference Center in Coldwater Canyon Park. Heatwave aims to generate new works on the Environment as well as greener practices in theatre operations.  The conference, reservations required, will have speakers - including Ian Garrett of The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts - entertainment and breakout sessions to encourage playwrights and producers in the LA-area to work together.

The project's mission says: HeatWave hopes to spark meaningful and creative cultural discourse with our audiences on the state of the planet and our place on it, empowering a ripple of activism and spurring meaningful change.

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One Day on Earth

Kellie Gutman writes:

On Friday June 1, and Sunday June 3, New York's premier reuse center, Materials for the Arts, will be the recipient of proceeds from screenings of One Day on Earth.  It was made in 2010, and filmed in every country on earth on the same day.  There will be a week of showings to benefit local charities in New York City.

Materials for the Arts is a program of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.  It collects unneeded materials from businesses and individuals and donates them to arts programming across the city.

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New on our news page

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

The Hay Festival kicks off today, with talks on architecture, food, art, social justice and fashion activism for starters.

We also feature summer celebrations of a place: the Jurassic Coast, Stonehenge, Wilderness and the Thames.

Thinking ahead, Nick Dear's new play, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, about the poet and nature writer Edward Thomas, opens at London's Almeida Theatre in the autumn.

image: iwantdesign

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The right environment

from The Last Lunch

Wallace Heim writes:

The Best New Play Award, offered collaboratively by New Writing South and the Brighton Fringe, is an award that has nothing to do with ecology. But this year’s award was given to two productions that have something to do with ecology.

Playwright Jonathan Brown won for his play about meat-eating, The Last Lunch.

The company Feral Theatre won for Triptych, three productions on loss and extinction: Papusza, The Last of the Curlews and TreeStory. 

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The summer music festival season starts this weekend. We select the less-carboned, solar-powered, up-cycled, educational, chilled and frenzied green ones.

In Dorset, artists walk and talk with people who use their feet (26 bones) or their hands (27 bones) to work with or to investigate the Jurassic Coast.

In Bath, FAB, the Fringe Arts Bath Festival, starts this week-end, with themes of Sustainable Earth and Metamorphosis.

We've added the ecologist Wendell Berry's National Endowment for the Humanities Lecture, 'It All Turns on Affection', to our online essays.

In London, there's an alternative Rio+20 conference; an exhibition on the anthropocene; and an evening sharing food growing stories from Ljubljana, Havana, Chiapas in Mexico and Jaos in Palestine.

image above from the Isle of Wight festival

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Tom Toles wedding cartoon

Copyright (c) The Washington Post

Kellie Gutman writes:


Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles' latest cartoon on climate change.

Toles has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning, winning in 1990.  He replaced the legendary cartoonist Herblock at the Washington Post in 2002. Toles' cartoons are syndicated in over 200 newspapers.  He is known for tackling complicated subjects such as environmental issues.  He often includes a small doodle, a caricature of himself, in the corner.

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U.S. Energy Secretary Chu on The Avengers

Kellie Gutman writes:

Steven Chu, the 12th Secretary of Energy for the United States, has a post on his Facebook page about the new movie, The Avengers. Though his friends are not listed, he does have 18,963 'likes' on his page. Chu lists his job:

As Secretary of Energy, proudly carrying out President Obama's ambitious agenda to invest in alternative and renewable energy, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and create millions of new jobs. 

About The Avengers  he says:

'[It] focuses on a new, limitless clean energy source called 'The Tesseract."... While the "Tesseract" may be fictional, the real-life global competition over clean energy is growing increasingly intense, as countries around the world sense a huge economic opportunity AND the opportunity for cleaner air, water, and a healthier planet...'

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Talking about climate change

Jason's story

Wallace Heim writes: 

One of the explanations offered for why climate change is not more prominent in people’s thinking is that it’s not physically seen. It doesn’t feel ‘real’ enough.

But a different view comes out in the stories people tell about how climate change is immediately altering their everyday lives. The climate is changing how they feel about the world and their decisions about what to do.

Project ASPECT, based at University College Falmouth, is gathering people’s stories about climate change from individuals and communities in Wales, northern England, London and Cornwall. Building a digital narrative archive, they are capturing on DVD how people talk about the climate in the context of their everyday lives.

There are those who watch. Heather continues the diary her mother started, recording every day what work is done on the family farm and the weather. Duncan and Matt are surfers in Cornwall, watching the storms. There are those who work with renewable energy, or, like Hanna, find green jobs for young people. Many are changing the way they grow food and eat: Mary from Incredible Edible; Owen with his backyard in Peckham; and masked night-time Ninja guerrilla gardeners. Singers, rappers, athletes tell their stories. Spontaneous acts of community kindness sit alongside the meticulous work of digitising the weather reports from World War I ship’s logs.

In these stories of everyday life, there is a cultural reality emerging, soft-voiced, but pressing. 

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A new chapter

Malcolm Bull on climate change ethics

"Climate ethics is not morality applied but morality discovered, a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know (about democracy, perhaps), but the future development of humanity may depend on what, if anything, it can teach us."

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New on our news page

Wasteland twinning: Nottingham and Yogyakarta

At the Brighton Fringe, The Ship's Log of songs marks the progress of the Boat Project by Lone Twin, and Feral Theatre perform three pieces on freedom, love and extinction.

OIL, photographs by Edward Burtynsky chronicling the oil industry, opens the new Photographers' Gallery.

A pop-up cinema at the edges of the Olympic Park hosts an evening of films on animals, cattle, herding and whaling.

Nottingham's wastelands are twinning with the wastelands of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Artists are making the connections.

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Six films on culture and climate change

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

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

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Carbon-lite touring

The Last Polar Bears on tour

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.'

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Floating platforms

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".

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Good topic

From the London Review of Books

In the next issue, which will be dated 24 May, Malcolm Bull on the intergenerational politics of climate change.

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Soap operas for social change

The Archers, courtesy BBC

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, called New 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.

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New on our news page

from Noye's Fludde

The comedy Thin Ice is inspired by the  'weather wars' between Britain and Germany over Arctic bases for predicting weather patterns and involves a thawing body.

In Wales, young people give a climate changing update to Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde.

Paradise Lost is the inspiration for a new church opera by Jonathan Dove, The Walk from the Garden, at the Salisbury Festival.

In Brussels, KAAI Theater hosts five days of performances, films, exhibitions and talks on cities, food, bicycles, farms, extinction, bees, rivers and the sound of pollen.

Make do and mend it at a symposium in the Lake District.

Proposals are wanted for a residency in Andalucía showing how the environment reacts to light in the desert.

Storytellers are walking to Canterbury. The call is out for new, green Canterbury Tales for the journey.

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New on our news page

from Occupy Everything by kennardphillipps

Science, theatre and population will get added together in Ten Billion at the Royal Court, directed by Katie Mitchell.

Sport and art meet the mountain in NVA's Speed of Light. Runners are in training while ticketing opens for the walking audience.

The graphics of Occupy Everything by kennardphillips are on show in London.

In Liverpool, twelve artists send work back from the Galápagos.

'Hinterlands' explores a Welsh landscape in a workshop on movement and environment.

David Abram's talk at the Sensory Values event in Edinburgh is online.

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New on our news page

'Take the money and run' reading group

The Dark Mountain Project moves north with a festival in Scotland in April, and a lecture in Falmouth by Dark Mountain's Paul Kingsnorth is now a podcast.

Headphones on: The Tate à Tate Audio Tour is available to download. It's three alternative guides to the Tate collections and their sponsorship by oil corporations.

A webcast conference on sustainable practice in the theatre springs from Minneapolis.

In Edinburgh, the Science Festival hosts three talks by climate scientist James Hansen, along with events on food, foraging and dance.

PLATFORM's Jane Trowell and the Live Art Development Agency 'take the money and run' in a series of reading groups on ethics, art and sponsorship. photo above

Other new courses include urban permaculture in Salford and Body/Landscape in Scotland.

Two exhibitions are coming up from Cape Farewell: HEVVA! HEVVA! by students on the Cornwall Short Course at the Eden Project; and in Paris, Carbon 12, pairing artists with climate scientists.

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SHINSAI: Theaters for Japan

Practicing for SHINSAI. Photo Erin Baiano/Licoln Center Theater

Kellie Gutman writes:

A unique event took place at 69 theatres across the United States on March 11, the one-year anniversary of the devastating Japanese earthquake.  Called SHINSAI - the Japanese word for an earthquake disaster - it was a series of readings of ten-minute plays to raise funds for the Japan Playwrights Association.

Some theatres held one or two readings before their normally scheduled productions; others made an evening of presenting many of the plays and songs put together for the event.  More than half of the plays have to do with the environmental disaster in Japan. To read the plays, register here

The Theatre Communications Group helped to organize SHINSAI. Japanese and American playwrights wrote works for the event; Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman reworked two songs from their 1976 musical Pacific Overtures. All plays were to be presented only on March 11.

National Public Radio did a story, which you can hear here.

Yoji Sakate, President of Japan Playwrights Association wrote:

Theater artists in Japan, centered around those living in the Tohoku region that was devastated by the great earthquake and nuclear accident, extend our hand to theater artists around the world to rebuild Tohuku and Japanese society, restoring the conditions that surround the art of theater, such as environments for creative activity, theater buildings, companies, rehearsal spaces, education and audiences.  We seek to work with our international peers to demonstrate the potential of human beings and the theater to overcome adversity as well as the primordial power of expression on stage.

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First daffodil three weeks earlier

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:

First daffodil in Low Wood

Following spring's advance

As the snow melts

Surest sign of spring in the US

Spring moved at 1.3 miles per hour

Spring arrives at three times the speed

It's a mile an hour in the states

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TippingPoint makes a step-change

Wallace Heim writes:

The TippingPoint last month, co-hosted by the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability, made a step-change from previous TP events. Many of the same elements were there, but something shifted. Something sparked in the combination of TP’s open structure and those participants, those presentations, the talk, the room and the city. It felt as if many things were converging, and instead of being an event proposing or speculating that culture and the arts could be important responses to climate change, it was an event going with and propelling the diverse and energetic work that is being made, and being dreamt of.

The presentations in more conventional conference form, many now online, were provocative, each presenting a distinct direction and raising questions that filtered through the rest of the event. Kevin Anderson and Matt Ridley's heated head-to-head ("Two men slugging it out over data" as one participant named it) exemplified adversarial strategies and the ways in which the ‘deniers’ and those who accept the consensus views of science tend to define one another’s arguments, leaving a blank between them. It also brought out the difficulties of seeing and critiquing the rhetoric and argumentation in debates that rely on scientific data.

Lucy Conway presented the artwork that is the Isle of Eigg, and how the population there is realising low-carbon, high socially and culturally benefitted living. Ben Twist from Zero Carbon Scotland +TBD, introduced the problem of whether art can, or should, be linked to behavioural change. Erica Whyman from Northern Stage showed how the major cultural organisations in Newcastle are collaborating across their business and institutional interests, and building a network that could include developing plans for material sustainability. The idea of organisational collaboration returned in Alan Davey’s announcement of Arts Council England’s decision to embed environmental sustainability into its funding agreement.

On the last day, Sue Gill, of Dead Good Guides led everyone in singing a version of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ before John Fox gave his reflections on the transitions in art-making from commercialised spectacle to vernacular art, to 'random acts of culture'. "Even if the markets fail, we must not tolerate the failure of imagination."

The three days were planned to allow for chance conversations and random mixing in small groups, like the ‘Show and Tell’ session, where participants bring an object with meaning for them relating to climate change. Some of these personal and emotive exchanges drifted into the wider discussions. The three Open Space sessions had themes, the first two mostly ignored: 'In what ways might I influence the future' and 'Exploring Possibilities', in favour of people’s more immediate concerns. The third, 'What am I going to do about the future', drew out dozens of groups talking about their projects, and help that could be given to them.

The openness of TP makes reporting back very subjective. It did feel as if something happened, more than presentations and networking. The unrepeatable, and well-facilitated, combination of the people, the ideas, the timing came together to make an event that showed and advanced the many edges of social and artistic action.

Audio recordings of the presentations, tweets, blogs, interviews and commentaries with participants and some of the evenings' entertainment are on Amplified. Photos above posted on Amplified by quitexander.

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New on our news page

Competition opens for this year’s Nick Darke Award for environmental playwriting, screenwriting and documentary, with a prize of £6,000.

After Miss Julie is to open at the Young Vic in London, a ‘Classics for a New Climate’ production with Julie’s Bicycle, aiming to reduce the amount of electricity used from the national grid by 50% in the production of the show.

Alan Davey of Arts Council England announces that ACE will embed environmental sustainability in its funding agreements with Nationally Funded Organisations and Major Partner Museums.

A tent in Edinburgh this week houses discussions and workshops on ecology and art with students from 'Art, Space and Nature' at Edinburgh College of Art, and eco/art/scotland.

In London, the publication ATLAS: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World will be launched at the Purcell Room, with geographer Doreen Massey, food urbanist Carolyn Steele, campaigner Andrew Simms and playwright Lemn Sissay.

At the Science Museum, London, architect Sunand Prasad, campaigner Martin Kirk and climate activist Cat Hudson will discuss how to get people to change their habits.

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