Founder of Julie’s Bicycle, Alison Tickell’s speech notes from the “Artist for a low carbon economy” seminar held in Sydney on Thursday 13 October, 2011 hosted by Gadens Lawyers and the Australia Business Arts Foundation and supported by British Council and City of Sydney.
"I can’t tell you how chuffed I am to be here today – the day after an historic 74/72 incredible!!!!!
You should be talking to me, not I you.
On the eve of India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi was asked whether he thought the country could follow the British model of industrial development.
His response encapsulates our dilemma: He said:
"It took Britain half the resources of this planet to achieve its prosperity. How many planets will India require for development?"
This question is hanging unanswered over all of us and remains more important today than in 1947.
We live in an era where what we eat, where we travel, how we live out our lives has never been more weighted with the knowledge of consequence.
Science is telling us that we must, now, take our custody of the natural world very seriously and arts and culture must do their bit.
Science and art share the raw material of creativity. Both proposition what we know and present it anew. They illuminate our assumptions and tug at boundaries in uncomfortable ways.
And very occasionally present a reality so compelling that the world shifts to accommodate it. And we are living through one of these rare shifts.
The earth’s natural processes are intimately – and marvellously – connected: a change in one area triggers a reaction in another, which in turn triggers another, and another and so on. This is interconnectivity on its grandest scale and human beings have benefitted prodigiously from it.
Now the earth’s equilibrium – that precious and complex phenomenon that has supported our gorgeous natural world of today for 2.5 million years, is no longer operating as it should. The change has been rapid – some 200 years – and we are feeling the consequences closely. Fewer birds in english gardens for some, but horrific suffering from the loss of natural assets - is a reality now
This is one of those moments, an historic exhalation of collective breath.
It’s as though we are all pausing in the knowledge that the next inhalation really matters – but even though the life force depends on it our lungs won’t quite plunge into a deep and full lift of fresh and generous air.
It seems that to breathe means to reach into all the big issues – health, food and water, poverty, geo politics, conservation, economics – just about the lot – and the task has rendered us breathless.
At the centre of the debate on climate change is a great reckoning. It concerns past and futur, and asks that we reconcile the distribution of resources between the rich and the poor, and decide who is responsible – and therefore liable – for what.
This is challenging us as individual’s countries, continents, cultures and as communities on the deepest levels. No wonder then that global governance frameworks have singularly failed to find our way out of it. And smaller communities with a public interest mandate – cities like Sydney and London, creative communities, are so important to drive this forward.
It’s an unfolding and very human drama which will only be resolved through acts of collective humility, forgiveness and creativity.
What a fantastic place for art. This is the stuff of creativity in its purest, surest form?
My organisation, Julie’s Bicycle is responding to this epic drama through the lens of arts and culture. When we started it was partly from a simple impulse to do something, and partly because art can do something that governments, technology, scientists and campaigning NGO’s can’t. The sizzle of art is felt, smelt, lusted after by people – including scientists, in desperate need of a voice.
Ill say a little about it now – we work across the performing arts, music and theatre - visual, arts and recently fashion industries mainly in the UK though we are doing increasingly working in Europe and the USA, and indeed in Australia.
MISSION
Our Ambition: Simply to sustain creativity – sounds glib, but it’s not
Julie’s Bicycle started in 2007, when Al Gore was popular and everyone was in a frenzy. JB was founded in that same short burst of activism and urgency. Everything we were feeling was just as I have described – too hot to handle.
So enormous that the only hope of getting anything done was to reduce it to size – our size, like the late Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai’s humming birds, tiny creatures that tried to douse the forest fire, drop by drop. We needed make this thing real, recognisable, and within our grasp. So we sarted with the biggest problem carbon – and have used this to cascade into the broader ecological and social issues.
I think the arts have been quite slow on the uptake. We pride ourselves on our ethics, somehow we carry it, we assume we have it and chatter a lot about big ethical issues.
– and it might be unearned. - big business and indeed some gvts have been leading the debate, and continue to do so – orgs such as Walmart, Westpac, M&S, Puma.
So do we have an ethical responsibility to respond to the environment?
Yes, yes yes. It’s how we take the next breathe that matters of course, not whether we take it – we don’t have the option.
JB began in the music industry - expert at gesture politics: The big gig, Rock against Racism, Drop the Debt, Live Aid, Live Earth – spectacular and euphoric crowd pullers which raise money, and consciousness but I know they don’t stimulate deep and abiding cultural shifts.
Off-sets and awareness raising concerts were the default response to any issues of broad concern. “greenwash” was often the result– the accusation of making false or misleading claims of good environmental credentials.
The phenomenon carries risk to individuals and to companies and, once bitten twice shy – it stimulates the opposite and equally destructive – effect, the green hush effect. This is important because it stops environmental sustainability becoming a norm.
Neither are states that stimulate action.
We need to think about our responsibilities more intelligently – and lead by doing, not singing a song!
This time we started with tho different things: the scientists and the business leaders – all at senior levels.
The arts share an industrial base with every other industry. We heat and cool, lighten and darken, create, display and reproduce art. We tour and travel and audiences follow in huge numbers. All this requires energy – significant amounts of it – and most of it is drawn from fossil fuels. Art has a real carbon footprint.
Our first piece of research scoped the carbon footprint of the UK music industry in partnership with the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.
It gave the industry the comfort of a pie chart, some real evidence, with which they could get their house in order.
By engaging these companies in the process and directly calculating their impacts, their relationship to climate change was legitimised. They felt connected to it. And it inspired them.
It’s much harder to say ‘climate change has nothing to do with me’ when it can be proved that it does.
We focused on how it works, how it fits together:
- the built environment
- the temporary, often out door events (city festivals, and festivals in fields)
- the movement of art, artists and audiences - tours, exhibitions
- and the relationships and levers of influence that exist across and between these bits.
This piece of work set a precedent that we have followed again and again: work with the experts, root in acadaemia – especially work with a disinterested party. The order in which we do things matters.
The perceptions that others have of us – are really critical to our success. When tackling an issue of public interest these perceptions should be built with foresight in a sensible, and logical narrative that will determine success or failure. Perhaps the carbon tax could have been managed differently had it not been called a tax from the outset – in the UK.
But what of the artists I hear you cry!!
I want to head off at the pass one of the more debilitating debates connected to where we ‘place’ art in relation to environment : the ‘art for art’s sake’ leave-issues-out-of-it .
We don’t need to be squeamish about instrumentalism. This is putting brakes on our capacity to act. These fears are largely ungrounded; commissioning art to a theme is nothing new and has been the bread and butter of many artists.
And it’s great – we don’t have to rely on pop stars for moral compass!!!.
And here, finally we have a job for the artists after all!
The simple truth about climate change is that society is still beholden to a growth model of business based on oil and coal. We all benefit from it and there is therefore no great stampede to wean ourselves off. But there should be!
So any vision of the future means deploying creativity of the highest order from all of us and the arts should have a pivotal role.
Part of this vision needs to be about adaptation, resilience in the context of a changing climate and the stress on resources.
Adapting to this warmer world will take some investment and lots of adjusting. But it’s perfectly possible if it is done now. And decision-makers need to take the initiative. This is one area where your lead is critical.
Then Innovation – the opportunity to look the new in the eye – this is where the arts can really thrive – working with all other parts of economy. Some of the most compelling and radical visions come from the developing world - focused, determined populations prepared to build new and low carbon creative economies.
We need to think beyond what we know – seek it out – and keep an open mind. We’re on totally new ground here.
We have a fantastic new layer in our atmosphere to play with – the arts digisphere. How does this fit in a resource-constrained world?
The digital and green economies are already inextricably linked and, working together will determine the future of our arts.
Policy makers, funders, sponsors and strategists need to think about what society be valuing – I can guarantee it will be green and it won’t tolerate waste. And your job is to put the conditions in place whereby the arts can begin to move forward, to scale.
A month ago Arts Council England issued its new funding agreements to 600 or so arts clients to see them through the next 4 years. This is in the context of a 30% cut in its funding settlement from central government.
It contains this statement:
"Within the life time of this funding agreement, we intend to ask all our national portfolio organisations to develop an environmental action policy and annual action plan to improve environmental performance and carbon emissions. Our target for this is 2013 and we will provide support and materials to enable this to happen."
In short that environmental concerns in the arts are recognized as a business critical issue as well as an ethical one.
I will leave you with Wangari, died 25th September who sums everything I have just said in two minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMW6YWjMxw
Thank you."