Can the Arts Save the Planet!

Written by Elizabeth Welsh

It is often the event least anticipated that will undoubtedly secure a place at the top of your festival list as ‘thought-provoking’. I was blown away by the impact the event Can the Arts Save the Planet? had on me. I came away from the event with more questions and concerns than when I went in, a sign of an engaging lecture. Whether I swallow every word of it, is another story.

Witty, informative, and packed full of literature and art, this event was undoubtedly provocative. Eric Dorfman, author of climate change book Melting Point, Melissa Clark-Reynolds, Ambassador for Al Gore’s Climate Project, and ecologist Mike Dickison discussed creativity, sustainability and social consciousness and left me speechless in more ways than one .

Eric Dorfman launched into the event with a discussion of his own climate change text Melting Point, and proceeded to run through a number of slides examplars of the positive impact achieved through art dedicated to an environmental message. Notable among these were several commissioned pieces by Greenpeace. An intricate pencil sketching of a forest turned out to be entirely made from office staples and heralded the plea “Conserve Office Paper”. A grasshopper with back legs constructed from pea pods, a message about genetic modification. The final slide showed Jacques Cousteau in 1960 on the cover of Time magazine and the question Dorfman posed to the audience was, “did this make a difference?” Dorfman spoke about two similarly apt figures from the 19th century, Turner and John Ruskin. As far back as 1884 Ruskin was attempting to impart the knowledge that environmental problems are moral problems through the medium of his public lectures. One such lecture discussed the “Storm Cloud of the 19th Century”, the smog produced in Manchester (and beyond) by the Industrial Revolution. Dorfman’s question comes back to why, if the arts have always been concerned with nature and the detrimental effects that humans have on it, have we never solved this problem?

Mike Dickison took the stage next and proposed that the arts produce an emotional response in us which impels us to action. Dickison split his discussion into two parts, ‘myth-making’ (and how to avoid it), and ‘natural inclinations’ (and how do we challenge these). Dickison staged a number of slides of Bill Hammond’s mythic representations of birds and their extinction, Barry Cleaver’s museum specimen like portraits, and Graham Sydney’s art work in opposition to wind-farming. Dickison honed in on Graham Sydney’s attempts to stop the construction of wind farms in Central Otago by using his art as visual advocacy. But here Dickison posed a problem; he divulged the information that the Central Otago landscape, before settlers, had been predominantly covered with totara forests. Graham Sydney has therefore produced art with a myth making capability, invoking a landscape that never existed until the white settlers occupied New Zealand. The mutters from the audience were audible.

Dickison then presented the audience with two series of slides, one with Pre-Raphaelite paintings depicting idyllic landscapes, savannahs, and the good old Kiwi lifestyle block. This is where the issue became sticky. Dickison seemed to appropriate Dennis Dutton’s argument (The Art Instinct) to claim human beings naturally, instinctively desire to live in savannah-like environments. I live in central city, and I certainly do not desire to live on a life-style block. But perhaps I am an anomaly?

The second slide showed New York City. “So which environment is more environmentally friendly?” he teasingly inquired. The blowing response was New York. I detected visible squirming. Dickison concluded with a question to the audience, asking how we can use the arts to challenge our natural inclinations to live in idyllic landscapes. This conclusion grated on me.

Melissa Clark-Reynolds was the final speaker of the morning, and the speaker I found most illuminating. She was less engaged with questions of why we look to art for environmental solutions and simply stated that it was part and parcel of various forms of artistic medium. She took up the discussion of our ‘myth making’ capabilities and examined a number of authors and their respective attempts at harnessing environmental myths. Clark-Reynolds did not push any particular ‘myths’ on the audience, which was refreshing. She flicked through slides of Phillip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Stanislaw Lem, Gerald Durrell, Tom Robbins, Ted Hughes and Studio Ghibli discussing the environmental heroes present within each. She concluded by rather unashamedly promoting her online environmentally-engaged gaming platform targeted at children. Targeting the audience required to take on these issues in the future this tool aims to energise and animate children about the rather dry and unglamorous issue of climate change.

Oddly, what I was reminded of as I walked out of this event and considered the potentiality and interchange between art and nature was Rebecca Solnit’s discussion of the ‘Claude Glass’ in her critical text Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. She wrote that “in Arches National Park there are simple metal tubes resting on bases with notches: If you put the tube in a notch and look, it will frame a little composition…versions of the Claude Glass, the device by which eighteenth-century English gentry turned the landscape into pictures that were easier for them to recognize as artistic compositions.” What effect does this have, conceptualising nature as a work of art?