Arts and Environment

Assignment 13
Music
• The use of music in environmental
education (EE) can help to inform
students through ideas incorporated in
musical lyrics, while also enhancing
interest in environmental topics. Music
can also enhance perceptions of the
value of the natural world, especially
when nature itself is recognized as being
musical.
• The arts can help provide some of the
affective components of environmental
education – emotions, values, and
motivations driving pro-environmental
behavior. As one of the arts, music can
captivate, entertain, and create a sense
of community.

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Culture
• Basic assessments of cultural conservation practices in different
ecosystems of the world have highlighted the relevance of
understanding and supporting local and traditional knowledge, when
biodiversity and cultural diversity have never been more threatened
than now.
• The Commission on Ecosystem Management carried out a workshop in
Doha in 2013 about “Spirituality and Ecosystem Management” and
included as one of the main recommendations to establish a new
thematic group that deals with those issues in a cultural context. As
examples, formal and informal religions and spirituality can contribute
to ecosystem management through mechanisms such as taboos,
practices of care, and community motivations for conservation.
• Real solutions to address the impacts of climate change and biodiversity
conservation require a knowledge and insight from the social sciences,
specifically the role that culture plays. For example, culture influences
consumption decisions that may impact species or contribute to
greenhouse gas emissions and culture influences how people support or
oppose responses to mitigate biodiversity loss or climate change.

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Society
• The Environment and Society specialization within
the Geography major provides students with an
understanding of the reciprocal relationships
between social and environmental processes.
Environmental geographers are concerned with how
human beings use the earth and how humans
impact the environments in which they live.
• Students study both the social and natural
dimensions of environmental issues. This approach
provides new ways of explaining and solving
environmental problems on the local, national, and
global scale. Research and teaching in this area
emphasize that the human relationship to the
environment can be biological, economic, political,
physical, cultural, chemical, or social.

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Artist’s contribution to
protecting the environment
• Show it’s more fun to be a creator than a consumer - Our
belief is that people act out of having a relationship with the
environment. If that emotional connection is not there, they
won’t care. Rather than relaying messages, it’s about creating
experiences and creating an alternative that’s actually more
rewarding. I often wonder if it’s as simple as encouraging
creativity over consumption.
• Use the media to influence opinion - There is an issue of
prioritization and obviously media would have to cater to
business interests as well. Climate change probably does not
sell very well. In my opinion, cartoonists, filmmakers, actors
and journalists should come forward to highlight the issue in
their own capacities.
• Highlight the down-side of car culture - Cars are a symbol of
wealth and prosperity in industrializing countries, so asking
people to give up on owning and using a car is a pretty big ask.
But the impact of crowded roads is easy to highlight – excessive
pollution, health issues like asthma and respiratory disorders,
congestion. This is stuff that most people can understand since
they are affected directly. So it helps sometimes to work
backwards and highlight the human impacts.
• Encourage human empathy - Climate change is asking us to
care about people we’ve never met and to fight for their
happiness as well as our own. I have family in the mid-west
who I love deeply but who can’t wrap their heads around
climate change because it’s “away”. The times when we can
have a truly heartfelt conversation about this is when I bring the
human element into it, to talk about my friend Abrar in
Bangladesh and his infant daughter, to talk about real humans
and their stories.
• Pull in primetime power - The audience drives primetime TV content, rather than the
contrary. How many Leonardo DiCaprio’s do we need to get messages to a wider audience,
both public (at the Oscars in February) or corporate (at Davos in January)? Even Olafur
Eliasson, one of the best-known visual artists, can’t compete (he was also in Davos). In France,
the best media for the cause over the last months has been the movie Tomorrow. Everybody
feels touched and empowered after seeing it.
• Lead by example - We’ve focused on developing the practical nuts and bolts to help people do
sustainability – for everyone in the arts – artists through to tour managers, festivals, buildings.
We work with funders and policymakers to put sustainability into the strategy of the sector. We
believe that the creative sector is an ecology – from design to heritage – and all of us need to
be engaged and talking to one another as well as wider audiences.
• Stay hopeful - The climate movement in general suffers from exhaustion, burnout, despair.
But I think those of us working in creative fields have the benefit of knowing that new
possibilities are always just around the corner, and hope is a fully renewable resource. I have a
lithograph hanging across from my desk by the US artist Morley. It says “If you’re reading
this, there’s still time.”
• Keep fossil fuel companies out of cultural spaces - In museums and galleries we need to
protect public space from oil company co-optation. They are trying to present themselves as
part of our cultures when really they are destroying them. In the wider social sphere, the more
power we take away from oil companies, the less they will use it to block important legislation.
• Offer concrete solutions - Here in the US unfortunately we are still fighting to prove that
climate change is real to many people. The first season of our US documentary TV series Years
of Living Dangerously worked to bridge the deep political divide that exists in the country, but
for the next season, we will offer concrete solutions. We need to say not only that climate
change is happening, but also, here’s the solution.
• Catch them young - Captain Planet created a generation of environmental activists. The show
portrayed young people in control, facing serious environmental threats in an accessible and
entertaining way for kids. The message of the series is still as important and relevant as it was
25 years ago. It’s sad that the events we portrayed as fantasy have mostly become a reality.
• Stand out from the noise - The challenge is that
people are inundated with different messages
daily and you need to have a message that stands
out – shocks them, makes them laugh. You then
have to ensure they want to find out more and
take some sort of action.
• Tell stories to make it seem real - We need to
make it seem real enough that many more people
will accept changes in lifestyle and will lobby
others to do likewise. The creative industries can
help by telling powerful stories in ways that
connect, but storytellers need to look closely at
real life in many parts of the world to create full
global impact and try to inculcate the realization
that “this could happen to me - I’d better start
changing”.