Artists can lead our climate response
A transdisciplinary approach with expansive thinkers may provide innovations
For many decades now, business and government have led the task of fixing the existential climate crisis. We're overdue for someone else to be in charge – namely, artists, especially those working in substantive collaboration with climate scientists.
Together, they are the will and the way.
Business and government, arguably, have failed to deliver a will and a way toward "Climate Hope". They are are too hemmed in by overriding priorities, regulatory compromises, jurisdictions and short-term pains to adequately address the scale, scope and severity of the situation or implement the long, multi-generational horizons of a climate fix.
Envisioning a future planet made sustainable is an opportunity.
Artists see that, for the most part, from the margins.
To meet this climate challenge, we need all the best, multidisciplinary thinkers at the table. That includes expansive, lateral and imaginative creators, like artists, who are unbounded by factors like shareholder value, national borders and economic growth metrics.
Artists can see a climate endgame, something we lack as we toil, defeatedly, on the front end a crisis that is characterized as "too big, too expensive, and too complex."
At Broto: Art-Climate-Science, we convene conferences that bring together big thinkers on climate – people who might not otherwise ever be in the same room. We’ve started a living document called a Collaboration Blueprint that makes artists and scientists equal partners and we’ve focused our unique conversations on the lesser explored topics of sustainability, such as scale, deep time, and our troubled relationship with nature.
Our fourth Broto conference, called Affinity, happened Dec. 5 & 12, 2020. And we’re planning more for 2021.
We’re working with the premise that we are estranged from nature – structurally and culturally – and that has consequences for climate. From an art-sci perspective, how might a mutually affirming partnership with nature reset society’s climate priorities?
As we work with this material and our esteemed multidisciplinary panelists, it has become very clear that art is an under appreciated active partner in the climate challenge.
Putting art in charge is less about creating climate operas and other art outcomes than it is about about embracing the artist’s process -- art thinking, art making and art distribution -- as a critical value-add in strategy and innovation.
Think about the ability of art to travel the world. Isn’t that a model for a climate remedy at scale?
The artists up for this challenge are self-selected, deeply rooted in an understanding of the mechanics of climate change, and capable of commanding both content credibility and an audience. Yet these artists exist, even if they are indeed a fraction of a fraction of the artistic community worldwide.
Special mention to Jonathan Latiano, Cecil Howell (image "Isle Royale on September 1, 2004" above, with thanks) and Daniel Ranalli among the very talented climate artists who deftly blend climate science into their works.
Their achievement is so much more than provoking and communicating – or, packaging scientific data to be “accessible.”
These artists engage original research that matches that of scientific inquiry. They investigate and test and retest. They see and evaluate information differently, making climate science more robust and multidimensional. Importantly, they understand our cultures and even drive cultural change, perhaps the real hurdle in addressing the climate threat.
Business and government will be active partners in rolling out climate innovations created by artists and scientists, but first we must dream.
Imagine a future in which climate is not an existential threat, when we’re living in a better partnership with nature.
Art isn’t the poor cousin in this equation. Rather, art is likely our last, best hope to make that societal shift, that mental leap forward, because the effective leadership isn’t coming from anywhere else.
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Ian Edwards, a sustainability consultant, is founder of Broto: Art-Climate-Science, a conference dedicated to substantive and mutual art-science collaborations pointed at the climate crisis.