Wordless at Tate Britain

I was at Tate Britain for a meeting but thought I’d take a look at the New Displays because the Guardian had reported its director Penelope Curtis’ decision to remove information panels. I’ve only been a cursory visitor in the past two years since her time in the post so hadn’t noticed many changes to the interpretation, although I’ve since heard that she has stripped information back a great deal. This account is, I hope, an insight for Tate and other museum professionals into what one experiences when you visit without full preparation or focused attention, and when your previous experiences of a museum drive your behaviour.

I’d skim-read the Guardian article assuming the stripping back referred only to the large panels explaining each room, so I was really surprised to see extended captions for maybe 95% of works gone. The labels are now only tombstones (artist, title, date, medium, donor). This example of a caption has more information than most because the donation of the portrait is significant for its location in the Manton entrance of the building. Most say much less.

Also, wayfinding and room signage seems much reduced. I had noticed a room plan at the top of the Manton stairs but because of my meeting at that time I didn’t look at it. I assumed I’d see another one later but didn’t, so felt rather at a loss.

This BP Walk through British Art is reminiscent of Michael Gove’s wish for schools to teach ‘our island story’, one step in time from age 5 upwards, but minus the didacticism. I knew the hang must be chronological but still expected each room to possess and explain a linking rationale, such as a movement, links between artists, or a common centre of production. It turned out the linking rationale for each room was simply a decade, although I didn’t notice the signs for that at first. An Independent article reveals that curators had to go through the whole British collection to select works produced year after year, and it suggests they are actually hung round the room in that order (although I didn’t check that). I know that some believe a strictly chronological hang provides the perfect framework for contextual interpretation – it’s largely invisible yet still allows for logical historical connections. Of course, chronology is useful. But in this case, it is a spare skeleton without other tools for contextual investigation which can help us to understand the dynamics between: places and periods; continuity and discontinuity; materials and ideas; individuals and communities. Many artworks are ahead of or before, or simply outside, their time – time is only one way to make sense of them.

Of course, for decades, Tate’s thinking behind New Displays have been based on this realisation that chronology is not the only way to do history. Tate curator Chris Stephens writes about the hang in the Friends magazine as a radical loosening up, that “All [curators] were surprised at how difficult it was to dispense with deeply embedded art historical conventions.” He describes how the process threw up unexpected learning about the overlapping of timeframes of artists’ work. However, there is no information for the general visitor pointing out any of this, so it comes across as a process that benefits mainly curatorial insight.

I spent most of my visit working out what was going on. I’d wandered round most of the rooms and had asked questions of five attendants about how I might find information, and it was only the fifth attendant who pointed out that the decade of each room was in small shiny lettering on the floor, and that some visitors were clutching little printed guides. I’d noticed neither of these aids because I could not behave in the intuitive mode intended with this new display plan. I had not been retrained out of my information-seeking expectations.

I rarely pick up printed guides because I don’t like to use paper. The printed guide was not visibly available (I only saw it later when I passed the Information desk) and besides, visitors are asked to pay £1 for it. There are (unnecessary) colour images, which must account for its printing cost and £1 charge. This doesn’t guide you room by room to explain the chronological history of British art. It introduces the change, then promotes some ‘focus displays’ and upcoming exhibitions.

My main concern was the lack of captions and the lack of alternative or digital provision for them. The only access to the Tate’s website is via your own portable device if you have one. I was the only visitor I saw in an hour actively holding or using a smartphone, and we can’t assume that people have the means or inclination to use mobile devices. I’m sure from my own experience here and elsewhere that your attention is more distracted from the art by searching for caption information on your device than it is quickly checking a bit of text next to each work. Also, I gave up using my phone as I found it so difficult to explore the collections on it combined with taking in all the display changes.

For those interested in why I gave up, the main problems are:

a) Navigation: The section on visiting Tate Britain explaining the rehang is separate from collections. Collections are now under the heading of ‘Art and Artists’, which didn’t make immediate sense to me.

b) Lack of intellectual coherence: Not being able to find works room by room and explore their chronological context. Within Art & Artists, you can find 1067 works that are on display in Tate Britain, but they aren’t filtered by decade or room number. (Also, if you sort them by date, either oldest first and most recent first, the records that come up on those first pages mostly don’t have digitised images so you feel put off.)

I would have persisted by searching for individual items if I’d had time and more precise motivations. However, there were no prompts, apart from the works themselves, that encouraged me to look things up or to form and share any set of responses.

So, what do you do if you have questions? How can you make informed connections between the works in each room and the decade they were made in, and then between the rooms? How do you pin down your insights or questions as you move from artwork to artwork and on to the next room? What do you do if you don’t have questions but you would just like some connecting stimulus other than the works themselves?

I asked several attendants what people do when they want information. They were all (apart from one) quite pleasant and happy to explain the rationale behind the changes but not particularly helpful. They all gave different answers, sometimes with contradicting information about the resources available. (For example, one said you could get the internet on terminals in the library but others said there were no terminals.)

I came across two attendants with the Tate Britain selection on their iPads, but they were very passive and static. I didn’t see them using the devices with visitors and one didn’t show me anything when I asked what they had there. The attendants said that using iPads in the galleries was a trial, replacing folders of captions they used to have more for staff reference. I’m not sure what a trial of this nature would show, especially when they had so few iPads and were not letting visitors know about them. It might be slightly easier for attendants to use iPads than a folder when they need to check things but it wasn’t serving visitors better. The attendants told me that the rationale for the change was to encourage more interaction between staff and visitors, but they didn’t seem to have tactics for optimising this human interaction.

Because of my Art History training, I can articulate questions about artworks. I know the Tate’s collection fairly intimately from 9 years of working with it. Despite this, I still wanted prompts or reminders about subject matter or material techniques, or different views on contested interpretations. I wondered how people would respond who don’t have this background, or don’t have my confidence to pester attendants with a random question about Francis Bacon’s psyche or whatever? Because so little alternative information was on offer, I felt that there was a serious lack of consideration for people with a range of different access needs. An attendant also said that because captions were believed to distract visitors from looking at the artworks, they decided to remove the captions to let the art speak for itself. I asked if any visitor research was done to provide evidence to underpin this decision, and it seems there was not.

On the whole, visual art does not speak, although it does stimulate thoughts and feelings, and can provoke a great variety of meaning-making in different viewers. Yes, this meaning-making process needs some space and that’s why I always say no to guided tours or audio tours. I know from my own delivery and evaluation of many museum and art projects that people need a mix or choice of different modes and layers of interpretation, but not presented in an overwhelming muddle. These modes need to be carefully designed so that people access the right stimuli at the right time or place. These might include stimuli of visceral, sensory, ethereal, aesthetic or emotional responses and might use images or sounds as well as straightforward texts. I’m not against an approach that is open-ended and aesthetically spacious, enabling personal response, as this new curatorial vision aims for. However, the more critical dimensions of meaning-making are missing: the communal (i.e. dialogue and other views), contextual (i.e. background in time and place), cognitive (i.e. articulating a critical response) and adaptive (i.e. how learning from this might affect my values and actions).

Interpreting art is a combination of reading in your own meanings, and reading out meanings that can be decoded from the work itself or from an investigation of its context. The work of interpretation requires that combination of reading in and reading out, a dance between subjective and objective. If you remove any cues that help with this reading out, you have this odd, vague experience as if you’re only using half your brain. Eventually, you lose motivation in looking in a fully engaged manner and only seek out what gives you aesthetic pleasure. (Maybe this is a clever tactic to generate a rather floaty sensation which visitors will need to balance out by buying books in the shop or booking onto courses, to get more intellectual satisfaction? It is hard not to look at this new vision and ask questions about how removing interpretation must reduce staff costs and encourage visitors to pay for it.)

Many people need some of the cognitive and factual elements covered first before they can relax into sensory and emotional experiences. They want to know the basics, or to have a nagging question answered, or they simply need priming in how to approach a set of artworks.

I would have liked to enjoy that floaty sensation of visual pleasure but I was too distracted by feeling that people without access to smartphones or an Art History education were being insulted. I don’t insist that information should be always on the walls by the works but I do believe that a publicly funded museum has a duty to provide it somehow, freely, visibly and accessibly, whether by loaning portable devices, providing printed guides at a central point in each room, or by recruiting more informed and active interpretation staff.

Although unrelated to my main complaint about lacking interpretation, I have two other negatives to mention:

I was surprised at the extent of mentions of BP, given the contested nature of their sponsorship. I’ve never seen the brand so integrated into the display titles and signage. This seemed to connect, for me, with the removal of critical and contextual information around the collection. Tate Britain becomes a place of escape from having to think about the world and from the worst of the news, much of which can be traced back to the impacts of companies like BP (if you believe, as I do, that fossil fuels, climate change, ecocide and corporate greed are the underlying causes of emerging conflict, insecurity and inequality).

I was disturbed by the acoustics in the Simon Starling installation, Phantom Ride, which carried throughout the whole building. The sound near the screens was so terrible I didn’t watch for long so I can’t comment on their content. I saw babies very bothered by the noise and thought it must be terrible for people with hearing impairments. Given that visitors need to talk more with co-visitors and attendants to understand the work, the sonic ambience is a significant factor. Apparently, it’s there for a year.

I am picking up on the more negative aspects of the change but there were positives. Visually, I appreciated the experience and felt as if I was seeing the Tate fresh. The colour schemes are very subtle and calming. There is more space for more work and there were some unexpected combinations of works. In places, the flooring has been replaced to take heavier sculptures and this adds acoustic benefits.

A helpful Information person explained that from November there will be improved visitor information in the main rotunda and more complete displays, as well as some kind of device-based trail. It should be a much more positive experience then. I’m hoping by then Tate Britain will at least be signalling more concern for people who need more intellectual access, as well as for those who feel sickened by its associations with BP.

As Sanna Hirvonen (from Kiasma Museum in Finland) said in response to this post: “Letting art speak for itself means letting art speak to few. Museums should do more.”

The Unmattering Museum

‘Unmattering’ is a word dreamt up by Pae White and woven into this installation at the South London Gallery. The threads give the word the appearance of matter but it remains as unsolid as the word itself. The artist suffers from insomnia and this word came to her in the early hours. It seemed to have great significance but she couldn’t pin down its meaning.

There’s a vogue for putting Un- in front of words to suggest a not-negative disruption, or a reinvention, of that thing. I’m involved in the Uncivilisation festival, which seeks new (or old) stories for rethinking civilisation at a time of crisis. At the MuseumNext conference in Amsterdam in my talk about future scenarios for museums I posited the idea of an Unmuseum. This could be a museum that would thrive by not being a museum as we know it.

The word ‘unmattering’ is slippery. It’s either, ‘relax it doesn’t matter anymore’; something losing its relevance; or a process of dematerialisation and remaking. I wondered, is unmattering happening to museums, perhaps in several different ways?

This question floated around through themes at the conference, through my walks round the city and visits to museums. Virtuality seemed to keep cropping up, partly because some of my visits didn’t quite happen, partly because there were so many dimensions of unreality in the experiences I did have.

I managed properly to get to four museums: the Van Gogh, the Eye, the Stedelijk, and Re:mbrandt – All his paintings.

I didn’t visit the Amsterdam Museum because three people on my route there (including the museum’s own shop staff when I was just on the threshold of going in) said ‘Are you sure you want to go there? Go to the Rijksmuseum instead!’

So, full of expectation of seeing its revamped facilities recently opened with spectacular fanfare, I set off. However, they wouldn’t even let me in the door with my small travel bag. So, of the real Rijksmuseum, I only have this virtual museum in my mind built from social media buzz about the opening and from hazy memories of carrying a grizzling tot into it in 2001. On the other hand, I have its amazing website to enjoy. Peter Gorgels spoke at the conference about their innovative approach to presenting the collection online. I love the way you can interact with each work, by selecting a portion to like, tagging the image, downloading it, getting creative, finding works by a colour code and so on. It’s brilliant. Why would I want to go to the museum? But, actually, it makes me want to go even more and I’m so frustrated I didn’t get in.

I’d long wanted to visit the Van Gogh Museum because I have a soft spot for his vivid paintings. I know something of that feeling, from childhood, of seeing wind throwing leafy branches, cornfields and clouds around, and knowing that it’s all alive. I had tried to visit the museum in 2001 but by that stage of the day my daughter was in full temper tantrum mode. I made it there this time due to conference drinks. The director, Axel Ruger, spoke about the emotion in Van Gogh’s work and I felt quite simply moved to see the paintings directly. And because of technology, I was given evidence, if I needed it, that he was really there painting what he saw. One painting, of women mending nets in sand dunes painted en plein air was accompanied by a close-up photo of the windblown sand caught in the paint.

The Van Gogh Museum is the quintessential museum experience. We have built up this man as a legend. We see him looking at us everywhere in Amsterdam, blown up as a giant on building hoardings, and tiny on fridge magnets. The museum gives you what you expect but enhances it with unfamiliar works and varied displays to surprise you and contextualise his life and work.

The museum has decided to let visitors take photos of the works, although, because they receive 5000 visitors a day, they are worried about the proliferation of these images online. Also, there are concerns about a sense of devaluation of the real experience. Perhaps you look at the ‘flesh’ of the work less and feel less emotion when you’re intent on taking a photo.

Some of us took photos of ourselves by ‘the sunflowers’, just to play with the expectation that we would. Also, sunflowers had been on the agenda from a presentation by Erin Maochu of MOSI about an amazing participatory project on sunflowers, Fibonacci and Turing. That, alongside Tony Butler talking about the Happy Museum Project, made my day.

The next day I went to The Eye. This is a new Netherlands Film Institute building with cinemas, exhibitions and in the Basement are free interactive displays about the history of film.

It’s a really stunning white building jutting this way and that, with a big glassy cafe overlooking the water. It’s a landmark building on the riverfront of North Amsterdam, reachable by a free ferry. You get the sense that there is a hope or plan for other cultural developments to accrete around it. However, given that so many Dutch cultural organisations were recently cut by the Government, these are not going to be publicly funded very quickly.

This really is a building out of a mind, designed by Delugen Meissl, and supposedly making many connections with ideas in film. More and more these days, new cultural buildings are like computer graphics come to life, as if sprung out of a giant 3D printer. In this phenomenon, the building is part of the marketing, designed to look good in photographs. Yes, attention is given at design stages to the flow of people around spaces but it’s all so optimised. I sense that they don’t think how it feels when you’re crossing a vast empty museum square with a hungry or bored child. Or how when you’re climbing an excitingly ziggy zaggy staircase you feel dizzy with your exhaustion. What I most felt was missing here was nature, whether in reality in greenery or in imagery of living things and bodies. It was like being in a set from a sci-fi film.

I was a little bit disappointed in the interactive displays. They were hard to find, if you didn’t know that ‘Basement’ was their name and location. The pods were nice to sit in and I enjoyed watching an old documentary about Holland in the 50s. I did enjoy the main room too, with a neat system for allowing you to choose clips of archive film.

But I did want more for the general visitor. I imagine it’s great if you go regularly, are a member of its club and can use the cinema. Film is an inherently virtual medium but there are also so many possibilities for creating spatial and immersive cinematic experiences with film heritage. They have succeeded in their experiment in the central room, a little less so in the pods, but I would have liked more richness, variety, information, more to play with and more human interaction.

I’ll be quick in describing my visit to the Stedelijk. It felt comfortable, like slipping into a warm bath, which is exactly what the new extension to the building looks like! Many of the works are familiar to me from my years of studying Art History and because so much is similar to the Tate’s collection. The contemporary displays seemed rather etiolated, as if the curators were afraid of putting too much in the space. It was a peaceful wander in cool beige light, windows veiled from the outdoors, taking in modernist artworks reducing reality down to its forms and concepts within a minimalist space.

The fourth museum I got to wasn’t a museum, it was a permanent exhibition. This was Re:mbrandt: All his paintings. This is an extraordinary collection of ALL his ‘paintings’ together, so you get a great sense of his working output over time. They are large high quality digitally restored reproductions, combined with a good deal of interpretation. The restoration means that there’s no effect of raking light distracting your gaze, and many of them are supported by x-ray images to show pentimenti and so on. Now, sometimes when I’ve seen real Rembrandts, I’ve gasped and then had this feeling of a kind of settling melancholy. There is such a presence of a person, although you know it’s an effect of shadow and despite the visible texture of paint. With this experience, I gasped often, but it was more at the abundance of images and their clarity. After my quick visit, I would have loved to see all the digital images online so I could return to study it some more.

Despite its location in a shopping mall in the city centre and despite this enticing image, recalling the famous Amsterdam sight of an unclothed woman behind window bars, the exhibition was pretty empty. This is a private enterprise, part of the Rembrandt Research Project. I think they should put all of the same content on a high quality website, and charge for access or provide free access for those who have paid to see the exhibition.

There was also an exhibition in the Beurs van Berlage, of screen-based and digital reproductions of Van Gogh’s work. I didn’t see this, which is odd because it wasn’t promoted to us although our conference was in the same building. But Mia Ridge and Suse Cairns wrote a blogpost about the issues that arose from it, in response to Jasper Visser who had helped organise it (?) and they hadn’t seen it either!

Part of the conference fringe was a talk by Maaike Roozenburg about her Smart Objects projects. She works with museums to ‘reverse engineer’ museum objects (such as ceramic teacups) to see if they can be returned to use and therefore better understood. The finished outputs bear the traces of both the original history and of the processes of scanning and reproduction. They are very beautiful and it’s a very thought provoking project. I felt though that they remain ghosts of the past, much more about the technology now than about the material and contextual history then. To ‘reverse engineer’ a historic object, you must also somehow recreate the webs of social and material interaction from its original time.

This talk was part of an event called Heritage Sells. In Holland, it seems, there is less coyness about the commercial enterprise of heritage. Local heritage inspiration is everywhere in the independent shops and cafes (see the photo below for a typical display). This is perhaps more so than in London or Paris retail and design, which are perhaps more internationalist or colonial in their heritage references. I loved walking round Amsterdam’s canals and streets, which were designated a World Heritage Site in 2010.  I also went on a bike with locals to visit a demo garden of urban permaculture and to find out how people were coping with change in the city.

In the end, much as I liked the museums, exploring the past and present of the city was so much more fun, informative and exciting. There was fresh air, yet there were always cyclists to dodge so it felt like being in a computer game. You can peer into people’s homes as there are no curtains, so you are almost living in their world.

I wonder what digital tools can do to really enhance this experience and deepen your learning of a place as you go? And what role do museums have to play in helping us explore the real world? Is that how museums can matter more?

Tony Butler reflected on MuseumNext that ‘Much of the talk I hear from museum leaders is how do we keep going, at MuseumNext the tone is how do we go some place else.’ On the last night of the conference, I had a great chat with Lone Hedegaard Kristensen from Meaning Making Experience, a digital support organisation for small museums in Denmark. We talked about how there are two tendencies in the museum digital sector: One is to enhance and extend the museum as brand/box/experience. The second is to enhance and extend the ‘whole internet’ through more museum-like experiences, or exploiting museum assets, or to deliver museum functions in alternative and perhaps more efficient ways. The first tendency occupies the great majority of time. It leads to lots of innovation that may be scary for non-digital people in museums, but in fact it’s incredibly tame compared with what is possible if we fully unleashed the second tendency. This is all about a positive ‘unmattering’ – showing how heritage really matters today and keeping it alive.

One final word: The organisers of the MuseumNext conference should be congratulated on always managing to conjure up such a convivial event, everything of such a high standard and such inspiring case studies.

The Oikonomic Value of Culture

At the end of April 2013, Maria Miller gave her first speech after 7 months in the role as Minister for Culture. In this, she was adamant that the Cultural sector should focus on generating wealth for the nation. This has yielded a flurry of responses, basically saying ‘we’ve been telling you the arts make money for the UK for years’, including this from ACE enumerating how arts and culture does indeed make a contribution to the economy.

Soon after, DCMS published A Holistic Approach to Valuing our Culture, by Dr Claire Donovan, who was on a 6 month fellowship exploring this topic very openly with a broad community of stakeholders. It’s a really good collation and reflection on a variety of economic and non-economic methods of valuing culture. However, I want to ask some awkward questions of it: Is it really holistic? Is it possible to have a non-economic method of valuation?

I can’t help asking awkward questions so I like this response to the issue by Eleonora Belfiore on her Cultural Value platform, in which she stresses the importance of asking awkward questions. However, after reading it, I still ask the awkward question: how exactly can we articulate value (or practice economics) outside the narrow, financial and  monocultural ways of valuing culture?

Why does this topic of Cultural Value rumble on so contentiously and unsatisfyingly? I believe it’s because we never get to the ground of the debate. We argue between either intrinsic or instrumental forms of value. We push either financial or social value. We become ever more sophisticated in our differentiations or mergings of these, but we’re dancing round a chasm in our understanding.

I argue it makes no sense to distinguish between economic and non-economic valuation approaches. Culture is an entirely productive activity (if you see product in the broadest terms) and valuation is an entirely economic process. There is another, more meaningful, distinction to be made and that is between two ways of doing economics.

The underlying reasons why so many people in the Cultural sector (and Environmental sectors) object to the financial valuation of our heritage ‘assets’ and creative ‘outputs’ are to do with the growing extremity of the Neo-liberal Capitalist framework within which economics operates. In the UK, this framework has become alarmingly extreme.

Economics is, broadly, a system for understanding and controlling the values that feed and arise from any activity to ensure maximum efficiency and generation of goods from it. However, economics is not as it should be. We understand and carry it out wrongly, and we even spell it wrongly. Economics comes from oikonomics, from oikeios.  This is short for oikeios topos, or ‘favourable place’.  Oikeios is home, kith, place, belonging, where we are fed, where we are not lonely and where we make meaning of the world. It’s not just our houses and streets, but the Earth, our only favourable place. Species of life thrive in favourable places and connect together to form ecosytems. So, economics is semantically and rightly to do with the dynamic relationship between species (mainly humans) and their environments (other species and materials). A new oikonomics would be about applying rational methods to ensure an abundant and healthy relationship between humans and the oikeios.

I agree with Belfiore and F.S. Michaels, the source she cites, that we’ve been overwhelmed by a financially-driven monoculture. However, as an escape from this monoculture, we hear talk about ‘embracing other ways of valuing’ or ‘getting beyond the economic’, without defining clearly what this other is. Models that attempt to be more holistic perform an addition sum: they simply tell stories or provide data about both money and people, or about money and proxies for it.

When clear water is drawn between, for example, Financial and Cultural value, these distinctions arise from different world-views that prioritise certain interventions or outcomes. Maria Miller privileges Financial value, or actions involving investment of funds, exploitation of assets and generation of (quick) profit. A community health worker might privilege Social value, or actions that diagnose and serve needs of certain groups of people. And, it’s similar for people who prioritise Environmental or Cultural value. Each type of advocate believes that their domain has the greatest powers to disseminate benefits more widely. So, for the Financial value advocate, the best work is in generating profit (exploiting Social, Cultural and Environmental assets), assuming it will trickle down to benefit all people and public services. Social value people will advocate for the wider impacts of skilling people and eliminating injustice, that this reduces the cost of public services and increases active citizenship.

Advocates for either Cultural or Environmental capital have a much harder time being understood, partly because both Culture and Environment are more complex and harder to engineer and quantify than Financial or Social capital. It may also be that they have more fundamental and widespread benefits than Finance or Social capital, but are slower to yield benefits. Mainly, these advocates struggle because Cultural and Environmental values are subordinate to the generation of Financial Value, which in turn is seen to yield Social value.

The problem with quantifying the value of the environment is that it is not separable from anything at all. The natural environment is the life-world for humans but also for millions of other species. Efforts to quantify the Financial value of ecosystem services might seem useful but are only really meaningful if we multiply their value to humans by the number of all other species sharing it as a habitat. (Result = priceless.) Moreover, the more strongly that Financial value is prioritised the more we are likely to destroy the environment while we transfer it as quickly as possible into this rapid exchange tool.

The problems with quantifying the value of Culture are similar to those in quantifying Environmental services. One problem is that culture is the same as diversity. (Culture is the myriad ways that humans construct meaning from their connection to, and create novelty and change amidst, the natural world.) The main problem is that human culture is actually enfolded within nature. Jason Moore in his essay ‘From Object to Oikeios Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology’ says “Nature-as-oikeios is…not offered as an additional factor, to be placed alongside culture or society or economy; it is, rather, the matrix within which human activity unfolds.”

What I’m trying to work out here is a truly ecological system of valuing culture, rather than one in which we use terms such as ‘ecosystem of cultural funding’ in only metaphorical ways. Capitalist market economics are an abstract confection, ignoring the realities of planetary boundaries. Therefore, I don’t think it is unrealistic to expose the possibilities of a more oikonomic way of valuing Culture.

In a more oikonomic system, time becomes a significant factor but one where we don’t privilege speed. We see that fast action for maximum accumulation of capital or value may be superficially efficient but it is not sustainably efficient. It could be possible to give a monetary or numerical/proxy valuation to every activity, eventually. The fastest yields occur when money acts upon itself, in the money markets (but while speculating on commodities from ecocidal landgrabbing or deforestation, and which causes hunger). The very slowest yields are when we regenerate natural environments that might take 1000 years to recover from human destruction. Somewhere between the two are yields from Social and Cultural interventions. Social interventions are more rapid because they can involve providing material human needs in a timely way. Cultural interventions can similarly see quick results in terms of joy or conversation, but these may take some more time to translate into Financial or Social value. They may translate through a very long ‘food chain’, which gives rise to subsidiary benefits that weren’t originally planned.

I believe that Cultural interventions are the most valuable (and therefore, the most economical) of all possible interventions. At their most excellent, to use ACE’s language, Cultural interventions have everything to do with oikeios:

• Cultural activity helps people cope with the loss of oikeios (whether this is displaced, enslaved or migrant peoples, or in fact all of us now facing the collapse of our global ecosystem).
• Cultural activity helps oikeios-making or placemaking: arts and heritage can help places thrive and help people gain a ‘sense of place’.
• Cultural organisations and expertise help to protect and conserve artefacts (or knowledge) that has become separated from its oikeios, for example the language, plant knowledge or material skills of indigenous peoples.
• Cultural activity can involve the virtual creation of oikeios, for example, digital learning communities, or the digital cultural commons, or literary/imagined places or reconstructions of lost places in the past.
• Cultural activity can enhance our own natural assets, in the form of our brains and bodies, through play, sport, dance and outdoor exploration.
• Cultural activity, such as sustainable craft or design, or arts-in-the-landscape, can contribute to the regeneration of oikeios, or the conservation or rewilding of places.
• Cultural activity can help change attitudes to our fellow beings, to be more generous and less materialist, to shift our society to more sustainable ways of living.
• Cultural activity can inspire some of the most advanced and imaginative visions of how we might live in a radically changed oikeios.

There may be other oikonomic ways to value culture but these will do for now. I’d love to know what you think. Are there better ways I can articulate this idea?

Graft

I’ve been busy. It must be the sudden Spring giving me lots of creative energy after a Winter that seemed to suck the life out of me. It’s also the effect of going on a poetry course in Scotland last weekend led by Em Strang and Susan Richardson.

I’ve decided to be more defined about my own creative work. I’ve never really called myself an artist but creativity comes into everything I do, and I’ve been doing more writing and photography in recent years. I’ve been putting a lot of energy into organising creative projects and working for cultural organisations without making space for my own creativity. Last weekend I decided that had to change, so I quickly put together a site called Graftage. It’s a grafting together of my photography and words, and may include short films and songs that I’ve started to work on. Of course, I had to use a name that comes from arboriculture.

And talking of trees, here’s an update on the Beuysterous project.

Beuysterous is about sharing artistic actions to do with trees, that will help people and places be resilient (or creatively boisterous) in the face of climate change and ecocide.

It’s grown out of our family projects we called The Unextinction Machine – collaborative creativity to combat Mass Extinction. We decided to focus on trees, at least for this year. 

Beuysterous is two things:

1) Celebrations as pivotal events around which others can organise pro-tree creative actions. 

These have included January Wassail, Tree Love Week and Tree Play Month.

In June, will be a summer solstice event (more about that below).

In August, linked to the Dark Mountain’s Uncivilisation festival, will be looking beneath the soil at roots and fungus.

In late November and during National Tree Week, we’ll be working with Feral Theatre on performances to mourn lost and threatened tree species.

2) Promoting the work of artists who plant trees, care for them, celebrate them and sustainably use them

There are regular blog posts about different artists and regular postings on a Facebook group and a Pinterest page. There are plans for a meet up or showcase event for interested artists. Please send info about artists we should be covering.

One reason for mailing you is to invite you to participate in the summer solstice celebration of fruit trees, local food and green fertility, on 21st June.

We’re organising the Garlick Man Parade in SE14 in London, and people are invited to come with costumes, performances, stories, parade music, installations along the route or creative contributions to the fruity picnic.

We’d also love to know that more people are organising similar things at Midsummer, and would love to hear about them.

Learning Planet progress

I’ve managed to find a day or two over Easter to do more research and planning for my book. I’ve produced a questionnaire, and I’m really keen for this to spread far and wide so I can get a general sense for what people think is effective learning and so that I can source some really interesting case studies. Please take a look, fill it in and/or spread it around:

I’ve reconsidered the structure, so that it will highlight the key principles of effective learning rather than make artificial distinctions between different kinds of learning organisation. Below is a short summary outline. Each of the main chapters will include three main case studies, and I’m very keen to hear suggestions of what groups I should be telling stories about.

Prologue: Why read this book?

This draws in the reader by asking them to reflect on their experiences of learning, both formal and informal. I articulate my own passion for this research, how I came to the point of writing this, including why I think the acceleration, the scaling up and ecological orientation of learning are so essential. The reader is invited and guided to apply what they learn from this book to their own lives and organisations.

Chapter one: How have people come to learn as they do?

This is a very brief overview of what is known about social learning. It covers human evolution as hunters spreading across the planet then agrarians, basic knowledge about learning in the brain and neuroscience, and explaining what is meant by cultural evolution and social learning, using examples in history such as the challenges of forced migrations over centuries, or the role of innovative centres in the Modern Age such as Coffee Houses in the Enlightenment and the Pioneer Centre in Peckham.

Thereafter, the book will be organised in five substantial sections based on the five factors (Five Ps) that drive successful learning communities (four Ps), weaving in findings from interviews and research. Each chapter will contain around four sub-sections, including an introduction and three stories.

Chapter two: Plurality

Learning in ways and situations that are plural, or diverse

Plural models of learning assume a culture of acceptance of others, as opposed to ‘identity thinking’ (i.e. being identical). Learning in a diverse culture is likely to be seen as opening doors to infinite possibilities, deviating from normality, rather than instructing and moulding a person to be the same. A plural approach encourages learning through diverse experiences, from diverse resources and people. It aims to produce diverse ideas and outcomes, including generating biodiversity.

Chapter three: Peer to peer

Learning by sharing between peers

Peer-to-peer models are not mainstream in formal education but many educationalists recognise the motivational benefits of various ‘paragogic’ approaches. People learn more enthusiastically when their teacher is a little more able than they are, when the teacher demonstrates that they are still learning and when there is a relationship of equality. This kind of learning develops emotional and relational capacities. This goes hand in hand with an open commons, where knowledge is freely gifted in the hope of mutual returns.

Chapter four: Play

Learning through open-ended experiment, joyful exuberance and imagination.

Play is how children learn if they have their will, which means that it is also how adults learn too, if they have their will. However, in the conventional mind, play is the opposite of learning: Being ‘ready to learn’ means that children are physically able to sit still and to focus on symbolisation of word and number. Freedom to play means to allow learners to act without fixed outcomes, accepting failure. Ideal settings for play are full of diversity, whether cultural or natural stimuli, but they balance these stimuli with provision of free time and open space.

Chapter five: Praxis

Learning through practice in real and meaningful situations

Praxis is a familiar idea in learning theory, but as schools become more protective and results-driven, and work places become more abstracted from nature, we see less and less praxis in effect. Praxis is increasingly hypothetical or replaced with highly artificial games. Effective praxis has three dimensions: Creativity (opportunities to take risks, produce new ideas etc); Co-operation (working with others to solve real problems for mutual outcomes); Contextualisation (especially referencing local and global ecologies).

Chapter six: Planet

Learning in order to restore and sustain life

Most thinking about the purpose of learning doesn’t go nearly far enough, including most alternative socially-oriented thinking. In both conservative and socialist models, the purpose is individual achievement, whether to generate economic capital (usually for a nation state) or general wellbeing and flexibility for the individual. I believe the purpose of learning should be to generate biosphere capital, through the generation of cultural and economic capital.

Chapter seven: What next?

What can we learn from these stories of learning? What was surprising to me? What gives me most hope? What can educational organisations and policymakers take away from this? What can we do now to increase learning to transform our communities so that we can restore the biosphere?

Take on the curriculum

This is my take on the proposed National Curriculum for England and the manner in which it has been revised. I should first outline my views on the purpose and best conditions for education, since these are the basis on which any curriculum is built.

I believe that the purpose of education is to nurture gentle healthy people with great capacities for learning so that they can contribute to global wellbeing at a time of immense crisis. I do not believe that education’s purpose is to turn out model employees to serve unsustainable industries so that our nation can compete in the ‘global race’. I believe that knowledge cannot be administered like medicine: it can only be formed by willing learners through their own practice and reflection, and the knowledge is transformed by learners through that process. Because of this, I challenge the premise of most debate about ‘what should be on the curriculum’ and ‘what should be taught’ because it assumes that knowledge can be delivered.

Based on a good deal of reflection and experience, I believe that the schools which best achieve this purpose of nurturing whole people support self-managed education or progress towards taking greater responsibility for learning over time. I’ve seen that young people have a strong instinct for what kinds of activities, questions and environments are most likely to help them learn and thrive. Self-managed learners tend to choose:

• open-ended exploration (often outdoors)
• interdisciplinarity
• hands-on making and creativity
• multimodality (not just text but visual, aural, sensory and mixed modes of communication especially those made possible with digital tools)
• emotional expressiveness and practicing social skills
• vigorous exercise combined with rest when it’s needed
• stories and word play 
• contemporary topics relevant to their lives and communities
• learning through enquiries that go beyond just simple questions, testing and stretching through practical and creative research
• finding shortcuts to get timely information, and constructing knowledge by reflection and practical application over a long time
• learning from peers or adults with whom they feel most relaxed
• immersion to master particular skills, especially those perceived to meet strong personal or local needs 

All of these choices serve them very well if they are also well supported by adults and peers who have more mastery than themselves, are exposed to diverse perspectives and have good access to resources. An example of successful self-managed learning is the Hellerup school in Denmark where students set their own projects each week and are free to use resources inside and beyond the school.

Many teachers even in traditional schools in England endorse some of the factors of effective learning listed above, although it has become increasingly difficult to give adequate time to them. However, the reforms in England are going in the opposite direction to this model.

You might say I’m not a valid commentator on a National Curriculum if I don’t strongly believe in nationalistic purposes for education and if I believe that learners should design their own learning. Given that even the validity of senior educationalists is being questioned, I may as well say my own piece. I do still believe in the state-funding of comprehensive schools. I think that schools across a nation or region benefit from a deliberatively constructed statement across about what constitutes an optimum education. You might not call that a National Curriculum but perhaps that’s what we should ask it to be.

Gove’s proposed curriculum has not been arrived at deliberatively.

I’m arguing it should be deliberated with learners but he hasn’t even consulted teachers. He has only listened to the most conservative voices. Gove with his attack dogs has answered criticisms of the new Curriculum by:
a) saying ‘look, some of the good things we’re influenced by are from lefties like you (so don’t say we haven’t listened or given you what you want) and also justifying his policies as being inclusive of all children in the great push for an ‘aspiration nation’ and, on the other hand,
b) homogenising and demonising the entire diverse education profession as Marxists.

A deliberative revision of any National Curriculum should first gain agreement on the ultimate purpose of education in relation to emerging needs, by considering what an educated person might need to be capable of, and then on the values and core competencies required. (This might seem self evident but according to the panel on The Moral Maze discussion about the History curriculum, starting from this point is bizarre and ‘chilling’.) This should lead to open-minded review of the subjects to be included, how they relate to each other and how learning can best be enabled. One or two subjects have been dropped or their names changed but it’s largely unaltered in its illogical bundling of traditional subjects.

The process of revision has been lazy and rushed, only slowed by delays caused by inadequate consultation from the start. There are a number of ‘outrages’ in it: the exclusion of climate change from most of the Geography curriculum (until a small mention in KS3) and the removal of ecological literacy and caring for the environment from Science and Citizenship. (Compared to the Scottish curriculum sustainability is near invisible.) Another outrage is the exclusion of drama, film, media and inadequate mention of dance in the Arts subject statements. It would take me days to outline my problems with all the statements in detail, and there are better places you can read the informed and consensual criticism by subject experts.

I want to focus for now on History and Geography, given that they are so problematic and most relevant to my work in cultural and environmental heritage learning. Practitioners in this sector have evolved a viewpoint of curriculum learning that is very integrated. We facilitate learning that arises from children’s responses to experience – of objects, places and people. We help children construct their learning by drawing out from and comparing with what they already know. This doesn’t mean restricting what they learn  only to what is familiar and local but extending their knowledge out to global human cultures and human interactions with nature over time.

Geography is an absolutely vital subject because it is the grounding for human history. We need to understand the changing geophysical, climatic and botanical conditions for the human story. Differences between cultures are not innate (or racial) but they evolve within bioregions and when groups have to migrate to other regions, or when they impact so much on the environment they must adapt to abrupt changes. These are complex concepts for young children but they are vitally important for an ethical education. The proposed History curriculum is so devoid of any reference to the environment that it doesn’t even mention the Agricultural Revolution.

We can begin to introduce these ideas early with positive appreciation of biodiversity and cultural diversity, and gentle introduction of more complex and worrying ideas about change. The Geography curriculum as it is written is perhaps open enough for some teachers to implement this if they are inclined. However, it emphasises particular local scenarios (e.g. polluted rivers) perhaps too much without introducing enough cultural geography or global ecology. I’m also concerned that Geography has a low status and inadequate time allowed for it. If History becomes so arduous that it takes up too much time, this will be even more so.

It might be acceptable to focus on local and national topics in the History curriculum if there was more time created for cultural histories (e.g. trade, migrations, agricultural practices) within Geography and Science. The overarching message of the new Curriculum is that concepts in Science and the Humanities should be learned as agreed facts, without enquiry or debate. The argument is that if you move on beyond core concepts too early you will only swim superficially around in contemporary issues and become confused.

It’s ironic then that the History curriculum pushes ‘too much too young’ the intricate deliberations and dynamics of particular ruling classes and figures. If schools do start teaching about the heptarchy, and other difficult but supposedly foundational concepts, they will have less time for ways of learning that children choose for themselves: exploring nature, inventing stories, asking why and why again, using art as a tool and so on. Because the History curriculum has been conceived as an ideological instruction manual, there is no understanding of ways that foundational concepts for early years are like seeds out of which complexity arises.

I hold out for museums, arts and environmental heritage sites as supporters of this kind of learner-led investigative learning: where Geography and History entwine, where Place and Time are seen in complex intersection, where you can see layers of history unfolding in a particular place. This helps children think diachronically and synchronically so that they can both understand the ‘sweeping chronology’ of history and see that this is always a cultural construction. By exploring the world through art and stories they learn to distinguish between myth and reality, and learn where it is difficult to disentangle them. In these ways, children learn about change and can perhaps better cope with changes yet to come.

What’s wrong with plantations?

The BBC Today programme on March 6th gave a few short minutes to a discussion about biofuels and forests. John Hayes, the Minister for Energy and Climate Change was on to defend the Government’s plans to go ahead with subsidies for biofuels. These plans include the Green Bank funding big biomass and the conversion of big power stations to burn wood. Biofuels such as imported palm oil and wood chips mean destruction of old growth rainforest in Indonesia and elsewhere.  The former Governmental Chief Scientific Officer Sir David King said that there were no emissions benefits from biofuels compared to fossil fuels, with the added negative of destroying habitats for animals such as orangutangs. Hayes retorted that trashing rainforests for biofuels and growing biofuels instead of food is a “bourgeois” concern. The presenter John Humphreys asked King a provocative question, challenging his defence of forests: ‘If you chop down old forests but plant new ones, that’s alright isn’t it?’ Hayes commented that people have always burned trees for fuel so there’s no reason why we should stop and that ‘there are immense plantations that are entirely sustainable’.

I picked up on these comments and tweeted about them, implying an opinion that it’s not OK to destroy old growth then replant. Someone replied ‘That’s just farming trees, though isn’t it? No worse than farming cabbages.’ I couldn’t respond in one tweet, so this is it:

1) The myth of sustainability and the normality of agribusiness

Firstly, monocultural farming of any kind, whether cabbages or trees, is really not alright. It may be normal. It may be our main source of food. But it’s not entirely alright. It is absolutely more sustainable to harvest timber from new growth plantations, than it is to fell native mature biodiverse forests. However, adding biofuels to the demand for clear-felled wood increases the rate and scale of felling native forests. The sustainable credentials of new plantations are used to justify this process, but new plantations are not sustainable when they replace wilderness. If you Google about the sustainability of plantations, there are pages of links about the wonders of new growth wood. You can’t easily cut a swathe through these to find any suggestions that we reduce consumption of wood or that we might promote old-forest-friendly crops and practices (fungi, berries, coppicing etc).

2) Monocultures

Plantations are monocultural plantings of fast-growing trees for lumber or crops such as palm oil, coffee or cocoa that are large scale, even-aged (all planted at the same time) and entirely commercial in purpose. (The term plantation also applies to cotton, tobacco, bamboo and sugar cane.) Agrotoxic fertilisers and pesticides are heavily used for maximum productivity. Monocrops are much less resistant to pests because there is a lack of symbiosis, whereby different animals and plants feed each other and maintain soil quality.

This video, a walk through Martin Crawford’s Forest Garden is a great explanation of how biodiverse forests can be perfect environments to provide food for people and for wildlife in a mutual relationship.

3) Time and scale

By 2011, half the world’s original forests were destroyed, including half the rainforests. The remainder are being destroyed faster and faster in this new craze for biofuels to replace fossil fuels. Add to this the observation that mature trees are passing the tipping points for climate related stress and are dying off at frightening rates across the world, mainly with disease, drought and fire. The global climate desperately relies on the O2 generated by masses of mature trees, but this engine house for life is dying. Tropical deforestation is responsible for c.20% of greenhouse gas emissions. We should be making extraordinary efforts in the next few years to protect them from ravages of disease and drought, and planting in biodiverse ways that restore soil fertility.

4) Biodiversity habitats and the Sixth Mass Extinction

Around 80% of the world’s biodiversity lives in old forests, so we are losing around 50,000 species a year to deforestation. Monocultural plantation forests tend to be home to many fewer species, partly because they will have been eradicated by destroying their previous habitat, and partly because of the heavy use of chemicals and the lack of variety of food sources.

5) Landgrabbing and displacement of people

In the last decade, there have been at least 80 million hectares of land in poor countries ‘grabbed’, which means the farmers who have lived on that land for generations are displaced to homelessness and hunger. When small-scale farmers are confronted by industrial farms in their locality, they can’t compete. Bigger farms externalise their costs and use temporary labour. Much of this landgrabbing has been for biofuels plantations.

6) Fire risk

Many plantation tree crops are pine and eucalyptus. These species are very susceptible to fire because they have high levels of flammable resin. They are being planted in places such as Australia and southern US that are warming rapidly and seeing an increase in forest fires.

7) Genetic modification of trees

There are major plans and projects for GM forests for biofuels. This film by geneticist David Suzuki, Silent Forest, explores the related threats. Species (such as eucalyptus) are modified to grow in climates they are not suited to, but then have affects on the ecosystem that they are unsuited to, such as depleting groundwater supplies. (A single eucalyptus sucks up 50 litres of water a day.)

8) Poor carbon sinks

Forests need to stand for many decades to function as a carbon sink, a process called biosequestration, because they need to build up rich soil from deposited leaves, rotted wood, fallen fruit, fungi and animal poo. New plantations rarely have time to build up good soil, and instead fertiliser and irrigated water are used to promote growth.

This just focuses on the key points about plantations, particularly for biofuel. It doesn’t go into all the other negative aspects of biofuels, including health risks. For more information, have a look at Biofuel Watch.

Wellbeing and social justice in museums

Here’s a thought provoking article by Maurice Davies of the Museums Association, asking Social Justice vs Wellbeing? Are they just different means to the same end?

I find it interesting as it’s the first time I’ve seen such a definite claim that museums have two distinct approaches in their social change work, ‘social justice’ and ‘wellbeing’ approaches.

He says “there are some philosophical differences.
Social justice focuses on areas such as human rights, inequality and poverty. It believes the state should strongly intervene in communities. With origins on the left, it is perhaps red.
Wellbeing prioritises concepts such as self-help, local organisation and relationships. It stresses the role of civil society organisations, such as charities and community groups, to complement the work of the state, whose main role is to help local communities flourish so they can find their own solutions. It has its recent origins, at least in part, in the green movement.”

He talks about rumblings of disagreement between the two camps “with social justice people thinking wellbeing people are a bit wet and naïve about the realities of disadvantaged people’s lives. Conversely, wellbeing people think social justice people are a bit too top down and doctrinaire.”

However, he doesn’t see a great deal of difference between them, seeing the approaches as more on a spectrum, and fundamentally sharing the same goals.

I agree that these two approaches do share the same goals, basically the elimination of inequality and suffering. Kate Raworth’s Oxfam Doughnut model shows that all issues, whether environmental or social, are aspects of the same goal we are all driving towards, providing a safe and just space for humanity. A safe biosphere and justice between people. What makes it different from prior models, such as the Millennium Development Goals, is that it acknowledges the planetary boundaries being breached by human action. Humanity needs to thrive so that it can steward and repair the planet, for the sake of both humanity and other species. If inequality continues, conflict and despair will make it harder for us to tackle these massive problems of our environmental infrastructure.

However, I think that there is more to say about the philosophical differences that underlie these rumblings in museums. If these disagreements are more clearly understood they can be flipped towards productivity (and museums really need to work harmoniously together right now). I wonder if the disagreements arise more from deeply held passions and/or denial about the immensity of the environmental crisis than they do from differing views on semantics or organisational tactics.

Social Justice is actually one of the four pillars of the Green Party worldwide so it’s interesting that a green/wellbeing approach is held as being opposed to social justice. The Wellbeing movement is in part a response to criticisms of environmentalists that they focus too much on the planet, that green measures will deny people the chance to escape poverty. (For an example of this, see how this socialist article likens the wellbeing and resilience agenda to neoliberalism.) Wellbeing advocates explore the many ways that an environmentally sustainable lifestyle is healthier for mind, body and society. If people can become less obsessed with consumption and wealth, they will suffer less from exposure to relative inequality. In turn, fewer people will pursue excessive wealth which causes inequality. The economy can be sustained, even grow, if we don’t place further stress on the fragile planet but start to heal it.

Maurice reports disagreements between the statist (social justice) and localist (wellbeing) agendas, but I’m not sure this reaches the heart of the difference. In the political world the statist and localist camps are fairly closely entwined. The thinking behind Wellbeing groups such as Transition Towns comes out of the co-operative and unionist movements, very ground-up and local, that led to the foundation of the welfare state. On the other hand, the Conservatives formed the Big Society policy and are pursuing localism (although arguably as a smokescreen for privatisation). The three major parties all pursue pro-growth free market capitalism in which a controlling state gives free rein only to profiteers. The three parties will differ in the extent to which they promote this, admit to it, or repress it, depending on their election strategies or how much money they have to spend on welfare schemes.

I think the disagreements are more likely to hinge on whether museum people developed their social justice practice in loyalty to their local communities and to Labour policies (after years of Thatcherism, and in current austerity), or whether they are more motivated by bigger geophysical and global threats. This loyalty is quite understandable and generates extremely worthwhile practice. The latter is somewhat taboo, in the museums sector and elsewhere, and is therefore under-explored. This taboo relates to a general public failure to acknowledge that ecology is economy, that land is food is wellbeing and that broken systems of ecology break humanity. (For example, it’s not widely acknowledged, but proven, that the root causes of uprising around the Mediterranean and Arab world are climate change and mismanagement of environmental resources.)

The stimulus for Maurice’s post was the Happy Museum project. This explores the role of museums in transitioning communities to a ‘high wellbeing, low carbon’ society. The ‘low carbon’ sustainability dimension was an integral part of its conception. However, the project evaluation showed that museums really struggle with public programming for environmental change. Most funding applications to both rounds were about health, intergenerational learning or reminiscence, not about ecologically sustainable communities. Tony Butler reported that “Well-being in isolation is an ‘easier sell’ than the trickier implications of setting well-being in the context of less conspicuous consumption, low growth, or environmental stewardship.”

The vision for the Happy Museum project has been changed to Museums that foster wellbeing that doesn’t cost the earth. It suggests a shift from a potential model in which ecological sustainability is prioritised as the means to achieve widespread wellbeing. Maurice Davies doesn’t see much difference between social justice and wellbeing approaches, seeing them both as means to an end. Maybe that’s because, in the museums sector, there isn’t really any difference: there are just variants on generous and people-centred practice. Social change projects by museums have had great impacts on individuals and localities but they haven’t cured inequality and ecocide, mainly because museums are not powerful enough alone. Also, they can’t easily tackle the corporatised culture that supports landgrabbing, ecocide, food speculation and banker’s bonuses when they are so entwined in that culture.

Beyond museums, there is a gulf between those who can see no way beyond capitalistic social democracy and those who call for complete systemic overhaul to avert imminent biosphere collapse. We may not be aware of the gulf because the calls for systemic overhaul are not given a place in mainstream media. Raworth’s Doughnut model does reflect perceptions that environmental and social issues sit either side of the ‘safe and just space’, perpetuating a Red/Just and Green/Safe split. Her work is so important because it aims to draw them together, to stop fighting over what is a ‘chicken & egg’ situation. You can’t have biosphere safety without justice and you can’t have justice without safety. (Personally, I think, in museums and beyond, there has been too much ‘chicken’ – too much denial about losses in environmental security, and not enough ‘egg’ – seeding ecological innovation.) It would be good to see more museums and cultural practitioners coming together in campaigns and practical actions for a safe and just world.

PS Here is a toolkit I produced with Renaissance South East and eight museums, aiming towards such a goal, called Museums for the Future.

Green Party on Culture and Education

The Guardian just hosted a chat with Natalie Bennett, the newish leader of the Green Party.

As the thread of responses is quite long and a little bit trolly, here’s an extract. I asked Natalie about culture and education because I think it’s important that the Green Party has more voice and expertise on policy areas that aren’t perceived as only environmental.

So, I asked this question:

There are two areas that the Green Party isn’t well known for being active or vocal in: Education and Culture, and yet both are vitally important for engendering ecological literacy and shifting cultures towards sustainability. The Government is undertaking major reforms of schools and HE, purportedly to help UK compete in the ‘global race’, but in ways that will diminish the creativity, resilience and global awareness of young people. They are also cutting funds for the cultural sector, which makes it harder for the sector to support an open, diverse and high-wellbeing culture. What can the Green Party do to stimulate support for creative education and culture?

Natalie’s response:

“@BridgetMcKenz – Thanks for the question! Coincidentally, I’m giving a speech tonight on Education (all welcome – http://islington.greenparty.org.uk/news/natalie-bennett-speaking-in-islington.html).

And I do want to do more work around cultural policy – and media; I spoke at a media conference last Friday in Bournemouth with a particular focus on the need for encouraging vibrant local media and acting to increase plurality in our national media.

One of the challenges here is that while we have lots of different, and I think strong things to say on for example education, from opposition to academies and free schools to zero tuition fees, but the media does tend to pigeonhole us and only ask us about environmental issues.

But we’re determined to raise our profile on a whole range of non-environmental issues, and I think we’re starting to get traction, particularly on economic and social issues, from our call for the minimum wage to be a living wage to the renationalisation of the railways.”

Just after posting this, I received the latest copy of GreenWorld, the Green Party magazine. This is an Arts and Ecology special issue, edited by James Brady. There are some timely articles. One of particular interest to me is ‘Seeing the Forest for the Trees’ about the work of David Haley and the Trees of Grace project. There are other pieces, referencing Cape Farewell and Tipping Point, as well as the role of the arts in tackling some problems of environmental engineering. Taken together the articles are intelligent introductions to ecological arts for those who haven’t realised the role of the arts. What the edition lacks is any idea of how this relates to cultural policy (and creative education) in the Green Party.

A commenter on my question pointed out that the Green Party had voted to remove the cultural policy. I’m not sure on the status of that, and intend to find out a bit more.

But if the question is an open one, what do you think the policy should it be?

What kind of actions are needed now to ensure that the education reforms don’t wipe out creativity, ecological literacy and skills that young people need for an uncertain future?

Tree Love Week

With Persephone Pearl, I’ve set up Tree Love Week, as part of Beuysterous.

It’s on February 11th to 18th around Valentine’s Day. We’re calling you to express your appreciation of a tree (or several).

Saint Valentine was a rebel against conformity – he believed in love, so he performed weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry. We have to be rebellious to protect trees these days, as they’re being threatened by climate change (excessive diseases, drought, fires, storms etc) and unsustainable business (diseases spread by international trade, destruction of woodlands for roads and trains, and illegal logging or landgrabbing for biofuels and other crops).

Show your love of trees, as they provide habitats for so many creatures…and so many other things. Chaucer popularised Valentine’s day with the Parlement of Foules, the love between mating birds. A lot of that love takes place in trees, of course.

What can you do for Tree Love Week? Write an ode onto a label or make sashes with hearts, or a waterproof card, and put them onto your beloved tree. Or you could plant flowers in a tree pit. Or provide a nest for some nesting love birds.

What about making a portrait of yourself or someone else by/with/in/up/around a tree that you love? Whatever the tree inspires you to do.

Please share your Tree Love:

Use the hashtag #treelove if you’re sharing on Twitter (or treelove on Flickr or Pinterest).

Join the event page on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/events/199492010197466/

Then, next up, Tree Play Month is in March…