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…

Are you willing?

Dear David Cameron

I’m writing this to you as an open letter and encourage others to do the same. I know that you have Christian faith and believe in compassionate politics. I know that you believe in the importance of science. I know that you love your children with all your heart. I wonder then what you feel about recent scientific confirmations that global warming is occurring much faster than predicted, that the planet your children are growing up on is heading to be 6C warmer by 2095? (See MIT report)

Because it is very hard to model scenarios that account accurately for the feedback effects such as methane release and the dieback of forests, the situation is even more desperate than can be portrayed. By the time your children reach middle age, life will be extremely stressed for them even with their privileged background, as they will be witnessing deaths and migrations of billions of people and destruction of ever more ecosystems. We now know that dangerous climate change occurs at only 1C of warming, not at 2C as previously thought. It is here already. In 2012, records for warm weather were broken all over the globe and news came in of alarming melting of polar ice, including in the Antarctic, dieback of old trees, excessive forest fires and storms. Can you imagine this news worsening exponentially every year, placing greater stress on our infrastructure and resources leading to greater conflict and inequality?

I assume that you have scientists and NGOs, and even businesses and the World Bank, ringing alarm bells to you about their findings and predictions every day or so, such is the extent and extremity of their data. I assume you have heard in many ways that climate action must be drastic and urgent, to reduce the concentration of CO2 to below 350 ppm within 48 months. Even if this information is filtered so as to muffle its effects I assume that you absorb media reports independently.

When it comes to your Government’s response to this data, I can make no more assumptions because their response is incomprehensible. Ed Davey has just announced that from 2014 you will aim to reduce emissions by 30% (rather than 20%) by 2020. This is rather like a morbidly obese person, on being told by a doctor he will die in 6 months, plan to reduce his intake by 100 calories starting in 12 months time. It is a delayed and uncertain plan, part of a loosened carbon budget that includes fracking for gas, which will contribute to climate change.

Are you aware that your Government’s policies need updating in the light of new data about climate change? Are you aware how much and how imminently climate change threatens the wellbeing of this nation of people you responsibly care for, including your own children? Are you willing to intervene in order to develop urgent divestment policies that might help save millions of lives? As you reflect on Christ’s compassion at the celebration of his birth, are you willing to put your own values into action to combat the social injustices of climate change?

If you are not willing, what will you tell your children when they ask you in coming years what you did in the fight against climate catastrophe?

Yours Sincerely

Bridget McKenzie

Reclaiming economics for cultural commons

Image: The Room for London on top of the South Bank Centre. Ironic because it is an elite space for invited performers and paying guests, yet also connotes a future time of sea level rises and a flooded city that will affect everyone. 

I like the timely mission of the Cultural Value Network in reclaiming cultural value from the ‘econocrats’. I agree with Ben Walmsley and also with Fiona Hutchison that attempts to give financial proxies to cultural activity can be ridiculous. I’ve been one of the voices calling for time and space for cultural work to take root and have unpredictable and untraceable effects. I can get frustrated when contracted to do evaluations of cultural projects that, to fulfil funding requirements, we must pre-ordain outcomes and measure impacts before the ripples have even spread.

Our debates get stuck in an endless to-and-fro between prioritising either the harder economic or the softer spiritual or relational outcomes. Those of us who share common distaste at hard economic measures can also be caught up in other dichotomous debates between the importance of measuring instrumental social outcomes and a wish to place culture otherwise, outside mechanistic and measurable realms. The claim of otherness evades description, causing difficulties in making the case for culture. We get frustrated because we are chafing at the bind we are in, which is global capitalism. This is both bind in the sense of tie and bind as quandary. The capitalisation of the commons provides us (the lucky ones, temporarily) with incomes and cheap goods. How do we break out of that without collapsing?

To move the debate on, I suggest that our main challenge is reclaiming economics from the capitalist ‘econocrats’. Economics is a way of analysing values of goods so that their accumulation and exchange can be efficient, fair and sustainable. However, the current global system of accumulation and exchange is so inefficient (or utterly wasteful), unfair (or socially unjust) and unsustainable (or ecocidal) it is destroying both the natural commons and cultural commons. (Culture of course is not distinct from nature, but an integrated part of it.) We can blame particular Economic schools for promoting this destruction, but not Economics itself. Economics can be a valid tool in a circular restorative system. Indeed, the discipline of economics and structures for accountability may even be vital in shifting us towards a circular economy.

The key principles of a circular economy are:

• measure the quality of systems rather than components
• create industrial systems that mimic ecological systems
• waste is energy (or food)
• diversity creates resilience
• regenerating the biosphere should be the primary reason for any activity.

All of these principles are very fitting with philosophies around the arts and heritage: complexity, flow, reinvention, creativity, diversity and conservation of past knowledge. Cultural organisations and practitioners have much to offer in supporting this. I don’t mean this in the simplistic sense that art can communicate messages, as critiqued here by Jeppe Graugaard writing about Cape Farewell. I mean that cultural organisations can change the way we design our world, can open our eyes to its diversity and soften antagonisms, and a great deal more. You might ask – how can I measure and prove this? You only have to imagine your world without songs, jokes, metaphor, games, stories, tools, designed shelter, gardens, cookery, clothing etc etc to know why they matter, and that these are all as they are now because of the contributions of creative people. It makes sense too that we need cultural infrastructure, whether it is informal community or formal institutions, to give us the most inclusive and excellent access to these things.

I don’t believe the cultural sector should retreat from political realities in wanting to evade financial or instrumental measurement. It should bring the powers of culture to change our lived and political reality. There are risks of course, especially that organisations may risk losing funding if they are seen to be against Government policy. But, it doesn’t have to go that way. The Happy Museum project is an encouraging example. It funds small action research projects into how museums can promote a high wellbeing, low carbon society. At first the stream was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation but now it has £146,000 support from ACE. Moreover, the long term risks of not shifting our political and industrial model towards a circular economy are very great. Even if we cease emitting CO2 today, the sea will still rise 3 metres. If we don’t stop emitting CO2 within a few years, it is highly unlikely that human civilisation will survive through the next century.

I’m aiming to shift my work from short term evaluations and projects, to supporting cultural organisations to travel into this unstable future while helping stabilise it. As a resource for this, I’m developing a ‘value ecosystem’ model for the cultural sector. (You can see an initial sketch in this post. In short, it aims to describe the value of work that feeds planetary, collective, institutional and individual wellbeing nested one within the other. It also suggests that we flip our meanings of hard and soft, so that ‘hard’ becomes the essential work of sustaining culture and ‘soft’ becomes lazy abstraction from the real world.)

In doing this I’ve wondered about the difference between ‘evaluation’ and ‘valuation’ as both a difference of scale and purpose. Evaluation is gathering evidence to describe the value of any project to participants and stakeholders. Valuation is usually the evidenced quantification of the value of investments or assets in a comparative (aka competitive) marketplace. Put like this, valuation sounds very harsh. However, it could be reframed as the valuation of assets and acts of stewardship within a commons. If the context changes to commons, its meaning changes from a market value to common values. Perhaps because valuation happens when an organisation or service is under question or threat, we are more wary of it. It’s like when a marital home and assets are valued at divorce. Perhaps we try to shield cultural services from this brutal treatment because we feel they are somehow like children who can’t be valued as if to be packaged up, only loved. We know the difference between pricing something and loving it.

Culture (as the creative flowering of the demos) is not loved by the powerful, because it benefits power to weaken the public spirit of resistance which might protect local places, traditions, freedoms or diversity. We hear the powerful say ‘if people value culture, or health, or education, people will pay for them’ so in turn cultural organisations scramble to mobilise public support for what they offer. As part of this we’re seeing a flowering of participation in cultural organisations, inviting public to comment on, co-create and contribute to services. This is to be applauded, but it is important for participation projects to be critically engaged. I’ll end on a little exchange on Twitter from today’s Museum Ideas conference. The new Director of the Museum of London, Sharon Ament, spoke admirably about how museums need to tackle problems like climate change and was enthusiastic about the moves by museums and libraries to be more participatory. She was quoted to say ‘At no time has an individual had such a chance to be heard’. Quick as a whip, Tony Butler, who leads the Happy Museum Project mentioned above, responded ‘At no time have the powerful been more unwilling to listen’.

We need to aim for a circular economy to reclaim economics for a commons culture. In doing so, we need to set up circular systems within and beyond our cultural organsiations so that people can have more than just a chance to be heard, but have political agency to make a difference.

Will you be a curator of the future?

Today is Ask a Curator day. I want to ask curators: If there was a global alliance of curators committed through their work to ensuring the continuity of human civilisation beyond this century, would you sign up to it?

Curating involves acts of care and stewardship. Museums exist to conserve cultural and natural heritage, both material and tangible, for posterity. They achieve this both by caring directly for that heritage and by changing cultures to be more capable of common stewardship.

This sounds all very well. There are two problems.

The challenge of ensuring the posterity of human heritage is extreme and urgent. Posterity will not be ensured by ‘business as usual’. The rate of Arctic melting this summer shows that the tipping point of climate change has passed and our only hope lies in global concerted action over the next two years and beyond to stabilise emissions and set in place massive biosequestration measures. Oil companies hope to exploit the melting Arctic to extract more oil, which in turn will cause more melting. The impact of continued oil extraction will be a potential temperature rise of 6 degrees by the century’s end, which would also spell the end of civilisation.

The second problem is a splitting or specialisation of sectors which causes many of us in any kind of organisation to take diminished responsibility. Museums, especially larger ones, are not immune from this. Museum curators believe it is their prime responsibility to care for and grow their collections, and to increase visitors and funds to do this. They may feel that this duty is an ethical one, so in turn, that it is ethical for this to be funded by oil companies or other sources of income that originate in, or exacerbate, ecocide. It is difficult for individual curators to steer the culture of their museums against this genocidal and ecocidal tide when their functions are so separated, their structures so heirarchical and their efforts at democratic participation by visitors are only superficial.

Maybe what’s needed is solidarity? Would it help if there were an alliance of curators (and other museum staff) who want to see a future for the next generations and other species, who want to reawaken people to the human capacity for stewardship, and most importantly, want their museums to be agents in this change?

Notes

• The Arctic has been shown to be warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet, with average warming of 1-2 degrees since the 1960s. According to the Met Office the earliest date at which the Arctic would be ice-free during the summer would be between 2025 and 2030. However, experts such as Professor Wadhams believe that the earliest ice free Arctic will be in 2015. This will have direct effects, causing greater disruption to weather, but it is also a sign that tipping points are passing. The melting will lead to emissions of methane, far more potent than CO2.
• Burning fossil fuels globally is the main cause of the ice melting, but the drilling process in the Arctic also has a direct impact, increasing the melting. Also, if there is an accident in winter months, the oil gush may not be fixable for months causing devastation to pristine ocean and wildlife. Spilled oil hastens the acidification of oceans that carbon emissions are causing.
• More about the ethics of cultural organisations being funded by ecocidal enterprise can be read on this post.
• More about how museums can act as agents for change can be found on this recent post Making the case for heritage learning and many others throughout this blog.
• There is actually an international network called CultureFutures, which aims to engage the cultural sector to create an Ecological Age. Please join and help to activate this group.

Seeing museums in 2060

The origin of the challenge

Pat Kane is involved in a future envisioning exercise, looking ahead to 2060. He asked me if I would try to envision museums, and culture in general, in 50 years. [Later I realised I'd misheard him. He's looking ahead to 2050, but what's 10 years here or there in such an uncertain future!]

I’m intrigued to do this because I’m preparing a talk for the MuseumNext conference (Barcelona, May 23^rd-25^th). I was also mulling a response to this post by Nick Poole, where he imagines what comes after the digital for museums. I agree with his prediction that young people will become more responsible and serious, although I don’t think that will be universal as certain groups will respond to fear with violence as described in this piercing post by Darren Allen. There is much I want to say in response to Nick’s post but this is a start.

In my MuseumNext talk, I’m proposing that when we think about museums in the future, we should not project by what we would like to see or by what is happening now. We should especially try to avoid what we normally do, which is to combine both our ideals and current trends. We also tend to extrapolate mainly from exciting trends in consumer technology. We should instead project from rigorous thinking based on multiple scenarios. (It doesn’t mean you can’t inject exciting technologies into those scenarios but as long as we don’t pretend these are the only drivers of change.)

I argue that a scenario-based approach is the only valid approach to future-thinking when the future promises to be so Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (or VUCA). With scenario planning, you must be strongly informed by a wide range of influence factors, and very clear-sighted about how influential these factors might be and how they interact with each other. You need to consider multiple scenarios in very categorical ways. And you have to keep retelling these stories, reappraising them as the context shifts. The purpose of scenario-planning is to assess threats and opportunities and take a proactive stance so that you can mitigate the threats and benefit from the opportunities. With this approach, you recognise that you can’t really predict the future, but you also come closer to being able to influence the future by understanding the factors that are generating it. If this sounds bloody hard, and confusing, that’s because it is. Perhaps because it’s hard we don’t do it often or well enough.

In my presentation I’m not painting any particular future scenarios for museums, partly because I don’t have time on the platform, and partly because, like I said, it’s bloody hard. However, the difficulty doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it and so I’m setting myself the challenge here.

Scenarios need a broader context

The starting point of a scenario-planning exercise is at a meta-level. You take a broad view of the horizon, and create a matrix of possible global or contextual scenarios based on the strongest influence factors. This is a matrix I’ve produced, taking into account the global ecological and economic crisis. (Elsewhere, I’ve also mapped several tribes or camps onto these quartiles.)

The X axis is a spectrum from ‘continuity’ on the left hand, to ‘radical disruption’ on the right hand. The Y axis is a spectrum from ‘technology-led’ at the top, to ‘nature-led’ at the bottom.

The four quartiles look a bit like this:

1)      Red global scenario: Tackle it but as now

Globally, there were strenuous efforts to tackle the environmental and resource crisis, but they were too led by technology and the free market economy, with not enough regulation to reduce ecocide and not enough effort to restore ecosystems. Too little attention was paid to reducing inequality, causing conflict over resources.

2)      Black global scenario: Accept decline

Globally, there were pockets of effort to tackle the environmental and resource crisis, but overall it was too desultory and late. Over time, communities and institutions succumbed to accepting the decline. They formed static besieged communities or became nomadic. Some individuals and groups chose or adopted a high-risk but very short life of crime and conflict. Others formed protective spiritual clans that claim to ‘live for now’ as an aspiration to morality.

3)      Silver global scenario: Techno-utopia

In the second decade of the 21^st Century there was a redoubled effort, supported by all the biggest corporations and countries, to replace fossil fuels with alternative energy sources and to engineer new sources of food and water. No efforts were enough to stop the ‘tipping point’ of climate change feedbacks. There was a tendency to neglect ‘rewilding’ projects in order to focus on green energy, so the ocean continued to acidify and deserts spread. However, there is hope that reducing greenhouse gas emissions has enabled some human cities to persevere and bring back climate stability over the next 1000 years. In some cities, amongst some groups of people, there are phenomenal technological advancements. It can only be a partial techno-utopia.

4)      Green global scenario: Eco-topia

In the second decade of the 21^st century there was a realisation that biosphere capital was the only kind of capital with real value and sustainable potential. Efforts to restore and rewild the forests and oceans were redoubled. City-dwellers found all opportunities to grow plants in, on and around their buildings. Energy policies were left without an overarching global strategy, assuming that supplies of fossil fuels would peak anyway. Geo-engineering projects were rejected. Their efforts could not prevent the tipping point of climate change feedbacks but there is hope that wilderness will be restored for biodiversity to thrive in some places again. This is not a global eco-topia but there are some areas where humans and nature are thriving.

All scenarios are personal but you can move towards a shared and evidenced view

If you’re doing scenario-planning in a group, it’s important for participants to express their own ideals about the future, as well as their fears, to establish together what you agree are the most likely scenarios, eliminating prejudice and bringing evidence to the fore.

The only preferable scenarios are on the right hand of this spectrum from continuity to radical disruption. Or to put it more bluntly, ensuring the continuity of diverse life on Earth depends on absolute disruption from the norm. To put it even more bluntly, avoiding human extinction in the next century depends on this. Some people argue that we will avoid total catastrophe because it is so unthinkable that we won’t act in time. Others argue that forces of collapse or entropy will overwhelm our capacity to act, that we’ve done too little too late. The assumption of positive reactive change e.g. that we will sort out our problems because we must, is seen as a fallacy.

My projection is on the hopeful side of realistic (though I’m generally regarded as extremely pessimistic): I believe that some human life will cling on to very small habitable zones and that the unthinkable, extraordinary challenges of global collapse will bring about a major cultural evolution. I think these extraordinary challenges will come earlier than we guess they will because all the major phenomena of ecological collapse have already come earlier (or faster, or more severe) than projected up to this point. We will be in the absolute pit of those extraordinary challenges in 2060 but there may be small pockets of amazing innovation.

My projection is a combination of ecotopia and techno-utopia, as I believe we need to stop fighting between camps that uphold entirely nature-led solutions and those that uphold high-tech solutions and attempt to unite the two. We are part of nature, and our technological symbolic capacities are part of our nature.

Why is this relevant to museums in the future?

Museums might be, in many ways, a grand fabrication, a utopian escape from the world. However, they are also real institutions, usually in real buildings, requiring real human staffing and, most importantly, looking after real material artefacts. Their core purpose is stewardship of cultural and natural heritage for posterity. If they are going to continue to exist and to enact their role as stewards, they need to consider quite how much they need to change in an era of radical disruption from the norm.

The reason why this is so difficult for the museum sector at this point is full of irony. They have already altered hugely. Many museums are going through a process of modernisation, following the lead of businesses in a free-market economy. All over the world museums are growing big shiny extensions or replacing their old buildings and displays, and new museums are being erected from scratch.

To attract more visitors, they’ve had to improve their facilities, and this means higher costs. Just as they have increased their costs, many are facing austerity measures and struggling to sustain their operations (the illustration is the Maxxi in Rome, threatened with closure straight after opening). In turn, their sustainability strategies are more often about keeping the business running than about keeping the planet sustaining life.

Businesses are increasingly acting in short-term interests, discounting the future. Museums have traditionally been slow, acting in long-term interests and supported by state or stately patronage to play this conservative role. This state or stately patronage is faltering, having raised their game and so now to maintain their ‘standards of living’ they are forced to start thinking like businesses. However, as realisation about the emerging crisis starts to dawn, we may see a lot of confusion but also some shift in thinking towards a longer view.

The general context for museums in 2060

Several scenarios for particular museums and/or particular places could be generated from the scenarios of a more general context. It’s important to note that no general context, or particular scenario, is a statement of truth. It’s a stab in the dark, put out there for others to adjust in the light of growing evidence and adding their ideas for solutions. What follows is my stab in the dark of the general context, but one that is based on a lot of reading.

Contextual scenarios will be massively different for museums in different countries, with equatorial areas most in trouble. India, China, southern Russia, the Northern half of Africa, the Mediterranean, Australia, the southern United States, central America and the north of South America will have had large areas too hot to grow food for the past 30 years. Their lands will have been increasingly wrecked by drought, storms, tree diseases, rising sea levels and earthquakes. Museums in these areas may continue to exist where enough investment has created some cities that can be resilient against these environmental ravages. Some cities in the most damaged areas may thrive by profiting from the final extraction of resources or salvaging of industrial waste, the securing of abandoned nuclear plants, or the exploitation of deserts or oceans to supply energy to more habitable lands. Some towns may be ‘seasteaders’, floating to avoid the worst damage from rising seas and to allow seasonal migration to habitable climates, and escape from pollution outbreaks.

The UK, Northern Europe, Canada, Alaska, Russia should still all be relatively habitable, especially in their Northern parts, as should the Southern parts of South America and South Africa, the South of Australia and New Zealand. These areas may have been forced to be habitable by the large numbers of migrants flooding south and north. (However, if large areas of the Antarctic ice shelf have broken off, this will have caused coastal areas to be flooded.) The labour and salvaged resources and knowledge of these migrants may have helped to build protective infrastructure in enlarged cities, with hydroponic biodomes and urban forests to grow food and desalination plants to provide water for them. There will be flood barriers to protect against massive storm surges and bunkers to protect against chemical attack, dust storms or nuclear fallout (from damaged plants on the coast and in the abandoned south).

It may be that there will be a new hierarchy of cultural value, with seed banks, biodiversity reserves, geological materials repositories, and also science exploratories (to accelerate education) seen as more vitally important than museums as repositories and propagators of human cultural knowledge. Cultural museums may have to support these other functions and, in other ways, propagate the means to thrive through biosphere capital. Putting a beehive on the roof and using recycled paper will have long ceased to be seen as enough effort.

Despite an emphasis on pragmatism, it is also likely that there will be a strong sense of nostalgia and clear needs for cultural therapy. So many cultures, both indigenous and industrial-era diaspora, will have been forced out of their original or adopted territories. It will be acknowledged that participating in constructive activities to learn skills, to play with others and ideas, to be inventive and to be immersed in cathartic or ritual situations, are all useful to combat aggressive and depressive behaviours.

In places of intense urban innovation, where technologies are advancing despite ecological collapse, there may be a sense of dislocation from biological origins. People may be augmented with implants to brain/eyes/ears/limbs, eating genetically modified food, maintaining health through epigenetic therapies, contact only with engineered animals, and monitored constantly. They will need cultural engagement that helps them feel connected to the past, to other beings and to their own emotions.

One museum in 2060: The ‘Greater Glasgow Museum’

Proviso: This is all invented because it is in the future where I’ve never been.

Glasgow is one of the very few thriving cities in what was known as the United Kingdom, as Scottish land has become more fertile in these warmer climes. London declined for many years after the great flood when the old Thames Barrier overtopped in 2018 and the financial industry it rested on collapsed in the same decade. This allowed the Northern UK cities to attract more investment, based on an economy of ecological innovation. Scotland suffered greatly in the great freezing storms of 2015-2025 but it recovered as temperatures rose. The migration of people from coastal and southern England placed great strain on its infrastructure in the 2030’s-2050s but by 2060 it has benefited from their investment. It is now three times the population and has absorbed many outlying towns. It is almost unrecognisable, with only the prime historic buildings preserved in the Centre all dwarfed by high rise towers draped with greenery. The buildings near the river stand on stilts or float.

The Greater Glasgow Museum is a consortium of a few large and several smaller museums across the conurbation. This consortium has existed for decades, which has allowed the museums to thrive by sharing resources. They also have a long tradition of making partnerships outside of the city and good links across Europe.

Much of Glasgow is 200 metres above sea level and relatively safe from sea level rises, although the Riverside Museum and Science Centre had to be closed due to continued flood damage. (They were replaced with a flotilla of heritage boats and other floating attractions.)

The less privileged people in Glasgow have returned to living in the tall tenement blocks for which the city was famous, but these new ones are taller, high tech and much lighter than in the old days. Still, they are very crowded and lacking green space, and also very hot and stuffy. So, visiting any public space is very popular.

By 2060, the Scottish Republic has stopped using money, using a high-tech barter-and-investment system instead. The Queendom of England still maintains its sterling currency in an effort to preserve tourism around its heritage. (King Charles had to change the word from Kingdom in the ‘decade of female power’ during the Big Freeze, and it has stuck, much to King William’s discomfort. Kate divorced William and was awarded the Princessipality of Wales, due to his infidelities, so England is on its own.)

The question about whether Glasgow’s museums should be free or not was dropped as soon as this system of barter-investment was widespread. When you visit a museum or attend a course, or go to a food shop, you commit a certain ‘number’ to invest in the city’s cultural infrastructure by donating time, energy, knowledge and shareable goods. (People with less wealth are those with less health, less knowledge and less free time.) You can reduce this debt once in the museum, for example, by contributing knowledge or memories to group interactives or by helping others solve problems. Even just clearing up after your lunch in the cafe helps reduce your debt a tiny amount.

Kelvingrove is the most popular museum because it is such a grand museum in a great garden. However, the architecture is problematic as it was not built to withstand extreme storms and hot temperatures. People love all the games and festivals they run, such as dressing up in pre-fossil era costumes, the Gaelic culture festivals, the lost languages celebrations and, their speciality, murder nights (people die, but they’re only robots). Scotland is now home to people who originated in every country in the world, although most have lost connection with the old ways and languages. Kelvingrove is a place to meet with other people from your ancestor cultures and honour the relics.

The Gallery of Modern Art is also very successful. As global collapse made life increasingly difficult, you might assume that contemporary art dwindled as it was seen as an indulgence. However, artists began to work in ways that meant that engaging with art became the most effective way to learn skills, to try new bodily capabilities, to solve problems, to connect with others and get healed. You can participate in art like this at home but it is something special to go and do it with others at GOMA. The gallery made a name for itself in commissioning art that was participatory and helped people imagine future solutions.

People find the Burrell collection a good deal less relevant to their lives, but they do visit to marvel at how people in the pre-industrial and fossil-industrial eras could spend so much effort making these objects with so little purpose except to accrue value by their uniqueness, and all made by hand!

Those who can afford it, including all certified educators, have augmented reality implants that allow them to project any object or scene as a hologram and to command objects to be fabricated. So, there is no shortage of knowledge about the forms of things. Things can be fabricated using nanotechnology to have authentic smells, textures and tastes so they don’t lack basic knowledge of sensory qualities either.  These things are abundant in shared spaces, if not in people’s homes. People don’t really come to museums to learn what things are like. They come because these real objects are understood to be iconic relics. (The Glasgow collections have grown massively since all the safe territories were forced to accept ‘refugee’ objects from abandoned cities. This is no longer a collection of Scottish heritage but stewardship of world heritage.) People also come to see real objects because they lack knowledge of how to craft things by hand with difficulty, to source materials from nature, and to feel what it is to live as part of an authentic natural ecosystem. Museums are valued because people like to learn these ‘hand skills’ with natural materials. Because schools are so specialised, if you can afford to go to them, you may not learn how to work with materials and your hands. Most young people have to work in food production and rewilding projects from the age of 11.

People have also worked out how to conjure up an image or even robotic replicas of the hundreds of thousands of species now extinct. They can also create simulations of these creatures living interdependently. However, if they want to do this with living (even if cloned or genetically engineered) animals it is very slow and expensive. There are many queries about the purpose of doing this, apart from creating attractions. Simulations like this only get done if people give time and knowledge, as there is no money.

Although there are many questions about the value of replicating past living creatures, fewer questions are asked and a great deal of support given to the creation of more holistic eco-environments. These are ‘living worlds’ experimental biodomes where these virtual and living simulations of nature take place. Greater Glasgow is building a Jurassic world attraction as people will flock for kilometres to see the robot dinosaurs and to play the jungle hunt & survive games, outwitting these giant creatures. (Now that people can augment their bodies, competitive games where bodies have to conform to a standard are no longer so interesting. Immersive team challenges where you pool your capabilities are more the thing.) The spin offs of the Jurassic attraction are from biogenetic research reviving prehistoric plant and insect species to benefit depleted ecosystems.

In summary, museums in 2060 Glasgow are much less places to wander and look than they used to be, much more places to learn, make, share, debate and plan ways to outwit the uncertainties of extreme weather and global conflict.

Dot Dot Climate Dash update

On 5 May, we turned New Cross Gate and Telegraph Hill into a messaging station about climate impacts. This revived its old function to relay optical telegraph messages about threats from the seas to the Government in central London. Our hilltop park has a fantastic view over central London so it’s a great place to get perspective over who has power and the impact of urban life on our planet.

The global event organised by 350 was all about the weather, joining the dots between unseasonal or extreme weather in particular places, to see the big picture of climate disruption caused by man. Unfortunately the weather was unseasonally cold and wet during the day, so we didn’t have the picnic and messaging station in the park.

Instead we set up a research station in New Cross Learning (the people’s library) in the morning, with artist Jessie Easter helping people to make dot artworks and Mahesh and Anna from the charity Down2Earth providing knowledge about climate impacts and solutions. Then we moved it up to the Telegraph Hill Centre in the afternoon. People could make their own dot message, could make a badge, do some dot-to-dot drawings, look at books and posters, have a chat and find out facts about climate change.

We took a photo on the hill, to send to the 350 team.

Then in the early evening we held a discussion about whether we can adapt to climate change, here in London and in India These are people’s thoughts in summary.

Later 300+ people came for a cycle-powered screening of the film Up. This was part of the New Cross & Deptford Free Film Festival, but it linked nicely to the climate event with the cycle powering and a short film before the main feature about oil and plastic.

All the dots were photographed and posted on this Flickr group. We had intended to join up the dots into an installation in the Top Park, alongside the film. However, we didn’t have as many dots as we needed to make the planned structure (due to weather and the closure of the Hill Station cafe). So, the plan is to use the posters and activities we have to set up the messaging station again in the Hill Station, in the Telegraph pub for the Festival of Transition, and maybe again in the library.

The uses of photography

Just a quick post to send you over to the Dark Mountain blog where you will find an article by me, called The Uses of Photography in a Crisis. 

The Dark Mountain Project is embracing visual arts and photography, though I guess it will maintain a focus on the written word. Cat Lupton, Tony Hall and I are curating this strand, for example, inviting photographic contributions to the Uncivilisation Festival and leading photowalks. We will also have some photo-essays in the forthcoming Dark Mountain book.

Please read and comment on the article and get involved in the photography activities of Dark Mountain.

Dot Dot Climate Dash

I’m organising an event as part of the international Climate Impacts Day on 5 May. We’ll revive the heritage of Telegraph Hill as the site of an old optical telegraph, where messages of threat from the seas were relayed to Government. Now the threats from the seas are of extreme or odd weather and rising sea levels. In London, we’re already in drought and we’re hearing messages of worse weather elsewhere. The main activity will be making an installation from lots of individual circle/dot artworks, visually expressing concerns about climate impacts.

This is the official event page, and this is the Facebook event page. Also, after the event, you’ll see all the dot artworks individually photographed for people to share with the world on this Flickr group.

Many Greens are focused on the election 2 days before and the Bank Holiday weekend means many will be away. So, although the day is promising good things it could be better. I’m using this blog, quite rarely, as an appeal for contributions.

This is where I’ve got to:

- The event coincides with, and is merging with, a cycle-powered film screening of ‘Up’ in the evening. After dark, there will be lit up houses created by children.

- The 350 organisation is offering lots of advice and help

- New Cross People’s Library and artist Jessica Easter are kindly running an open workshop for people to do creative research in the library and make dot artworks. Also, they’ll get local schools making dots.

- The Young Mayor and youth participation team of Lewisham council are keen to come

- In the Hill Station cafe from 6-7.30 pm for an indoor debate. Jody Boehnert of Eco-labs, has offered to lend big canvas posters which depict the impacts at 1 to 6 degrees of warming. This will be good provocations for a debate.

- There will be dot to dot drawings and a badgemaking stall.

So, what else do we need?

- We’d love you to come along, dressed in dots, with dotty things, to picnic from 1pm and make a dot artwork

- Please put the poster up (ask me for a JPEG)

- We’d welcome stalls or information panels from different organisations, e.g. about wildlife and climate, or coping with drought, or impacts on other countries, or rising sea levels

- We’d welcome more artistic contributions, e.g. about rising water levels or semaphore

- We’d welcome more heritage contributions e.g. about the optical telegraph station

- Some people willing to do short provocations at the debate

- Some people who will take audio, video or still images to document and spread the word, and bloggers too

- we need a black light (ultraviolet) to illuminate the dot installation

If you have any ideas, please get in touch on bridgetmcknz@gmail.com

How about we…

…face what we really feel about future threats to life on Earth rather than self-anaesthetising with constructive denial?

…acknowledge the current threats to the biosphere, and agree that devastating effects of climate change are happening now everywhere, that it is not a vague and indefinable future threat?

…stop asking children to get angry about their future on our behalf?

…stop fighting in a growing panic between camps that prefer different solutions and instead try many clumsy solutions?

…stop feeling that it is shameful, inappropriate or pessimistic to raise our fears or anger about the devastation to our planet?

…know that every time a political or business decision is made it impacts on all living beings, including people, not just on people, because we are all interdependent?

…see that in times when or places where the dominant view is ‘man must conquer nature’, like in Mao’s China, masses of people suffer and die?

…understand that the economic crisis is not the reason to lose interest in tackling the environmental crisis, but that ecocide and climate change are actually causing the economic crisis?

…stop casting environmental action in negative terms, as if it is about saving or meanness, but promote it as the task of generating biosphere capital?

…turn our work, our institutions and our communities into organisations directed to the goal of generating biosphere capital (through eco-innovation, rewilding, permaculture, renewables or eco-literacy, for example)

…start accounting for ecological externalities?

…stop justifying any environmental damage by saying that it brings ‘jobs and growth’, but instead ask, does it give us the ‘means to thrive’?

…insist on using and propagating terms that will help bring about a more ecological way of knowing?

…become literate in all the planetary boundaries, not just climate change, but all of them, and find out how they all interact with each other?

…do something to heal the breaches in planetary boundaries, collaborate with others, and try to make sure our actions aren’t driven by ego?

…campaign to make ecocide an international crime against peace?

…elect representatives who don’t dismiss the environment as a ‘single issue’ but who understand that it is ‘the issue’ that stands between mass extinction and a chance for continued human civilisation?

…what else would you add?

I’ve written this because I feel an increasing need for clarity. An election is coming up on May 3rd and the environment (i.e. future generations, era of mass extinction etc) seems to be so little on the agenda or reaching media attention. I’m organising Dot Dot Climate Dash as part of Climate Impacts Day on May 5th, and wanted to produce a call to action. It’s not there yet. I’d like your comments and additions.

I’d also like to compile a list of ‘shift terms’ – phrases and concepts we need to promote for a more ‘ecological epistemology’. I’d love your ideas on that too.

Myths and Revelations

I’m going to an event on Monday organised by the Dr Christopher Shaw and the BSA Climate Change study group, examining the Social Dimensions of Climate Change. To prepare for this, we’ve been asked to read some papers, including the summary chapter of Mike Hulme’s ‘Why We Disagree about Climate Change’. He has identified that there are four main myths that people use to see and make sense of climate change: Eden, Apocalypse, Babel and Jubilee. After reading this, I had a chat with Jodie Boehnert who runs Ecolabs, the visual communication of ecological literacy. Together, sharing our own models, we came up with a matrix to help visualise and interpret these myths. You can plot all kinds of stories and initiatives (Transition, Denial, Dark Mountain, Carbon War Room etc) on these axes:

Axis one: One end of the spectrum: The myth of Babel = Imperialist, Man will Overcome, We Just Have to Come Together, Technology Will Fix It

Axis one: Other end of the spectrum: The myth of Eden = Arcadian, We Must Return to Nature and Live in Harmony with it, Man Shall Have No Dominion

Axis two: One end of the spectrum: The myth of Apocalypse = Crisis, Massive Change, Urgency, Despair/Preparation/Acceptance

Axis two: Other end of the spectrum: The myth of Jubilee = Celebration, Reassurance, Opportunism, Imagine a Bright Future

Any story or initiative that is really interesting or worthwhile will be impossible to neatly plot on this axis. There will be individuals or dimensions within them who change or differ. Stories or initiatives about crisis shouldn’t be doctrinal but flexible structures to help us think and make decisions. For example, see how Tania Kovats describes the Svalbard Seed Bank as ‘both Eden and Apocalypse’.

I’ve been talking with some friends who are fellow supporters of the Dark Mountain Project (a cultural movement for an age of global disruption) about how we can draw and contribute more meaning and action from it. There has been criticism that Dark Mountain is too Apocalyptic and, variously, either too Babel or too Eden. I welcome the emphasis of Dark Mountain on facing the reality of crisis, even, let’s use the word, Apocalypse. (Incidentally, see this piece on why the term Apocalypse should not be used with such fear, as it means the revelation of what is hidden not the end of the world.) I’m dismayed and sometimes shocked by most mainstream thinking which, even if not meaning to deny or befog, still does so by overusing the Jubilee myth so as not to frighten people. However, I think that Dark Mountain would gain strength both by embracing more myths of crisis and by making more attempt to rehabilitate Apocalypticism (is that a word?). Also, it could benefit by developing communications and methods that come across as more ‘Jubilee’, to attract and reassure people in the difficult tasks of exposing and facing revelations.

Actually, I think this is already happening with a flowering of Dark Mountain groups and the theme of Coming Home in its 2012 publication. Other ways to achieve this could include developing more activities and voice for children and young people, and more programming for the visual arts. I’m hoping to be able to give time to both strands of activity this year. To acknowledge that these elements have been lacking is not intended to criticise Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine for their leadership so far, which has been inspiring.

Dark Mountain has been a fantastic network for me, leading me to some wonderful, like-minded and also provocative people. One person I met at the 2011 festival was Keri Facer. She has just invited me to a seminar and study group on Education and the Crisis in March. To help with this (and for my research), I’m trying to think more deeply to understand how people react to news of crisis as opposed to experience of crisis, and how the reality of crisis can be dealt with in education.

Daniel Gilbert, the evolutionary pyschologist (author of Stumbling on Happiness) explained how the human brain evolved to respond to threats, helping us decide to run away or fight, or stay and nurture. He says our brains have evolved to respond to threats with four features, none of which is shared by climate change (a shortcut to describe wider environmental crisis): 1) Threats of social intention or plotting 2) Threats that violate our moral intuitions  3) Threats that are coming right at us now  and 4) Threats that are sensorily evident.

Much of the task of a cultural movement like Dark Mountain is to help us reveal what is hidden, to make people notice, understand and respond to these threats. Perhaps we can do this by understanding how myths are constructed (as above), and by understanding how we deal with threats.

Thinking about threat one, Social Intention and plotting. Most denialists interpret the problem of environmental crisis as a problem of conspiracy or intention to hurt other people, so it has to be revealed as a geophysical problem.

Thinking about threat two, Moral Affront, the more I learn about ecocide and inaction on climate change, the more my sense of morality feels affronted. So, the moral dimensions of the geophysical problem must be revealed as fully as possible.

Thinking about threats three and four, that Environmental crisis is too distant in time and not sensorily available to us, cultural forms must reveal that it is here now and happening, that it is the root cause of many other problems that can be felt more readily.