Let’s talk about the future: Can the arts help save the planet?

What is the impact of environmental change on the arts and what part can the sector can play in addressing the global issue? Julie Hosking reports in the first of a three-part series in partnership between Seesaw Magazine and the Chamber of Arts and Culture WA.

“If you knew you were at the last days of the human story, what would you write? How would you write?” – Ben Okri, author and poet

Peter Newman is a self-confessed “hope merchant”. 

The renowned professor of sustainability at Curtin University has spent much of his working life finding ways to prevent the planet from veering inexorably toward self-destruction. Yet he is far from despairing.

“I think we can see a better future now, we can see our way through this but it’s going to be very much a question of bringing everyone along – and dramatising it,” he says.

The arts have always used creativity to confront, challenge and push for change; the global climate crisis providing an increasingly bleak canvas for decades.

In December 2015, artists Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosings arranged 12 large blocks shorn from Greenland ice sheets in a Paris street ahead of the United Nations agreement on climate change. The second installation of “Ice Watch” wasn’t just a spectacle but a tangible call to action – spectators could, quite literally, feel the world melting away.

More recently, author and poet Ben Okri called for a “new art” to shock people into action. “We have to be strong dreamers. We have to ask unthinkable questions.”

The Booker Prize winner proposed an “existential creativity wherein nothing should be wasted”, which in Okri’s case meant everything he wrote from here on “should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species”.

The art of hope

While Professor Newman is far too aware of the magnitude of the environmental problems the world is facing, he believes the arts should also be celebrating “acts of extraordinary heroism” in the fight to turn the tide.

“It doesn’t bode well for the potential to change our world if you constantly show we’re failing,” he says. “We think that’s what the role of art is in the environment, just to make us feel bad. But we’ve got to dramatise the success stories and we are starting to see that.”

Regenerating Australia, a short film set on New Year’s Eve, 2029, looks back on the decade “that could be” through the prism of hope; hope for a greener nation where wind, solar and hydrogen power the country and empower its people with a program of regeneration and reforestation.

It is not an impossible dream, wrested from vivid imaginations and rendered real with the wonders of computer-generated imagery. Having been involved in the push for wind-powered desalination to help solve Perth’s water crisis, the 2018 WA Scientist of the Year knows it is possible to avert environmental disaster where there is the will — and a way.

And the arts have more than a supporting role to play in navigating that admittedly rocky path.

Creative solutions

With his daughter, Dr Renee Newman, a lecturer and researcher at WAAPA and an acclaimed actor, director and producer, Professor Newman developed a Leadership in Sustainability course that has creativity at its core.

Dr Newman says most of the students doing the Master’s unit at Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute come from science or economic backgrounds, or the resource industry.

“The fundamental principle is that in order to be a leader you have to start to think laterally, you have to think creatively, you have to think differently,” she says.

Driven by conversations rather than lectures, students are encouraged to share their stories and take others along for the journey, an act that requires a lot of courage, as well as the ability to embrace complexity.

“When we ask them to open their soul and tell us a story in some way through an artistic and creative medium, it can be quite a vulnerable thing,” she says.

“We say to them ‘in order to think differently we would like you to act creatively’ – and that can be in any way. We’ve had people doing dumpster dives and turning them into cakes and we eat them. We’ve had people build a brick wall so they can employ an artist to paint a mural and take us through that process. It is about enacting some form of change.”

Satire and a cautionary word

As co-founder of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, Oron Catts has been encouraging us to think differently, to question constantly, for decades. The first to grow so-called victimless meat, SymbioticA has been pushing the boundaries of arts and science since 2000.

Describing himself as a problem seeker rather than a problem solver, Catts has grown increasingly wary of satire as a messenger for change.

SymbioticA’s “Sunlight Soil & Shit (De) Cycle”, held in Fremantle in February, subverted the removal of nature from food production in the name of sustainability — the idea that by somehow removing ourselves from nature we could save it.

Attending a conference in Munich shortly after, Catts was horrified to hear company hacks actively advocate for what SymbioticA had been skewering.

“There were people standing up there using even more ridiculous lines than we used in our satire extremely seriously, in order to raise funding from venture capitalists,” he says.

“I think many artists who see themselves as producers of cautionary tales are amazed by the amount of times those cautionary tales are becoming a kind of instruction manual.”

The conference caused something of an existential crisis of his own, one that Catts is still grappling with: Had he spent the past two decades feeding the very same mindsets and ways of operating that his art was questioning?

Irony was also lost in translation — at least for some — when Professor Newman’s son Sam held an exhibition in Fremantle in June.

The Kimberley-based artist produced a massive canvas map harpooning “Col’s canal”, a proposal for a 3700km waterway from Kimberley to Perth that former premier Colin Barnett infamously took to the 2005 State election.

“Sam showed this extraordinary canal bisecting the state and he was presented as the Council on Navigation (CON) and some people did not see it as a satire — they thought he was actually proposing it,” Professor Newman says.

His daughter acknowledges one of the difficulties of issue-based artwork is the degree to which data, statistics and other complex information can be put forward without shutting down an audience, “unless that’s the point”.

Creating a sustainable practice

But the beauty of the arts is there are so many ways to get a message across.  Katie Mitchell’s production of “Lungs”, about a couple wrestling with the environmental impact of having a baby, was powered entirely – sound and lights — by its two protagonists on stationary bikes.

While this novel mode of production might be the exception rather than the rule, the arts can make concrete and lasting changes in the way they operate.

The Blue Room Theatre became the first arts organisation in Western Australia to become carbon neutral in 2019. A member of The Blue Room’s sustainability committee, Dr Newman says it’s about making a commitment to a value system.

“It was really important to be the leader in that independent, small to medium sector, to say we can actually do these things,” she says.

This commitment means more than simply switching to solar, changing lights to energy-efficient LED, and recycling materials. “Sustainability is not only about being able to address our footprint but also how we engage with communities and how we take everyone along for that ride,” Dr Newman says. “It’s also very important in terms of inclusivity, access and justice issues.”

Artistic responsibility for sustainable practice is a tricky issue, one that Catts and many of SymbioticA’s residents have wrestled with over the years.

“It’s (about) how do you get artists and the way artists think into the whole policy making arena. And I think that’s a positive thing — it will be more about how we change the way we think.”

Oron Catts

The creative hothouse generates a green illusion but is, in fact, resource intensive. “For many of them, it becomes a feature of their work,” he says of the creative response to a sobering reality. “This is why I think places like SymbioticA are very important because they provide very direct experiential engagement rather than this fantasy of what we’re being told.”

Being part of a research university also forces artists to think differently. “Ethics commissions in institutions are basically based on a cost-benefit analysis and how you measure the benefit of the arts as opposed to the cost is something that you don’t usually think about as an artist,” Catts says.

“So the whole discourse about uselessness as the power of art is becoming more and more important, about how artists can actually help transmit ideas which have a value rather than talk about solving very specific problems in the world.”

As someone driven to find solutions through his work at CUSP and on a global scale with the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Professor Newman is under no illusions about those problems.

“This is a daily issue for every person in the community – what is the future for my children going to be – and it’s getting worse. But it is not going to get worse forever,” he says.

A recent IPCC report shows it is becoming easier for soils to absorb carbon, while the 2022 State of the Environment report reveals Western Australia absorbed 23 million more tonnes of carbon than were depleted last year.

“Yet for 200 years we were depleting our soils. So it’s turned around and that’s a global phenomenon,” Professor Newman says. “And the arts need to show us what that is, not just highlight the problems. We need to see that we actually do amazing things out there.”

Similarly, artists like Eliasson are driven not by despair, but by hope: that their work will inspire change rather than generate fear. “Without positivity, it’s very hard to create a consensus on the fact that we need to solve the climate challenge,” he says.

Catts takes a more pragmatic approach.

“It’s really funny coming from an artist but actually I’m a staunch believer in realistic foresight rather than dreaming and imagining better futures,” he says. “I think what art should do – and what art does really well – is challenging people into rethinking their position, rather than telling them what is right or what is wrong.”

Catts believes policy is the key to behavioural change. And creative thinkers can make a world of difference if they have a seat at the table. He is encouraged by a recent visit to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, where a program to engage art and science with policy is under way.

“It’s (about) how do you get artists and the way artists think into the whole policy making arena. And I think that’s a positive thing — it will be more about how we change the way we think.”

The future is everyone’s responsibility

Dr Newman points to Okri’s idea of existential creativity, that it is impossible to imagine a future without confronting our present. But while the arts must be part of the conversation, they can’t be the only ones speaking the truth.

“It’s not our responsibility; it’s everyone’s,” she says. “I think the future very much has to sit in that interconnected balance — that relationship between the arts and civic society, institutions, the larger community, global and local — and by doing that, invariably we will be addressing the environment.”

Artists are exhausted from their roles as messengers but at the same time it’s that “blessed unrest” that drives creatives forward. And Dr Newman has never seen more motivated emissaries.

“There is a great deal of frustration and sadness. Sometimes that leads to a sense of ‘what’s the point’, but I’ve also never been part of a generation who are more activist minded,” she says. “They’ll not only be the next generation of artists, they’ll be the people that will be in charge of our institutions and they’ll take them down just as much as they’ll rebuild them.”

Part two of “Let’s talk about the future” will explore whether the arts are good for our health.

This article has been produced with in partnership with the Chamber of Arts and Culture WA with support from Lotterywest.

Listen to the podcast with Meri Fatin: Can the arts help save the planet?

Photo credit: One of 12 ice blocks in Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing’s ‘Ice Watch’, Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015 Photo: Martin Argyroglo