Reports

28.09.2012

Addressing Children’s Nature-Deficit Disorder: Bold Actions by Conservation Leaders Worldwide

The 2012 World Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Jeju, South Korea turned out to be a big boost for the worldwide movement to re-connect children and nature.

At the prestigious and influential Congress, which convenes every four years, more than 10,000 people representing 150 nations and more than 1000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) came together, resulting in many approved declarations and actions.

The three most important declarations concerning the children and nature movement are:

Read more »

By Nikolai Huckle

08.06.2012

Nomads Occupy the Global Village: Left Political Art Timeline, 2001-2012

For the last decades, collaborations between art and ecology have become more popular as an option to try solving environmental issues, as well as a way of social intervention. You can take a look at the work of several environmental artists in this article by G. Roger Denson, cultural critic and essayist, published by the Huffington Post, which discusses political artists of the last decade:

Click here to read the full article.

By Luis Bravo

04.06.2012

Ernest Callenbach’s last words

Classic environmental novelist Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia, passed away on April 16th 2012 at the age of 83. Shortly after his death, this document, which contains his “Epistle to the Ecotopians: Last Words to an America in Decline” was found:

Click here to read the full text.

By Luis Bravo

11.04.2012

ASEF Report now available: “Linking the Arts to Environment and Sustainable Development Issues”

In 2010, ASEF commissioned research to investigate good practices connecting the arts to initiatives tackling environmental sustainability issues in a number of Asian countries. Titled Linking the Arts to Environment and Sustainable Development Issues,  the research project aimed to carefully document case studies that can not only provide inspiration for networking and collaboration between Asia and Europe in this area but also aid policy making and planning.

The researchers examined initiatives by the cultural sector as well as by civil society organisations working on environmental issues in nine Asian countries: India, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Mongolia.

Direct link to the final report (PDF file): Click here

Read more on the ASEF (Asia Europe Foundation)  website: click here

By Sacha Kagan

07.12.2011

Artists & Environmental Change: The Elusive Power of Contemporary Art

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (Great Salt Lake), 1970. Photo: George Steinmetz (2002)

Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water

The “Land“ artists in the 1970s as well as artists like Joseph Beuys and Agnes Denes in the 1980s paved the way for the ecological artists today and for art to act as an agent for social change.
Today environmental art includes various approaches and issues. Artists employ urban landscapes as well as other environments in order to serve as a platform to show their concepts to their audience. Sustainability has found its way to art and culture and artists see new ways of enacting change and of collaborating e.g. with scientists. Read more »

By Janna Gehrke

03.12.2011

Emergence: The Document!

Emergence: The Document!
Creative industries play an important role in the process of developing a sustainable future for the planet, but often there is a lack of ideas and practical solutions on the way to this more sustainable future.
The partnership project between Volcano and Cynnal Cymru-Sustain Wales supported by Arts Council Wales and British Council generated a conference report in an engaging and informative document:
Emergence: The Document! is a free resource to help creative industries tackle climate change and understand their role in creating a more sustainable society. It documents visionary talks in the field of sustainability and the arts and includes ideas and tools as well as useful contacts for a more sustainable practice.
The focus of the series of conferences documented in this report lay on creating an impulse for change within the arts and a motivation for artists and creative companies to discuss and develop solutions to reduce their environmental impact. Furthermore the document encourages artists to see the possibility to influence people’s behaviour and thus generate a change through their work. Read more »

By Janna Gehrke

24.03.2011

Societies, Systems and Swarms

A publication is now available online, from the “2nd Sustainable Summer School”  that took place in Jüchen (Germany) in September 2010 (cf. our earlier post about the event). The theme of that summer school was “Societies, Systems and Swarms”.

Download the PDF file: Click here

By Sacha Kagan

17.02.2011

Networking the arts to save the Earth

Cathy Fitzgerald, film-maker and author of ecoartnotebook.com, has completed a research paper on the “sometimes under-utilised potential of online art and ecology networks“:

Online social networks are a recent global phenomenon of the last five years. This paper considers the value and under-realised potential of online social networks that connect cultural practitioners and organisations who are responding to ecological concerns across the world. That the cultural sector will have a significant role in engaging the world’s audiences and projecting new visions of how humanity may live more sustainably on this finite earth is increasingly recognised. However, Read more »

By Sacha Kagan

08.02.2011

Extended workshop report now released on Sustainable Creative Cities: the role of the arts in globalised urban contexts

Working on formulating possible recommendations at the workshop

an extended report from the workshop organized at the ASEF CCS4 Conference (ASEM8 Summit)

The extended report (59 pages) is now available: click here for download (PDF file). This longer report contains detailed discussions from the workshop exchanges, as well as several ‘good practice’ cases and further reflections elaborated by workshop participants in the couple of months following the workshop.

Please join the discussion in the forum!

About the workshop Read more »

By Sacha Kagan

22.12.2010

EDUfashion research report online

After nearly one year of research and discussions the research report of the EDUfashion project “OpenWear. Sustainability, Openness and P2P production in the world of fashion” is downloadable in pdf format.

It is released under Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The report includes contributions by Oleg Koefoed (founding coordinator of Cultura21 Nordic).

For further information, see the website of EDUfashion: http://www.edufashion.org/

By Sacha Kagan

25.08.2010

Sustainable creative cities report is online

Please find below a weblink and direct link to a PDF file, released by the ASEF (Asia Europe Foundation) about the publication, today, of the short report from a workshop on “sustainable creative cities” organized as part of the ASEF Conference alongside the 8th Asia-Europe Summit of Heads of States in early October. We are also preparing now a longer version of the report, which will be available online in early 2011.

The workshop report starts with the following text: Read more »

By Sacha Kagan