Hotspot

It felt cold in the UK recently, but New York, which hosted the International Society for Performing Arts (ISPA) Congress this year, was bitter. This is counter-intuitive in the context of global warming, but although we are entering a period of fluctuation, which may result in cold snaps, mean temperatures across the globe are rising inexorably. The ISPA conference, co-hosted by the British Council, had a broad theme of sustainability and the environment. It was an opportunity to explore climate change in relation to other countries and cultural practice. Our Director of Research Catherine Bottrill and I presented the work of Julie’s Bicycle (JB), and specifically our unfinished research on the impacts of international touring.  

 One of the great challenges in communicating climate change is to make it manageable and specific to our community while being true to the scale and reach of the problem. Sir Peter Crane, former Director of Kew, now at Yale University, gave a sobering address, focusing on social as well as ecological degradation. JB considered the nuts and bolts, making explicit the vital connection between the macro and micro. Neither the arts nor science sits separate from society, and as we wrestle with preventing dangerous climate change, more opportunities to interact and collaborate will be valuable.
The next few years will be critical for us to establish sustainability as the guiding principle of society. We, as the cultural sector, need to identify our environmental impacts in pragmatic and straight forward terms – energy use in venues, production, travel, merchandise, touring, digital delivery – and deal with them. We need to determine what the arts and cultural sector will look like in a low carbon world. We need to support an infrastructural shift, but, above all, we need to understand, and reflect in all our doings, a value base which puts sustainability at the heart of our current and future cultural practice.