Page 25 - APAP - Inside Arts - Summer 2020

WHAT’S YOUR VISION
FOR A POST-CARBON
ARTS SECTOR?
The emergency deadline has been announced: 2030.
HOW CAN WE PROCESS THIS ETHICAL QUANDARY?
In the United States,
our nonprofit missions and programming were devised in
the latter half of the twentieth century when climate change— understood by scientists even
then to be an existential threat
to organized human life—was successfully ignored by most everyone. Those arts organizations developed, professionalizing the fields and creating the vibrant artistic communities we have today. Parallel to that growth was the acceleration and proliferation of
air travel, and then, with that, a total dependence on it. However, revolutionary experiments,
actions, and visions for another
way forward have yet to flow into the mainstream of our field’s practices—even given what we cultural workers know now about climate change. There is an opening and an opportunity for collective leadership and deep systemic change here.
DIFFICULT QUESTIONS TO EXAMINE AROUND OUR FIELD’S DEPENDENCE ON AIR TRAVEL
For arts-presenting and arts- producing organizations: Can we continue producing shows and booking tours that require and depend on fast travel and that consequently unleash massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions? What can we learn from the not-so-distant past, before air travel was the de facto mode of transportation?
For professional networks and service organizations: Can we create alternatives to in-person conferences and meetings as a default feature and habit of our programming?
BY VIJAY MATHEW
Sounding an alarm in October 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report to warn the world about the impact of the smallest decimal point changes in global warming temperatures above pre- industrial levels. The report also stated that, in order to prevent even larger scale human suffering than we are currently on course
to collide with, the world has to commit to drastically reducing global emissions starting now until 2030, or face a point of no return for humanity. This hard deadline implies not just a profound shift in our current lifestyles, but also the creation of entirely new systems and cultural values for how our civilization operates.
This pivotal moment in history begs the questions: How do we—the institutionally supported nonprofit arts sector, primarily in the wealthiest and most polluting countries—continue to justify our business-as-usual, fossil-fueled programming, which relies on one of the worst contributors to emissions, air travel? When we create long-term plans for our arts organizations, are our designs implicitly informed by our current fossil-fueled way of thinking?
How can we revise our missions to address the existential emergency that human civilization finds
itself in while not inadvertently propagating the crisis and our cognitive dissonance with our institutional travel practices? How do we reconceive of our art-making systems for a post-carbon world?
AIR TRAVEL IS A CARBON BOMB
Many nonprofit organizations that serve and support the artistic, educational, and cultural field in some way have come to depend on the commercial aviation industry to make their programming and fulfill their missions. We have decades
of habitual practice of flying dozens—if not hundreds—of people all over our large continents for conferences and productions. For many of us, this is programmatic activity central to our organizations’ missions.
In terms of the types of fossil- fueled activity in the arts sector,
air travel is the major area that we can collectively focus on in order
to develop alternatives. The reason to focus on air travel specifically
is that there is no near-term post- carbon technology for flying. Only slower land-based and water-based transportation systems have the eventual potential to be low-carbon or zero-carbon in the near term.
SUMMER 2020 INSIDE ARTS 23