Page 26 - APAP - Inside Arts - Summer 2020

Solutions and examples for the change that’s needed now:
1. ACCOUNTABILITY AND DIVESTMENT
Our field’s funders could decide to lead and encourage their grantees to design artistic programming that’s not fossil-fuel dependent, especially in the United States where a significant percentage
of funding for the nonprofit arts sector comes from private nonprofit philanthropic foundations. These private foundations may have more agility in terms of creating post- carbon policy than government arts funders, and many of these private foundations’ pro-social agendas
are already aligned with mitigating the impacts of climate change. All funders, perhaps inadvertently, have an enormous influence on the culture and behavior of our sector, and they can use that power for progress, creative stimulation, and a revival of how we all operate. They can invest in our transformation.
In addition to stimulating our arts sector to re-envision itself, foundations and other institutions such as universities that support the arts should live out their
stated values and divest their financial investment portfolios from corporations that contribute to climate change. Fortunately the divestment movement, as tracked by DivestInvest, is now in the mainstream with major institutions participating worldwide. Find the full list of universities and private charitable foundations that have divested or have committed to divestment. If your institution has not joined this list, encourage them to do so.
2. INSTITUTIONAL TRAVEL POLICIES
In the cultural and educational sector, a few universities are
leading the way for post-carbon, sustainable travel schemes by favoring alternatives to air travel, such as trains or buses, for attending conferences or restricting air travel entirely when alternative travel
falls within a certain distance or duration. The University of Ghent has a university-wide sustainable travel policy, which allows for individual departments to make their own agreements on travel sustainability.
On the funding side, the European Cultural Foundation’s STEP Grants for cultural workers have a simple and effective funding scheme designed to encourage
land travel instead of air travel. Individuals can ask for more funding if traveling by train or bus compared to airplane. Their guidelines state that, for environmental reasons, they encourage applicants to travel by land, which is widely accepted as the least polluting means of mass transportation.
3. VIRTUAL CONFERENCING, LIVESTREAMING, AND LIVE PERFORMANCE EXPERIMENTS
There is much experimentation and development left to do when
it comes to organizing meetings, assemblies, conferences, and performances through video conferencing and livestreaming technologies. One promising concept is replacing the traditional large-scale conference in a destination city with multiple mini- conference hubs in difffferent cities, which are all connected through live
video presence and communication. This would be a kind of hybrid in-person meeting with video conferencing that ties all the hubs together. Participants would use slow travel methods to get to the cities they are closest to in order to participate in the conference. The HowlRound TV livestreaming and video archive project has a decade of experience helping organizations to experiment with video and conferencing, and we see these technologies now as vital tools for transitioning into a post-carbon present and future.
VALUING INSPIRATION, CREATIVITY, AND DEEP CHANGE
Because we’ve unintentionally designed much of our arts programming by adopting our dominant culture’s values of energy abundance, conveniences, and speed, change will be difficult. However, I believe that if we collectively decide now to step out
of the business-as-usual model and proactively work toward rapidly transitioning into an alternative, systemic way of supporting and making art, we will find new meaning and relevance for our work.
24 INSIDE ARTS SUMMER 2020