Art and attitudes to the climate crisis

People peddling bikes

The climate crisis is still accelerating. In 2023 global greenhouse gas emissions remain at record-high levels. Back in 2021 at COP26, the UK’s chief scientist said “changes in behaviour are needed to tackle the climate crisis”, but how do we connect hearts and minds to bring this behaviour change about?

Dr Carla Benzan, who is co-leading The Open University’s Open Societal Challenge Art and Ecology project and specialises in History of Art said, “Our way out of our current crisis requires not just technological solutions, but a wholescale shift in the way people think about environmental issues.”

Art and Ecology

The Art and Ecology project sets out to change the way that people understand today’s ecological crisis through the art and visual cultures of the past. The project responds to the current need to transform public attitudes to the climate emergency, moving away from complacency and pessimism towards curiosity and active engagement – something which is crucial to stem our current greenhouse gas emissions.

The project aims to disprove the incorrectly held view that the Arts and Humanities are fundamentally separated from scientific knowledge, and that only the science holds solutions to environmental crisis. Although science provides the tools that are needed to address the climate crisis, without adoption little will change. Art is a powerful tool to engage individuals, communities, and organisations on emotive topics – such as pollution, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather and climate refugees, all caused by the climate crisis.

Objects and images have the power to change the way people perceive the world. Museums across the UK, hold an incredible amount of material through which to tell stories about the ecological crisis. What is currently missing are the people to highlight the relevant connections, create the resources, and take the conversation to as many people as possible. Art and Ecology is collaborating with museums across the four Nations of the UK that span art, natural history, science, and technology. Working with these museums, and the range of objects within them, offers a means of engaging interdisciplinary conversations about crucial topics such as climate breakdown, sustainability, urban growth, human-animal relations, and biodiversity.

Promoting and supporting conversations

Art and Ecology will create a range of resources to promote and support these conversations, including an Art and Ecology Film Series of 12 short films drawing on the research of OU academics across disciplinaries and nations; an open-access resource hub online platform where educators and museum professionals will be able to access a comprehensive suite of resource packages; and an Art and Ecology exhibition that brings together the art and scientific objects and artifacts that feature in the film series

This collection will be further supported by Continuing Professional Development workshops with teachers and museum professionals, creative activity stalls at Science Festivals; and social media campaigns to shift the way that people understand and approach climate crisis. The project then has an ambitious aim to create global connections that allow the collections in the Four Nations of the UK to connect with partners in the global South, expanding the range of topics covered by new films.

Dr Samuel Shaw, co-lead for the project and specialist in History of Art, said, “We have successfully led the production of the first two films through planning, devising and implementation. In 2021 we established the network Open Ecologies, an Open University (OU)-based group of interdisciplinary researchers working on ecological subjects. The membership of Open Ecologies is drawn from across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. This is an exciting project that marries science and art. We have an active network of external collaborators outside of the OU and have developed strong working relationships with Art UK, various museums across the Four Nations, and with charities including the RSPB. This, and the broad reach of the OU as an institution, puts us in an excellent position to take up this societal challenge, and to create long-term change in the way people understand both art and ecology.”

Watch the video to hear more about what Dr Shaw has to say about this project:

Show transcript

I’m Sam Shaw and I am an Art Historian and I have a real interest in the intersections between art history and the natural sciences.

I'm especially interested in the interdisciplinarity of museum collections.

So public collections across the four Nations, the United Kingdom.

They have scientific equipment, they have paintings, they have taxidermy specimens.

These are often put in slightly different departments in the museum. Here at the OU.

I'm running a project called Art and Ecology, which is about bringing these objects from different collections together to have a conversation about the environmental crisis.

Art and visual culture has a huge role to play in communicating information about the climate crisis.

For many reasons.

One firstly is it's a kind of creative and enjoyable way into quite difficult and dark subject matter.

And I think sometimes young people find the debate around the climate crisis very kind of depressing, also very full of sort of data and quite complex data.

So using art and visual culture is a kind of way into that that's maybe not so obvious, a little bit unexpected, a little bit of a sort of different pathway in.

So you say rather than dealing with this depressing subject, let's start by talking about this painting of a Polar Bear and then you get the conversation started and then you can slowly move into the more difficult territory.

But it's about kind of getting people there gradually rather than hitting them over the head with the depressing data right from the start.

So what our project Art and Ecology is about is not creating new technologies but trying to change mindsets.

And this is where art is a really powerful tool.

We know that art can change the way that people think about a problem.

So by getting people to look at, for instance, landscape painting is a way into getting them to think about kind of landscape and sustainability.

What something like the Industrial Revolution did to the landscape in this country?

So it's a kind of a way into the topic that's maybe a little bit more creative and innovative.

We've made some films as part of this project and we launched in by a pedal powered cinema, and there's two reasons we did this.

First is that I find that when academics are thinking about sustainability, they're not always behaving in a sustainable way as well.

So we thought it's really important to really wrap sustainability into how we're doing things as well as kind of the theme of what we're doing.

So producing films that would be launched by a bike powered cinema is a way of doing this.

It's also a way of making what we're doing that a little bit more fun.

So what we're doing when we go to these launches is we're finding people who like cycling come and jump on a bike and then suddenly they're watching a film about art and ecology and they get into that.

But that's not why they came to our store.

They came to our store because they like cycling.

So again, it's about creating different pathways in and trying to kind of grab people and get them to see something or to do something a little bit unexpected.

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Art and attitudes to the climate crisis

Art and Ecology

Promoting and supporting conversations

Watch the video to hear more about what Dr Shaw has to say about this project:

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