In this article Dougald Hine asks, in the context of the Climate & Ecological Emergency (or what our mutual friend Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard calls ‘the Enormity’), what would an Alcoholics Anonymous for a whole culture look like?
I’ve been thinking about how the Cultural sector (as a whole, globally) can collaborate to create something like this AA emergency response and recovery service that Dougald is reaching for. This week I’m heading to Berlin to take part in an expert workshop on Museums Facing Extinction – how museums can hold hands across their global community to tackle the Emergency. We’ve been asked to take a provocation. This is mine:
Museums should focus on ending an Extractivist culture, prefiguring a Regenerative culture and enabling wellbeing in a time of collapse & mass extinction. This is the distinctive role they can play as part of global & local civic coalitions mitigating, adapting to and reducing suffering as the Emergency unfolds.
And, in order to do this, they need a framework. I’ve been working on this since attending the launch of the Climate Heritage Network in Edinburgh last month, which I found really helpful for its inclusion of adaptation and its long-term thinking. It included the framing of culture as victim, cause and solution of the emergency.
It just so happens that my working title for this framework is Analysis and Action – or AA!
It goes like this:
Climate Museum UK 