This is our Spring newsletter, one of our quarterly newsletters planned around the solstices and equinoxes of the year. This year’s equinox took us a bit by surprise at Climate Museum UK, and our usual Spring newsletter has sprung a little later than usual as a result.
As the days and nights grow more equal in length and Mayday approaches, we feel this is a good moment to remember the importance of equality in the struggles we face as part of the Earth crisis. As a collective of practitioners, we aim to raise awareness of social justice issues as well as environmental concerns in our work.
Below are some of the projects we are launching that address not just the Earth crisis, but also the social, political and economic currents that helped to create it. Through these projects, we hope to explore and imagine new possibilities and ways of doing things to create a better future together.
Make Climate History
Our aim with Make Climate History is to help people come together to make a history of climate change so that more people understand how the climate was disrupted by the burning of fossil fuels and vast damage to land and nature. We also want to make climate disruption a thing of the past, which is helped by understanding the historical and political dynamics that have prevented positive change and how we can overcome these.
Read more about the pilot of this project in Norwich (and Bromley), and how we want to take it forward
Reimagine the City
We’re helping to organise and take part in a Culture Declares assembly in Norwich.
This will be a lively workshop led by artists invites people from across the social, environmental and cultural sectors to generate ideas for how we can learn, work, eat and be well in the future. Bringing the key principle of Doughnut Economics – building a social foundation for everyone in ways that don’t harm the environment – there will be five imagination stations each led by a local artist or creative organisation.
We are running one about the future of learning. What are the capacities people will need in the Earth crisis and how will learning systems need to change? Find out more here
Wild World
We’re excited to be working with the South Downs National Park on our Wild World programme with three strands, engaging museums & heritage staff, teachers and young people.
For museums & heritage staff, we’ve offered two creative training sessions, exploring how we might put an Eco Lens on Place. One was in-person at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, and the other online.
We regularly run training sessions putting an Eco Lens on Collections. These sessions have an added dimension of thinking about places in terms of how people have interacted with nature over history, and how the Earth crisis will affect our relationship to places in future.
Eco Young and Engaged Conference
And for young people, Kevin Davidson, Bridget McKenzie and Lucy Carruthers are collaborating to provide resources for an Eco Young and Engaged Conference, a fantastic event which gathers over 200 primary and secondary school children in East Sussex to discuss how they can take action in the local communities over ecological issues.
Extreme Weather Stories
What does it feel like to arrive on Earth at the end of a 3000-year trajectory? ‘Pink Waves and Purple Sandpipers’ is a visual essay straight from the North East coast from CMUK member Justine Boussard. A tale of love and loss for bird lovers.
Please get in touch if you would like to publish an Extreme Weather Story on our Medium platform. We are open to all formats and approaches, in words and images, about emotions, lived experiences and opinions about changing and disrupted weather.
News from our Associates around the Country
North East-based member Justine Boussard has designed and delivered a couple of mini Amateur Ancestor Tours of the Great North Museum: Hancock for secondary school students in Newcastle. We travelled through the Holocene and into deep time, explored multigenerational stewardship with the Haudenosaunee, and considered the traces we leave behind. Pictured are drawings made by the students to represent “time” before and after the session, and they speak for themselves!
Wise Ram Theatre’s Staging the Climate Crisis workshops
Interested in finding out more about making theatre about the climate crisis? Our monthly sessions explore the different aspects of creativity and the climate crisis, everything from writing characters to getting funding.
Our workshops are suitable for people working in theatre and the creative arts, as well as people who enjoy creativity as a hobby, students, climate activists, and anyone else who is interested in exploring climate change through theatre.
The workshops are free/pay-what-you-can and take place at the Glitch bar in Waterloo, London.
Find out more and book here
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