Title artwork: Yes, our ancestors deliberated but...
Art and Deliberation: Degrowth through the lens of the Climate and Ecology Blueprint
Vanessa (Nessy) Haines-Matos
GERMANY
PCAF grantee Nessy is a Nature-based Solutions researcher and doctoral student at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn, Germany. Nessy’s project in collaboration with anthropologist and activist, Dr Jasmin Immonen, will use art, alongside science, to engage the public in her Climate-Ecology Emergency Blueprint initiative. The 'Blueprint' is a ''model law'' proposal providing countries of the Global North with an adaptive climate-nature legislation framework to address climate and ecological injustice. At a series of creative workshops participants will be invited to learn about the 'Blueprint'‘s climate-nature aims through illustrative art and the written word, they will then contribute their own ideas which will be translated by Nessy into a single body of work.
Read more about Nessy’s project though her own words and illustrative artwork below.
Through the medium of both art and words, presenting the concept of the ‘Blueprint’: a potential piece of groundbreaking legislation, advocating principles to safeguard against greenwash, filibuster and climate-ecology injustices, the framework from which to generate ideas for the strategy/action plan of how citizens would wish their Government to contribute their fair share, in stewarding the world from the Anthropocene back home to the Holocene epoch.
This ‘Blueprint’ - derived and adapted from the UK Climate & Ecology Bill - creates a benchmark standard and framework for a potential piece of synergistic climate-nature legislation for countries of the Global North. The Blueprint’s objectives and ethical benchmarks act effectively as a form of legal obligations that the legislature in any given Global North country could opt to adopt, in order to address/ recompense for the latter’s disproportionately over-sized carbon and ecological historic and current footprint, relative to that of countries in the Global South.
These climate-ecology objectives apply to a country’s full cycle of material consumption, whether production of goods and services that deplete the Earth’s resources and cause pollution have been undertaken within that country’s territory or outsourced to another country.
We need to recognise that the Climate-Nature Emergency is a human-induced phenomenon that derives from a particular way of treating the Earth’s ecosystems and its flora and fauna, through unbridled exploitation of the biosphere and societal over-consumption. We also acknowledge that societal consumption is inequitably divided.
The Blueprint stipulates principles that ensure that speculative, unproven tech fixes and the type of unbridled ‘green growth’ that perpetuates unsustainable demands of energy, polluting extractivism and the fallout of accumulative waste along supply chains, are minimised if not avoided. A post-growth/degrowth paradigm is therefore up for discussion.
Participants in this creative workshop are invited to attend to a series of images and prose, in a moment of quiet contemplation, to learn about the principles of the Blueprint and then to partake in informal deliberation; to generate ideas of how the Blueprint should manifest in practice. Thus, to imagine an alternative political destiny; a secure future for our global kith and kin and Mother Earth, decoupled from the measures of GDP.
Following this exhibition, participants will be invited to contribute their own written (and anonymous, where preferred) vision of a model of 'Post-growth' and the realisation of what a valuable and meaningful life constitutes within the backdrop of the ‘Blueprint’.
The Naked Truth Hides No Longer
Imagining Chlorophyll
Time for some Earthly humility among the human species
©Vincen/Nature Advisor