Artists of all stripes from around the world are reducing their carbon footprint in creative ways. Many prominent ones – including the Cirque de Soleil’s Gil Favreau – are coming to 91��ɫ this month to share how at a conference on sustainability and the arts.

Hosted by 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Fine Arts, will bring together more than 100 presenters from all corners of the globe April 20 to 22. They will discuss the challenges of creating environmentally sustainable arts practice and performance. And they will tackle the question of sustainability from two vantage points: cultural and ecological.

Keynote presenters will share practical measures and radical rethinking about sustainability:

David Buckland, founding director of , London

• Artists, Scientists and the Environment: For nearly a decade, Cape Farewell has been in the vanguard of an impetus to rethink climate change as an opportunity for cultural reorientation. Buckland illuminates how scientists and the creative community have joined forces to envision and work towards delivering a sustainable future.

Above: Michael J. Morris, Theresa May, Ian Garrett, David Buckland

Gil Favreau, director of social action and responsibility,

• Cirque du Soleil: Creator, Performer and Citizen: In 2006 Cirque du Soleil adopted a proactive environmental policy based on sustainable development. Under Favreau’s direction, new initiatives aimed at reducing the company’s ecological footprint continue to be launched with Cirque du Soleil’s inimitable creativity.

Ian Garrett, executive director of , Los Angeles

• The Performing Arts and their Carbon Footprint: Shows can live long lives: The Phantom of the Opera became the longest-running Broadway musical at its 7,486th performance in 2006. But of 14,000 non-profit productions in the US that year, the average ran for less than 13 performances. While rapid creation and disposal are at odds with sustainability, this cycle is also an opportunity to reinvent the process and redefine theatrical production. Garrett explores available resources and best practices to enable more conscious choices while maintaining artistic excellence.

Theresa May, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Oregon; artistic director of

• "This Is My Neighborhood!" – Community Identity, Ecology and Performance: In two indigenous performances, May explores how local identities and economies are linked to global challenges, and how global ecological issues are etched in the lives of people and the land they call home.
  

Above: Catriona Sandilands, Colette Urban, Gil Favreau and Katherine Knight

Catriona Sandilands, Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Environmental Studies; and Michael J. Morris, choreographer and ecosexuality scholar at Ohio State University

• Eco Homo? Queering Bodies, Queering Sustainability: This textual/choreographic conversation/dance takes aim at assumed understandings of the human body in popular and policy discourses of sustainability. It presents an imaginative-performative “taking in and taking on” of the other, as opposed to a version of sustainability built on corporeal closure and defence.

Performance artist Colette Urban and filmmaker Katherine Knight

• : Directed by Katherine Knight, this film explores art and place, presenting Colette Urban's enigmatic art performances set against the rugged beauty of rural Newfoundland. It received special mention at the 2010 Ecofilm Festival in Rhodos, Greece.

More than 20 panels will explore topics such as the sustaining, imaginative and parasitic potential of the ruins of human habitation; the ecological ethics of John Cage’s chance music; Max Goldfarb’s Deep Cycle art installation; Basia Irland’s river restoration art actions; and sound-walking.

Other highlights include practical workshops on sustainable stage production practices and technologies, and staged readings of two plays: Chantal Bilodeau’s trilingual work-in-progress, Sila, weaving together Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic ecological policy; and Jade McCutcheon’s The Elephant’s Graveyard, a consideration of the public and political implications of aging and scientific attempts to cure the "disease" of death.

The conference concludes with a roundtable discussion by leading Greater Toronto Area artists and arts administrators on the role of sustainability and the arts in a major urban centre.

Staging Sustainability is produced and presented by 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Fine Arts with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Registration is $80 to $100; students $20 to $30. For program information and online registration, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The next instalment of the series will be delivered by , a professor in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Environmental Studies and . The lecture will take place Monday, March 21, in 001 Vanier College from 6 to 7pm.

Sandilands is the author of numerous publications in environmental literature, history and cultural studies, including writings on national parts, queer and feminist ecologies, ecocriticism and environmental public cultures.

Sandilands' lecture, titled "A State of Nature? National Parks and Canadian National Identity", places a different kind of lens on Canada's national parks. Anyone who has ever visited one and wondered why there are so many rules, trails and signs in the "wilderness" should consider coming to this free public lecture.

Above: Cate Sandilands and the unnatural signage in the Bruce Peninsula National Park

"Canadian national parks are often referred to as 'national treasures', part of a public understanding of heritage that view them as a sort of repository of the essence of Canada. In this view, parks 'preserve' a nature that is the origin of the nation, a key part of our collective identity as Canadians," says Sandilands.

"In fact, national parks are deeply political creations. They 'organize' nature in specific ways, and have served a variety of economic and other agendas since the first Canadian national park – Rocky Mountains Park, now Banff – was established in 1887," she says.

"This presentation will consider the politics of national parks over the last 125 years, with a particular focus on the dynamics of 'national natures' as they are a part of different economic, political and ideological trajectories for Canadian identity," says Sandilands. "Thinking about parks solely as sites of preservation obscures a far more interesting history."

The Canada Like You’ve Never Heard it Before Lecture Series series showcases the breadth and depth of Canadian scholarship and research at 91��ɫ. The series was organized by Jon Sufrin, coordinator of the Canadian Studies Program. This academic year, several senior faculty and two Canada Research Chairs have delivered presentations.

Sponsors of the series include: the Dean's Office, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; Stong College; Vanier College; Winters College; New College; Calumet College; Founders College; Students for Canadian Studies; and the Canadian Studies Program.

For upcoming lectures and speaker bios, visit the Canada Like You’ve Never Heard it Before Lecture Series website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Much of what informs environmental thinking springs from a view that equates nature with sexually straight and queer with unnatural. The editors of a new book , turn those notions upside down.

Co-editors Bruce Erickson (PhD 09’) and 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Catriona Sandilands, Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture, wanted to challenge the current thinking about what is considered sexually “normal” in nature and how nature is used to create normative sexualities. To do so, they gathered a group of mainly senior scholars who’d done work close to the intersection of sexuality studies and environmental studies in research areas such as queer geography, eco-feminism, environmental justice and gender and sexuality studies.

The result is a book that looks at three broad topics – “Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality”, “Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics” and “Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments” – with contributors from literary studies, landscape ecology, geography, science studies, history, philosophy, sociology and women’s studies, including leading researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Erickson, who studied with Sandilands and is now a post-doctoral fellow in environmental history at Nipissing University, says part of the reason for Queer Ecologies was to explore the connection between environmentalism and discourses of homosexuality. “The birth of modern environmentalism and the birth of modern understandings of homosexuality and queerness came about at the same time through very similar actors and so we wanted to think about that a little bit more and see how those connections are actually a lot more deeply ingrained than simply being a kind of accidental event,” says Erickson.

Queer Ecologies asks contemporary environmental thinkers and activists to consider how their practices and assumptions about nature are located in homophobic and heterosexist perspectives, and to ask the queer communities to engage in more ecological discourse and action, says Mortimer-Sandilands. “It’s important to make nature and environmental issues part of a more robust queer platform. It’s not just about achieving equality in an ecologically disastrous world. It’s also about thinking about the interrelationship between sexual resistances and environmental justice, for example.”

Left: Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson

There are several historical connections between sexual and environmental politics, says Sandilands, author of .

“First, species, race and population were all hotly contested concepts in the late-19th and early-20th centuries; these debates influenced emerging understandings of both ecology and sexuality, which also influenced each other. Second, large-scale industrialization and urbanization both created new spaces in which new sexual cultures could thrive, and also contributed to larger social anxieties about hygiene, degeneracy and what was considered an 'effeminization' of white national virility. Out of these processes arose both modern understandings of sexuality and gender and modern institutions of nature conservation, most notably national parks.”

With these historical connections, it is important to understand that the modern environmental movement has sexual origins, and also that sexual politics have embedded understandings of nature and environment, she says. “In addition, political resistances to dominant sex/nature categories also have a history: from Radclyffe Hall’s literary defence of gender inversion to Oscar Wilde’s refusal of ‘natural authenticity’ to the Radical Faeries to the Lesbian National Parks & Services. It's a fascinating history.”

As a result, Queer Ecologies includes essays on both the “historical links between sex and nature and on more contemporary issues, such as the current popular fascination with the sexuality of animals, conflicts about public sex in designated nature areas, heterosexual panic in anti-toxics activism, population and development politics, and resistances by the queer communities to all of the above in art, literature and politics,” says Sandilands.

Erickson’s essay takes issue with the iconic nature of the canoe. “My starting point for the essay is Pierre Berton’s comment that a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe. I try to trace back this national feeling through these very normative ideas of heterosexuality and how the assumption by those that take up Berton’s statement as being such an interesting and witty way of understanding Canada reify a kind of heterosexist image of the nation.” He also looks at the politics of colonialism that have allowed the canoe to become a symbol of the nation.

Sandilands turns her gaze to two authors, Jan Zita Grover and Derek Jarman, and how they responded politically and with dignity to the massive losses brought about by AIDS, and how they offer a model for thinking intelligently about the daily losses that are part of the environmental crisis. Too often environmental loss becomes tourism. Everyone runs out to see the natural wonder before it’s gone.

“But that approach is part of the problem, ethically and politically, we can't just ‘move on’ to other natures, and some of the approaches to loss and memory explored in the massive artistic and literary response to AIDS are very instructive to help us think about the consequences of what we are losing environmentally,” she says.

The book came about through a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada grant Sandilands received related to her work as Canada Research Chair, which included funds for a workshop which inaugurated the Queer Ecologies project.

Sandilands' next book, This Is For You: Walks with Jane Rule (UBC Press), is forthcoming.

Queer Ecologies was published last week; a launch will take place in the fall.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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For one thing, those most heavily engaged in environmentalism have become significantly younger – from middle-aged mothers with higher incomes and education in the ’90s, to adolescents and university students today, Winfield says. And that means increased involvement in an age bracket where traditionally there has been little. “This constituency is very important because it’s a whole new generation that is carrying these values forward.”

It’s in part because of this that Earth Hour has become an international phenomenon since launching in 2007 in Australia.

This year will be another record-setting event for organizers, as 1,100 cities in 110 countries have signed on to the event – 100 cities and 22 countries more than last year. It’s a testament to how broad-based support has become for the environment, experts say.

So much so that sorting our garbage in several ways has become part of our normal, everyday routine in Canada – an act of “complex social behaviour” that amazes visitors from other countries, Winfield says. “What’s happening with each successive wave is that the environment is becoming more embedded in our public consciousness.”

To knowingly pollute and show little concern for the environment has become a secular sin, Winfield says. As former US vice-president Al Gore preached in An Inconvenient Truth, it has now become a moral imperative to take care of the planet.

You see it in grocery store lineups, where customers with reusable cloth bags are slowly outnumbering those without. It’s a subtle shift, driven by peer pressure. “These values have become so deeply embedded that if you’re not recycling, your neighbours will look down on you,” Winfield says. “Those are very powerful drivers.”

Similarly, while the environment traditionally falls off the radar during economic downturns, polls show it has endured as a priority during the latest recession.

But the current wave of public support doesn’t impress Professor Catriona Sandilands,  Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture in FES. It means little if it doesn’t translate into constructive public policy, she says. “There’s public anxiety over global warming, but the question is, will this mean any long-lasting presence? I’m less optimistic.”

The climate change talks in Copenhagen were a dismal failure, she says, and Canada has been rebuked globally for being an environmental laggard and an obstacle to progress. Moreover, there’s been no movement to curtail the tar sands, which she calls a gargantuan blight on our environmental record.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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