A creative attitude is vital to generate critical thinking for environmental management

CIWEM believes a creative attitude is vital to generate critical thinking for environmental management and welcomes the new opportunity this provides to challenge and refine our perceptions, awaken our sensibilities and renew our relationship with the environment.

The arts can help us to understand the environmental problems facing the world by informing, inspiring and showing how things can be changed. CIWEM sees synergy between arts and environment agendas as a crucial enrichment of society's responses to the technological, ecological, cultural and moral challenges of the twenty first century, and as an enrichment of people’s lives.

CIWEM’s commitment to the arts and the environment agenda started in 2007 and is now driven by its Arts and Environment Network (AEN). The AEN includes representatives from the Arts Council England, RSA’s Arts and Ecology, Manchester Metropolitan University, the Environment Agency and engineering consultancies WSP and Arup.

Andrew Nairne, Executive Director Arts Strategy, Arts Council England, says in support of CIWEM’s Arts and Environment initiative: "Artists find unique ways of getting us to think about difficult issues. The best art asks questions, helps us understand and maybe inspire a solution. And there are no greater challenges than the environmental issues our world is facing, nothing more fundamentally important than the water we drink. That's why the Arts Council is delighted to be a part of this partnership, to encourage science and the arts to work together to find creative solutions to those challenges."

In a recently published Policy Position Statement, the AEN advocates the engagement of arts practitioners in environmental solution-finding so that art and artists become an assumed component of multidisciplinary approaches to environmental solutions, on a par with other disciplines. CIWEM also wishes to raise the profile of environmental artists; lead national policy dialogues on the subject; build strong alliances for an increasingly shared agenda and nurture new ways of thinking.

The Institution believes that the interdependence of natural, socioeconomic and cultural values and processes needs to be better recognised by taking a “whole systems” approach; and that it is possible and necessary to link skills and insights in better ways across different disciplines in the arts, education, science, technology and management. Combining the best of intuitive, improvisational and non-linear approaches with the methods of science and technology will enrich diversity of thought and action in positive ways.

Dave Pritchard, Chair of CIWEM’s Arts and Environment Network, says: “The arts help us understand, plan and manage environmental challenges effectively. CIWEM believes that it is time to see issues of creativity and environmental management as less narrowly bounded by the definition of specialist disciplines, and to make better connections between agendas on arts and on environment. By putting more creativity at the heart of environmental policy and action, we expect that sustainable environmental management, individual self-expression and community cultural vibrancy will become much more mutually reinforcing.”

Related categories:  Climate change and global warming 

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