My conversation with Julie's Bicycle CEO Alison Tickell on art and climate change
- Art can speak to people in meaningful ways that really does call on us to respond to this differently. So wherever you are, anywhere in the world, you will almost certainly have some kind of creative cultural allegiance and how do we use that in a purposeful way is a critical question for us all…
alison tickell, conscient podcast, october 2019, ottawa
Meet UK musician and climate change activist and CEO of Julie’s Bicycle Alison Tickell.
Alison is a colleague and friend who I first met at the National Arts Centre’s Summit on Theatre and Climate Change in April 2019.
She is CEO of Julie’s Bicycle, a UK based charity that supports the creative community to act on climate change and environmental sustainability. Julie’s Bicycle believes that the creative community is uniquely placed to transform the conversation around climate change and translate it into action.
I had the pleasure of going for a walking interview with Alison on parliament hill in Ottawa on October 26, 2019.
I asked Alison how the arts contribute to environmental awareness, about the relationship between art and the public and the work of Julie’s Bicycle. We then got into a philosophical conversation about art, life, Buddhism and many other things as we descended the stairway from Parliament Hill to the shore of the Ottawa river...
[00:00:00] Alison Tickell
The arts do offer something quite unique and something that really has not been noticed enough around here. We pass lots of building work. Something that really hasn't been focused on, I don't think, as part of the processes of what it is to be human. Because the arts, in a very generous sense, I use that term generously. The arts and many tributaries of the arts and I include in that fashion, design, film, really do speak to us in a different way. There's an aesthetic realm that they occupy and there's also a lifestyle and taste making realm that they occupy. And they do go to the heart of what it is to identify oneself both in a community or an identity, cultural context, but also that much deeper sense of meaning that we experience so often in the arts that you just don't experience in most other practices.
[00:01:17] Claude Schryer
Well, I guess the second part of my inquiry is how. What change happens as a result of the point of contact between art and the public. So what impact, how does it change an individual? You sort of alluded to that. Could you talk a bit more about some of the things that you've seen that have been impactful and what kind of actions come out of. I mean, some art is action oriented and obviously that's the goal, community engaged and so on. But there's so many different art practices and they have different effects on the public, short term, long term.
But I'm interested in having your thoughts about that.
[00:01:56] Alison Tickell
Yeah, so I think on one level there's an emotional response and that emotional response that art is able to unlock and allow us to inhabit is very difficult in other spheres. And that, you know, often it manifests as grief and loss and a palpable sense that of a deep compassion and empathy with, often with the natural world and a sense that. That we're losing something that is actually not just precious to us, but is actually deeply part of us. So there's, you know, art. This is why I'm. For me, music and spoken word are the two kind of areas that. And sometimes visual arts can unlock that experience of what it is to be a sensate being along with the rest of the beings with which we share the planet.
There is a sort of real urgency to experience that because it makes. Connects us. And I think we long for connection and I think we long for a connection with this particular theme. And very few realms do that, and particularly very few realms do that. Magnificent view. I'm suddenly confronted with huge.
[00:03:26] Claude Schryer
This was part of the idea of doing this.
[00:03:28] Alison Tickell
Fans of water and the colors of.
[00:03:30] Claude Schryer
Autumn see over there is The Museum of History that was initially called Museum of Civilization, that Douglas Cardinal, indigenous architect, designed in the 80s. And then over here is the Supreme Court. And so we're looking over the Ottawa river, and so on the other side is Quebec, and here is Ontario.
[00:03:46] Alison Tickell
I love the way that over in the court you've got these spikes, and over here you've got these domes, the four domes and the completely different. It's an incredible space of a lone canoe in the middle of the water. It's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. But I think converting that also. The other thing about the arts is that we also, because we are so interesting, the Homo sapiens, is so interesting in terms of taste and culture and how we locate ourselves within types, you know, not just our broad national culture, but also how incredibly diverse that is and how subtle our community building and gathering is the signifiers that we choose in order to both locate ourselves, but also locate ourselves to others in the world. And there's a huge opportunity there for. And it's an opportunity that people are taking up with great enthusiasm for expressing the outrage, the bewilderment, the anger, the call for action, the urgency, you know, both to one another, but also to the wider world on this.
And what's been fascinating for me is that you've always had nature as muse, as I said earlier, but actually, how you convert that now, and as I said, I'm not a. I'm not remotely squeamish about instrumentalism. How you convert that into a call to action, however that is manifest, is a question, I think, that is absolutely central to the creative community and is actually being taken up because art can speak to people in meaningful ways that really does call on us to respond to this differently. So wherever you are, anywhere in the world, you will almost certainly have some kind of creative cultural allegiance. And how do we use that to. In a purposeful way, is a critical question now for us all. So JB Was set up really to answer that question, Claude, and to say, what is the best thing that we can do in order to support that A.
In order to respond in appropriate way to climate, to the climate crisis. And there's a very material part of that which is about absolutely doing everything we can to reduce our material impacts because they matter so much. But the second and the second part, I don't want to create a false binary. Look at this lovely, lovely stairway. Beautiful.
[00:06:58] Claude Schryer
And it's wood. So you will hear the sound of our steps quite clearly.
[00:07:04] Alison Tickell
But the idea really is that if we can work, if we can embody the values that we hold as a community, which are about caring for our planet, which are about a sort of almost Hippocratic principle of do no harm, that actually that will translate into content and into the work of artists wherever they are, because the context in which they're working will be reinforcing their values, their self expression, their community expression. And that actually that's what we needed to do. So 12 years ago, when we set up, we set up very counterintuitively, actually. We've been asked a lot why we did it this way around, which was to really explore, to really explore what this looked like on all dimensions of arts practice, arts and cultural practice.
And that's what we've been doing. So just literally finding out what our environmental impacts are and driving change on that. And actually what's been really lovely is that particularly over the last morning, couple of years, we've seen this real flowering of creative expression. And I'm not saying that it's down to us at all. I think we've just been a part of this movement. But it has given people a lot of confidence and it has changed a lot of practice. So I actually think it's a really damaging false binary to say that practice, cultural practice, is different to creative content.
I think it's quite dangerous because what it means is that once again, you're creating these false oppositions around creativity. It's extremely creative to rethink your practice. And many great practitioners like Paulie Constable and Dhonielle Wuerl, Tanya Beer, are really exploring creative practice, looking at constraints, production and creative constraints through a lens of environmental care. So it offers this wonderful opportunity to rethink how we work. It also creates divisions between the sort of production idea, which is very mechanistic, and the sort of neuroticism that we apply to our artists. We put them on pedestals, which is very unfair, particularly when they have something to say around an issue. Because often that can be quite a risky place to be.
And we, you know, it's a way of making art, the idea of art kind of precious. And actually it's not precious, it's like everything, it's deeply a part of ourselves. And I think that idea of art as being very precious has had a lot to do with how art has become kind of very exclusive, very elite in lots of places, unrecognized where it's happening. So we just, you know, we need to sort of ground art and artists, our practice and how we perceive. I mean, I'm a great supporter of bad art. I really am, you know, this, this squeamishness that so many people have had in the realm of climate art because, oh, we don't want to have a bad play or we don't want to have a bad work. There's bad everything.
And when, you know, as we bad to me, bad, not bad to somebody else, all of this is part of this kind of making art very exclusive. And as we explore what needs to be a completely new cultural practice, and that's what's so exciting about it. Very creative. There will always be stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work, and that's fine. You know, we just need to encourage the work and not worry that it's not going to be, you know, the equivalent of a Chekhov play. The climate crisis is calling us to. Is calling on us to re examine how we got here.
And of course, lots of people have been in this space around social justice for many, many years. But this one really does require a deep, long look at the sort of moment of that conversion from hunter gathering right through that sort of, that incredible story of human history which landed perhaps inevitably into the Industrial revolution and into colonialism and imperialism and into the profound inequities that we have today. And one of the, perhaps the biggest and unexplored inequity is not around people, it's around the natural world. I personally think that the way that we treat animals is going to become recognized as the most horrific genocide that is just breathtaking in not too long a period of time. And there is an awakening going on about how we treat everything that isn't human, but that is indeed, as we know, increasingly sensate. And it's. So these are difficult questions because they're asking us to bring a degree of empathy and compassion to not just one another and to one another's histories, but also to a wider frame.
And it's jolly hard, but. And again, this is where art is. It can take us, it can steward us through all sorts of different routes into a different relationship to our past, our present and what we want our future to look like and be. But it's not easy.
[00:13:40] Claude Schryer
It's not easy and it's also difficult to, to change. Right? We're very comfortable. But what I like about your work and similar, and I would call you a cultural worker or activist or visionary really, because you have a vision of how we can move into a positive space, a happy, comfortable. I use that word because it's not that difficult to be comfortable. It is in many parts of the world, but that's what we want for every human being, is to be comfortable and to be happy. But. But you don't have to have this crazy material.
Absolutely no over consumption. Lack of awareness. And if people were more aware of the impact of their behavior, and I mean truly aware, like taking a plane and just being aware of the impact that that has or the impact that construction has on ecosystems and all of that, there is an awakening. And I'm like many people, discouraged by the state of the world. You know, I shared with you my article, Terrified Awakening. And that was a very interesting time for me because for three days I woke up. I mean, I'm a Zen practitioner, I'm trying to wake up anyway, but I woke up to the feeling of truly acknowledging what's happening to us as opposed to being in denial and being in a bubble.
It's hard to do, but once you're there, you go, okay, well, what am I going to do about it? What do I do?
Well, who do I. And regardless of your age, you just take yourself and take control of your life and your abilities and you apply them to addressing what essentially is our generation problem. Right.
[00:15:30] Alison Tickell
It's so fast. It's happened in the last 50 years, really.
[00:15:33] Claude Schryer
And that's our lifetime. Right.
[00:15:34] Alison Tickell
So there is. There's a kind of inevitable. Well, it's not inevitably, but, you know, you look back at history and you just see how these sort of moments, these values that were built into our myths of who we are, there's a sort of.
But you're right. I mean, I think the other thing is that once you've got. It's a bit like having eaten the apple from the Garden of Eden. Once you're there, you can't sort of spit it out and pretend it doesn't exist. And the sort of ebb and flow of how we occupy those that as human beings doesn't go. And again, this is a. This is where art can be a really.
It can be a place of refuge, actually, because it can change our mood so much or it can allow us to inhabit moods so much more easily.
[00:16:20] Claude Schryer
Or to acknowledge our emotional state.
[00:16:22] Alison Tickell
To acknowledge it. Exactly. And it'll get, you know, sometimes I feel so happy around what's happening in other times, so devastating. And that will never go, you know, that sort of panoply of emotional frames. One of the most. I think one of the most destructive things that we can do is say, right, okay, once you're getting cracking with this, we're not allowed to experience how hard it is again. There was a moment maybe five years ago, and I think a lot of the denial is about this where it's just, you know, we know that grief doesn't motivate people.
Well, do we? Do we really know that? I don't think that's true. I think grief does motivate people. Anger motivates people, and it's making sure that that's channeled in a way that really is useful.
[00:17:12] Claude Schryer
Well, it's certainly an authentic experience. I mean, if you don't go through some kind of grieving, you're not really living your life fully.
[00:17:18] Alison Tickell
Right.
[00:17:18] Claude Schryer
You have to acknowledge that that's reality and that you're. What you're feeling is lost because we are constantly in loss, right? We're gonna die. That's the ultimate loss. And yet as a Buddhist, you know, you think, well, you know, maybe there's a different ways of seeing that. You might have been raised in one culture, but when you connect to something like Buddhism, it changes your worldview. And it certainly helped me understand the importance of being aware and being conscient of, of what's really happening around us and letting some things go.
And then you're more available to what needs to be done because somehow you're not as caught up in stories that are maybe not so important. Well, I think we could go on talking for a while, but there's a. We've come a long way. And now the leaves.
I mean, I'm. I'm going to just do a little sound walking here to end our conversation.
Their leaves are. You see them? Right, there's that yellow one coming up. And if you really stop and pay attention, of course to our left there's the Alexandra Bridge, which is a very noisy, quite beautiful.
It is gorgeous 1900 era bridge. But you can literally see and then hear leaves fall one by one. And it's really quite something just to allow that, to experience that because there's thousands of them up there and they're just coming down one by one, sometimes two at a time. And they fall ever so gently, either on asphalt or on grass. So, thank you for this exchange.
[00:18:58] Alison Tickell
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.