Robert R. Janes
My conversation with archaeologist and former museum director and CEO Robert (Bob) R. Janes (author of Museums and Societal Collapse : The Museum as Lifeboat) and his son, famer and educator Peter Janes (author of Fake Plants Never Die - an eclectic technical instruction manual - Essays on pre-apocalyptic adaptation) at TreeEater Farm and Nursery on Denman Island, September 16, 2024. This episode is condensation of a 90-minute conversation into ‘fifteen’.
Suggested questions and action points
Please see the transcript of this episode for hyperlinks of cited publications and organizations. For more information on season 6 of the conscient podcast see a conscient rethink or listen to it here.
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Story Preview
Can art save us? A former museum director and his son, a regenerative farmer, confront a world on the brink, finding solace and solutions in the land and in rethinking the very purpose of our cultural institutions. It’s a story of hard truths, reluctant hope, and the power of reconnecting with nature.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Call for Truth in Art
01:02 Building an Educational Farm
02:19 Lessons from Indigenous Cultures
04:43 Museums as Lifeboats
06:57 Navigating Hope and Hopelessness
10:21 Regenerative Practices in Agriculture
12:09 Art’s Role in Environmental Advocacy
Featured Quotes
Behind the Story
Robert R. Janes, with nearly five decades in the museum business, reflects on his early archaeological work and a transformative experience living with Dene families near the Arctic Circle. This shaped his understanding of social ecology. His son, Peter, driven by a desire to correct educational inadequacies, established a farm focused on regenerative practices. Together, they offer a vision for a future rooted in sustainability, truth, and a reconnection with the natural world.
Transcription of conscient podcast e209 robert and peter janes – telling the truth through art
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00 - 00:00:40] Robert R. Janes
I think that the first thing artists have to do is to start telling the truth. You know, just like climate change five or six years ago, you just didn't really want to talk about it. You got shunned in polite company if you talked about it. Now we have the C word, right? We've got collapse, but the conversation hasn't started yet. And I think just broadly speaking, the artistic community, the best of the artistic community, has always been on the edge, right? The social edge. Pushing, complaining, challenging, resisting justice. Yeah, but that's, I think that's still a minority of the artistic world, really. I mean, the artistic world, a lot of it is still stuck in this whole notion of elitist collecting and acquisition.
[00:00:41 - 00:00:42] Robert R. Janes
How much money is that worth?
[00:00:42 - 00:01:09] Claude Schryer
And the European canon and yeah, all that.
Episode 209. My conversation with archaeologist and former museum director and CEO Robert R. Janes and his son, farmer and educator Peter Janes : telling the truth.
All right, well, maybe start at the beginning, Peter, and tell us what kind of what this farm does.
[00:01:10 - 00:02:17] Peter Janes
I mean, I came here originally to, as an idealistic, like 23-year-old wanting to build an education center to sort of correct for what I perceived were the inadequacies of my own education. So now it's been 20 years of me sort of self-educating and trying to build a place that could do that and I guess is doing that at this point. But there's a lot of potential, different angles. What it, what it's turned into for me is developing relationships with the things that are here and the things that I've brought here and trying to figure out, like which of those relationships, I guess uses the least amount of energy, I guess you could say, and has the most like, legs as far as being something that people can rely on further into the future, past the era of now, cheap oil, so to speak. So a lot of my work has to do with setting up those systems and those relationships that'll hopefully outlive us and support other people in the future.
[00:02:19 - 00:02:29] Claude Schryer
How did you get into this lifelong interest in environmental issues and museums? How do those two connect and where did it come from?
[00:02:31 - 00:05:17] Robert R. Janes
Yes, that's going back in time because I've been in the museum business now for about 48 years. But I go back to when I started out as an archaeologist and I was doing my field work in the Western Canadian subarctic, studying the cultural history of the Dene people. And I did a lot of field work. But in those days, you know, the Western scientific tradition didn't think that talking to local people about where they knew the archaeological sites were or about their culture was really on. Of course, we were Western scientists, we were senior graduate students. We had all the answer. And I came back after my second season of field work in the bush and realized that that was completely wrong because I was going to be spending five years writing a PhD about the cultural history of the Dene people. And I didn't know any of them personally. So my wife Priscilla and I dropped out of graduate school for half a year. And we spent that time near the Arctic circle living with five traditional hunting families and about 40 people or so, ranging in age from about six months all the way up to about 88 years old. And it's there that I learned the meaning of social ecology, that you can't separate cultural affairs from. From the natural environment, that they're inextricably linked together. But I also learned all sorts of other things that have always stood to me instead as a later a museum director, volunteer author, editor. And that was this notion that stems from the idea of small group culture where you share values and beliefs and leadership is based on respect and competence, not hierarchy. There's a big emphasis on self organization. If somebody can do a certain task better than others and that person is nominally in charge. And there was always that fluidity, no hierarchy. There is a great emphasis on generosity. So that that work with, with indigenous people has stood with me too and has really sort of shaped my career. And I am ended up here now. I think also because I was reading lately that Latin American, this isn't a book. Latin American activists believe that if we need to get anything done, you got to work within the system, you got to work against the system, and you got to work beyond the system. So I'm still very much involved in the museum system as a writer and a speaker, advisor and a mentor and an elder. But I also consider this farm outside the system. As you saw today, this isn't a sort of run of the mill operation. And there are values here and long-term commitments here that I think need to be nurtured so that we do have some more sort of optimistic paths to the future. And I think farms like this, with no industrial input, based on intimate knowledge of the land and growing your own food, are critically important to the survival of our species.
[00:05:17 - 00:05:30] Claude Schryer
I was saying that it's very sensual, bordering on erotic to have such so many fruit that we can eat, you know, the raspberries and pull them off. It seems unreal, like a just like.
[00:05:30 - 00:05:32] Peter Janes
Garden of Eden sort of.
[00:05:32 - 00:05:32] Robert R. Janes
Right?
[00:05:32 - 00:05:57] Claude Schryer
That's what I was going to say. And what does one do in the Garden of Eden? Well, work really hard, keep eating. So how would you encapsulate the intention of the book? I mean, overall, what is your goal, this idea of museums as a lifeboat?
[00:06:01 - 00:08:46] Robert R. Janes
Well, I guess first, I mean, interesting to hear you say that you felt the book was a bit devastating because I have got some comments, gotten some comments, but I had to do that. In the beginning. I worked on about probably 650 references, but I had to set the stage. And if we tell the truth now, setting the stage is a very negative experience because we're in the midst of this huge poly crisis and now four tipping points have already been reached. I mean, two of the Antarctic ice sheets are melting. The Amazon is turning into a carbon producer rather than a carbon sink. And now we have the threat to the North Atlantic Current, which, if it actually transpires and shuts down, western northern Europe will start to experience another ice age. So the signals are just so brazen and loud, but ostensibly ignored by most of our arts and culture colleagues. So I had to lay out that case. But then the second half of the book, I really tried to be constructive. And I think that what I would really like people to do in our business is to ask four questions and answer them. Now, these four questions aren't mine, and you'll recognize these because you listen to Jem Bendahl, the founder of the Deep Adaptation Forum, and he's posed four questions and I think these fit the museum world and the arts world really conveniently. What is worth keeping well in the museum world? Museums are worth keeping because they nurture social capital. They nurture relationships of trust and collegiality and honesty and dependence and interdependence amongst their visitors. That idea of social capital is going to be absolutely key if society begins to unravel. And I think the museums are a major source of that social capital. Also, Museums are seed banks. You know, of all the things we've accomplished as civilization, the good and the bad, and we are going to need intimate knowledge of those seeds as the modern techno industrial society begins to wind down and all our fossil fuel dependencies become unstuck. So those are just two examples of what we need to keep. So what's worth keeping is one of these questions. What must we get rid of? What can we bring back? And I think what we can bring back is starting with asking the question, why? Why are you creating art? Why are you making art? Why does your museum exist? That question of why seldom gets asked. It's always, what are we going to do? Or how are we going to do it? But very few strategic plans in museums actually ask and answer the question of why.
[00:08:46 - 00:09:24] Peter Janes
Yeah, I have like a mixed sort of relationship with that concept of hope because I actually genuinely have very little hope for the continuation of humanity. But then at the same time, every day I'm out here making bigger ponds and planting trees that I think will do better and trying to bring on board people with the same ideas and visions. So it's a bit of a contradiction, I guess. For me it's called life. Yeah. So, yeah, I make a personal effort towards hope, but I don't feel any hope. I guess you could say it's really.
[00:09:24 - 00:10:27] Robert R. Janes
Easy to be hopeless. And I suppose it's rather contradictory to say hopeless, but still want to do things constructively to overcome that hopelessness. And so I guess that's what I mean. There are so many things we can do. I mean, we know what we need to do to weather this storm. But I guess the sacrifice and the suffering it's going to cause is just too much for people's imagination. So there's middle ground with all that. And again, this farm is a source of being helpful and I guess underneath that being hopeful and a source of being. What was the mantra? It's helpless but not hopeless, but not helpless. Yeah. And. And the farm for me is that. Is that tool. It's that environment. It's the context to do helpful things and to pave the way for the future. Well, I wonder how regeneration now figures into permaculture, because that's the latest catch word, right? It's regenerative work.
[00:10:28 - 00:10:32] Peter Janes
Yeah. Could or couldn't, depending on it, but probably usually does.
[00:10:34 - 00:10:38] Claude Schryer
Regenerative being the idea, how is that different from just regular farming?
[00:10:39 - 00:10:51] Robert R. Janes
You're not taking away; you're being conscious of putting in too. Like Beer's been talking about. It's not just an extractive sort of thing. It's developing healthy relationships with the land and the animals and the plants.
[00:10:51 - 00:11:00] Peter Janes
But the regenerative livestock people are all about adding carbon to the soil. I think that's the main thing they're doing, trying to do is increase soil health and carbon holding capacity.
[00:11:00 - 00:13:10] Robert R. Janes
It seems to me there's a growing consensus of opinion that that's going to happen in localized efforts. It may not happen in these big urban environments, but it may happen on a place like Denman Island. It may happen on all these other small collectives, all these small family farms, all these intentional communities. I think that's where the future lies. But it's going to be a hardship because most of the world's people can't participate in those sort of things. Artists, I think, can generally become advocates for the planet in whatever sort of work they're doing. Because I don't think there's any really sort of revolutionary methods or artistic techniques that haven't already been discovered. It's the message that's important now. And that message is telling the truth. And that is we've got to repair this rupture between nature and culture. And artists really are in a key position to do that. Because if you really look at the history of museum work, they've largely failed to do that. In fact, most of the world's 95,000 museums, if they aren't natural history museums and science museums, and even those are committing this mistake. They separate nature and culture. They don't present the interconnectedness; they don't really practice social ecology. And that's been a big failing, right, because that underlies the whole modern techno industrial society that we can treat this forest any way we want to, we can extract whatever we want continuously until it's dead. And again, as I said, if these tipping points all open up and happen, it may be too late. But we still have to keep that optimism, right? As you described, we have to do what we can do now. But it is a wild card. And it's not climate change. I think it's the loss of biodiversity. Because I think the climate crisis is just a symptom of our over consumption and our wastage loss of biodiversity. We don't have to worry about saving the world, the planet. It's our civilization that we need to save. Right? Mother Nature will take care of herself one way or another. She's hurting, but she'll take care of herself. It's you and me that we have to worry about.
[00:13:11 - 00:13:13] Claude Schryer
Oh, you'll attract.
[00:13:25 - 00:13:28] Peter Janes
They're the most pretentious animals ever.
[00:13:28 - 00:13:29] Claude Schryer
The most what?
[00:13:29 - 00:13:31] Peter Janes
Pretentious how?
[00:13:31 - 00:13:32] Claude Schryer
What do they pretend to be?
[00:13:33 - 00:13:34] Peter Janes
They just have a lot of attitude. Attitude.
[00:13:35 - 00:15:13] Robert R. Janes
I feel extremely sad about what's happened and I think, you know, that sadness has really come home to roost because here we are on the farm and we have a new, our fifth grandchild. She's five months old. What is her life going to be like? And that causes me to be sad because our generation, the baby boom generation, has used 50% of the world's resources. So it's pretty hard to deny that responsibility. But I also feel empowered to do constructive things. This farm. And I feel empowered when someone like you comes from the outside, walks through the farm and says, whoa, this looks interesting. This looks good. Tell me more. That's empowering. I think it's empowering for Peter, too, even though he may not express it the way I do. I think we've got to. We have to keep fighting. We have to resist. And that's where the artistic community comes in, because they've often resisted incredible things. I mean, just think of paintings like Picasso's Guernica, right, where he told the world this is what the Nazis did to that city. He resisted and he protested. And I think it's incumbent upon all of us now to assume that responsibility by action, not just walking in a march. And I have that in my book too. The difference between real action and just protesting, we have to do both. But it's an ever-present need now, because the establishment is not listening. They're carrying on with despoiling the planet for personal gain.