Where Art Meets Ecology

We are a charity that supports artists, creates cultural hubs, runs a public programme of art and ecology events and provokes imagination and action around the potential positive impact human beings can have on biodiversity and ecological resilience.

Our Work

Art

Ecology

Art + Ecology

Sometimes the issues facing the planet and the solutions to tackling them can seem large, overwhelming and impenetrable. Art allows us to build connections, inspire emotion and engage people in a creative and innovative way that can raise awareness and make these issues more accessible.

We are working with artists to explore human beings’ relationship with the living world, to raise awareness around biodiversity loss and the enormous potential of ecological farming to increase biodiversity and ecological resilience.

We also have an objective to support the arts to flourish. Art is an integral part of what makes us human and an expression of who we are, it is not a luxury or something that can be sidelined. We believe that art is a deep expression of our humanity, that supporting and empowering artists and engaging with local communities through art generates a vast ripple effect. The importance of the arts in society should be reflected with the Autonomy of Artists.

We carry out this work in a variety of practical ways including providing artist studios, gallery exhibitions featuring artists focused on ecological issues, running a professional development program for artists, commissioning artworks on key ecological concepts, taking artists on tours of biodiverse farms, holding public lectures and inviting people working in food and ecology to visit our artist studios.

Our Reason for Being

If we are to take the age of the Anthropocene seriously, low ecological impact is not an acceptable aim. If humanity is now the dominant influence on global ecology we must have dramatic positive impact.

Many other human civilisations and many other species create ecological abundance in the process of pursuing their own aims. Why don’t we do this? It is worth considering a few examples.

By hunting deer, wolves create habitats for young trees and bushes and thereby birds and small mammals, supporting the flourishing of the local food web, the soil microbiome and enabling greater availability of water in the process - as the example of Trophic Cascades in Yellowstone National Park show. Beavers cut down trees to eat the cambium and use the wood to build dens and dams for their own homes, slowing down the flow of water and creating small temporary wetlands which are abundant habitats and sources of food for amphibians, water birds, water borne insects, young fish and other small mammals. They also protect against flood and drought further downstream. A short explanation of this is here. These are just two very short examples of common Keystone Species.

There are many examples of human beings who are also beneficial to the ecologies around them. Many forest peoples significantly increase the biodiversity of their local forest area simply by planting and maintaining tree and shrub crops which they like to eat or use for other purposes. In the process of making the desert more hospitable to themselves, desert peoples have designed and engineered oases which have been self-sustaining for thousands of years, providing a life-line of water and food to plants and animals surviving in extremely arid ecologies. In a more modern industrial context, the Loess Plateau Regeneration Project has regenerated a desertified landscape the size of France in less than 15 years using ecologically sound agriculture.

We are at an epic moment of transition in history. The processes our civilisation uses to obtain what we need is causing ecological destruction on a global scale. This cannot continue as the systems that support life on this planet are intimately connected and human life on earth is inseparable from them. We need to reimagine our relationship with the living world and transform our way of being so that our civilisation creates abundance of life rather than mass extinction.

Proposition exists to provoke reimagination and action around the potential positive impact that our civilisation can have on biodiversity and ecological resilience. We work with artists, agroecologists, ecologists, material scientists, architects, designers, urban planners and people whose way of life is in harmony with their ecology to develop understanding of the potential for positive impact, reimagine our future and cataylse action.

Why do we Focus on Food?

Food is a fulcrum for human being’s relationship with the natural world. How human beings obtain food is a defining characteristic of their civilisation.

In the past 50 years there has been a meteoric decline in life on earth. Vertebrates have declined by 60%, marine species breeding biomass have declined by 65% & a 27 year study in Germany recorded a 75% decline in insect biomass. On our current trajectory more of the world will become uninhabitable in the near future due to rising sea levels & increasing temperatures. We must change this direction.

Food is at the very heart of these problems. The number one reason for the decline of land species is habitat loss, and of this, Agriculture is the number one cause. Industrial fishing is one of the lead causes of decline in marine life. Agricultural chemicals & monoculture farming are having a devastating impact on insect populations. Food globally has the largest greenhouse gas emissions of any sector, once agriculture (especially flooding rice paddies, fertilizer manufacturing, methane emissions from livestock, poor cultivation practices and petrol farm machinery), industrial fishing and distribution is combined with storage, packaging, processing and cooking. Our civilisations’ dominant form of obtaining food results in not only the largest proportion of pollution, it is also responsible for monumental decline in the biosphere’s ability to sequester carbon.

Thousands of farmers across the world are demonstrating there are many other ways of producing food that increase biodiversity & ecological resilience while providing for human needs. Cutting edge science is being combined with traditional practice to create methods of farming that can be applied systematically to create ecological abundance in all climatic regions of the world. Yet this Agroecology is being done in almost total obscurity, with very little press attention and virtually no public consciousness of its potential for global transformation. These pioneers have a message about the potential future of humanity, this message Proposition are working to deliver.