RATIONALE 1: Fostering environmental stewardship: an anti-colonial environmental rationale

“Environmental stewardship” is traditionally imagined as an ethos for human practices that directly care for, and transformatively interact with, ecological systems that centre nonhuman nature.[1] This might seem to position environmental stewardship as inherently outside of the human-centered theatre and culturally-enclosed performance classroom. However, integrating ecological thinking and reciprocal relationships into cultural and educational spaces is exactly what is called for at this moment of climate crisis.

The transition to a low-carbon world entails a holistic transformation of many of our existing cultural practices. In light of the harsh realities of environmental degradation and climate change, unsustainable conventions of theatrical production—from productions powered by fossil fuels to workshops stacked with chemicals and toxic substances—are rightly being questioned within the industry, and wider systemic changes to granting and funding structures are unfolding even in the absence of cohesive environmental cultural policy in Canada (see Appendix 1).[2] In its 2021-2026 Strategic Plan, “Art, Now More Than Ever,” Canada Council for the Arts projects that artists, collectives, and arts organizations will play “an inspiring, innovative, and exemplary role in our collective development” at the same time as having the means and resources to exercise their “social responsibilities and contribute to mitigating the devastating consequences of climate change.”[3] Here, the benefits of art for society are explicitly linked to the unfolding effects of the nature and climate emergency. Assertions about the inspiring, innovative and exemplary role artists and arts organizations can and must play to face the realities of the climate and nature emergency and embrace alternative ways of being and relating abound (see Appendix 2).

Theatre and performance training programs play a vital role in the transition by seeding ecological thought in the next generation of practitioners, and training them in sustainable and decolonial performance-making processes, as well as demonstrating to publics that a broader cultural shift is underway. Artist-scholars like Tanja Beer and Ian Garrett have made compelling arguments that we must do more than reduce the carbon footprint of a production. Instead, there must be an emphasis on ecologically responsible practices that necessitate deeper, structural changes to uproot the modern/ colonial system in place, make reparations for harms done and demonstrate the commitment to stop colonial extraction. Theatre artists incorporating various eco-efficient and environmentally-sensitive management practices for waste and resources merely minimizes negative impacts amounting to a “business as usual, but greener” paradigm that fails to take into account leading sustainability experts’ contentions that we have already exceeded the earth’s “ecological carrying capacity,” and thus, we are only slowing down degradation.[4] Instead, there must be an emphasis on ecologically responsible practices that necessitate deeper, structural changes to uproot the modern/ colonial system in place, make reparations for harms done and demonstrate the commitment to stop colonial extraction.[5] These practices start with an acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of communities and environments in the making of the work we do. For example, as Beer writes, “[e]coscenography challenges our modern and prevailing individualist focus (a mindset that favours the ‘ego’) to consider the wellbeing of the whole of which we are also part (one that values the ‘eco’).”[6] Fostering environmental stewardship means teaching decision-making rooted in socio-ecological values that value longterm commitments to people and places.

Fostering environmental stewardship will thereby also be understood as a constitutive component of good relationships to land and our responsibility to care for all our relations. It must be envisioned in relation to decolonial frameworks advanced by Indigenous knowledge keepers that underscore the importance of reciprocal relations and interconnectivity.[7] As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd note, “The story we tell ourselves about environmental crises … determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do.”[8] There should be no uncertain terms about the colonial roots of the climate emergency, or that the transformations of the environment and changing climate is the result of the continuation of practices of dispossession, genocide and accumulation-based society that have been at work for the last five hundred plus years. The insights and innovations of Indigenous communities and others disproportionately impacted by the colonial histories must be centered in efforts to chart new paths forward.[9] We would do well to reflect on a question posed by members of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research collective: “what kind of climate education could interrupt the reproduction of colonial futures in response to the climate and nature emergency, and activate a deeper sense of social and ecological responsibility in the present?” This is a vital question in the Canadian context, wherein Canada was eleventh on the 2020 Climate Watch list, and bears geo-political responsibility as a rich G7 nation.[10]

  1. “What is Environmental Stewardship?” Institute for Stewardship of the Natural World, James Madison University, 2024. ↵
  2. Advocacy around what this policy should entail is emerging. The contours of these movements and calls are overviewed in Claude Schryer’s Conscient podcast interview with Anthony Garoufalis-Auger, a climate emergency strategist with an emphasis on arts and culture sector, as well as Garoufalis-Auger’s op-ed, “Canada’s climate policy doesn't change without a cultural transformation,” National Observer, March 7, 2022. In January 2022, Pablo Rodriguez, former Minister of Canadian Heritage, held a National Arts Summit at the National Arts Center on the future of the sector, with representatives advocating for a sustainable recovery from the pandemic and just transition framework be developed for environmental cultural policy. A similar conversation was recorded in fall 2021, at the Gathering Divergence Multi-Arts Festival & Conference, in a panel on National Cultural Policy and Arts in Response to Climate Change featuring Santee Smith, Devon Hardy, and Anthony Garoufalis-Auger, and facilitated by Claude Schryer. Calls for representatives from the cultural sector are also being made at the international climate policy level. ↵
  3. Canada Council for the Arts, “Art, Now More Than Ever: Strategic Plan, 2021-2026,” 14. ↵
  4. Tanja Beer, Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 66; Ian Garrett, “Theatrical Production’s Carbon Footprint,” Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 201-209. ↵
  5. Sharon Stein et al., “Beyond colonial futurities in climate education,” Teaching in Higher Education 28.5 (2023), 988-989. ↵
  6. Beer, 33. ↵
  7. TRAction’s 5-member Indigenous Advisory Council, including Chantal Stormsong Chagnon, Cole Alvis, Sandra Lamouche, Starr Muranko and Jacob Crane, along with its co-directors, Melanie Kloetzel and Kevin Jesuino have produced a “Decolonial Toolkit for Climate Artists.” A few key resources for thinking about working across and between settler and Indigenous communities include Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening, Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Lisa Cooke Ravensburgen, “Five Protocols of Theatrical Indigeneity,” HowlRound Theatre Commons, 2 July 2021; Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti, Towards Braiding (Musagetes, 2019). ↵
  8. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16.4 (2015), p. 764. ↵
  9. On Indigenous leadership in the climate crisis, see Erin O’Donell et al., “Stop burying the lede: the essential role of Indigenous law(s) in creating rights of nature,” Transnational Environmental Law 9.3 (2020), 403-27; Irmelin Gram-Hanssen, Nicole Schafenacker and Julia Bentz, “Decolonizing transformations through ‘right relations,’ Sustainability Science 17 (2021), 673-85; Kyle Whyte, “Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points,” Wires Climate Change 11 (2019), 1-7; as well as Indigenous Climate Hub and Indigenous Climate Action. Within theatre and performance studies, see Lisa Woynarski’s engagement with “intersectional ecologies,” a way of looking and a praxis that recognizes ecological thinking overlaps with socio-ecological “injustices, exclusions and oppressions'' to consider “who is affected and marginalized, and whose voice or perspective is being heard and whose is being erased.” Lisa Woynarski, Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 6. Woynarski also convened a dossier with Adelina Ong, Tanja Beer, Stephanie Beaupark, Jonah Winn-Lenetsky, Rulan Tangen, and Michelle Nicholson-Sanz, on “Climate Change and the Decolonized Future of Theatre,” for Theatre Research International 45.2 (2020): 179-208). We also recommend viewing “People, Planet, and Performance: From the Global South to the World,” convened by Taiwo Afolabi, published on HowlRound Theatre Commons, July and August 2023. ↵
  10. Government of Canada, Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2023. ↵

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A Guide for Environmental Stewardship in Theatre and Performance Training Programs Copyright © 2024 by Kimberly Skye Richards; Hope McIntyre; Selena Couture; and Kelly Richmond. All Rights Reserved.

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