4. Connect to other initiatives on and off campus advancing sustainability, climate justice, decolonization.

Embedding ecological thought and committing to fostering environmental stewardship in our programs opens doors to new and creative collaborations on our campuses, ranging from Offices of Sustainability to student organizers advocating for climate justice to colleagues in STEM disciplines with ecological orientations. For example, in an account of “Greening Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Justin A. Miller describes the production as a collaboration with the Office of Sustainability that responded to a call for collaboration with departments outside of The College of Arts and Letters.[1] Such collaborations might be beneficial for financial and other resource sharing (including knowledge exchange), as well as model change through the formation of inter-disciplinary partnerships for research and innovation in culture-related technology (such as support around the decarbonization of cultural infrastructure). Garrett identifies certificates and standard schemes like LEED as one way to educate and encourage those within higher education environments.[2] Cross-campus dialogues and collaborations can enhance opportunities for carbon literacy training and also be helpful for building momentum for a larger cultural shift at universities which might not yet have developed environmental and climate policy (or indeed divested from their fossil fuel holdings).[3] While it will be easier to undergo a departmental transformation with clear commitments, targets, and financial resources from the university to meet environmental targets aligned with the climate agenda (that is, when there is a top-down commitment to sustainability with funds to match), a bottoms-up approach can also produce significant changes, and its success can be paired with other advocacy mandates (e.g. EDI and Decolonization) to help gain momentum for those larger shifts.[4] A strong continuing thread in climate crisis research in all fields is a discussion regarding the impact of the climate crisis on the Global South, Indigenous people and Black or otherwise marginalized populations. Additionally, many findings also indicate that Indigenous ways of knowing regarding relationality as well as stewardship of lands and waters offer much needed insights into altering harmful extractive practices.[5] This is also partly why communicating the story of change to students, other campus parties, community partners, and external stakeholders in programming, learning, and outreach can activate more action and promote cultural leadership in the climate and nature emergency.[6]

Creative partnerships may help to address gaps in faculty expertise or expedite processes for new course offerings. The University of Calgary has piloted a program during their block week course (wherein students earn course credit during a condensed week of learning) wherein they hired officers of CG Tools to teach an introduction to environmental sustainability in arts production and train students to use the tools with data from local theatre companies in established partnerships. There is also an opportunity to deepen relationships with local and regional theatres through sharing materials, rather than (re-)creating them, as well as recycling and reusing them in eco-responsible ways.[7]

“Discrimination, economic and environmental injustice, and resource depletion are all manifestations of the same system gone awry. And to change the system, we can’t just tinker with individual elements- we have to rethink the whole synergetic mess.” This strategy of connecting to other ongoing initiatives will, in addition to broadening the network of participants and amount of resources, continue to advance around the interconnectedness of the climate emergency with movements for racial justice and decolonization. Chantal Bilodeau writes, “Discrimination, economic and environmental injustice, and resource depletion are all manifestations of the same system gone awry. And to change the system, we can’t just tinker with individual elements- we have to rethink the whole synergetic mess.”[8] Just as grassroots movements and movement leaders are stitching together imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth gaps), and surging white supremacy, so too must be our approach towards departmental transformation.[9]

  1. Justin A. Miller, “Greening Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Readings in Performance and Ecology, ed. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 191-200. ↵
  2. Garrett, “Theatrical Production’s Carbon Footprint,” 203. ↵
  3. An example of this is the Climate Action Coalition U of Alberta which was formed in 2020. The coalition is driven by a cross-section of students, faculty, alumni and emeritus professors across the institution which they describe as a “petro-university” and has run campaigns on divestment, the declaration of a climate emergency, banning of single-use plastics, among other efforts. Members of the Coalition also took part in the 2021 U of A Theatre Change Climate Action event. ↵
  4. In Chapter 1, Taxopoulou shows how the shift towards sustainable theatre more easily emerges when there are national environmental cultural policies and regulatory policies and frameworks that align national commitments and the climate agenda, while also pointing to grassroots initiatives rooted in clear ethical frameworks that have still resulted in some success. ↵
  5. The June 2020 National Arts Centre’s Green Room series opened with a keynote session by Eriel Tchekwie Deranger (Dene) from Indigenous Climate Action (13:00-51:00). Tchekwie gives an overview of damages done and explains how traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge and contemporary ingenuity can contribute to solutions. She also connects the climate crisis to systems of oppression, and how theatre can contribute by creating space for BIPOC stories while also making reparations for violence and theft as all sectors must do. The 2022 IPCC report also directly addresses the importance of arts and culture work in social transformation: In the “Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change – Summary for Policy Makers,” Jim Skea et al. state that “Effective and equitable climate governance builds on engagement with civil society actors, political actors, businesses, youth, labour, media, Indigenous Peoples and local communities'' and that mitigation “options that align with prevalent ideas, values and beliefs are more easily adopted and implemented” (59). Additionally, in “Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation,” Felix Creutzig and Joyashree Roy et al. discuss addressing the social aspects of mitigation, recognizing the importance of eudaimonic well-being (5-16) and the impact of narratives that can either support mitigation efforts or justify climate scepticism (5-80). ↵
  6. Taxopoulou, 48. ↵
  7. For example, in Montreal, Écoscéno accepts materials in good condition with good reuse potential. ↵
  8. Chantal Bilodeau, 2019. Qtd. in Beer 9. ↵
  9. This framework is summarized in Kimberly Skye Richards’ “Seeding a Green New Theatre,” Theatre Research in Canada 42.1 (2021): 8-25. ↵

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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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