“What do I know about environmental issues?” I ask myself.
Surely we should all be aware of our carbon footprint, our intake of certain types of foods, the fuels that we burn and the clothes that we wear. But I’m really not sure how consciously I do anything about it. Anyway, are we even able to do anything about it in the relation to the bigger picture? We should try of course, as a responsible human being. Products, materials and processes are being made and created constantly, it seems, so maybe it does come down to our own individual choices, and the decisions we make as we live that will help the situation. I remember seeing Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, which was a powerful but perhaps lecturing message, back in 2006. It seemed sort of hopeless at that time as we continued to drive fossil fuel cars, eat meat and buy new stuff.
I’m reading an extract from Malena Ernman book in The Observer Sunday newspaper, Malena is Greta Thunberg’s mother. Greta’s background is described through a timeline of her young life, it’s quite amazing how she has taken the position that she now has from what appeared to be a difficult early start. It appears to me that something triggered Greta to make her individual stance outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, starting the global Fridays for Futures campaign and to get all of us to listen to our children and their voices.
What have we, as older people, been doing all this time? We weren’t really paying attention, maybe we went on marches about student fees, or conscious about racism during the late 1970’s through music and gigs. I don’t think I thought about travel, learning to drive, taking planes, consuming stuff, being aware of where and how our food comes to us until about…now.
I recycle our kitchen waste, I put the recyclable things in the blue bin, we do this without thinking now, maybe it’s because if we didn’t we wouldn’t get our bins emptied. I remember years back taking a huge pile of NME’s to the general public dump out by Turnhouse golf course and just throwing them into the pile of other stuff, now I wish I had still had them, although maybe they would just end up on eBay and not in the recycling bin. And also the time that the old freezer was taken and just put into a large hole by the digger. What on earth were we thinking and doing?
During the mid 1980’s we had a studio where we made sculptures, drawings and functional things, from stuff we found in skips around Edinburgh. It was needs must, we took the discarded and made something new. Installations of objects, painted sculptures and lights. We seemed to make quite a lot of lights out of old metal pipes, reconfigured electrical equipment, and welding, like Tom Dixon and Ron Arad.
So in all this, making more artwork could be seen to be adding to the problem. Unless it’s from recycled materials, or ephemeral things and experience. It’s our individual decision, still being creative but consciously aware of the issues in our production.
Iain Irving 