EXPEDITION ONE: DECARBONISING CULTURE

Liverpool is the world's first UN Accelerator City for Climate Action - a hub for climate-friendly experimentation focused on arts and culture - and Green Gathering folk have been getting involved, aiming to inspire radical action.

GG director Em Weirdigan joined Expedition One, a summit aimed at decarbonising the live music and film industries, and was invited to a mind-blowing Massive Attack gig packed with hard hitting info and images that really drove home how urgently we need to act. The aim is to phase out fossil fuels from creative productions and we want to help kickstart projects to do just that - if we can do it, the big players can too.

Em wrote this on her return from Liverpool:

“I was surprised some of the film industry reps at Expedition One were only just beginning to think about embedding sustainability into their operations, but it’s great they’re doing it, and they’ll hopefully buddy up with teachers and researchers from A Greener Future, which has been pushing sustainability at events for years. We’re short of time, extreme weather is happening now, and we need fast action rather than reinvention of the wheel.

Having said that, fast action can lead to getting things wrong. I couldn’t help wondering about the underlying structure of many of the organisations at Expedition One. If profit is their primary motivation, how truly Green can they be? Is there a danger of greenwashing?

In breakout groups at Expedition One, I floated these ideas in brainstorming sessions:

• People need to be passionately committed, not just ‘doing a job’.
• Sustainability needs to be embedded at the very core of every project.
• Let’s do stuff differently! Don't be ordinary! Rather than trying to replicate what we already do - just in Greener ways - let’s create fresh, better experiences.
• Ecotricity, led by Dale Vince, is doing incredible things with huge, renewably-powered battery banks... But those giant battery banks do have climate and resource costs, so my feeling is we shouldn’t be rolling them out on an industrial scale. Is cramming tens of thousands of people in front of vast stages in parks and fields necessary? Let’s move to smaller events, and / or more intimate venues. Even with solar-charged batteries rather than diesel generators, the other impacts of big events (on biodiversity, land, transport emissions, and resource use) are huge and, really, isn’t it more fun to be up close to a band than to be crushed into a mob watching them as a tiny figure on stage or on a TV screen?  Let’s reserve the big battery banks for very special occasions, and look to other solutions – like downsizing events – as well.
• Creative industry organisations need restructuring as cooperatives, B-corps, community interest companies… structures that are designed to maximise benefits other than profit.

It was interesting being amongst different kinds of people – many of them more ‘mainstream’ than I'm used to. I experienced some sexism, and in one session I was slapped down for being 'not radical enough' which was infuriating and also a bit funny, because my ideas were definitely both more radical and more realistic than those being presented. Several people thanked me afterwards, so hopefully my contributions were useful… and the appreciation helped shrink my imposter syndrome a little!

As dusk descended over the riverfront where Expedition One was held, I told a man who works for Live Nation that I want to destroy capitalism, which turned into a fascinating conversation, attracting some fab festival and film people from Bristol. Here I’d like to give a shout out for Film Strike for Climate, a grassroots group of film makers aiming to green up the film industry and create more stories with socio-ecological impact.

And then we went to the Massive Attack gig, which was genuinely awesome and mind-blowing. Hard-hitting messages about climate, war and disinformation were layered with spine-tingling vocals and music that’s been a backdrop to formative parts of my life.

Overall, I'm pleased I went along, and excited to see what happens in Liverpool over the next year, and how that spills into the music and film industry across the UK and beyond. Let’s see if we can genuinely accelerate climate action while keeping arts and culture alive!”

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