Truth, Care and Change: values to activate an Earth Crisis response

I facilitated a workshop of 85 people at the UP Projects ‘Bodies of Water’ symposium in Liverpool on 11 Sept 2025. The event asked: What is the role of socially-engaged public art in the context of our accelerating environmental crisis?

I was supported by Danny Chivers, an independent sustainability advisor who works, amongst others, for the Gallery Climate Commission, and we were invited to be involved by Justine Boussard. I’ve known Danny since getting active in c. 2010 in the movement against unethical cultural sponsorship. I’ve known Justine since 2020, when she joined Climate Museum UK as one of our community of practitioners.

I was representing Culture Declares Emergency, the movement I co-founded in early 2019. We are a network of individuals, organisations and international and UK-based Hubs, sharing knowledge and practical support to seek justice, work towards regenerative change and provide care through arts, design and heritage. We are putting critical and practical action into Cultural practices, and Culture into environmental activism.

You can see the slides from the session here, including the word maps used to prompt discussion.

Danny gave an introduction that emphasised that change is possible:

• The Cultural sector’s own environmental impacts are not on the same scale as some, but disproportionately high in certain areas.
• It also has a disproportionate impact on public discourse to care for each other, more-than-human beings and future generations! Cultural engagement has a vital role to play in unlocking the power of the unknowing ‘silent majority’ worldwide (89%) that wants intensified climate action but assumes other people do not. (See the 89% Project.)
• In 2012, around 20 major UK cultural institutions were supporting the fossil fuel industry through sponsorship and branding partnerships. A successful movement led by artists, performers and culture workers rose to challenge this in creative ways. By 2024, almost all of those fossil partnerships had been dropped.

I dived a bit deeper into the Earth Crisis — how it goes beyond climate change to include seven breached planetary boundaries, and social shortfall too. My point is that we should focus on the systemic root causes (extractive capitalism, essentially colonialism) and shift our attention to how we can be safe and resilient in the face of impacts (conflict, displacement, food insecurity etc.) Mitigation of carbon emissions is absolutely vital, and we must do this much sooner than current national plans, but will be more effective if we can broaden the possibilities of action to multi-solving, justice-driven, place-based initiatives. Cultural practitioners and organisations can sit at the very heart of such initiatives.

I outlined the three dimensions of Environmental Responsibility as I see them:

• Reducing harm: rapidly limiting emissions of Greenhouse Gases and other pollutants; reducing waste; and taking a justice-driven approach to reduce suffering through your own activities and those of your communities and stakeholders.
• Resilience: Anticipating and preparing for future risks; coping with unfolding impacts in ways that include personal, social and more-than-human resilience; supporting vulnerable communities and species.
• Regenerative system change: Increasing positive actions; working for longer-term system change even when reacting to immediate trouble; be mission-driven to help sustain the living world into the future.

I showed some examples to explain how these three areas of responsibility map onto the values of Tuth, Care and Change.

Then participants were invited to explore brave ideas for responding to the Earth Crisis around the three values of Truth, Care and Change, in ways that include but go beyond reducing their footprints.

Some key themes from those using Truth-related words as prompts:

• Be aware of positionality and privilege — all experiences of trouble are different, and privileged people own and replicate the narratives about value in the Arts. Learn from how they exert power through narrative but with an anti-capitalist, decentred, compassionate approach.
• We must deal with amnesia (forgetting trouble, the causes of it, one’s own entanglement, and traumas others have experienced)
• Develop your own language to talk about the Earth Crisis — make it personal, nuanced, varied, relevant. It is important to dialogue with people you don’t agree with. Change the position of the artist as ‘learning from’ rather than lecturing.
• Programming to acknowledge the way our work fits into ecology & geography. Acknowledge physical connection to place (e.g. make clear “we live on an island, by a coastline or river, and that housing and jobs here are unstable and unsafe due to climate impacts”).

Some key themes from those using Care-related words as prompts:

“You can only think expansively and imaginatively if you have the place and time.”

• This work needs to be child and parent-friendly. Bringing children and elders together for intergenerational truth-telling. Be sensory-friendly. Be honest about the facilities available for parents.
• Communication: awareness of collective action, building shared resources, and partnering beyond the Cultural sector.
• Generosity towards each other: recognising that good choices are made out of opportunity, and that there’s a lack of equity in this experience, while also acknowledging responsibility.
• Reflective awareness (relational slow practice, embodying the journey and flow).
• Fostering optimism is part of Care. That sits alongside or as part of events to discuss and help accommodate grief.
• Work with new mothers who are anxious about the future.
• Build resilience into everyday life.
• Training in nonviolent communication.
• Shorter working hours, a four day week, planning zero hours contracts, and Universal Basic Income.

Some key themes from those using Change-related words as prompts:

• Access and Inclusion: Everybody needs to be involved, which is why messaging and communication are vital (links with points made above)
• Involve people in futuring and backcasting.
• Be hyperlocal: how do we know where we are? Connect intergenerationally in places.
• All big funders have the same vision — do we need to shift that? Projects already happening need sustaining — and talking about, don’t just start new things. Using networks and influence to seed small actions on a big scale. Commission artists to be embedded in places.
• Discourse — commissioning to explore ways to control the narrative versus dangerous hate/denial.
• Transdisciplinary practice bringing together arts, sciences, design and more; breaking down barriers.
• Accountability and choosing partners who align with your values.

Conclusion

As well as these more general ideas, there were lots of examples of practice and place-based initiatives (for commoning, mutual support and imagination). There were ideas to make an Ego Sucking Hat, a Gentle Protest Manifesto, artists making and caring for micro-utopias, a shared material warehouse (like a Library of Things but for creative production and community projects).

Four themes that came up across the three groups were:

• Time: That everybody needs more time for the in-depth discovery, expansive imagination, grief-work, relationship-building and action planning that is needed for responding to the Earth Crisis.
• Intergenerational and intersectional approaches are crucial: Recognising and adjusting for the multitude of challenges that affect engagement and activism, while celebrating and inviting a diversity of experiences.
• Inequality: The need to get to the bottom of the links between ecological overshoot and social shortfall, and how to support people with economic challenges to contribute to regenerative system change. Artists are among the lowest paid in UK society, so economic challenges apply to us (despite perceptions of an elite arts sector in contrast to ordinary struggling people).
• A different kind of change-making: The question of quiet activism, whether modelling peaceful and generous behaviour creates enough change, fast enough, or whether action needs to be more physically challenging, life-disrupting, movement-building etc.?

Key learning for me was that we (in Culture Declares) need to keep embedding the three values in exciting examples from places and practices, connecting them to clear calls to action:

• WHAT: Declare a climate & ecological emergency and form communities to take action in places and sectors/types of work
• HOW: Do your practice of Art-making, Communication, Design, Heritage, and Participatory work, with awareness of Earth Crisis impacts, causes and tactics for response.
• WHY: To reduce suffering, for the justice of all affected, and for the continuity of life for the future.

Finally, if you want to develop your skills in engaging people with the Earth Crisis, take a look at joining the Earth Talk community.