Communicating Biodiversity Creatively

In November 2010 I went on a workshop organised by Wildwise about communicating biodiversity creatively. The workshop was facilitated by an artist who has a lot of experience working in nature with children and community groups.

We spent the first half of the day outdoors at the beautiful Sharpham Trust learning about different ways groups can experience biodiversity. This included an exercise which involved collecting natural objects and making a map or message communicating something you’d like to say to a particular animal, which I think in this case were mice.

We then went back indoors for the remainder of the day to create an image about what we’d experienced in a medium of our choice. The slightly blurry image below shows a fabric painting of a bird, a seed head and a hand.

Personal learnings from the day included reminders that not all maps have to be made on paper, and that many subjects have to be experienced in context before they can be communicated. Our verbal language does not stretch far enough to fully communicate something as complex as our relationship with nature, but art and lived experience can go some of the distance towards helping us define and feel what these things mean to us.

Visualising the Big Sustainability Summit

Last month Mindful Maps was invited to graphically record at the Big Sustainability Summit; an event to mark the end of the Sustainable Development Commission and an opportunity to ask the question ‘How can we take sustainability to scale?

The summit, co-organised by Futerra and the SDC, hosted a diverse range of speakers who responded to this question. Amongst the speakers was Jane Davidson from the Welsh Assembly Government (very fitting as the event took place on St David’s Day!) who spoke about how Wales has embraced sustainable development.

The group also went into open space sessions for a large portion of the day where groups went off to discuss their ideas and projects. One of the open space sessions (hosted by Futerra) looked at the idea of a ‘people’s SDC’ to continue the work of the SDC in a more participatory, bottom-up way. This initiative is being taken forward by Futerra as a result of the session. All of the open space topics were captured in the image:

One of the most resonant themes from the day seemed to be connecting vision and task. This image kept appearing in conversations throughout the day.

Building the bridge between vision and task is a frequent barrier to action. Visually documenting a process can be a powerful way to synthesise and make sense of key information; serving as an aid to memory which is more instant than a classic report. The final image is now in the capable hands of Futerra, who will use the material to illustrate and inform the evolution of the People’s SDC.