First a poem:

Vision deficit
The language of policy
Need for poetry

Perpetuating
Vanity and distraction
Drivers of desire

As this disjunction
Mutilates our vision
With which we seem live

To live life daily
Dream to find reality
Art as rule-breaking

Aspire to collapse
a matter of emergence
Time as metaphor

Look to the futures
Of indeterminacy
Knowledge dynamic

Matter of context
Knowledge given form to flow
Knowing how to know

Kean ways to listen
Poetic ways of seeing
The white-faced clown dreams

Reframing questions
One being influencing
Ecology of action

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Then a text:

We must learn
Not to be afraid
Of context

To briefly contextualise my perspective, I refer to my practice as ecological art.  I define ecology as the study of organisms, their relationship to each other, and their relationship to their environment – my practice is concerned with those relationships. The word ‘art’ is derived from the ancient Sanskrit word, ‘rta’.  Rta retains its meaning in contemporary Hindi as a noun-adjective for the dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created, virtuously.  It refers to the right way of evolution and we still talk about excellence, or the correct way of doing something as an ‘art’ – the art of cooking, the art of football, the art of gardening, ‘The Art of Archery’, ‘The Art of Making Cities’, and even ‘The Art of War’.  I wish to consider complexity as an art, art as a complex system, and indeed, how we may understand and engage with climate change and many other issues.

We must learn
Not to be afraid
Of indeterminacy

The single biggest problem facing the IPCC, since its inception, is ‘uncertainty’ – uncertainty in the significance of its data, uncertainty in the strength of its predictions, and uncertainty in the fact that we simply do not know what the future will bring.  Disjuncture from being this natural state of indeterminacy is, I argue, the weakness of most science, most education and much of our society’s inability to even admit to ‘the carousel of 21st Century challenges’.  And yet, again and again, despite the potential knowledge and skills base, the arts are relegated “… to tell the good story of science”, present art that is politically neutered and deny our creativity.

We must learn
Not to be afraid
Of collapse

I wish to challenge the futility of our engineered culture and its consequences, the ‘ecology of action’.  Instead, art may provide creative leverage, ‘to intervene in the system’, and ‘learn how to deal with complexity rather than rejecting it’.

We must learn
Not to be afraid
Of climate change

From ‘sustainable development’ to ‘sustainable living’ to ‘capable futures’, to ‘next generation evolution’, I call for the ‘deconstruction’ of Climate Change to re-contextualise its existence, its impacts and its epistemology.  We may then consider ‘economy’ as an aesthetic/ethical imperative, and whole systems ecology as the determinate of culture, providing the meta-narrative [creation myth] to evolve complex futures.

We must learn
Not to be afraid
Of diverse futures

And like science, art needs to understand that it is, itself, a system of complex behaviour, and that ecology may be the description of its contexts, relationships and processes.  It is, therefore, necessary to reconstitute art as an expression of dwelling-making, or ‘ecopoiesis’ (Haley 2001), according to the patterns of evolution, rta, or what Capra calls ‘the cosmic order of things’ (Capra 2002 p.442); and its deployment may be through creative processes, or ‘ecopraxis’ (Haley 2001).  And if we are to address the most pressing issues of our time, we must learn what Morin calls ‘fundamental culture’ (Morin 2005 p. 27) through ‘ecopedagogy’ (Haley 2008).  Then perhaps, the greatest potential for art is to contribute to a new paradigm that embodies complexity; not a dialectical opposition to the present canon, nor a re-enchantment (Gablik 1992), but the emergence of a new form, a new order – ‘the art of complexity’.

We must learn
Not to be afraid
Of complexity

David Haley, 2011