Art and Sustainability, Part 5: What I Have Learned

Artistic Leadership in Sustainability: What I have learned

My journey of practicing sustainability in the arts feels like only the tip of a melting iceberg of a much larger challenge. The climate crisis is undeniably overwhelming for us all, but as I near the completion of Virginia Tech’s Executive Master of Natural Resources (XMNR) program, I find sustainability's all-encompassing presence and practice to be encouraging and uniting. Whether driven by a desire for the wider planetary well-being or more personal wishes of human legacy, sustainability is woven into every action we take. We can consciously incorporate sustainability practices by choosing buying local, upgrading to water-saving shower heads, and taking action to hold companies responsible for their operational emissions — or unconsciously choose for nature by feeding our children healthy foods, biking to work, or using public transport. Whether we notice or not, sustainability is a language we already speak simply because we want the best for ourselves and our loved ones. This kind of care can be brought to any sector, which means any job can become a sustainability job, in as much as any household can contribute to a more sustainable future. Collective individuals hold as much force for change as businesses and cities. Collective practices can become cultural practices, scaled deep to personalize efforts and challenge communities to develop new ideas that are not one-size-fits-all.

Reflecting on the insights of my previous articles The Performer, The Creative, The Technician, and The Institution, I would like to finish this series by highlighting my own experience in the XMNR program and what feels exciting about practicing systems leadership from the point of view of an artist.

Imposter syndrome

Initially, I believed I needed to be a climate science expert to contribute to sustainable decision-making. However, the XMNR program taught me that effective leadership is about fostering direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) among diverse populations, across disciplines and sectors. What’s truly needed is cross-sector, boundary-spanning leadership to integrate sustainability deeply into our communities. The coursework reshaped my perspective, from recognizing the overwhelming energy demands of construction, to the powerful role of religion when integrating stewardship of nature, to the impact of water access on gender equality. Monthly learning-by-doing exercises required us to allocate resources for sustainability issues, mirroring real-world policy challenges and demonstrating why effective leadership is difficult and transcends opinions, and why informed decision-making is essential. In the end, no one person or professional can tackle sustainability alone and, therefore, imposter syndrome is not relevant because absolutely everybody needs to take part in sustainability and resiliency in order to succeed.

Team 3

Teamwork and collaboration are both a large cornerstone of the program - that said, I felt I was put to the test when joining Team 3! Being paired with three strangers — a farmer with a career in the military, a Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill, and a recent college graduate who is perhaps half my age — I realized, although I have lived abroad for many years, that not much has made me feel so foreign as this group and I wasn’t sure if I would find any common ground. Almost immediately, I realized that the practice of getting to know different people was also a wonderful chance to think about what makes people come together. We were asked to create team principles, look at team dysfunctions, and actively listen to the different points of view and stories of people I would have never had the chance to meet otherwise. This helped me reimagine the stories I was telling to myself and discover what parts of my own stories were missing. In my case, I found out that Team 3 are some of the most intelligent and caring people I’ve come across in a long time, and our differences helped us create something more meaningful than anything we would have achieved on our own. Our assignments were no longer simply a report to hand in, but were the result of different people coming together to look at sustainability’s most wicked problems using direction, alignment, and commitment to shape our interaction and change our experience together. This prepared us to achieve real-world consulting reports for Arlington County and Mezcal Amaras, informative articles for Isla Urbana, prepare for the X-Talks (a TED-Talk simulation), and even complete a Global Study trip to Mexico.

What should Environmental and Natural Resources (ENRS) professionals know about the arts?

Author and scholar Amitav Ghosh wrote, “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination,” in his 2016 publication, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The arts serve as a powerful communication tool, making complex sustainability concepts impactful through storytelling. This may sound like an over simplified approach, but effective storytelling can humanize environmental issues and translate data and policy into more tangible narratives that can inspire action. Historically a catalyst for social change, the arts foster innovation through cross-sector collaboration with scientists, educators, and communities, driving public engagement by poetically reframing difficult topics. Artists have the capacity to help audiences embody scientific concepts that are often presented in disembodied ways, building resilience among communities and fostering social cohesion for reflection and healing. As a form of cultural work, the arts hold political, economic, and social power, shaping narratives and mobilizing public support. I dare to hope that the previous articles and interviews with artists concerned with sustainability offer several examples (among the millions of others) in which ENRS professionals can leverage creativity, and perhaps artistic collaboration, in order to advance sustainability goals more impactfully, and open the door to an entire sector that can increase creative environmental solutions.

How Can Artists Lead in Sustainable Development?

The landscape of cultural management is undergoing significant changes in our increasingly interconnected world. For arts communities to advance sustainability effectively, we can adopt systems thinking, recognizing the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and economic systems. By collaborating with scientists, policymakers, and communities, artists can create interdisciplinary projects that address some of the root causes of sustainability challenges, inclusively and effectively. Adaptive leadership is essential, requiring flexibility and responsiveness to evolving issues, such as climate change. Artists can promote sustainability through their materials, techniques, and themes, while avoiding echo chambers by engaging with diverse perspectives to enrich their work. Finally, artists can leverage existing resources — grants, networks, open-source data, and partnerships with institutions like Virginia Tech — to amplify their sustainability initiatives. Artists and theaters may not be aware that all these stakeholder groups are at their disposal and, more often than not, are ready to jump into new alliances on topics that align with their mission.

Performing Sustainability

In the end, our performance of sustainability is a performance of systems that reveal themselves on our podiums, in our policies, and in our everyday lives. To be effective, sustainability can be embedded in the very systems we practice every day. This involves redesigning our approaches, ensuring that sustainability is not just an ideal, but a lived reality. As someone from the field of the arts, I recognize that artistic practice often thrives on the ethical concepts, such as those in “Think Little,” by Wendell Berry, focusing on the intimate, the local, and the personal. However, as I near the end of the XMNR program, I now feel how I have a voice in the larger conversation about sustainability, more able to embrace and articulate the complex interconnectedness of the larger systems that shape our world, as well as our art.

If nothing else, this blog series is a lens through which one can have a taste of what I have seen and heard. My classmates helped me sum it up by saying that we are ready to finish school, but we are not ready for the experience to end. The XMNR program continues to change as rapidly as that of sustainability itself. We would all like to stick around and see what happens next! It is a truly inspiring open field that has bonded us as students, as much as it has connected us to larger real world efforts from new cherished stakeholders, colleagues, communities, institutions, and friends.