Episode 7: When art meets conservation

Today my guest is an artist!: I am very happy about it and I hope there will be more episodes to come chatting with artists! I am very deeply convinced that science and art have a lot in common and can benefit each other.

My guest today is Geraldine Simmons geraldineswildlifeart.com. She is a member of Artists for Conservation (artistsforconservation.org) and works from her home studio located on Sydney's northern beaches, Australia. I was looking for painter/ drawer to invite when I found her amazing work online and decided to contact her.

Geraldine's love of drawing has evolved into the heartfelt animal portraits that she draws today in either pastel and colored pencil or scratchboard. These mediums enable her to capture the true textures and emotional expressions that bring each animal to life. Through paying close attention to the eyes her mission is to communicate that animals are unique amazing creatures.

During her travels in 2005 with Friends of the National Parks Foundation in the deep jungles of Borneo, she was captivated by orang-utans and Indonesian wildlife. This was the catalyst for her mission to raise funds and awareness for endangered wildlife. Geraldine has exhibited both nationally and internationally accepting many invitations to donate her works to significant animal conservation groups and campaigns.

About Artists for Conservation (AFC)

This is a group of international artists that promotes conservation through art. It is the world's leading artist group supporting the environment, representing 500 of the world's leading nature/wildlife artists from 30 countries.

AFC's mission is to support wildlife and habitat conservation and environmental education through art that celebrates nature.

The Morris Animal Foundation supports AFC https://www.morrisanimalfoundation.org/article/fostering-wildlife-conservation-through-art

This is not a news!

...if we are going to have a new connection to the environment it will have to happen in individual hearts and souls... the artist can help us fall in love with the earth again. Berensohn 2002

Promoting conservation through the arts: outreach for hearts and minds. Jacobson SK, McDuff MD, Monroe MC. Conserv Biol. 2007 Feb;21(1):7-10.

• Emotions play a central role in the decisions we make.
• The arts offer a way to make an emotional connection to people, and the visual and performing arts can help conservation practitioners reach new audiences. Art can provoke reactions that typical education and outreach methods do not. Art has the potential to inform audiences or participants in a new way about conservation topics, and it can stimulate new dialogues and actions.
• Conservation educators often focus solely on technical dissemination of scientific information and overlook other ways of understanding the world (Turner & Freedman 2004). This technocentric approach may not incite people to reflect on their values or personal behaviors (Job 1996) or inspire people to engage in sustainable land-use or consumption patterns.
• Environmental organizations often use art exhibits to raise funds and stimulate social interaction. Art exhibits can go beyond this by engaging audiences in contemplating new perspectives about the environment.
• Participating in an art event can go beyond making people more open to information or supportive of an organization or a cause. It can stimulate changes in proenvironmental behavior, such as the stewardship of a natural area.

Evidence-based conservation education in Mexican communities: Connecting arts and science. Montserrat Franquesa-Soler et al. 2020. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228382

• Several studies suggest that 63% of primate species are currently threatened due to deforestation, pet-trade, and bushmeat hunting.
• Successful primate conservation strategies require effective educational programs capable of enhancing critical system-thinking and responsible behavior towards these species.
• Arts-based conservation education can simultaneously foster cognitive and emotional processes.
• In this paper, we evaluate an artsbased educational program focused on the conservation of black howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra).
• A total of 229 children from communities located in primate-habitat areas, both inside and outside protected areas, participated in the study. Different educational techniques were tested (storytelling, theater and shadow puppets), contrasted with a control group, and evaluated through an analysis of drawings.
• Our results showed that children's knowledge increase with each art-based technique, with storytelling being the most effective for children's learning.
• Specific drawings indicators also revealed the increase of children's knowledge and a decrease of misconceptions between pre and post evaluations.
• Finally, a satisfaction survey about the program showed a high positive feedback.
• The study highlights the value of designing multidisciplinary projects, where arts-based education program (grounded in scientific information) has shown to be a successful way to communicate animal knowledge and promote conservation.

Identifying transformational space for transdisciplinarity: using art to access the hidden third. Toddi A Steelman et al. 2019. Sustain Sci. 14(3):771-790.

• A challenge for transdisciplinary sustainability science is learning how to bridge diverse worldviews among collaborators in respectful ways.
• A temptation in transdisciplinary work is to focus on improving scientific practices rather than engage research partners in spaces that mutually respect how we learn from each other and set the stage for change.
• We used the concept of Nicolescu's "Hidden Third" to identify and operationalize this transformative space, because it focused on bridging "objective" and "subjective" worldviews through art.
• Between 2014 and 2017, we explored the engagement of indigenous peoples from three inland delta regions in Canada and as a team of interdisciplinary scholars and students who worked together to better understand long-term social-ecological change in those regions.
• In working together, we identified five characteristics associated with respectful, transformative transdisciplinary space. These included (1) establishing an unfiltered safe place where (2) subjective and objective experiences and (3) different world views could come together through (4) interactive and (5) multiple sensory experiences. On the whole, we were more effective in achieving characteristics 2-5-bringing together the subjective and objective experiences, where different worldviews could come together-than in achieving characteristic 1-creating a truly unfiltered and safe space for expression.
• The novelty of this work is in how we sought to change our own engagement practices to advance sustainability rather than improving scientific techniques. Recommendations for sustainability scientists working in similar contexts are provided.