Can the Arts Help to Save the World?

Panel: Future Nature, Future Culture[s]: Reflections on Balance-Unbalance

We are living in a world reaching a critical point where the equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy society needs and the interconnected economies could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to a complete new reality where unbalance would be the rule and human beings would need to be as creative as never before to survive. Have the arts a role in all this? Have artists a responsibility in this context? Environmental problems, economic uncertainty and political complexity has been around for a very long time. Not one year, one decade or one century. What was different before was the speed and depth of transformations compared with today’s fast changes. The frequent occurrence that certain events are having around us – such as floods, twisters, etc – seems to be increasing very fast, and the effects of human beings on modifying our adjacent surroundings as well as very distance places have turn into a power capable of changing the whole planet, improving or ruining people’s life and even eliminating all human life on Earth. In this context of global threats: how can the arts help? This apparently simple idea was the seed triggering the Balance-Unbalance project. balance-unbalance2013.org