Art + Conservation: The Perfect Pair
Outreach and community engagement are critical components of conservation. It’s up to us, those working in any -ology, to find a way to change the course toward a more sustainable future. The fate of our ecosystems and the plants, wildlife, and people within them depend on our ability to educate and inspire both children and adults in a wide range of settings from classrooms to forests.
The use of art as an educational tool allows people to explore topics in conservation in new ways. They can attach the feelings they have about the natural world to real-time conservation work through hands-on reflection.
Art as an engagement tool.
Art creates an experiential learning process. It enhances our ability to build awareness, appreciation, and promote a shared responsibility for the natural communities around us. Through this mode of engagement, people are able to discover ecological relationships and learn about the balances that are needed amongst biodiverse ecosystems. It allows people to become motivated to act in more sustainable ways and gain a deeper level of connection leading to more long term involvement in conservation efforts.
Art provides a fun, stimulating, hands-on experience - taking learning to a new level and encouraging people to create new concepts. Becoming an environmental steward doesn’t always mean tending to the outdoor world. It requires a certain level of self-awareness in our connection and our tiny place within the outdoor world, and with that, tending to ourselves. When there is a focus on a specific conservation issue, a celebration and increased awareness can lead to even greater learning. Creativity that has a purpose will allow for collaborative ideas, feelings, and values guided towards problem solving relating to both local and global conservation.
Art has been used in promoting conservation awareness for many years, however, involving people in their own art projects is a fairly new practice. This type of outreach gets people to connect their ideas, propose unique solutions, and carry out their own visions of involvement. On a global scale, conservation issues can be extremely broad. There are many species in decline, though, many are highly recognizable.
Art has a huge role to play in raising awareness for wildlife conservation because it enables people to demonstrate their feelings and take action using new knowledge, connection, and understanding that they came to on their own. Focusing in on a person’s perception and sensory skills through the acts of creation and observation offers new insight into the different mysteries and symbolisms that are increasingly found in the natural world. Much action happens through emotion, and art is a key form of outreach that has the ability to affect emotion.
What can you do?
In your own community, you have the ability to make a place-based conservation impact. You can hold a small event with friends or neighbors that hosts a craft or painting of a wildlife species you love. You can work with local artists to raise money for a specific cause - sharing the issue with them and having them connect to it through their work.
Art can come in many forms, and painting, coloring, drawing, gardening, and small crafts are only a few. Anything that gets people to connect to a conservation issue through hands-on creations can make a huge difference in inspiring action for future generations.
