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Julie’s Bicycle joins Culture Declares Emergency

Culture Declares Climate & Ecological Emergency

Julie’s Bicycle declare a Climate and Ecological Emergency

Julie’s Bicycle helps the creative community take meaningful action on climate change and environmental sustainability and have been at the heart of the cultural conversation on climate change for over a decade.

In supporting the #CultureDeclaresEmergency initiative, we pledge to continue to work with and support our community and advocate internationally in tackling this Emergency, and we call on others to do the same.

These are our intentions:

We will tell the Truth

Governments, and their public broadcasters and cultural agencies, must tell the truth about the Climate and Ecological Emergency, reverse inconsistent policies and communicate the urgency for far-reaching systemic change.

We will communicate with citizens and support them to discover the truth about the Emergency and the changes that are needed.

We will take Action

Governments must enact legally binding policy measures to reduce emissions to net zero by 2025 and to reduce consumption levels.

We pledge to work towards reducing our emissions to net zero by 2025.

We will challenge policies and actions of local and national governments and their agencies, where we interact with them, that do not help to reduce emissions or consumption levels.

We will actively work to imagine and model ways that my practice / our organisation can regenerate the planet’s resources.

We are committed to Justice

The emergency has arisen from deeply systemic injustices. Arts and Culture can imagine and forge shifts in the ways we relate to one another and the world, in our values and behaviours.

We will do what is possible to enable dialogue and expression amidst our communities about how the Emergency will affect them and the changes that are needed.

We will support demands for more democracy within our civic institutions and government.

We believe that all truth-telling, action and democratic work must be underpinned by a commitment to justice based on intersectional principles, led by and for marginalised people.


Letters to the Earth

The launch of Letters to the Earth takes place on Friday 12 April, where 52 arts venues, theatres and community spaces across the world, from Zambia to Canada, from Latvia to New Zealand, will host readings of Letters to the Earth, to coincide with the Global Youth Strike for Climate and as part of the lead up to Extinction Rebellion’s International Rebellion which begins Monday 15 April.

Here is a letter written by JB Founder and Director, Alison Tickell:

Dear earth,

I passed you halfway up the Strand the other day. I would have stopped but didn’t want to distract you, swept every which way as you were, in the slipstreams of taxis and buses. The yellow of your wings is lovely this year.
News please. I can’t believe you’ve been evicted again. You must be so fed up.
I passed you on the motorway, in a cluster of grape hyacinths. Your blue is particularly lovely this year. I couldn’t stop, though would have liked to push away that plastic bag and bottle of piss. Just to give you a bit more air.
I heard you lost a fair bit last year, soil, song birds, some insects. Sorry about that.
Dear earth, I’ve tried to get in touch a couple of times but I can’t find you on social media. I feel I’m missing something. Let me know what’s happening.
Grief is trending, and I just wonder if it’s you, your patience frayed, the eco-cleansing a bit too much to take?
Can you imagine if all we are left with is us?
I’m not sure how it would work. I suppose a lot of tech – stuff to do the things you do, and maybe some avatars to cheer us up.
Anyway, for now,
Love
Alison

– Photo above shows a snippet of an artistic intervention by Ackroyd and Harvey through Central London that culminated in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Photograph by The Lightscaper Photography