The Junior Civic Mayor

Go Wild for the Junior Civic Mayor Amy Enwright

Children from Bentley High Street Primary School taking part in the Junior Make Your Mark vote with Participation Officer (Doncaster Council), Amy Enwright, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Schools, Nuala Fennelly and Angie Davies, Mental Health Lead Practitioner for the school.

In November 2019 Doncaster ran the Junior Make Your Mark campaign for the very first time. Our young people get involved with the National Make Your Mark campaign for youth every year and we are proud to say that we are the first local authority to run a junior version for primary aged children. 6,909 children and young people telling us that they want to ‘improve and protect our environment’.

Our Junior Civic Mayor, Alfie Turton, was one of the children that voted to improve the environment in the Junior Make Your Mark campaign.

Both campaigns allow local children and young people to vote for an issue that is most important to them and that they would most like to improve. This year we received over 18,000 combined votes for both campaigns. 13,108 young people took part in the national campaign, which is the highest amount of votes that Doncaster has received. We also had 5,000 children take part in the junior version, a great success for the first year! Alfie says, “I voted to improve the environment because I think Doncaster needs to stop using plastic and reuse more items because the sea is full of plastic and it’s damaging the environment. My school already does things to be eco-friendly such as recycling and reusing paper. They try to encourage us to use less plastic and take our own reusable bottles into class. At home we try and help the environment by buying things second hand, by not buying things we don't need and recycling." children to attend. The event will take place on Friday 6th March 2020, from 9:30am-11:30am, at Bentley MyPlace, Askern Road, Bentley, Doncaster, DN5 0HU. Alfie will headline the event and special guest, Ed Miliband MP will be in attendance to hear all about the positive eco-based work that schools are doing already. We are sure he will also take great interest in any other ideas that the children may have to improve our environment, so that we can all make a real difference to our borough.

If you would like to know anything else about any of the information mentioned in this article, or if you feel that you could contribute to our ambition to become the most child friendly borough in any way, please email: yourvoice@doncaster.gov.uk.

Interestingly, both campaigns came out with the same top result, with Following the Junior Make Your Mark campaign we have decided to hold a ‘Primary Network Conference’ for primary school

ART & ECOLOGY Mike Stubbs

William Ruskin (1819-1900), thinker, critic and artist urged us to make sense of our environment, by directly by observing every detail, being in and studying nature (some of which took place on his walks in Yorkshire). Artists across time have layered observation, curiosity, material exploitation and imagination, to explore our place in the world and find meaning. We look at nature, and the nature of ourselves. A cave painting in Borneo from over 40,000 years ago depicts a bull. Was the unknown artist scribing those images for identification of animals as food (as a utility) or as an appreciation of the beauty of the beast? What pleasure was derived in making those marks?

© photography courtesy of Ackroyd & Harvey

The Renaissance, Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau and much contemporary art and design references natural forms in a romantic way. Even Ai Weiwei a romantic himself in his design for the Beijing Olympic Stadium, references nature in ‘Birds Nest’. Like much of his work natural forms involves roots, trees (often up-rooted) and their displacement as both symbol and metaphor for humans, and a structure which could not have been realised without computer aided design and hightech construction techniques. We sometimes forget that we humans, are also part of the ecology: it is not something out there, but within us. I also believe it is within art's nature to experiment and challenge the status-quo and am very interested in artists that have made a direct connection to nature as part of their process. Joseph Beuys is a critical figure who amongst many things was cofounder of the Green Party in 1973, planting 7,000 oak trees in Kassel in 1983 as an art ‘action’, and was committed to a synergy between environmentalism and art, as a form of social sculpture or activism. Contemporary artist duo, Dan Harvey and Heather Ackroyd went

on to nurture acorns from Beuys’s original oaks and produce ‘Beuys’ Acorns’, a project which would continue his original aims into a new generation of people and trees. They have made art with natural processes at their core and also as the material itself for a lifetime. Last year in 2019, contributed to an extra-ordinary intervention with Extinction Rebellion, at the Tate Modern when they took horses with riders adorned in grown grass clothing into the Turbine Hall (this was unannounced!). Crazy temperatures, wildfires worldwide, flooding as close as South Yorkshire, (not to mention a shocking lack of action by leaders worldwide) leads artists like others to intervene, beyond ‘normal’, combining art and protest. Tate have subsequently declared climate emergency. This urgency reflects how many of us feel, wanting to be happy in nature through making small differences whilst at the same time seeing a climate emergency; a mass extinction juggernaut, hurtling towards us. If most of our experience is derived is from our immediate surroundings, formerly known as nature, how manmade has that nature become, in a globalised technologised world? Where can we find that direct connection with life and space to reflect on what it means to be a conscious, being as much part of the ecology as animals and plants? And as a species, philosophise knowing our impact on the world far outweighs, our numbers or timespan compared to other species on earth? Would those early people who did the cave drawings have known that their future relatives might go on from hunter gatherers to farmers (or operatives in agri-business), and in so doing, change a relationship to the land in such a way that might possibly lead to the extinction of entire species of plants and animals? We are part of evolution along with a conflicted relationship to technology as we mutate into cyborgs, most of us glued to artificially intelligent ‘smart’ phones; future humans, prostheticised with memory enhancement and audio visual extentions. Our ‘natural’ environment is of course now as much, ‘human made’ as ‘natural’ we are in the anthroprecene era, (the geologic period dominated by one, [the human] species). This era when the medium (art, music, film, video, publication, social media) would both rely on and become the message itself. Artists have always experimented with materials and technology, from aquamarine pigment derived from grinding lapis lazuli into a powder, as early the 14th Century, acrylic paint and electronic art in the 1960’s, Nano-art and biologically synthesised art in 2020? Science Fiction? No, new media. As science and technology develop for utility, artists re-appropriate and re-invent for other means, asking important philosophical questions and experimenting with new processes and materials. Doncaster born Nathaniel Mellors (consumption and robotics), Jakob Steensen (augmented reality & climate change), Morehshin Allahyari (virtuality & politics), Erica Scourti (social media & identity), are some good examples of artists both employing and questioning our relationship to technology, whilst addressing issues of automation, cultural identity and mental health. Yorkshire artists Jake Harries, and Monika Dutta share a strong commitment to hacking technology and permaculture as an alternative to industrialised farming (For every 1 calorie of food produced by modern agricultural methods, 10 calories of fuel are burned in its production). The result is a hybrid art practice in the form of a community café, serving home-made Dandelion Burgers, food and process as artistic medium. Interested in the relationship between modern, urbanised living and individual health and wellbeing, they utilise the current issues of renewables, rewilding, biodiversity, and sustainable food sources as a means of exploring and challenging contemporary approaches to the natural world. So, as many of us walk about glued to our phones, remember we have a choice to stay curious, draw, recycle stuff, go into nature, grow things and have fun, if we are not happy: the ecology is not happy, we are all part of the same ecology and nature. Finally, to quote William Ruskin: “Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.”