The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

What if museums weren’t confined to buildings but could be part of the natural world? What if sculptures could not only celebrate our oceans, but also provide habitats for marine life?Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor, environmentalist, and underwater photographer. His works are constructed using materials to instigate natural growth and the subsequent changes intended to explore the aesthetics of decay, rebirth, and metamorphosis. DeCaires Taylor's pioneering public art projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation but also works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world."The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the 'museums' expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight.And then they had these incredible sponges. You know, you see a lot of sponges on the reefs and you don't really take a lot of notice, but actually, some of the formations and the patterns, they sort of blanketed the sculptures with a network of capillaries and veins, and these incredible sorts of scarlet reds and pinks. And it was something that I had no idea would colonize in such a way. And sponges are really interesting because they actually filter water, so they almost breathe the water in and then exhale it out once they've taken the nutrients. And, for me, that was when the work really became living and part of the ecosystem. And I thought it was a really nice metaphor that we are nature. We are part of the system and we're all connected. And I think we lose sight of that a lot."www.underwatersculpture.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity.People typically have quite a dire view of the state of the world but have a positive view of the local environment, which is very interesting. So it's the potential of every individual to make an impact and to spend a little bit of time thinking about their actions and, and how they can influence the way that other people also care about the environment.Because when you have young, impassioned people involved in environmental work, there's a magnetism there that draws other people in, and that's what I've seen from the young pioneers and the emerging scientists that they can generate a lot more excitement and momentum within their peer groups and their age groups."We have lost around 85% of oyster reefs. That’s not only the loss of oysters but also the habitat they provide other marine animals and plants. Oysters are amazing, not only do some create pearls but as sequential hermaphrodites, they can switch between male and female almost on a daily basis.Dr. Dominic McAfee is a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. His work centers around restoring lost marine ecosystems, specifically shellfish reefs. Along with employing novel technology and reef restoration projects, he seeks to understand how oysters enhance the resilience and function of coastal ecosystems. He seeks to develop conservation messaging strategies that enhance public engagement via conservation optimism.https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/dominic.mcafeewww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

We have lost around 85% of oyster reefs. That’s not only the loss of oysters but also the habitat they provide other marine animals and plants. Oysters are amazing, not only do some create pearls but as sequential hermaphrodites, they can switch between male and female almost on a daily basis.Dr. Dominic McAfee is a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. His work centers around restoring lost marine ecosystems, specifically shellfish reefs. Along with employing novel technology and reef restoration projects, he seeks to understand how oysters enhance the resilience and function of coastal ecosystems. He seeks to develop conservation messaging strategies that enhance public engagement via conservation optimism."There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity.People typically have quite a dire view of the state of the world but have a positive view of the local environment, which is very interesting. So it's the potential of every individual to make an impact and to spend a little bit of time thinking about their actions and, and how they can influence the way that other people also care about the environment.Because when you have young, impassioned people involved in environmental work, there's a magnetism there that draws other people in, and that's what I've seen from the young pioneers and the emerging scientists that they can generate a lot more excitement and momentum within their peer groups and their age groups."https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/dominic.mcafeewww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is the role of music in cinema and why it is such an important part of the storytelling process? How does music increase our capacity for empathy and wonder?Fabrizio Mancinelli is an Italian-American composer, songwriter, and conductor, best known for his musical contributions to the world of cinema. As a songwriter, he has created original scores for The Land of Dreams,The Snow Queen 3, The Boat, and the upcoming animated drama Mushka, among others. In 2017, he led the orchestral recording for the Academy Award-winning Green Book, and he recently scored the documentary Food 2050, which premiered at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2022."I'm always trying to find my place here because, yes, I'm American. I'm an immigrant. I don't want to talk about the difficulties I face in my coming here, but it was not easy. So when I was writing the song called 'Give Up', and it's like a song that I'm singing to myself. Those are things, like there is a lot of personal experience. I was a luxury immigrant on a Fulbright grant on a J-1 Sponsor Visa, you know, with a solid family I could go back to in Italy in case anything went wrong. But at the same time, it was not easy. I want to do my job with a smile on my face, and it brought me to write the lyrics like: 'It's my turn. My time is now.' It's like something that I'm trying, we all try to get our turn to be our moment, to shine our moment. We're all waiting. We don't know if it will happen, but we need to try at least. We need to grab our life with our hands and make it work one way or another. So that's what I mean in my song 'Orlando Dreams.'I always have hope because I've been always on the other side of the world, you know, searching for inspiration, and I've always been like, you know what, I have to recognize there have been special people in my life that have given me their hands at the right moment. There have been also people that slammed the doors. I forgive, I don't forget. But there have been multiple people, way more that have given me their hands and a smile. Like even a compliment from a composer that I admire, you know, those things made a difference in life. A nice inspiration, like, yes, you can do it. It's difficult. I'm not going to say it's easy, but the right attitude can make it easier."https://fabriziomancinelli.uswww.instagram.com/fabmancinelliwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Does becoming a mother mean forgetting who you were before? How can we reclaim our lives as women, while still being mothers to our children? What does traveling alone teach us ourselves and those we love?Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut."I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away."www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhoto credit: Elena Seibert

Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, England, where he has been based since 1999. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Tampere, and the University of Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus, Santiago del Compostela, Turku, Manitoba, and Lille. He is a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions. He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature, E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, The Uncanny, Veering: A Theory of Literature, How to Read Shakespeare, and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing, as well as the novels Quilt and An English Guide to Birdwatching, and Mother: A Memoir. In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Sixth edition, 2023. Royle’s current projects include a detective novel, a collection of essays about new approaches to narrative theory, and a collaborative work with Timothy Morton on Covid-19. His latest book, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, is due to be published in November 2023.Mother: A Memoir“Pre-word In my mind's eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of Milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in a floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I would know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of 'In my mind's eye': Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.”www.routledge.com/An-Introduction-to-Literature-Criticism-and-Theory/Bennett-Royle/p/book/9781032158846 https://myriadeditions.com/creator/nicholas-royle/ https://quickfiction.co.uk/www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What role do the visual arts play in drawing upon history, activating democracy, and asking questions about what culture can do?Australian artist Anthony White lives and works in Paris. White’s artistic work revolves around the notion of reclaiming the act of dissent through the production of cultural objects. His research is situated at the intersection of several fields in the social space including, politics, human rights, and postcolonialism. His practice is centered around concepts of design and its history as a form of social and political expression. He works with painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. Through this practice, he tackles relevant questions to our time, to encourage emancipation and new ways of thinking.Anthony White’s artwork has been exhibited in Australia, Europe, and Asia. He has received support through cultural agencies such as The Trust Company Australia, The National Association for the Visual Arts,(NAVA) and The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). He has also received critical acclaim by recognition in the form of art prizes and reviews most notably The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2007) The Creative Art Fellowship at The National Library of Australia (2020) and acknowledgements in The Australia Financial Review, Art Collector Magazine Australia and also Elle Décor US edition. His exhibition Manifestation is on show from the 12–30 of July at Lennox Street Gallery, in Melbourne."Not in terms of subject matter. Not in the fact that I've taken images from the Eureka Stockade. It was a point in history where there were some gold miners, and they revolted against the government because the government was enforcing licensing fees that were outrageously expensive at the time.So, I don't reproduce figurative paintings, but I wanted to take that energy of what dissent is about, and I wanted to reclaim the energy of the gestural mark as a signifier of dissent. So when I was doing the research in the library, I came across a Roman guy called Raffaello Carboni who wrote a book on the Eureka Stockade.It's actually the book that Sidney Nolan had been reading and his point of motivation for making this large mural. And I found it quite interesting that Carboni was a politically active guy. He was a supporter of Mazzini and Garibaldi who founded modern Italy. And then three years after Carboni fought in the movement that unified Italy, he went to Australia to Victoria. And he was also involved in that Eureka Stockade moment. So I thought, Oh, that's an interesting connection between my roots in Australia and my roots in Europe. So Carboni goes back, and he dies in Rome. And I see that this moment of civil disobedience is interesting and what's happening now with the rise of Fascism. It's an interesting thing that maybe there need to be other moments of civil disobedience where democracy is activated in a way. So I think that the visual arts, they have a role to play in terms of activating democracy. In terms of drawing upon history and asking questions about what culture can do."www.anthonywhite.artwww.instagram.com/anthony_white_paris/www.metrogallery.com.au/exhibitions/manifestationwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is the path to peace for the war in Ukraine? Is America still powerful enough to impose global order? The US has just 4.1% of the world's population, while the BRICS countries have 41.5%. In this conversation with economist Jeffrey Sachs, we discuss the origins of the conflict in Ukraine and NATO enlargement, US-China relations, and the decline of US dominance.Jeffrey Sachs is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Sachs has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General. He was an economic adviser to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Sachs was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders, received the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor from France, and was co-recipient of the Blue Planet Prize. He is Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, and academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican.Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011)."The US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge. Russia massed troops on its border and put on the table a draft US-Russia security agreement on December 17th, 2021 based on no NATO enlargement. The Biden administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January. Then Russia invaded on February 24th, 2022. Four weeks later, Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality. In other words, the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table, and during the second half of March, with the Turkish government being the mediators, Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement. Incredibly, the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government: you fight on.The basic point is the US has 4.1% of the world population. So how could it presume to be the world leader? You know, the US is a powerful country. It's a rich country, but it doesn't run the world, and it should not aspire to run the world. That's a kind of madness, and the US ideology for a long time has been that the US should run the world.It's, to my mind, unbelievable. But then again, I've spent most of my career outside the US seeing the other 95.9% of the world. And I know that the other 95.9% of the world doesn't want the United States to run the world. It's not against the United States. It just says: let us have our own part of the world. We don't want you running the world. We don't want you deciding what our government is, who we are, how we rule ourselves. You know, you're just one place. And this, the United States leaders don't understand. They're very arrogant. They're very ignorant because of the two big oceans. They're very unaware of the history of other parts of the world. And we end up with this arrogant and naive and dangerous foreign policy because, there's no doubt the United States is rich and powerful, and it makes lots of weapon systems. And I'm 68 years old and the United States has been at war almost every year of my life from Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya, and now Ukraine. Come on, give it a break."www.jeffsachs.orghttps://sdgacademy.orgwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It, and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.www.margepiercy.comwww.miafunk.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Home of the Brave” performed by Laurie Anderson & Dickie Landry on The Late Show. Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Keith Sonnier, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass’ ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11. Listen to his music on Unseen Worlds.http://www.dickielandry.comhttps://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landrywww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast