NAVIGATING TENSION BETWEEN CULTURAL EXCHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

Based around the twin theme of musical traditions and the natural world, my Making Tracks project brings together eight exceptional musicians each year to showcase diverse music and initiate new collaborations during a month-long residency and tour. The project is based partly on the idea that the collaborative creation and sharing of music is an ideal vehicle for crossing cultural and political divides. It’s also based around environmental responsibility, and an understanding of the interdependence between nature and culture. 

Now for the tricky bit - how do you balance the benefits of bringing together musicians from the UK and around the world to exchange ideas and foster greater tolerance and understanding across borders with the inevitable carbon footprint? 

Perhaps it isn’t possible to answer this question, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I believe that one part of the answer lies in unleashing the creative potential of musicians. Music, as Tolstoy and others have similarly commented, is “the shorthand of emotion”. It makes our emotions soar and the hairs stand up on the back of our neck. For these reasons I believe that musicians are in a unique position to inspire reverence and engagement with the natural world among the wider public. Making Tracks’ residencies create opportunities to explore and facilitate this work, partly through the adoption of an annual nature theme (it was Birds in 2022). The concept of listening is key to our approach to collaboration, and this theme extends to going on sound walks, engaging in ‘interspecies music-making’, and ‘tuning in’ to the surrounding natural environment in various other ways. In recent years, outcomes have included the weaving of natural soundscapes into our public concerts, and pieces being written inspired by the folklore of birds like the endangered Eurasian curlew, or the calls of the collared dove imitated and echoed on Iranian tar (pictured below, with 2022 Making Tracks Fellow Shahab Azinmehr).

Creative engagement with nature by itself, is not enough. What can we do on the practical side? Carbon offsetting is something that organisations typically turn to when the environmental impact of a project needs to be either genuinely or optically addressed. Offsetting is something I’ve looked into very carefully (I’ve even created some guidelines for best practice), but having done so, I was left with very little faith in it. Often presented as a silver bullet, in reality the world of offsetting is a minefield of complexity. To start with, it is still very far from a precise science - and even if it were, you can still never undo emissions at source.  While emissions - for example, those relating to a car journey - are often more or less measurable, those absorbed by offset projects are usually not. This is why terms such as ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘net zero’ are so problematic - especially for large projects like, a football World Cup, or the construction of a city. Some level of ‘greenwashing’ probably lies behind every claim of carbon neutrality, even though it might be the result of naivety or wishful thinking rather than deliberate deception. Part of the reason why offsetting has gained such currency is that we desperately want it to work. I think the rest hinges on a misconception - that it is possible to precisely counteract or ‘offset’ emissions.

Perhaps offsetting can sometimes contribute to a wider strategy, but it should never be the priority. As clunky as it might be, a term like ‘carbon apology’ would better reflect the realities of offsetting. If you accidentally trip someone up and then apologise, it’s usually better than simply walking away.  You can’t undo a flight, or take away a trip, but perhaps you can limit the damage.
 
Although I flirted with carbon offsetting in Making Tracks’ inaugural season in 2019, an emissions reduction strategy is now the priority. This involves drastically reducing the number of flights taken by international artists travelling to the UK to participate in the project, and has required us to put in place new measures to support and encourage musicians to travel to our residency by train. We pay a daily stipend for each day en route, for example, and encourage the musicians to use their journeys to start conversations about music and the environment. In 2022, this resulted in artists travelling from as far away as Denmark and Sweden by train. These changes have helped bring Making Tracks’ total transport emissions down by around 79% since our first year. Reducing flights to almost zero has required us to make other changes, such as limiting the number of artists selected from outside mainland Europe. Although we remain open to applicants from all regions, we now only select a maximum of one musician based outside Europe per year. You might wonder why we don’t simply reduce the number to zero. Well, it stems from that lurking impulse for cultural exchange. Although Europe is home to many diaspora musicians, I still believe that there is significant value in including someone from further afield - someone who has never been outside their own continent, for example - and giving them the opportunity to make connections and perform on the other side of the world.  It is valuable in terms of career development, and has immense human value. By capping numbers from outside mainland Europe, I suppose I’ve gone one step further towards answering part of the question about how to balance cultural exchange with environmental responsibility. We might not be there yet, but we are much closer than we were in 2019.

None of this has been easy. Sometimes I wonder if I am fooling myself that these different impulses can ever be reconciled. But if I look at the progress made by Making Tracks over four years, I’m encouraged. In many ways this progress hasn’t been made in spite of the challenges, but because of them. If you care about both cultural exchange and environmental responsibility, then the tension between these two aims can become fuel. Tension can become creative tension. By prioritising emission reductions and exploring creative engagement from musicians, I hope that Making Tracks has earned the right to keep evolving. Perhaps one day we will get to a point where cultural and environmental impulses no longer feel like they are competing.

Merlyn Driver, 2023