At the beginning I would like to write a little about my reasons for writing M.A. thesis concerning such a topic, and some purposes of it. I chose this topic because interest in environmental education is closely associated with my personal life. I did not conceive the thesis just as a task required by my studies. Therefore work on the thesis meant also considerate development of my ideas and assumptions, it is a reflection of my world view.

I have been dealing with environmental education before, as a member of an environmental movement I participated in organizing weekend or longer stays for young people, focusing at environmental education. As I studied art education I was specially interested in relation of these two subjects. I wanted to learn more about it, experience and try activities using artistic approaches in environmental education. This idea lead me to choice of the topic for my thesis.

Unfortunately, lack of literature was quite limiting for my work and there was little chance to obtain some in the Czech Republic. I started to seek for it in libraries as well as write letters in order to obtain information from abroad. This demanded considerate effort which brought a little effect. Nevertheless, finally I managed to obtain enough literature to create the thesis and render some ideas to people interested in the area.

I would also like to write about aims and purposes of my thesis. These are:

To propose a concept of approach in environmental education expressing my ideas of education leading to sustainable life. It is based on literature included in bibliography as well as on my experiences and world-view.

• To show possibilities of art to change people’s attitudes to nature and contribute to solution of ecological crisis. I provide examples of artists who concern in environmental issues in their work. (They are mostly American artists presented in a book by Suzi Gablik ‘The Reenchantment of Art’ (Gablik 1993). Some of their Czech counterparts are presented by means of interviews and information from Atelier journal.) I used Gablik’s book as well as other authors’ articles to provide also a theoretical and philosophical background for such art, which I mediate by means of interpretation of her and the others’ ideas. These ideas as well as two theoretical chapters dealing with environmental education and environmental art education can serve as a theoretical basis for environmental art education.
• To provide ideas of projects and various activities that may be used in environmental art education (these are included in the practical part of the thesis, called ‘Projects’). The activities I tried in practice are accompanied by short reflection and sometimes recommendations.
• To recommend various sources of information and ideas that can be used by people interested in relation of art and environment and environmental art education. There are two lists of literature included in the thesis; the literature I used for the thesis and the literature I consider as useful and relevant and recommend it to people interested in the topic. I considered as helpful to provide also various addresses that can make obtaining other information about the topic easier.

I hope my thesis will help the people interested in this topic to develop ideas of environmental art education. I myself would like to thank many people without who my thesis could never come to existence. These are people who provided me necessary materials and information, who spent their time on interviews, on obtaining books abroad, who helped me with translations and vocabulary, who provided me computers to write my thesis and helped me to give it this form, people who participated in the practical artistic activities lead by me and also those who helped me to organize them, and last but not least, I would like to thank all the people who encouraged me in my work. I hope that all this effort will bring benefit to people who are interested in this topic and who might be in a similar situation like I at the beginning.

“Although it may seem as if the individual in today’s world has a little power, the truth is that only we have the power to transform our situation: there is no one else.”

Suzi Gablik

The present world is typical with its hectic pace, lack of time and new and new demands on people. We have to be adaptive to frequent consecutive changes, to keep pace with the society. Because of the pace we are not allowed to stop, to perceive and reflect our lives in a broader context, realize the impact of human activities on the environment. Maximizing outcomes of our work and profit seems to be so important today. The idea of economic growth is a motor of the competitive behaviour that has apparently destructive impact on ourselves as well as on nature that is being plundered in the name of progress. This self-perpetuating mechanism which seems to be the only guarantee of higher living-standard prevents us to perceive its consequences. Unable to stop our sprint “we block so much feedback, both trough official secrecy and through psychological denial, that we feel the crisis too big to let in.” (Macy in Gablik 1995)

It is not pleasant to face a possible catastrophe. That is why it is easier not to believe it. Moreover, the immense plenty of information surrounding and attacking us every day is difficult to orientate in and judge what is true, what to believe. Therefore reports of environmental degradation however alarming they are they are be ignored by most of people. Although the problems of environment are closely connected with our life on this planete, they are often too complicated to be quickly comprehended. However some phenomena associated with state of the Earth cannot be exactly and reliably predicted by ecological hypotheses, when they confirm it will be late for remedy.

I think many of us notice apparent marks of pollution of the air, water or soil, amounts of litter produced by human society, diminishing numbers of wild animals. It is sometimes difficult to put these facts into a broader ecological context, judge what they indicate. Many of them even cannot be perceived directly, especially global ecological problems like depletion of the ozone layer, cutting down the tropical rainforests, polluting oceans, population explosion in the Third world countries, etc. Nevertheless, our behaviour can contribute to worsening these problems. Destroying the vital ecosystems of the Earth would be most probably fatal for our specie as well as for many others.

Our world has changed a lot in this century. It is much more interconnected than ever before. Examples of this are: developed transport all around the planet, communication that uses knowledge of modern science as well as high technology equipment, integration of many countries’ economies and trade. The world seems to become smaller, the distances are shortened. Some speak about ‘global village’. However all these facts seem positive at first sight, they have also their shady side: lead by the vision of progress, using results of science and technology, the white race has been expanding to the whole world, bringing their culture everywhere, putting through its own values and destroying the traditional social structures of many ’primitive nations’. Now Europe itself is threatened by the influence of American mass culture. There is something like ‘global culture’ coming into existence. People who used to solve problems of their region now have to face problems of the whole planet.

Some environmentalists urge people to ’think globally’ and ‘act locally’ but it is not easy to behave according that simple slogan. It is difficult to even imagine something concrete, what should such action look like. It is one of the demands on people, however meaningful. To cope with such a deal we should know more about human nature causing environmental problems as well as obstacles of their solving. A book by Konrad Lorenz ‘Eight Mortal Sins’ (Lorenz 1990) describes the most serious vices of human race. I mention here a few of them as well as opinions of other authors on roots of the current state of the world.

Besides immense working pace, a merry-go-round of competition and consumption, he mentions also overpopulation of this planet, environmental degradation, nuclear threat and others. These are phenomena that not occur with any other biological specie. Why? Man, as a biological specie, has two types of hereditary anthropological characteristics. One of them he shares with the other living organisms. The other type are specifically human characteristics, thanks to which man differs from animals. Unlike the other organisms, man is aware of his death. ”He is driven by a desire to avoid it or, at least, to put off the moment of the death. This existential anxiety is said to be the motor of civilization.” (Librová 1994) The combination of the two characteristics mentioned above seems to be the most risky moment during the mankind’s existence. Thanks to ability to learn quickly, to explore his surroundings and its laws and thanks to knowledge of highly specialized language, he reached ability of ’offensive adaptation’. It means that he does not adapt himself to the environment but he tries to adapt the environment to his quickly changing and growing needs. By means of science and technology man liberated himself of natural laws. Number of individuals of this specie rose extraordinarily. “In the privileged part of he world the consumption is many times higher than hundred years ago.” (Kohák 1993) The mechanisms limiting numbers of individuals of a certain specie are weakened at people. We can shift the limits by means of technology and thus lost the sensitivity for sustainability of environment. Peasants who lived on cultivating land knew what they can afford and had to adapt their needs to capacity of envtironment. We cannot assess this any more. ”For example, when a number of fish drops on the critical level man creates a more efficient trawler and can keep the haul till complete extinction of the caught specie.” (Kohák 1993)

Lorenz assigns the aesthetic and ethical decline of man to separation from nature. It is not possible to develop a sense of reverence surrounded by cheap artificial products. We are getting used to obey the imperative of advertisement - it is easier to believe its seductive promises and consume than to strive for an alternative. Thanks to consuming tendency we increase our demands of living-standard and comfort. Unlike our ancestors we do not want to bear suffering. Thanks to modern technologies we avoid suffering whenever we can. Inability to bear suffering caused a loss of strong positive emotions. According to Lorenz this has also destructive influence on environment and “our ability to judge what is good and what is bad.” (Lorenz 1990)

Value orientation of people and basic patterns of their behaviour have its base in old fylogenetic roots. In everyday life man behaves like a ‘being of intuition’ that thinks a bit like a primeval hunter and picker. These archaic basics cannot control the way people act in the modern world which operates highly efficient instruments. Most people are confined (as apes are) to interests of small social groups - their families and the closest friends - and to a limited physical space. They do not take larger social or geographical horizon and broader impact of their behaviour into consideration. Life of the pre-historic people was difficult and dangerous. They experienced hunger very often and depended on uncertain prey. Therefore overeating in times of abundance was quite justified as well as relaxing and laziness after an exhausting hunt. People had to face danger and therefore it was logical to be precarious. Today we can easily avoid many dangers but we also enjoy overeating as well as laziness. That is why we are so weak in resisting suffering and insensible to pleasant experience. We demand still more.

The contemporary Euro-American civilization is ‘man-centred’. Nature is taken only as an instrument for reaching human aims. Rational approach to the world has a strong position in the European culture. Promoted in the classical period of Greece, it reached its historical top in Descartes’s philosophy. He made a strong difference between two worlds: ‘res extensa’, a world of things with only spatial characteristics and reality, and ’res cogitans’, world of meaning and value that has only an ideal reality. A human mind is the only source of value. Nature - the objective world - is of no own value. This kind of approach supports the idea that we can rely only on exact information, that emotions are something wrong, irrational, destructive, and unpredictable, that confuses our rational judgement. ”Paradoxically, the rational conception of the world contributed to creation of a rigid and irrational belief in omnipotence of science and technology, which is a source of people’s pleasure.” (Librová 1994)

One of the pleasures mentioned at the end of the previous chapter is pleasure of consumption. Value of consumption becomes a universal value in consumers’ society. Such an attitude promotes ethical relativism, malady of the 20^th century. Ethical relativism is an inevitable consequence of scientific world-view. Overwhelming rationality caused decline of religious belief and spirituality. Existential conception of man that was associated with scientific denial of religion provoked disintegration of traditional conception of man. Skolimowski judges ethical relativism as weakness, lack of responsibility and discipline. This approach supports indifference and apathy. It can be defended by opinion ‘Everybody does this.’, expressing inability to accept any moral attitude. A statement, that we all are different and therefore cannot be equal (some of us can satisfy their needs rather than others) is based on this relativism and supports injustice.

For creating a new conception of man Skolimowski proposes an idea of environmental ethics, based on a system of certain values. He puts forward a three-level system of values. The basic ones, the core of an ethical system, are: reverence to life, responsibility (as a connecting, uniting element between ethics and rationality) temperance, diversity, and ecological justice (the result of our ecological thoughtfulness, of the idea of responsibility for all and knowledge of the world’s interconnectedness).

The change of our system of values (a motor of our behaviour) requires accepting a new, more environmentally sound lifestyle. Masculine values, typical for Western civilization will have to be reassessed. An approach based on values like control, mastering, rationality and power refuses and depreciates behaviour associated with humility, empathy and feelings.

Continuation of exploiting natural resources as well as competition and permanent economic growth cannot last forever. Stores of natural wealth are limited and increasing consumption in the West on the expense of Third World countries can lead to political instability. The unsustainability of this development became apparent thanks to research done by Daniel and Donella Meadows - authors of books ‘Limits to Growth’ and ’Beyond the Limits’ (Meadows 1995). They present the results of computer simulation of Earth’s future based on facts like: birth-rate, exploiting non-renewable resources, production of food, industrial production etc. Standard scenario based on the data mentioned above leads to a collapse. Exponential growth is followed by steep decline. It is not a positive perspective of mankind. Unfortunately, we are still at the phase of growth and we are satisfied with a hope that the future will be the same.

To prevent such fall, the Meadowses suggest the concept of sustainable development, efined as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This concept accepted also by official policy of some states is based on the following conclusions.

1. If the present tendency of the world’s population growth, industrialization and exploiting of the natural resources goes on, the limits to growth will be reached in next hundred years on this planet. Sudden and uncontrollable decline of population and industrial capacity will be the most probable consequence.
2. It is possible to change this tendency and it is possible to prepare conditions of ecological and economic stability that would be sustainable for a long time. The state of a global balance can be designed in such a way that basic material needs of every individual on the Earth could be met and that each person would have the same chance to make the most of his individual abilities.
3. If the mankind decides to attempt to work out the second point instead of the first one the chance to succeed is the higher the earlier it starts to work on its attempting.” (Meadows 1995)

The conclusions resulting in planetary demands might seem abstract for an individual. He or she cannot change the world’s policy. But he or she can change personal attitudes and behaviour. Josef Vavroušek (the former Czechoslovak minister of environment) wrote: “When seeking values for sustainable life we should focus at first at ourselves, at values dominating in Euro-American civilization - part of which we are. Not only because change of our behaviour can solve problems of our region but also because our civilization crucially influences what happens in the world. Therefore, if we realize unsustainability of the existing global trends we have to admit fundamental contribution of Euro-American systems of values in this unsatisfactory development. If we start with ourselves we can change the world.” (Keller 1995)

Change of one’s behaviour is not easy at all. The way we act has its roots in values we appreciate (and which are acknowledged by the society). This is why we should consider our own values and try to adapt them to demands of sustainable life. Vavroušek suggests to reassess the following aspects of human life-

• man’s relation to nature
• relation of an individual to society
• relation to stream of time and an interpretation of history
• relation to the meaning of one’s own life
• relation to freedom and responsibility
• relation to the level of our knowledge
• relation to one’s own life
• relation to future generation
• relation to different opinions and other civilizations
• relation to joint matters

(Keller 1995)

One of the approaches based on changes of our mind-set can be the restriction of one’s consumption. In ecological terms it is usually called ‘voluntary simplicity’. This term comes from the book by D.S. Elgin. Kristin S. Shrader-Frechett refers to it in her essay having the same name (Shrader-Frechett 1996). Implementing the principles of voluntary simplicity in life is impressively described in Hana Librová’s report of sociological research among Czech and Moravian people who denied many of the pleasures of civilisation and decided to live modestly face to face to a possible ecological catastrophe.

What does such an uneasy change require? It is difficult to separate from the crowd and live in a less comfortable way. The economic system relies on consumers who need still more and more goods which is supported by advertisement. We have to be able to create our own vision of the world, positive conceptions of our future based on effort to true knowledge of reality around us and reckon with a possible catastrophe. “Gabriel Marcel anticipates the tragic of ecological situation in his text: ‘The structure of the world which we live in allows absolute despair and as if it recommended it; nevertheless, an invincible hope can arise just in such a world.’ Despair can be the stepping stone to greater certainty.” (Librová 1994) A similar feature appears in work of Joanna Macy - a deep ecologist. She calls the activities based on dealing with anxiety and despair “despair work” (Seed 1993). They should help people to stop blocking the feedback and the challenge of one’s spiritual transformation. The people in Librová’s book are practical, creative people majority of which live in the country but who often come from cities. There are relatively many artists among them. They set their consumption according their real needs, not advertisement. According to Shrader-Frechett temperance can help people to get rid of subordination to money and necessity of economic competition. Modesty strengthens freedom because it supports relying on oneself. people who do not want according to economic laws of society cannot be manipulated so easily. False idea of higher living standard makes people do absurd things.

As Ivan Illich states, car is a typical example of this. “The Americans spend enormous plenty of energy on the car transport. A typical American spends 1600 hours per year on his automobile; this is not only the driving time but also earning money for the car, etc. Why should a typical American invest 1600 hours a year to cover 12000 km? Which is not even 8 km per hour! In countries where most people do not use cars and petrol, people also travel in 8 km/H’s pace and spend about 3-8% of their time on transport. An American spends 28%. In this case Illich does not find a reason to state that people in countries dependent on high consumption of petrol and automobiles live better than people with different lifestyle.” (Shrader-Frechetteová 1996)

This American example is going to early do justice situation in the Czech Republic. Car is a symbol of people’s lifestyle and wealth however its use can be sometimes wasteful. People who decided to live modestly can buy and consume things they choose according their utilitarian and not representative function. Voluntary modesty does not mean to live in poverty-it turns life into a struggle for survival which prevents people to be aware of other people’s real needs as well as the Earth’s value.

As I have mentioned, change of people’s behaviour towards environmental sustainability is a difficult task. A person who is used to live according to certain principles and values might feel losing the world-view as threatening for his or her identity. Denying values of the majority can be impossible for many people, for more, if they do not understand the reasons for it, they are not motivated at all. One of the important conditions for real willingness to do something for the Earth, to change everyday practices, is an emotional bond to nature. Facts are important, we should know them, but they can hardly make us change ourselves, our values.

An easier (and maybe the only possible) way to creating this bond is experiencing stays in nature, exploring and enjoying nature during childhood. People who grew up in the country or used to spend there a lot of time are more likely to change their lifestyle towards more environmentally friendly way. In the situation when destruction of nature threatens our existence on the planet, it is necessary to adopt new priorities in our lives. A chance to influence the system of values and priorities is in educating children and young people who will participate in the society and decisions about environment in several years.

Unfortunately, contemporary schools, especially in the Czech Republic, often reflect the vices and practices of the society. Rationality and perfect outcomes are required, children are used to competition as the only way to success, often they are made to memorize many facts without understanding of broader context. Projects including practical, real activities and situations are still rare. Numbers of pupils in classrooms prevent teachers to treat children as personalities, as partners. Therefore the curriculum is focusing rather at necessary knowledge than pupils’ needs. In these conditions it is difficult and almost impossible to build a sense of the value of nature and hope that it will influence real life of children or students. Such an approach cannot be put forward by a teacher who does not personally accept the values he or she leads the young people to. The teacher’s or educator’s personality determines the atmosphere of lessons, of the common experience. Besides competition he or she should also improve the children’s ability to co-operate, to help each other. Individualism is not a good way to be interested in others, to understand them. We expect from the others to be accepted and important for them, feel that they care of us.

As adults, we find expressing deep feelings difficult and even improper. We rather appreciate behaviour described by expressions like ‘judge something without emotions’, ‘not to give in emotions’, etc. Nevertheless, emotional alienation from the world can hardly form a basis for human characteristics like compassion, empathy, humility, love, or reverence. Real affinity to nature, perceiving the Earth as our home cannot be gained without emotional commitment. We need deep experience, emotional bond to nature which requires direct contact with natural environment, perception and also sensual exploration of it. Perceiving nature as a magnificent complex, which has been developing and functioning for millions of years can be a stimulus to reverential thinking about it, about life. The approach I call ‘environmental education’ is meant to provide children chance to experience something new which might be a stimulus for forming their attitude to environment and ability to think and act according to more environmentally sound principles.

I think that environmental education should not be an isolated subject, providing information and experience, which is later examined and evaluated. I think that this could not work properly, it might lead to formalism. Environmental education should rather pervade all or most of subjects. Not as a set of information or a special area but as a kind of approach, including certain principles and ideas, as a way of thinking. The principles I explain in the chapter concerning directly in environmental education (‘Environmental Education’)

As a student of art education I chose this subject to show some examples of applying the principles in art. As artistic activities have much to do with right hemisphere, emotions and the unconscious, they can help children to develop their expressive abilities a well as serve as a complement to the other, mostly rational school subjects. Art education can provide pupils opportunity to express themselves, to explore nature in various (often uncommon) ways and to create their own projects and actions for the environment. I sought inspiration in practical examples of using artistic methods in environmental education (which are not many) and in activities of contemporary artists who concern environment in their work (who are not many either). On the basis of these information as well as my personal experience and ideas I tried to create a conception that might inspire teachers and educators at schools and in other institutions.

“Science without love can give us no good reason to appreciate the sunset, nor can it give us any purely objective reason to value life. These must come from deeper sources.”

David Orr

This chapter deals with environmental education - one of the possible solutions of the world’s future ecological situation, as I stated in the introduction. Environmental education is, of course, a long-term strategy but I think that it is one of few ways to influence people’s attitudes towards environmentally aware ones. We need a kind of education responding to environmental emergency.

What could such an education look like, is the core of this chapter. I created a conception of features which I consider as essential for environmental education. It is based on books, opinions and articles by various authors, as well as my own point of view. The chapter includes also a brief overview of environmental education in curricula of Scotland, Norway and the Czech Republic providing a picture of how environmental education can be conceived by the state.

As my proposal of environmental education cannot be a complex, professional conception I rather emphasize the features that I consider as important for purposes of environmental education and that are often missing in our education at present.

Environmental education should lead to:

• Ability to create a positive vision of one’s own life and future, compatible with principles of sustainable life
• More thoughtful attitudes of people, taking consequences of one’s behaviour into consideration.
• Ability of real action for the environment

These are aims that are deeply associated with personal commitment of people which cannot be accomplished formally. The form of education should correspond with the contents. Such principles are not much respected in the contemporary teaching (and not only in the Czech Republic). As professor David Orr from Oberlin College in Ohio writes; “For the most part we are still educating the young as if there were no planetary emergency,” and adds that “More of the same kind of education that enabled us to industrialize the Earth can only make things worse. The skills, aptitudes and attitudes necessary to industrialize the Earth are not necessarily the same as those that will be needed to heal the Earth or to build durable economies.” (Orr 1993)

His criticism refers mainly to the English educational system but I think that in many points it applies to conditions in most Czech schools, too. Prevailing rationality and emphasise on passive receiving facts rather than understanding is still typical for many of our schools. Success is assessed according to pupils’ knowledge performed in examination and is expressed in marks. This is why there is a little chance to appreciate individual qualities of pupils or students. Numbers of pupils in classes are another obstacle in treating them as individual personalities. This prevents a chance of students or pupils of self-expression and some, less assertive ones can feel inferior. In the atmosphere of competition they simply cannot succeed and feel as equal members of the group.

The current state of Czech education can be considered exclusively as a consequence of the past Communist era but the problem is not that simple. However, more meaningful reforms of education has taken place in Britain since the World War II than in the Czech Republic. The last one reminds Mary Tasker of a return to a totalitarian way of teaching, as she writes in Resurgence. She means the controversial National Curriculum. I think that her opinion on it can tell us much about our educational system: “In the United Kingdom the National Curriculum has resuscitated a traditional subject curriculum which harks back to the 1950s. Government disapproval of ‘trendy teaching methods’ such as children working in groups or individually at their own pace, gives official sanction to the whole class teaching. So the classroom remains hierarchical with the teacher dispensing knowledge which is itself decided upon by government officials removed from the concerns of pupils, teachers and parents. At universities, where approaches to knowledge might be expected, the Cartesian world-view still prevails. Objectivity, positivism and instrumental rationality are intellectual values underpinning many courses in higher education particularly those in science and technology. teaching and learning styles are mostly formal, even authoritarian.” (Tasker 1993)

Although the situation in the Czech Republic is not very optimistic, there are exceptions. These are initiated by people who did not wait for governmental reforms and guidelines and try to change the system ‘from below’. For environmental education it seems as the only possibility because neither the Ministry of Education nor the Ministry of Environment pay much attention to it. (see the part ‘Curricula’ of this chapter). I supposes that ideas of David Orr may serve as an inspiration for those who want to ‘green’ their teaching and educating.

He proposes several measures for a reform of the present environmentally insufficient curriculum. His concept of a reform is lead by an idea that “Students in the next century will need to know how to create a civilization that runs on sunlight, conserves energy, preserves biodiversity, protects soils and forests, develops sustainable local economies and restores the damage inflicted on the Earth. In order to achieve such ecological education we need to transform our schools and universities.” (Orr 1993)

The first of the measures requires developing more comprehensive and ecologically solvent standards for truth. Cartesian philosophy stripping nature of its intrinsic value should be replaced by a broader conception of science. Orr emphasises here feelings and personality, union of subject and object, of mind and body and their ecological and emotional context.

The second measure means a challenge of the persistent idea that human domination of nature is good, that growth economy is natural, that material progress is our right. Because of these beliefs we are not able to resist seductiveness of technology, convenience and short-term gain.

The third one points to preference of individualism and rights in curriculum whilst little is taught about citizenship and responsibilities. “The ecological emergency can be resolved only if enough people come to hold a bigger idea of what it means to be a citizen, and this knowledge will have to be taught carefully at all levels of education.” Orr means here citizenship in a broader sense, citizenship in the biotic community, understanding our dependence on the wider community of life. Patriotism would then mean thoughtful treatment of natural resources, limiting production of waste, pollution etc.

In the fourth point he criticizes our absolute belief in technology and its constant evolution and asks: ”Is technological change taking us where we want to go? What effect does technology have on our imagination and particularly on our social, ethical, and political imagination? And what net effect does it have upon our ecological prospects?” Orr supposes that technology has a negative influence on our ecological imagination, “with which we can envision restored landscapes, renewed ecosystems, and whole people living in a whole biosphere.” Our imagination is increasingly confined to technological possibilities like computers, television, virtual reality generator etc. Nevertheless, our needs are different. Orr finds them as “decent communities, good work to do, loving relationships, stable families, and a way to transcend our inherent self-centredness.” These needs are rather of spirit, yet our imagination is aimed at things.

Finally I would like to mention Prof. Orr’s idea of the goals of - in his words - ecological education. Traditional education aims at providing pupils and students qualification that increases their earnings and upward mobility. Usually it is called ‘career’. Orr puts forward another conception of educational aim, ‘calling’, and emphasises that students should be encouraged to find first their calling. When concerning the goals of environmental education, he points out two terms: ‘career’ and ‘calling’. A career is the value of education that increases the graduate’s upward mobility and lifetime earnings. That is what most school prepare for.

On the other hand, a calling is not the product of calculation but an inner conversation about what really matters in life and what difference one really wants to make in the world. “A career is a test for of one’s IQ; a calling not only a test for intelligence but for one’s wisdom, character, loyalty and moral stamina as well.” (Orr 1993)

I created a conception of features that I consider as important for developing children’s and young people’s attitudes to the environment. I think that many of the ideas included in the proposal can be applied to every school subject. Some can be emphasised in a certain subject, some in another, it depends on their character.

This point should encourage an approach operating more with feelings, emotions and perception rather than with rationality. I would emphasise a physical contact with the environment (the built as well as the natural one) and diversity of various people’s feeling, uniqueness of each personality.

Children should be provided a chance to express their feelings, they should be taught to express themselves, to cope with their emotions, and to rely on their personal perception. The teacher should support originality and sincerity of pupils’ expression, without evaluating and saying what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ because nobody can be actually wrong in this field.

Physical contact with the environment and practical activities benefit from advantages of ‘learning by doing’ and help children to understand the environment in a way that theoretical knowledge cannot provide.

“The early experience of nature in childhood, the ability as an adult to enjoy these experiences comprehending the value of the richness and diversity of nature, and the need and energy to act on behalf of nature and a better environment are all interdependent.” (Mantere 1993)

This point is focused at understanding the processes, elements and various characteristics of the environment and a man’s place in it. Various methods and points of view should be used in learning about the environment. Not only scientific, theoretical approaches should be stressed. Activities in the open air, field studies and sensual perception are equal to them.

Children can learn about various qualities and characteristics of the nature (investigate physical, chemical as well as sensual qualities of the environment), natural processes (birth, origin, growth, and extinction). Another wide theme is the mankind’s position in the world and its relation with it during history, man’s impact on the environment, evolution and the planet’s perspectives. Various sources of information can be used for learning: from personal experience, experiment, scientific theories, to literature (fiction, myths) and art.

“Scientific understanding is not going to change our habits or give us the political will to change our life - even the hard facts which tell us we should not do this or that, do not actually persuade people as much as spiritual experience can. You have to touch the hearts of people.” (Environmental Education 1992)

This point should help us to develop pupil’s ability to accept different points of views, to change the way of treating facts, tolerate other people’s opinions.

Accepting that there are many ways of perceiving things, many points of view should help the pupils to understand and tolerate other cultures, members of other races, accept rights of other creatures and living organisms.

Children should be lead to ability to see various aspects of one thing or a phenomenon, to realize many faces of the world. They can observe temporal changes of things, look for various meanings of them (biological, cultural, mythic, historical, physical,...). Pupils should be able to look at things from a detailed as well as a global point of view

This is a field for an interdisciplinary approach, for using and benefiting from the project method.

This point focuses at raising ability of pupils and young people to create and to have personal opinions. Students should be able to create a concept, have a positive vision for future, idea of their life. Ability of creating a positive vision prevents passivity and egoism.

“There is a great difference between seeing the future as only an ominous and vaguely defined threat or void, and seeing it as something one can outline, imagine and influence.” (Mantere 1993)

Our schools are in my opinion uni-laterally intended at competition, at success we can measure and compare by means of marks. When we take the pupils as a set of individuals, group of unique persons then it will be difficult (if not completely impossible) to use one scale for all of them. There are also other qualities we can focus at and appreciate than only efficiency.

However competition is one of the main principles of our society and it is useful for pupils to deal with it, we should also emphasise the ability of co-operation and compromise.

Supportive atmosphere of co-operation can show the children advantages and possible benefit form this kind of behaviour.

In group-work children can learn and develop the ability to put through their own opinions as well as subordinate themselves to an opinion of the majority. Children should be aware of value of their own opinion and to be able to accept someone else’s opinion. This might encourage capability of children to participate in democratic processes. Skills like listening, discussing, negotiating and presenting are be developed in group-work.

“Confidence is gained within a supportive atmosphere and individuals can begin to express their own different ideas. If the group can cope with this diversity it may achieve a level of greater creativity and can begin to tackle more contentious issues. A ‘mature’ group could then begin to formulate plans for environmental action.” (Environmental Education 1992)

In most activities in our education I miss practical outcomes, real actions, openness to publicity. Most schools are ‘isolated’ institutions without apparent relationships with the local community, connections with ‘real life outside’.

A hope that things can really be changed, a belief in one’s own ability to improve the environment may encourage children in their personal efforts. The active approach at schools based on concrete practical activities, communication with local authorities and media can help to prepare children to be accepted members of civic society.

Concrete examples of environmentally friendly behaviour applied in practice at school can show children a way which is different from the contemporary consumers’ passive approach. Thus the way to sustainable life would be based on experience in everyday life. “The specific practices of the school, e.g. regarding recycling, waste treatment and energy consumption, are naturally an essential part of environmental education offered to pupils and students. The example of adults in this and other choices affecting the environment (e.g. the unnecessary use of cars) is probably more important than what grown-ups say about them.” (Mantere 1993)

As I have mentioned above, environmental education has much to do with personal commitment and one’s feelings. Such an approach, aiming at ‘touching people’s hearts, poses special demands on the teacher’s personality. Aims that should influence real life of young people cannot be gained through formal style of teaching. “It is essential that there is a consistency of values. Learning cannot be divorced from the methods of acquiring that learning. For instance how we arrange the furniture in the classroom, speak and listen to the students and evaluate their work will create strong messages. Are these consistent with the attitudes we are trying to encourage in environmental education? If we are trying to promote participatory approaches to the environment we must accept participatory approaches in the classroom.” (Environmental Education 1992) Teachers or educators who aim to develop environmental awareness of other people should first make clear their own attitudes, their personal relationship to nature. According to M.-H. Mantere: When the teacher’s own study of nature and his or her personal reality in this sense are in order, or at least have found a good start, he or she is prepared to approach others.” (Mantere 1993)

These are demanded requirements and many people could consider them as too high. Fortunately, teachers and educators who want to make their teaching more environmental can attend courses lead by specialists from environmental centres that can provide them inspiration and help for the beginning. (addresses of some of the centres can be found in the list of addresses)

In the last part of this chapter I would like to provide some information about environmental education and curricula in three countries - Scotland, Norway, and the Czech Republic (unfortunately, it was not possible to obtain more of them in CR). As these materials are not very compatible it will be rather a set of examples of approaches and activities than a comparison.

I will start with Scotland. In Scotland the National Strategy for Environmental Education was published in 1993. The Scottish Curriculum of Environmental Studies is divided into three branches: science and applications, social science and environment, technology and applications. There are also goals which the pupils should attain. These repeat in several stages. I quite appreciate the feature that pupils return to a topic several times during the school time. Thus it is possible to prevent pupils to come across a topic one time, to be examined, forget it and never return to it. I also like the fact that the topics have always a practical outcome in a concrete activity.

I was optimistic that arts are taken into consideration in Scottish conception of environmental education. It is stated in the National Strategy for Environmental Education that “Attitudes to the cultural environment will have much to do with the way people behave towards their physical environment. It also helps people express themselves about their physical environment: the recent report of the National Inquiry into Arts and Communities draws attention to the empowering quality of community arts in enabling people to communicate such local needs as environmental protection.” (Learning for Life 1993)

There is an example of ‘community arts’ in that material, a project called ‘Greenscheme’:

”A unique community arts project in Craigmillar is working to raise awareness of relevant environmental issues, both local and global, and promote changes in the built and natural environment through the arts. Greenscheme includes projects like ‘Tree time in Craigmillar’ which was launched before, and was continued after, National Tree Week 1992, which aimed to promote appreciation of trees as enhancing the urban environment and also being vital to life. The community was involved in the following ways:

• leaflets to houses asking where people would like trees;
• workshops on the project, stickers and promotional events;
• broadcast on Radio Forth;
• gift of a tree to Edinburg, planted in Princess Street Gardens;
• woodcarving workshops for adults using fallen trees;
• children’s dance, drama and costume workshops (Tree theatre);
• storytelling in eight primary schools
• drumming workshops in the secondary school.

All these activities culminated in Tree*vent - an outdoor performance of tree theatre - in a park with theatre lighting to create the atmosphere among mature trees. This was followed by an indoor tape and slide show, display of tree-theme artwork and community ceilidh.” (Learning for Life 1993)

The material appreciates the role of artists in a housing renewal project, collaboration between professional visual artists and others who shape our environment - architects, planners, developers, community workers, etc.

An example of interaction between arts and the environment is shown by a ‘Green Room’ in 1992 exhibition of Society of Scottish Artists. The ‘Green Room’ included a seminar which was partly “a response to the Working group at which artists discussed the kinds of contribution they make to public understanding through widening awareness, questioning the nature of quality, and encouraging creative response.” (Learning for Life 1993)

Norwegian Core Curriculum was published in 1994. This curriculum conceives man as a complex of several integrated human beings. These are:

• the spiritual human being
• the creative human being
• the working human being
• the liberally educated human being
• the social human being
• the environmentally aware human being

The section concerning the environmentally aware human being starts with a general view of the present world and man’s position in it, the impact of technologies, consequences of our decisions which have global scale now and points out the need of solution of ecological problems. Besides this need, responsibility of industrial nations ensuring the common future of the world is emphasised, and importance of solidarity with the world’s poor. “The interplay between economy, ecology and technology must make unique demands, scientific and ethical, on our age, if we are to ensure sustainable development. Education must therefore provide a broad awareness of the interconnections in nature and about the interplay between humans and their habitat.” (Core Curriculum 1994)

The last point is one that pleased me very much. It is called ‘The Joy of Nature’. This point puts through the importance of physical activity in nature, living in a beautiful country, “in the lines of a landscape, and in the changing seasons. It should awaken a sense of awe towards the unexplainable, induce pleasures in outdoor life and nourish the urge to wander off the beaten track and into uncharted terrain; to use body and senses to discover new places and to explore the world.

Outdoor life touches us in body, mind and soul. Education must corroborate the connection between understanding nature and experiencing nature; familiarity with the elements and the interconnections in our living environment must be accompanied by the recognition of our dependence on other species, our affinity with them, and our joy in wildlife.” (Core Curriculum 1994)

Situation in the Czech Republic is not that optimistic. Although environmental education is included in a law of education from 1990, the reality looks different. According to the report about the current state of environmental education in the Czech Republic, environmental education is properly incoporated neither in curriculum for primary, secondary schools nor for universities. Ministries of Education and Environment assign a little priority to environmental education. (Kulich 1995) The author (and a director of the environmental centre SEVER in CR) criticizes the approach of the institutions mentioned above, significant with lack of conception and specialists as well as by low financial support to projects concerning environmental education. This is why environmental education in CR is provided mainly by NGOs - various environmental centres, that are not many. (See the list of addresses.)

Of course it does not mean that no conceptions have been created in the recent years. This is e.g. a project by Josef Vavroušek for secondary schools ‘Human ecology’. Examples of some others are: ‘Ekologické gymnázium’, Pøírodní škola (Natural School) in Prague, or Základní škola (Primary School) in Obøíství.

The ‘National Programme of Environmental Education’ (NPEV) with a subtitle ‘Proposal of Strategy of Environmental Education as a part of the Czech Governmental Policy’ was elaborated in the Czech Environmental Institute (ÈEÚ) for the Ministry of Environment in 1994. This programme focused at building a network of environmental education in CR that would include institutions as National Parks and Protected Areas, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health Care, NGOs, administration, etc. Unfortunately, Ministry of Environment did not accredited it and efforts of ÈEÚ to put the programme through are in vain.

This is not a very optimistic conclusion. Teachers who want to incorporate principles of environmental education into their subjects have to rely mainly on their enthusiasm and creativity; “we can begin to show alternative approaches through our personal example and enthusiasm and form networks to share our ideas and experience and give each other necessary moral support and encouragement.” (Environmental Education 1992)

“Artists - the shapers and sizers, storytellers, poets, filmmakers, actors and paiters - are the ones with the power to feel the outlines and echoes of shared truth beneath the fragmented surface of our world; to give us back, however fleetingly, the sense of wholeness and communion without which we cannot live. That is why we need artists.”

Joyce McMillan, Arts for a New Century (the preparatory document for the Charter for Arts in Scotland)

Art is not the first area of human activity that occurs to us when thinking about solutions of ecological crisis. However art might seem far from to this issue, its role in changing the established paradigm need not to be marginal. Authors like Suzi Gablik, Henryk Skolimowski, Thomas Berry or Inez Martinez share the idea that in our spiritually poor time art can bring a key to our hearts and provide stimuli for change of people’s way of thinking and behaviour in order to change the direction that mankind is following now. At the beginning I was very curious and interested in solutions and ideas that might be provided by art. I found some in book ’The Reenchantment of Art’ by Suzi Gablik (Gablik 1991) and in articles by other authors mentioned above. Gablik’s book included besides many examples of artists who try to divide form the mainstream and respond to the world’s ecological situation also a broader aesthetic, philosophical and ethical basis for such art. Her assumptions are mostly based on analysis of American situation in art. I consider the book as very helpful for my work on the thesis as well as for my personal development. I decided to convey you Gablik’s and other authors’ ideas by means of my interpretation of their main ideas. I incorporate many quotations into the chapter because I consider access to the materials as rather difficult and want to provide the ideas to people interested them in this way. (As the quotations from Gablik’s book are really many, they are printed in italics, without bibliographical notes).

The examples presented by Gablik point out mostly American art, therefore I decided to provide also the Czech point of view of art and ecology. Because of the lack of literature dealing with this topic in the Czech Republic - the only material I obtained was Jiøí Zemánek’s article in Atelier journal which I used for introduction for chapter about Czech art (Zemánek 1996). I illustrated the situation by interviews of three Czech artists concerning environment in their work: Olga Karlíková, Miloš Šejn, and Jiøí Èernický. I suppose that ideas and examples presented in these chapters can serve as a source of inspiration for various artistic activities and philosophical and ethical basis for them, too.

At the beginning of her book Gablik poses a question what does it mean to be a ”successful” artist working in the world today? and adds that much of the book is devoted to considering this question. I was surprised with that question at the beginning of the book called ‘Reenchantment of Art’, it seemed to me very American but later I understood the importance of such a question. As a Czech society tries to join the developed countries, capitalism with all its vices and virtues is quickly developing here and Gablik’s initial question becomes more and more topical in my country too.

Notion of success is deeply rooted in people’s thinking and it is personally appealing to each of us. Being successful is a motor of much of our endeavour. Another question is, how we define success; success is judged according to generally accepted social measures based on values appreciated by the society. Values important for present Western society - rationality, power, dominance, independence - are mostly patriarchal ones. We accept these values although putting them through is not favourable for the environment. Success of an artist is determined by similar values. What values could replace this mind-set in order to save nature is one of the main issues of Gablik’s book

An opinion that contemporary art got into a kind of an ‘endgame’ situation, that an epoch has come to an end is an opinion shared by more authors. The main role in what is now happening to art is assigned to former avant-garde. The group of artists that used to be a source of confrontation, lost its revolutionary vigour and has been absorbed into the mainstream. It became a part of the economic system being controlled by the art market. According to Gablik, art whose primary qualities should be the spiritual or aesthetic ones becomes just a commodity, an element in the market system. When art became socially feeble it can just mirror its problematic nature or transform it into a hollow parody of itself. In such a situation nihilism is about to prevail because there is no escape from the status quo. In Lyotard’s opinion; what is revolutionary today is to hope for nothing. Deconstructive postmodernism is negating the out-of-date modernist myths, e.g. idea of revolution, change, or originality. Artists are deliberately breaking rules of a game ‘who came first’ by exhibiting copies of other authors’ work or ready-mades. Gablik describes Ronald Jones’ exhibition with a commentary of one of the typical features of contemporary art; nothing ever operates at face value.

In 1989, Jones exhibited a group of five classic “modern’’ sculptures - biomorphic forms cast in bronze, resembling sculptures by Hans Arp and Constantin Brancusi. Each sculpture was set on stacked blocks of limestone and wood that perfectly simulated Brancusi’s pedestals. As it turned out, these biomorphic forms were actually three-dimensional constructions of HIV (AIDS) virus, and various DNA genetic fragments that trigger malignant tumor growth, masquerading as sculptures. Artists deny to supply the market with a new artistic trend every year. A contemporary tendency called ”hovering” is based on idea that everything has been done already. We cannot expect any change from avant-garde now, when it is clear that modernism has failed its political ambitions. Gablik asks two questions here; How do we conceive of the post-avant-garde artist? and whether postmodernism offers any real break with the “disenchantment” of the modern world view and begins her answer with an idea that there must be two postmodernisms, representing opposite poles - a deconstructive and a reconstructive version. In spite they differ in their opinion on the possibility of change they share in common an understanding that the belief system that belonged to modernity has become obsolete. I found a similar idea in an article by Patricia Sanders who writes: “Unlike these deconstructive efforts, however, the forward looking postmodernism of much environmental and social art endeavors to construct a frame of values more conducive to a sustainable environment and to social harmony.” (Sanders 1992)

Gablik refuses nihilistic thinking about future of art and a discussion about possible content and philosophy of reconstructive postmodernism became the core of her book. She denies the traditional role of an artist as an observer of the world. She considers it as a consequence of Cartesian world view which has deeply influenced Euro-American thinking. Reconstructivists are trying to make the transition from Eurocentric, patriarchal thinking and “dominator” model of culture towards an aesthetics of interconnectedness, social responsibility and ecological attunement. According to her art could be one of the stimuli of social transformation. Different paradigm could initiate the change in thinking of every individual and thus change the social structure. What we are learning is that for every situation of our lives, there is a thought pattern that both precedes and maintains it, so that our consistent thinking patterns can also change our experience. People give legitimacy to all social institutions, no matter how powerful those institutions seem to be, and they also have the power to withdraw legitimacy.

Deconstruction of meaning is one of the postmodernist features. Artists do not want to be bound and limited by tyranny of correct using of meaning. By breaking such rules, art becomes something like a game without rules, where anything goes with anything. Nevertheless, people are dependent on meaning of what they are doing, meaning of their life. Deconstrutivistic freedom is more likely to confuse them, make them feel threatened. Without certain rules it is difficult to orientate in the world, find one’s position. Gablik points out another aspect of destabilizing a meaning. There is also a loss of a mythic, transpersonal ground of meaning in the way that our particular culture transmits itself. Skolimowski explains the intellectual confusion about meaning of art by “our soul’s confusion about the meaning of life; not only a break up of the ideal beauty but a break up the coherence of our lives” (Skolimowski 1992). In a situation when meaning of everything including art is arbitrary, art that denies all judgment can easily escape into total irresponsibility. In the age of simulation when we often cannot make difference between what is real and what isn’t, there are many opportunities for parody and indifference in art. Artists act in a strange vacuum, without consequences, where the only possibility to respond to the market system treating art as commodity is to commodify itself even more. Deconstruction becomes the cheerful orchestration of collapse, the cracked mirror of a culture where products must continually replicate other products, where artists become the author of someone else’s work, and everything competes within the same marketing system of seductive senselessness. Gablik illustrates this situation with an example of television reality given by Lisa Philips; in the electronic landscape of television, “the unrelenting abundance of data and its transmission... make each image, word or impulse mean less and less.” In a televised universe the real and the imaginary, the catastrophic and the trivial, coalesce on a single plane of electronic flow - there is more and more information and less and less meaning. In such a world where nothing is can be proved as real or fictious there is not a ground for appropriate human emotions, communication or understanding. When everything is relativized, including ethics, feelings like compassion, reverence or sense of responsibility lose a meaningful context. Freedom of meaning becomes just a senseless vacuum.

“Adieu, said the fox. Here is my secret. It is very simple: we can see properly only by means of our heart. The essential things are invisible for eyes.” (Exupéry 1995)

The passage from ‘The Little Prince’ embodies a beautiful metaphor of another way of perceiving the world around us. The common way of thinking acknowledges only reality that can be explained and described by means of clear terms, where everything works according to predictable laws. We are used to rely on our rationality, abstracting and controlling ego. It is one of the consequences of development of sciences and rationality. The adverse side of this was a loss of a sense of he divine side of life, of the power of imagination, myth, dream and vision. There is a lack of visionary or mystic experience in our lives, we cannot cope with our unconsciousness.

We no longer have the ability to shift mind-sets and thus to perceive other realities - to move between the worlds, as ancient shamans did. Ritual signifies that something more is going on that meets the eye - something sacred. Nevertheless, although most people are reluctant to believe experience and phenomena we cannot ”verify”, practices like rituals start being used by artists as well as environmentalists. By means of a ritual called ‘Council of All Beings’ people can access deep experience of feeling unity with all living beings, understand their troubles in this world. Thus the people have a chance to change the way they see the world and behave, doubt the dominating role of man.

Fern Shaffer accepted a ritual as an equivalent form of art. She performs rituals that were created with an intention of marking the passage of the seasonal equinoxes and solstices with special ceremonies. Shaffer says about her rituals; “The significance of what we do is to reenact or remember old ways of healing the Earth”.

The important thing is whether a shift in awareness occurs, creating a point of departure, an opening for numinous or magical experience that can never be obtained by cultivating intellectual skills; the world of magical perception has to be explored experientially, with wholehearted participation of the entire being. Thus it is possible to accept the other models of reality, common in shamanic cultures but hardly comprehensible for a member of the Western society. For Shaffer and Othello Anderson, who takes the photos of her rituals, the experience of being out in nature is what the rituals signify; within the participating ambiance of earlier world views and ancient cosmology, a lost sense of oneness with nature and an acute awareness of the ecosystem is opened up. One of the attractions of shamanism for modern individuals is that it appears to provide a possible basis for reharmonizing our out-of balance relationship with nature, which is especially important just now.

A direct experience of the natural world is what is lacking in our lives. To imply it into their life and work again, some artists started to walk in solitude in various parts of the world. These are for example Richard Long or Hamish Fulton, both British artists. They renew a tradition of a famous environmentalist D.H. Thoreau, who lived alone in his cabin by the Walden pond. His essay ‘Walking’ written in the first half of the last century became famous. Hamish Fulton says about his walks; “Nature is a source of my art and the art is a form of passive protest against the dominance of urban life. I’m curious about the wilderness not the metropolis.” (Fulton 1983) On his walks he tries to get into a state of mind when he can get rid of urban thinking and can make contact with some other perceptions. He not only takes photos on his walks but also records sounds and things he cannot be photographed. Richard Long makes long solitary walks during which he creates circles and lines in the landscape as well as experience seemingly ordinary activities; “walking, climbing, picking up wood, stones, clay, mud, kicking, moving, replacing, throwing, erecting stones, camping, making fire, pouring water, throwing mud, stopping, sleeping...” which turn into meditative artworks. (Long 1987) The simple geometric works he creates - circles, lines, spirals, squares, crosses are universal forms used by many cultures.

In our industrial age, when we live separate from nature, we cannot experience nature by our senses, we are surrounded by technology, walls, concrete, metal, plastic; we live our life in artificial environment and are getting used to this, a bit poor world. We are separate even from such phenomena like death or birth, the universal experiences. People are born or die in institutions, assisted by technology, far from the other people. Thus death or birth are treated more as diseases, something that does not fit into the predictable world. The moments of human life mentioned above have much to do with a phenomenon of soul. The notion of soul does not match to the traditional way of thinking, it is irrelevant to sciences. Only C.G. Jung deals with it in his psychoanalytical work as well as in the unconscious, which has not been much explored yet. According to Jung it has a mythical nature. It is a kind of mystery as well as soul. But mystery is difficult for contemporary man to coexist with. We have pursued our masculine extroverted values for so long that we have come to see soul as an unnecessary complication in an otherwise neat and tidy masculine world. Thus the world became seemingly simpler and less mysterious.

Separation from nature and its cycles caused a lack of direct experience of nature. Scientific theories and facts, however these admirable results of human intelligence and effort, can hardly provide a source of emotional experience of nature. If we rely only on rational approach, an important dimension is losing from our life. Ludwig Pesch calls it “sacred dimension”: “The sacred can only be understood as an over and impersonal dimension which bestows beauty and dignity on life and on very level known or even unknown to us and even in the most unlikely circumstances.” (Pesch 1995)

Pesch emphasizes sensitivity, perception, listening within which he finds many features common with art. Art can be the key that can ”unlock the sacred in the profanity and confusion of everyday life... According to sages of many civilizations, art was and continues to be the very key and therefore, has no meaning unless it fosters this perception of the sacred dimension underlying our personal lives and connecting it with every other life there is, has been and will be.” (Pesch 1995) To get rid of the rational bias of Western society through developing a more open model of the psyche is one of the tasks of the ”reenchantment project” defined by Gablik. The remythologizing of our consciousness through art and ritual is one way that our culture can regain a sense of enchantment. She proposes e.g. methods of trance and shamanic experience; In trance, when the ego-personality is temporarily displaced, the mind experiences another world from the everyday world, where inside is not separated from outside and a spontaneous experiencing of presences that do not belong to the ordinary world seems to occur. However this reminds of ancient practices, it is not meant as imitating archaic cultural style but as a way to our psyche and its abilities. These abilities can be activated with various occasions. One of them are the already mentioned solitary stays in nature, in wilderness. Primitive nations used to have a perfect sense of orientation, thanks to their ability of observation, which contributed to their knowledge of the environment. H. Fulton seeks the state of mind when he can concentrate e.g. on orientation. He calls it “perception, clarity and peace”. (Fulton 1983)

Another artist, Gilah Yelin Hirsch has been spending long periods of time alone in wild places; for her, nature is an ecstatic living presence, teeming with elementary spirits. The solitary, ritual journey into wilderness, facing the unknown in total isolation, has always been a classic part of shamanic training, since it engages one directly with fear; the intensity of the experience can often dissolve ego-boundaries that normally separate inner from outer. She experienced loneliness, danger, away from human contact, when she was climbing mountains in blizzards, felt the presence of animals. She started to feel herself an embodiment of nature by pervading the traditional barrier separating the observer and the world outside. This barrier causes that we underestimate our connectedness with the environment, our dependence on the Earth. We do not perceive Earth as our Mother any more...

Gablik is one of the authors who emphasize the necessity of a shift from exclusively masculine values that overwhelm in the Western civilization. We no longer need old authoritarian ideologies, which demand that art be difficult, willfully inaccessible and disturbing to the audience - in some sense a contest of wills - as it was under modernism. However, any other approach, even now, is still considered analgesic, conciliatory and without a critical edge, which brings me to question of whether there can be a truly postheroic, postpatriarchal art - one that does not equate aesthetics with alienation from the social world but embodies modes of relatedness that were difficult to achieve under modernism. The art should leave its ideal of a solitary hero, struggling for his ideas against the society. Gablik’s model of new aesthetics emphasises therapeutic attention, and sensitivity to psychological conditions of an individual and the society as well as to the ecological character of the world. Art should be more communicative, compassionate and responsive, emphasized rather process than fixed forms. Other authors put forward an approach called ‘healing’ for the new deal of art, call for connectedness of ‘ego’ and the ‘other’.

Art cannot function as a self-sufficient field of human activity, separated from the contemporary reality. The ideal of the self in opposition to the world, corresponding to the dominator model has to be replaced by a ”Partnership model”. The tendency to alienation was supposed by the scheme of functioning of the Western society. In the individualistic mode of behaviour there is no need (and consequently no chance) for cooperation. Competition is the only way to success. As this way of thinking is destructive in society promoting the necessity of unlimited growth, in art it cannot do any more.

Within the dominator system, art has been organized around the primacy of objects rather than relationships, and has been set apart from reciprocal or participative interactions. The formerly celebrated freedom and independence leads us to the catastrophe. Freedom without responsibility is ruthless. Not taking others into consideration is environmentally unsound, it is not sustainable. Gablik puts forward the term ”connective self”. As an example of a kind of more communicative, responsive and open art she presents art work ”Touch Sanitation” of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist from New York.

This project went on for eleven months during which she went around the five boroughs of New York and personally shook hands with each sanitation man in the department.

”It was an eight-our-day performance work,” she told... I’d come in at roll call, then walk their routes with them. I made tapes and video. I did a ritual in which I faced each person and shook their hand; and I said, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” The real artwork is the hand shake itself. When I shake hands with a sanitation man ...I present this idea and performance to them and then, in how they respond, they finish the art. Ukeles chose shaking hands as a gesture of openness and generosity. She joined the sanitation men, showed her appreciation for their work. She tried to break the barrier between those people and society that considers them rather as a communal equipment. Thanks to the personal contact Ukeles learned about their problems connected with their occupation and tried to make the community aware of this.

Ukeles organized several other projects focusing at sanitation New York. These are for example ‘Ballet Mécanique’ for which she adapted a city garbage truck. She decorated it with mirrors so that people could see who produces the waste. Another was “’Flow City’, the first ever permanent public-art environment planned as an organic part operating waste-management facility, site of the transfer from truck to barge of three thousand tons of New York waste every day.” (Ukeles 1992), or ‘Garbage Out Front’, an exhibition that showed works over 150 artists dealing with waste, including Ukeles’s ‘Landfill Cross Section’ - a thirty-six-foot-high visualization of current regulations and an ethos of bioengineering restoration.

In this chapter I will mention the work of M.L. Ukeles again, by means of proposals for her exhibition ‘Care’ from 1969. “Every day, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the museum: (1) the contents of one sanitation truck; (2) a container of polluted air; (3) container of polluted Hudson River; (4) a container of ravaged land. Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced: purified, depolluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical, and/or pseudo-technical, procedures either by myself or by scientists. These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition.” (Ukeles 1992) This exhibition as well as the already mentioned truck with mirrors and others show us the shady side of our excessive consumption. We are the most expensive inhabitants of the Earth. Members of Western societies live at the expense of the Third World as well as other beings on the planet. We are bred from birth to live on the earth as consumers, and this exploitative form of perception now determines all our social, economic and political relationships, in a style that knows no limits.

We lost our reverence to the Earth, to other living beings. We deal with plants, vegetable products, animals’ meat as if they were only things. As if everything existed only for our pleasure, satisfaction of our needs. Henryk Skolimowski finds the cause in a loss of most of our spirituality, sense of beauty, ability to perceive the life as sacred. “The denial of beauty is the withering of spiritual life, is the undermining of human meaning. When beauty is rendered meaningless it loses its potency. Then the ugly is acceptable, then spiritual squalor, and meaninglessness of our lives becomes an ‘acceptable’ consequence of a culture which has deliberately destroyed the concept of beauty.” (Skolimowski 1992) Continuation of this process is precarious, the idea of progress (resulting in pollution of air, water and soil, damaging important ecosystems and plundering natural resources) is not a viable perspective. But the system is still functioning, everything goes on. The parts function without interest of the whole. What can be done in such situation? No one can provide us easy, elaborated and simple solution, we have to try to do what we can and what we consider as necessary, follow our intuition and hope. Our loss of ecstatic experience in contemporary Western society has affected every aspect of our lives and created a sense of closure, in which there seems to be no alternative, no hope, and no exit from the addictive system we have created. Bill Devall thinks that “...we cannot wait for the perfect intellectual theory to provide us with the answers. We need earth bonding experiences...” The direct experience cannot be obtained by means of rationality. We have to use our feelings and senses to awaken empathy and humility in ourselves. These are not dominator’s feelings. They can help us to start to consider Earth as our Mother, feel a part of it. Facing the ecological reality require creativity. According to Ukeles: “We are powerful enough to transform us to us and to Earth. I propose that we flood with creativity our environmental infrastructure. This is Art can mark u; the time we turned and used our freedom to maintain our Home.” (Ukeles 1992)

Earth as our home or Mother are beautiful and clear metaphors. They imply characteristic that we appreciate with people. Idea of healing the Earth is a similar one. According to H. Skolimowski, healing should be the main mission of ecologically sensitive art. He calls such art eco-art. The condition of creating eco-art that could heal is liberating “ourselves from the nihilistic conception of man which envisages the human as a myriad of broken pieces with no meaning and coherence.” (Skolimowski 1992) An artist who is broken within cannot be a healing artist. Another condition is ‘reverential thinking and perception’. Its underlying assumption is a reverence for life - foundation of right ecological thinking. American Indians expressed their reverence for nature in their mythology. In an idea that there is a spirit behind every tree they accepted and expressed their respect to intrinsic value of natural phenomena. “To think reverentially is first of all to recognize human life as an intrinsic value; it is to recognize love as an essential and indispensable modality of human existence; it is to recognize creative thinking as an inherent part of human nature; it is to recognize joy as an integral part of our daily living; it is to recognize the brotherhood of all beings as the basis of our new epistemological paradigm. Reverential thinking is a vehicle for restoration of intrinsic values, without we cannot have a meaningful future of any sort.” (Skolimowski, 1992)

One of the artists who work in nature, who approaches to nature as to the subject, not just a backdrop of his work is Andy Goldsworthy. He differs from artists concerning in land-art who remove huge amounts of soil or manipulate with natural materials only as with resources for their activities. His gestures are delicate and unobtrusive in the environment. He doesn’t arrive at the site with the materials but finds them there. The challenge is in tuning in and adapting to different landscapes and seasons, establishing a dialogue with the place, cooperating with its subtle web of interrelated processes. By means of his activities he tries to understand the natural processes, not only the isolated objects like a stone or a leaf. His works created from leaves, blades of grass, snow, ice, or stones usually do not stay a long time on the spot. They melt or they are blown away with the wind. Ephemerality and impermanence is typical for them. Tuning with natural processes is a crucial point of what can be called eco-art. There must be a mystique of the land itself that goes beyond the political and economic needs; this is the only foundation of any environmental concern - a love of the earth itself, respect for its intrinsic worth. As a protection of our life-support systems becomes a top priority, this evocation of a mystique of the land is the role being fulfilled by artists and poets and natural history essayist, who are building ecologically sound role models into our cultural consciousness.

The feeling of loneliness in the world lies at the root of many problems of contemporary people. It is associated with a loss of meaning of life in such a world, reluctance to continue with it. Existential feelings are typical for man of our century. The individualistic capitalist society focusing rather at competition than at cooperation, can hardly help us to recover. The stronger one is the winner. The weaker lose in this struggle, the majority dominates over the minorities, the economically self-sufficient can control the dependent. According to Gablik, art seems to accept this approach. An artist working on his or her private business is only a witness, a disinterested spectator who can mostly reflect the situation but not to respond to it. From within the paradigm of alienation, it has been difficult for individuals to feel responsible for conditions in the world over which they feel they have no control. But as we begin to move toward a new ecology of consciousness, and the world becomes understood as a place of interaction and interconnection, the challenge will be to break through the Cartesian illusions that have generated the impression of separation and detachment. Relationship is the key sight of ecology. In a world that needs our help we cannot remain emotionally distanced from what is happening.

Gablik refuses an opinion that art should evoke aesthetic, not real emotions. That lived reality is repressed by the disembodied eye and transformed into spectacle. David Michael Levin considers the reduction of being to picture characteristic of aesthetic as a pathology in the very character of our vision. He proposes a radical change of vision. Vision that does not just observe and report, objectify and enframe but that is rooted in a responsiveness that ultimately expresses itself in action. In other words, vision that is truly engaged with the world is not purely cognitive, or purely aesthetic, but is opened op to the body as a whole and must issue forth in social practices that “take to heart what is seen.” Artists who follow the idea of vision as a social practice concern social groups like the homeless, children from poor neighbourhoods, old women, prisoners etc. They are interested in the people, listen to them, help them to experience real community in their lives, being listened to.

Krzystof Wodiczko designed a special cart for the homeless. This cart can be used for transport and storage as well as a temporary shelter for the people who live in the street. The carts are not meant for mass production which could involuntarily institutionalize homelessness but rather for collaboration between designers and potential users, for meeting the emergency needs. ‘The Homeless Vehicle Project’ points out the right of the poor not to be excluded from social life. When a stronger social class sets the rules in a society it does not have to take care of the weaker, of those who have little chance to equal. As if they were not allowed to be members of the community.

This is what the artists working with minorities deny: “What the homeless need.” according to performance artist John Malpede, “is caring. They need situations they would allow them to participate in life, to contribute and feel as though they are part of something.” John Malpede is working with street people. In Los Angeles he founded a theatre group composed of them, called LAPD (which stands for Los Angeles Powerty Department). He began to work as a volunteer in a soup kitchen so that he could gain access to the homeless community. He formed the group through weekly talent shows. The stories of the homeless form the core of LAPD’s performances. First there are only monologues, often raw and chaotic that gradually change into dialogues between people. “We didn’t know it but doing performance in a group turned out to be exactly what isolated and mistrustful people need. It has helped them develop skills for relating to others, like how to argue, for example. In the beginning people didn’t know how to relate to each other at all - which reflected the reality of Skid Row, where things happen on top of each other, not in an organized way.” says Malpede. LAPD’s performances are a direct experience of what it means to be a homeless person. The characters are not pitiful and sometimes they are not very nice, the aim of the performances is not to provoke sentimental charity. Community, as it is being enacted here, is the ability to touch others in ways that matter to them - to give them a voice. No matter how accurately art may mirror back to society its negative features, the perception that alienation subsides when we become aware of our connectedness with others leads inevitably to a different sort of artistic practice - oriented toward the achievement of shared understandings.

Another important element of Gablik’s ‘reenchantment project’ is represented by compassion. Examples of such an approach are for example Malpede’s theatre for the homeless or the ”Homeless Vehicle Project” of Wodiczko. Someone could say that a better way of helping people in need would be political activity, membership in an organization concerning in minorities etc., that the projects mentioned above are more likely to be considered as social therapy, which is not a matter of art. That such ideas cannot stop any great artist now from what he or she is doing. Gablik considers this point of view of art as a consequence of modernist approach influenced by concept of Cartesian aesthetics, a tradition in which individuals and individual art are the basic elements. According to this modernist cultural myth, artists act as

quintessential free agents, pursuing their own ends. Our cultural myths support economic advancement and the hardedged individualist writ large, rather than service, caring attitudes and participation. It is difficult to put forward a new approach. When challenged by a countermyth, an individual’s prevailing myth will often entrench itself more deeply, since there is usually a strong emotional investment in the common assumptions of the current societal paradigm, because it defines one’s world and oneself. The principles of domination and mastery are example of the resistant cultural myths, however they seem fatal for this civilization as well as for the environment. Any attempt to come with an alternative concept has to face refusal, anxiety and even anger. Gablik perceives art industry as a protector of the present paradigm, and even more, as a contributor to the deforming effects of the whole cultural pathology. She quotes Arthur Danto’s essay that says; “it’s hard to conceive of art from the perspective of service, or as something that isn’t commensurate only with itself.” Competitive individualist capitalism and free enterprise have influenced our psychological needs that the rules we follow seem indisputable. In such a situation, finding and creating an alternative model is inevitable.

Work of Dominique Mazeaud, artist from Santa Fe can provide an example of it. Her project called ‘The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River’ started in 1987. Since that time, each month, ritually on the same day, armed with garbage bags, she has been cleaning the pollution out of the river. Sometimes alone, sometimes with several friends. A diary is a part of her project. She records there her experience, feelings, reactions of other people, ideas. Besides picking the litter she is observing the river, meditating. She refers to one morning, when she was sitting on a warm stone before starting cleaning the river, meditating; “I see what I am doing as a way of praying:

The river became her friend, its pollution became her problem; “Why in all religions is water such a sacred symbol? How much longer it is going to take us to see the trouble of our waters?” In a certain period she started to feel lonely in her effort, stopped to announce her ‘art for the earth’ in newspapers, counting bags with litter, collecting the so-called treasures of the river; “All alone I pray and pick up, pick up and pray.” She feels empathy to the river, feels pain and sadness. She decides to transpose what she was witnessing into some from that people could share. She started to write her ‘riveries’. When thinking about the name she finds out that ‘rageries’ might describe her feelings better. “But do I really rage? I have been talking about feeling pain, sadness. Is rage my next step? Would rage affect the way of my work? Would it make me more of an activist than I am? Would it make me more open to the community about what it is that I am doing the river?” Mazeaud is not addressing people by means of persuading them, strong arguments. She remains humble and emphatical to the river, open to people. The river taught her “to be silent and to listen.”

Receptivity and compassion are ones of the qualities highlighted by Gablik as feminine. Within patriarchy, we are trained to respect only what is masterful, expensive and imposing. Mazeaud isn’t competing in the patriarchal system at all, but stands true to her own feminine nature. By returning to the river every month on the same day to resume her task once again, she makes the ritual process into a redemption act of healing. The conscious femininity pointed out by Gablik and represented e.g. by Mazeaud’s art should not be confused with political issues, struggle for women’s rights. It is not meant as an impulse for supporting women’s art. Gablik is talking about a certain kind of approach, way of thinking and acting, about the reemergence of certain neglected archetypal aspects of the human psyche, enabling more feminine ways of being to be reinstated in the general psychological patterns of society.

Another question associated with Mazeaud’s activities is whether projects like ‘The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River’ can be considered as art at all. Isn’t it just a sanitary practice?

However the tradition of object making is strong in art, ideas like walks to remote places of R. Long or H. Fulton have been accepted and conceptual art as such became a part of art’s history, action-art or exhibiting ready-mades became a common practice. So, what makes the difference between exhibiting a manufactured urinal and hauling a withered sofa out of a dying river in their chance to be accepted as art? According to Gablik, the difference lies in the intentions of the artists, and how they see the consequences of their work. Within the aesthetic framework, real-life actions or situations can sometimes be art, but only as long as they are not useful and serve no purpose. Within the context of modern aesthetics, creativity is at odds with utilitarian purpose. We got used to se artist only as a kind of mirror of society and its vices rather than as a person who would deal directly with these vices. Gablik reminds here the insistence on freedom for its own sake, freedom without praxis - the kind of freedom that makes picking up the garbage valid as art only if you want to “romance” the trash (that is, use it for an aesthetic effect), but not if you step beyond the value vacuum to try to clean up the river. In the name of aesthetic freedom, a meaningful action based on the perception of a real need is more likely to be viewed as “real” work than it is an art - because in the language of modern aesthetics, art has been defined as “meaningless work”.

She considers getting rid of this idea as a condition for a socially or ecologically grounded art. Keeping art separate from any moral or practical purposes is becoming obsolete in the present situation of emergency. The idea of refusal to judge the artist separately from his or her art work corresponds with H. Skolimowski’s opinion that “art is not separated from the real world ecology and its agonizing problems are ‘out there’ while art stays ‘here’ in its little secluded and isolated niche.” (Skolimowski 1992) He considers art as an important part of the healing process, in which the artist’s personality plays a crucial role. According to Skolimowki all good art should emanate certain psychic energy, express connectedness with the Earth and Cosmos. This task requires a positive tuning of the artist. However I consider his measures of ”art for the third millennium” as a bit strict I agree with his premise that “Art is a particular manifestation of the glory of the energy of life. The purpose of this energy, which is contained in art, is to sustain the human species and make it flourish.” (Skolimowski 1996) He denies nihilism in art because art should be looked at as a form of life. “In this sense art becomes intrinsically organic and we might add ecological yet not in a superficial way by being loaded with superficial images of nature, but in a deep sense, as conveying and expressing condensed energy of life.” (Skolimowski 1996) Here he mentions lives of the saints, people who devoted their whole lives to care of the others and service. “New interpretation enables us to see the saints and exceptional spiritual lights, not as something apart from life but as something which is a part of the great tapestry of life. Such a conception we dare say, does not diminish the life of the Buddha or the life of Jesus of Nazareth but rather makes their lives more integrated with the Big Flow of Life. In our times, the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, of Krishna Muriti, of Mother Theresa equally deserve to be called great works of art, for they have been great healers and sources of sustaining spiritual energy.... Art on the measure of the third millennium must be all embracing, deep, sustaining on the cultural and spiritual level; and yes, healing the earth and ourselves.” (Skolimowski 1996)

Art market, it also means galleries, where art is exhibited and offered to the customers. This white, clean, artificial space that makes art exist in a kind of eternity of display, isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself as art. The outside world must not come in. The market plays the main role in assessing the art’s price and thus determining the artist’s success. As I already mentioned, this tradition corresponds to the mechanisms typical for our society and contributes to it in a great extent. We are used to follow a certain programme, our identity is based on generally accepted paradigm. Persons who grow up in any society are culturally “hypnotized” to perceive reality the way the culture experiences it. Acculturation, according to social scientist Willis Harman in his book ‘Global Mind Change’, works exactly like hypnosis. This trance of consensus programs much of our behavior. The challenge of the next few decades will be to awaken from this hypnosis; as Harman states, the real action today is changing fundamental assumptions, so that he can learn to transcend our culture. Once we become truly conscious of how we have been conditioned to follow a certain program, we can begin to surrender some of our culture’s distorted images and role models for success. The possibility then arises for modifying the framework and not just being immersed in it.

One of the established traditions in art is separation of artist and the world as well as artist and the audience. In an article called ‘Art to Nurture the World’ Gablik compares art with a therapy: “Both are private, indeed almost secret enterprises, carried on in rooms whose doors are closed.” (Gablik 1993) The isolation corresponds with the generally accepted role of artist as a free, independent agent without responsibility. Gablik puts this into opposition to an idea that “all activity in the universe is typified by collaboration, interaction and dialogue.” (Gablik 1993) According to people’s need to be listened to, which is at present widely neglected, art should leave the traditional dualist concept of object - subject, artist - audience. It should try to reestablish the unity of them. The dialogue can be enriching for both sides, as it is in work of Ciel Bergman.

She started with paintings but gradually, as she was thinking about the current state of the world, she was asking her questions like “In a time when science is not providing the answers we had hoped it would, what can art do? What can artists do? What is my role as an artist and what does it have to do with painting?” As a result of these doubts about making pictures; she began to experience the need to move beyond paintings as a one-way, passive medium, and to investigate possible situations in which artist and audience would be equally involved in investigating the problems of the world together. The ocean became the main theme for her work. She felt it as sacred, as a source of all life on the planet. In 1987 she created an installation at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, deeply associated with the ocean. Bergman decided to use the occasion to clean up the Santa Barbara beaches. She and her collaborator, sculptor Nancy Merill, spent three hours a day for five weeks picking up the nonbiodegradable plastic they could find and then brought it to the gallery. Most of the plastic was hung from the ceiling, creating a contemporary ”Merzbau” of sorts. The feeling inside the room was that of a temple, with sounds of the ocean, whales and seagulls drifting through from an audiotape. On the south wall, Bergman painted a black mural, a rich compost of grief, in which there were seven openings onto the sea and sky. The trash objects on the floor covered in flour, which created a haunting, post-nuclear-explosion atmosphere, and in the center of the room was a firepit of ashes, which functioned as a circular prayer altar, in the manner of Native American medicine wheel. Near the altar, fresh flowers were placed in vases and changed daily. Since the room was dimly lit, it took a while before people realized that what they were looking at was not art but garbage. Visitors to the gallery were invited to write down their fears for the world on one of the remaining walls and their hopes on the other. A collection of sticks that had been picked up from the beach were left in a pile, along with other natural materials and some rice paper, with a further invitation to the audience to make prayer sticks. By the end of the exhibition, both walls had been covered with writing, and nearly four hundred people had written a prayer, hope or thought and attached it to a stick, which they decorated and placed in a ring around the ashpit. Some people stayed for a long time, reports Bergman, and a few of the sticks were so beautiful that she found it difficult to part them at the end. But since they had been intended as an offering, they were finally returned to the ocean in a special ceremony after the exhibition.

Instead of an opening, the artists held a ‘closing’; in the form of a public debate about what to do with all the plastic, which now filled up six dumpsters. One of the results of Bergman’s project was instituting recycling for certain types of plastic litter in Santa Barbara.

Besides Cartesianism, Gablik’s judgment of situation of American art points out the role of market and its influence on character of contemporary art. According to her, art that got itself into a trap of art market now often takes recourse to nihilism, an approach typical for deconstructive postmodernism.

In the Czech Republic the situation is different due to several decades of the Communist era. Besides artists whose work was approved by the establishment, there were also artists who had hardly any opportunities to present their work publicly. That is why influence of art market on these artist’s work was minimal. As the artists could not afford to depend exclusively on money earned by their artistic activities they could not be controlled by the art market so much.

Another important idea included in Gablik’s book is necessity of change of the contemporary mind-set that is based mostly on masculine values. She emphasizes accepting new values by artists as well as by the society. Artistic approach that has its roots in modernism leads to alienation of the artists from society, individualism and depreciation of the ‘other’. This approach does not have a perspective today and tends to parody and cynicism. Gablik proposes another model that should replace the former ideal of ‘solitary battling hero’, denying responsibility for his work. This new approach that should be more feminine, caring and responsive to other people as well as to nature is presented on examples of several artists. These are not exclusively women - empathy, openness, and humility should be accepted also by men and become equal to values that prevail in the contemporary society.

The ideas of feminism (or even eco-feminism) can turn to be really problematic in CR. As American conditions are quite different from the Czech ones, people here often do not understand the aims of struggle for women’s rights in U.S.A. and feminism is associated with many prejudices here. Therefore any idea refusing patriarchal attitudes is quite difficult to put through.

The last Gablik’s idea I am going to mention is ‘Ecological Imperative’. Gablik as well as other authors assume that awakening our spirituality in order to appreciate nature’s qualities and value, and to realize our dependence on the Earth might provide a new meaning to art. That art could be a source of stimuli for changing the mankind’s self-destructive tendency.

These are beautiful ideas but I am afraid that their pursuing in CR is not very easy. Interest in environment is perceived as associated with politics and extremism by the majority. Therefore I think that many people as well as artists are reluctant to be considered as one of the ‘crazy’ people because of their concern in the environmental issues. Underestimating the problems of environment is partly a consequence of the Communist era; information about the state of environment were published in a quite limited way in order to maintain the official idea of success of socialist economy. Activities doubting the government’s decisions were not possible.

The present government welcomes indifference of the majority. Low priority is assigned to environment which is expressed in statements like; “Ecology is not a science but an ideology.” of our prime minister. References of ecological crisis are ignored by the government. “Human freedom is again - for the third time in this century, after fascism and communism - attacked. Not on behalf of the oppressed, exploited or racially better but in the name of nature that cannot deny the advocacy of itself.” (Klaus 1995) People who can be confused by various controversial opinions about environment often prefer to believe the optimistic statements that allow them to ignore the planetary emergency and do not threaten their comfort. Affluence of goods brought about by market economy provides people a chance to enjoy consuming. They often do not realize the shady sides of consumption and capitalism known well in the West. There is not enough time to pass through the whole process that Western countries has passed and thanks to which they could realize unsustainability of the contemporary tendency. This is why I consider Gablik’s book pointing out consequences of such development and possible solutions as very helpful for us.

In his article Jiøí Zemánek provides an overview of Czech artists interested in environment and reflecting this interest in their work. He also mentions the differences between Czech and American tradition of relation to landscape which is interesting in context of Gablik’s book.

At the beginning he points out the origin of people’s interest in nature and first attempts to conserve it. According to him as well as Hana Librová (who concerns people’s relation to landscape in her book ‘Love of Landscape’- Librová 1988), people started to realize and appreciate other values nature than utilitarian in Romanticism at the beginning of 19^th century. “Undoubtedly, it was a result of secularization of the world associated with rationalism of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution which were based on Cartesianist assumptions substantiating mechanistic approach. Fact that beauty of wilderness started to be appreciated by artists only seems to be a paradox.” (Zemánek 1996) Aesthetics of natural environment influenced poetry, painting as well as character of gardens of that time. Many parks in England were changed with a purpose to resemble natural landscape. “In a half of 19^th century many people started to consider solitude in nature as necessary for spiritual regeneration of urban inhabitants. At that time the conflict between economic development and nature conservation clearly perceived and named. Most clearly in Europe this appeared in England, the most developed industrial country at that time, and in the most marked way in America that was founded by immense exploitation of seemingly unlimited natural wealth of the continent and its inhabitants. All the most impressive ecological appeals have its origin in America, e.g. a famous speech of Indian chief Seattle.” In Zemánek’s opinion “it is not a coincidence that earth-art of the 1960s and 1970s which lead artists out closed gallery spaces to direct work with the natural materials in the open air, far away from inhabited areas appeared for the first time in America and was associated with a criticism of consumers’ society that conceives art as a commodity.” (Zemánek 1996)

“In compare with changes in the vast area of the North American continent, colonized during a century, the changes of European continent were gradual and relatively mild. They were associated with the 2000 year’s gradual cultivation of the land by nations and nationalities who formed its stabilised resident structure in abut 1000 A.D. A specific intimate impression of the Czech landscape was not connected just with its generally recognized lyrical character but first of all with its synthetic quality noticed already by Goethe and analysed in detailed way Christian Norberg-Schulze; it means, in Goethe’s words, that Czech landscapes ‘are neither mountains nor plains nor valleys but all of this together.’ All the landscape elements, according to Norberg-Schulze’s realistic perception are compounded into a kind of a romantic microcosm whose parts can function as ‘a world in the world’. Thus the whole structure stresses the importance and significance of a place and creates a relation of man to landscape as to a dwelling place.

Nevertheless, there are two large landscape complexes in the Czech Republic that has been attracting all kinds of romanticist; Giant Mountains and Šumava. One of the admirers of aged balladic and mysterious forests of Šumava was Josef Váchal, in 1920s and 30s. He celebrated them in a book of woodcuts, called ‘Šumava Dying and Romantic’ (1931).

Miloš Šejn’s artistic activities develop in terms of relations of art and science. They are associated with his stays in the open air, most often these have a character of wandering. During them he was focusing at studying natural associations and structures of their metamorphoses. We can find similar approach in Olga Karlíková’s and Milan Maur’s work. Wandering in landscape has led Šejn to ”broader respect of natural relationships and their interconnectedness. Here I would like to remind the author’s collection of natural pigments he has been finding. It is open work arising since the half of 1960s and today it includes more than a thousand of pieces. In context of the present ecological crisis manifested by diminishing genofond and extinction of vegetable and animal species Šejn’s project acquires apparent ecological implications, topicalization of the idea of saving and conservation of unique natural substances and materials.

Within the framework of his work at Prague AVU (Academy of Fine Arts) where he has been leading a conceptual studio he started to develop team work principles. This work includes designs of landscape projects for devastated areas of Bohemia as well as workshops during which the students learn to realize their body and mind as an integral part of the perceived natural complex. These mental and physical exercises have their origin in Šejn’s previous work; i.e. spacious tactile drawings with the help of natural pigments he topicalizes his relation to a certain area. An experience of certain total action perception of the landscape complex in which distance between him and the environment disappeared. A sensationally complex organism of the human body became his instrument. The main purpose was opening oneself to natural fullness of continually evolving space. It means not only to what is placed perceptively in front of you but also to what is behind you, around you and over you. The space is not conceived in a sense of static selective perception but it becomes rationally unarticulated dynamic field of relations. We can come across with a similar aperspective spatial experience in Dalibor Chatrný’s work and explicitly visionary form in Karel Malich’s work. Malich’s vision can remind us of morphogenetic fields theory and morphic resonance theory of contemporary biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Like Sheldrake in his theory, Malich also expresses in his sculpture the integral unity of mind and nature.

At the end of 19^th century, in the ‘age of problematic certainties’ according to a philosopher Erazim Kohák man is seeking the ‘unquestionable truth he or she could rely on.’ He tries to solve his unstable position by one-sided emphasise on human significance, importance that has to bring unambiguous and unquestionable meaning and order into the estranged and meaningless world. Consequently, postmodernism reacting to ideological and concrete results of modernist totalitarian practice reaches extreme relativization of all values, a statement that ‘reality may not have its own truthfulness that it is amorphous and senseless.’ (V. Bìlohradský) Karel Malich’s and other artists’ mentioned above work is apparently associated with another alternative of opinion respectively another life experience. Namely, that there is not a gap between man and the world, that they have a common basis, such a shared field of meaning. That the meaning of the truth is neither some exclusively human an instrument for controlling nature (modernism) nor, on the other hand, something quite arbitrary, that cannot be articulated (post-modernism). More likely it is something we are grasped by what extends beyond us; a horizon which we relate to and whose layers we reveal as well as co-create by our own practice.” (Zemánek 1996)

The artists I have chosen for my interviews represent three different approaches to nature and environmental problems, three generations. These are two men and a woman: Olga Karlíková, Miloš Šejn and Jiøí Èernický.

Olga Karlíková’s pictures refer to intimate, almost meditative experience in nature. These are tender records of various sensations - birds’ singing, flying, etc.

Miloš Šejn is more interested in landscape. Besides activities based on experiences in landscape he also focuses at its material qualities. Some of his activities have a character of rituals, some remind of scientific methods.

Jiøí Èernický is the youngest of them. In his performances he was pointing out concrete problems; discrepancy between human being and consequences of people’s expansion and destroying natural environment.

I listed the interviews according to chronology of their origin. As all the three people were of quite a different nature, the interviews reflect this. I did not want to adapt and shorten them too much in order to preserve the original impression as well as character of the interviewed people.

Jiøí Èernický was born in 1966. He studied at the Pedagogical faculty for four years and then left for UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design). Now he works as a lecturer at Adéla Matasová’s studio at Academy of Fine Arts and also concerns his diploma work there.

As soon as I came to Prague after the revolution I interrupted my studies at the Pedagogical Faculty and went to work to a mine. I had painted before and dealt with a phenomenon of colour itself. Then I came into environment that was horrible. I was working there on an excavator. And somehow I felt as if the painting lacked meaning. I was not quite sure why I should paint. If to endeavour for certain harmony that impress people ...It’s all so subjective. And I rather felt it artificial. The painting is just an illusion, I was a bit sceptical about it. So I started with actions. The reason for it was that I wanted to really experience what I was painting so that it would be neither fiction on a sheet nor a sculpture because sculpture is lifeless, you know. I wanted to experience it personally at the very moment.

Well, as I worked in the mine, my job was in a machine-room of an excavator, in its leg on which the excavator stands. It is called a jib. And the excavator that is as big as a block of flats, moves by means of the jib in which I worked. There are four pistons in the machine-room and my duty was to climb over the pistons to barrels with vaseline and put it into them. After the vaseline oozed through the pistons it felt into such strange tubes. Unfortunately there was no good access to the tubes and it was not possible to empty them with a help of a shovel. So I had to take it out with my hands. Though I had overalls on I was greasy up to my elbows all the time. This was depressive work that was making me furious. Then I had to take the stuff outside the excavator. I was forced to burn it which was always producing huge black columns of smoke. I was anxiously trying to show the workmen that it was no good to burn it like that, that it should be dumped somewhere. They used to laugh at me, saying that nobody cared a bit for it in that vast desert plain. The open-cast mines look like the Moon surface. So I started to do the actions to prove them that it was all desperate what was happening there. That they were so callous and didn’t perceive that so much filth was burnt there every day infesting the environment. And not only the environment but also themselves by their non-cultivation. They used to smoke all the time and to eat goulash every day, every day the same things, it was affecting their physiognomy, too.

And one of the events I realized there was an attempt to draw attention to all that. I communicated with them about art and was considered as crazy. I told them that I was making graphics and that we could make the largest graphic in the world, together. I decided to use the giant excavator for it. The jib I was working in was of 16 meters in diameter and I supposed to use it as a matrix for printing the graphic. I wanted it to be rather expression of superficiality than a picture of something. It was based on an idea that I, as a man of certain stature, certain height, create such freaks. I wanted to confront the human body with that giant monster, with the excavator. That is why the photos of it look so monstrous however it was not a purpose. The things there are megalomaniac, they are superhuman in that environment.

I asked the man on the excavator to make a hole in ground. Then he moved the excavator over the hole I created thus a kind of a cave. I descended to the cave and coated the excavator, the iron ceiling of the cave with red paint. Then I spread a sheet of paper in front of the excavator and he treaded upon it, making a print of red stripe on the large white area. The purpose was no content, I just wanted to demonstrate the superficiality, total superficiality and dullness. The connection between my actions and ecology is irony above man who struggles against nature, which results in his solitude and misery.

Well, and the other action that I realized also later in Marseilles, first took place in the mine, too. I descended the hole made in a ground and kneeled. I was smeared with a special emulsion reacting to humidity. The emulsion was covered with effervescent stuff mixed with powder paints. I stuck a pin into my hind part and tied a string of a kite to it. The kite was hovering in the air. Although I couldn’t feel the wind in the hole I perceived its strength by means of the kite. Being drawn by the kite I had to keep balance by all my body. After a quarter of an hour’s struggle against the wind I started to sweat. The drops of my sweat were reacting with the emulsion and the paints and all the effort displayed by means of the colours. So my body was colourful due to the wind. The first time, in Czechoslovakia, there was the excavator next to the hole, which gave the action a very intimate, naked and raw character. The kite looked like a sensor, umbilical cord or midriff touching the excavator. The point of the action was the direct contact with nature, expressed in a raw way, the absolute sensual consciousness of the nature in which I was working, the miserable and horrific nature.

I did this action in 1993. I was concerning in art at that time, studying UMPRUM. But I was still disconcerted in a way. I despaired of what the other people were solving. I had a feeling that art should be solving something, communicate the inward nature of the person concerning in something professionally. However everybody’s dealing with something and everybody is an artist in a way, the artist takes the risk of revealing his ideas leaving them at the mercy of people. It doesn’t mean that the artist is more than the others, they just don’t have time for it. So I was, like at the beginning, uncertain about the meaning of art. You will start to sell it some day, people will be buying it. However you are trying to smuggle some ideas into it, the essential ones don’t fall into fertile soil. It will became more likely a commodity. So I felt a permanent need to doubt it somehow. I had been concerning in process apparatuses that were connected with human body, they were something like a part of you. It was a total utopia. I am very interested in utopia. And the following action was one of them. It was based on ideal, idealization. I find it meaningful to act according an ideal. It is not possible to do only rationally calculated things. But I didn’t want to base the action on something like religion. However many religions exist, people seem to be looking for something else, they are not satisfied with their belief. Although they believe in God, he never replies them, they are alone with their belief. They are doping themselves with their belief every day but I think that a few people have prophetic experience or visions. I denied to rest the action on this. I wanted to follow something that is inside of me, something pure, something that even the society believes in. I wanted to find out what are people most interested in, what’s the most important thing in the world. But the more I was trying to find it the better I knew that if I pronounced what I consider as most important I would be laughed at. What do you think, what’s the most important thing in the world? It’s in every fairy tale, every religion, it’s the basis of the universe.

Yes, because love is vital. This is a conclusion of every wisdom. It’s a basis for relation among people, between man and god etc. However though you’re aware of this, you know that you cannot present it to this society. It’s a cliché, without value. When someone says it he or she’ll be laughed at. It can’t serve as a basis for anything. Notwithstanding, I knew it must be the base. So I had to deal with a tough task to give reason to it and give it a form that would be accepted by the society. I decided to totally crystallize the idea of love. It mustn’t have been puzzled, like preaching on the corner. I chose a form of agitation. Like e.g. Mayakovski who was using shop windows for presenting poems or performing plays. I knew that it must not have shifted somewhere where I could be considered as a priest or as a fanatic. So I was trying to act totally sincerely. On the other hand, I made myself a child, a child that doesn’t bear all the responsibility. I didn’t want to be like Jesus, I didn’t want to make myself Messiah. I wanted to stand apart and initiate something among the people, something that originates in them. At that moment it looked totally crazy. Imagine that you write ‘Tears for the World’ in a centre of a large city. It’s absurd the people must start to think that you are crazy. So, it was necessary to write it in large letters in the very centre of Ústí where it took place. I chose a large shop window. It was necessary to work it out rationally, I had to be able to explain it in media. I was being attacked by people, explaining it all the time, they wanted to know if I am a total idiot or an absolute god. I didn’t want to be neither god nor silly. I had to write a manifest, I called it the Manifest of Fanatism. Thus I presented a new trend in art, like manifests in the past. I think it was no longer art at all, it was a kind of social and such a peculiar action that followed it involuntarily. A charity but not a charity based on material support. I am convinced that it is not important to give you money if you are poor. The crucial thing is that I have a serious interest in you, a warm relation to you. I am afraid that it is difficult to express this. A crowd in a street cannot be changed like this, all of a sudden, not to take it as a phrase. I was forced to resolve this all the time. So I didn’t talk about love with the people. I suggested them to cry, shed tears spontaneously in public. Sincerely, not forcing themselves to cry, pretending something but to provide a real prove - the tears. I created something like urinals there, tear urinals. These were three buckets; you could cry for something completely abstract into the first one, for something you are not conscious of. This was an ideal state, crying for nothing. That was the point of the thing, to be able to show your emotions to something abstract, to god, to cry for this world. I wanted the people to evoke feelings in themselves, to experience them. I would see as ideal if people revealed with their feelings, if they were able to get excited for nothing. This point was a bit paradoxical in the situation because Ústí looks like a place where nobody could do this, the environment is so gloomy and tough surrounded by factories. Everybody who would cry for something would seem ‘living’ to me, a human being itself, a sign of life. The other vessel was supposed for expressing one’s feelings to something concrete, something they can imagine. I chose a nation of Abynissians - in Somaliland and Ethiopia which are the poorest countries in the world. I had to confer the action an absolute dimension in order to people believed that it was true.

This point refers also to the planet, as if it were a living being that is breathing, acting as a living organism. As if it had some spirit. I am convinced that if a certain number of people were capable of doing such a thing, if they proved that they are able to experience really, not by means of media, to express feelings to somebody thousands miles distant that something happens. It will display somehow and hopefully move the people in Ethiopia. The fact that somebody, without sending them anything feels sympathy with them, though he or she cannot understand it properly. The fact that the people who did it are ordinary people working in a factory or somewhere else, I don’t know. So I started to communicate with the people in such an absolute way and guaranteed them that it won’t be wasted effort if they bring their tears. Bringing, providing the tears was inevitable. Because nobody will be moved by a statement like ‘I cried’. you can read this in newspapers every day. But if you’ve got the tears, it’s like water of life. It’s nothing like urine; when you come to the doctor’s and he asks you to make water into a jar. You have to experience something to shed tears. You cannot squeeze them out of your eye. If you have really got a small drop of tears it’s a prove of the experience, it’s fantastic! It’s like believe, you can’t trick here, you can’t pretend. It wouldn’t work, it’s useless. You doesn’t experience anything. And this is my idea of the gift. Instead of bringing the Abyssinians clothing or medicaments I will bring them the most vital remedy. The people are sure to understand it, to believe the experience beyond it which can be feelings of a hundred people, in one small drop. I was attracted by this, by the absolute communication. So I realized it. To get success, I had to prove that it had a meaning. That is why I obliged myself to send it to Ethiopia, to concrete people. This was very difficult to fulfil, the idea looked so naive that nobody believed me especially when I declared me as a fanatic. It was not possible to offer the tears to charity organisations for sending it together with medicines and clothing. Nobody would be able to explain it there. At that moment, when I felt responsibility to the people, I said to myself ‘you will have to go there on your own’. I created a thermometer into capillary of which I fused the tears. I asked Soros foundation for money, at least a minimum for the airticket and left for Africa with the thermometer. I went to Lalibela - a monastery that is the centre of the local church. They have a special modification of Christianity called Monophysite Church of Ethiopia. They believe only in Jesus not the Holy Trinity. As 90% of Abynissians are in that church I decided to communicate with the church and bring the tears to the monastery. It is placed on a mountain plain. I came there after a three weeks’ walk from Kenya and handed the thermometer with the Czech people’s tears to the main priest. The most astonishing thing was that the people took it at face value, without any need to verify whether it is possible that someone cried for them. They took it as I told it to them. I took a photo of the black priest which was the only thing I brought back to the people, later it was published. So, it happened this way. I didn’t want to turn it into an ideology, assert myself. I wanted to base it on pure love and a prove of the love as such.

Sure, the art is in its own trap. It’s an aspect of modern art that is failing because it’s an artificial thing. To me it makes difference to address the most ordinary person. I am not sure to what extent I succeed. I had an exhibition in Ústí where the greatest number of visitors came, in compare with other exhibitions. I think it has a meaning. Many people are sceptical about art but I am not. Therefore I do it. If you destroyed all art, someone would come suddenly who would create it again. The society would demand it. It’s true that there are many artists but more likely the people are not interested in art. It may be because of the avant-garde syndrome. Avant-garde used to be all the time ahead of society. I used to make excesses before but now I am trying to make less of them. They cause that you get isolated from people. They don’t understand it as you do. I am attracted by it and don’t perceive it as excesses. Nevertheless they think that I am crazy. They consider these things as craziness; why should I make the largest graphic in the world? Why should I smear myself with filth to change colours by means of wind? These things are incomprehensible for people, you can’t defend them in press. People can see you, they can come to you. I think that the society will accept it in some time. No artist, unless he is really mad, is crazy. He’s normal, everybody who would concern in these things every day would start to meddle into them like this. because it has a meaning. Life is not predetermined by means of certain patterns, it’s incomprehensible and this is why art appears the same way. Scientists keep trying to prove some facts, the truth, check something ten times from different points of view and it can fail for the eleventh time. It’s difficult to make it clear for the people so that they understood it. The exciting aspect of art is that the person producing art is a priori confronted with the fact that he or she doesn’t understand the world. Nevertheless, he or she might be a medium of it. Then people can look at the world from a different point of view. Free from strict categories for which they might be worse. The task of art is to doubt them all the time.