Liz Capelin On Encouraging Ecological Conservation Through Creative Expression

Liz Capelin is a creative producer working at the intersection of creative industries, environmental conservation and community engagement.

The interdependence of socio-cultural and ecological systems inspired her to found Third Nature Projects. For 17 years Liz has conceived and coordinated projects where creative inquiry and practices have given voice to environmental themes, forming experiences for and between people, igniting ecological curiosity and inspiring stewardship of place.

Her interdisciplinary approach was nationally recognised as a Banksia Award Winner for the 2019 biodiversity-focused Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve BioBlitz. In 2021, she designed and delivered Tiny Giants, a multi-faceted invertebrate research project in partnership with the Queensland Museum. Liz is also an environmental interpretation writer, curator of eco-art exhibitions and coordinator of arts-based conservation programs on the Sunshine Coast (Kabi Kabi and Jinibara Country).

Liz discusses how green art inspires communities to engage in their natural surroundings and builds their understanding of complex environmental systems.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off Liz, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your interest in creative approaches to conservation and social impact?

[Liz Capelin] - Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that I'm calling in from Kabi Kabi Country on the Sunshine Coast and pay my respects to elder’s past, present and emerging. It's a really beautiful part of the world that I live in, and I'm continually grateful for the traditional custodians of this area. My background and how I got into this space is I've always been innately creative. I've dabbled in lots of different creative industries including film, TV, animation, music, sound design, sewing and visual art, and I seemed to find opportunities to bring sustainability and conservation messaging into a lot of the projects. I would wind creative approaches into teaching people about the environment.

I realised quite early on that the environmental crises that we're facing are actually socially constructed, they're social problems that are to do with changing our culture.

I studied social science with a community development focus. It was really interesting homing in on people and their values, their education, their sense of place, and working with people using creative methods to take care of our environment, learn more about it and be more present in it. That led into fun projects that included festivals and research projects where I would work with scientists and artists here on the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. Also, I volunteered in Vanuatu. Every project I work on, I just meet so many amazing passionate people and I learn heaps about the subjects that I'm focusing on through those projects, which is always really inspiring. It just gets deeper and deeper the more fun I have.

Can you tell us a bit more about Third Nature Projects and its social purpose?

The goal of Third Nature Projects is to really push this approach forward of using our creativity to enhance conservation initiatives and education while working a lot with artists and local governments to achieve sustainability and liveability goals. This is through creative approaches which audiences and the public/communities really respond well to. My projects are always really well attended and sold out, and families and members of the public are really keen to connect with their local environment and learn more about it, but learn through a language that isn't just data or static text in a report.

If people are able to come together and have an experience that's really tactile, positive, interpersonal and creative, the knowledge about those environments and scientific conservation actually goes deeper into them and they become stewards of those places and of the species they might be learning about. This is really through having a lot of fun and being quite exploratory. I work a lot in nature play, so with children and families, and children innately want to explore and play in natural spaces or botanic gardens. They can come together and follow their own curiosity, fun and exploration and interact with nature, and in doing so, they make a connection with those places that is embedded in their memories and also in their own sense of self in place.

How can creativity be utilised to connect people to their natural habitats and surrounding ecology?

Creative practices are ways of making meaning, marks and storytelling. We can use different mediums to connect people with place and tell the stories of place. This could be through painting a particular threatened species, participating in a workshop constructing a beautiful, endangered butterfly, or simply learning about catchment processes and hydrology.

There is something really innate in people where through that process of engaging in a creative practice, they connect to that ecology and they become impassioned to stand up for it, value, and see it more because creative practices catalyse environmental literacy.

There's this incredibly diverse and complex living system that's all around us, but it's not interpretable unless we have a language or a way of connecting with it. These practices (some are quite experimental while others are seemingly very simple) can render the natural world around us and our place in it intelligible back to us. It's almost like learning a language, as soon as you have words for things, you start to recognise that all the green around you isn't just a wall of green, it's a complex overlapping of different botanical species. As you learn their names or their role in holding a creek bed together, or their role in flowering and their connection to a bird species or an arboreal mammal that might live in them as a habitat, it starts to become more vivid, beautiful and complex. These ways of developing projects that embed scientific knowledge and First Nations knowledge together in creative experiences render that complex system that's around us more alive, visible and knowable. As soon as people know about things and have that personal connection with them, it changes our ethics. It changes our value of that system and therefore how we regard it, how we make decisions that are considered towards it. I think that's really powerful, and that's what I hope we achieve with Third Nature Projects.

Why is it important to engage communities in nature and what benefits does this create in either the short-term or the long-term?

We all understand that we live in a time and a place (not to get apocalyptic) where there's converging environmental crises underway. These problems also mirror personal and social wellbeing issues regarding dislocation or a sense of collapse. Even at this crazy time in 2022, our capacity to look forward and have hope about future generations and our survival is important. I think it's possibly narcissistic to say this, but more than ever it's absolutely vital that individually and collectively we engage with the places which we belong to, that we take care of them and that we respond appropriately to the emerging evidence that's all around us. Biodiversity is under threat, the climate is changing, our actions as humans are having an incredible impact on the very world which we depend on for survival. There's survival in terms of clean water, clean air and the provision of healthy food, but there is more and more emerging research around our wellbeing and connection with nature.

There is a positive impact on their own sense of belonging and meaning in landscape and what they're contributing to it and how they are responding to taking care of it. Being a custodian in this time for future generations, that if you are involved in these things and you're taking care of your little patch or your part of the catchment. It can be very small, it could be your tiny little edible native garden, or it could be broader in terms of being involved in the repair and restoration of your local creek or broader global issues that you're acting for from a local scale. That's incredibly meaningful and positive for people as individuals and I find that the networks of people who then come together around caring for place and connecting with place start to build that social fabric and social capital around taking care of each other as well as taking care of place. It's so interdependent, and from my perspective, that's incredibly vital right now here in this time. It probably always has been vital throughout history, it's just that it's coming to the fore now that we are more and more aware of the imbalance that's occurring because of the scale of change. You can look at it as a response to this incredible threat, which at times can be quite frightening.

But, if we actually do positive things and enact connection to place, that's actually really healing and moves us through that paralysis of thinking, "I don't know what to do, and I feel like everything's falling around me," to actually noticing what's happening around you. People start being aware of what is in flower, of what impact their home or work life, or actions might be having, and that's an incredibly positive step to take. From the circles that I follow and the movements that I'm aware of more and more people are really connecting in with that, and it's mutually beneficial for both people.

Liz you are a past alum of The Refinery, a Sunshine Coast based business incubator. During this program, what was one of the biggest takeaways that you had?

I had the incredible pleasure of participating in The Refinery last year on the Sunshine Coast with fifteen other awesome creatives, and really one of the biggest takeaways was that a lot of creative entrepreneurs are slugging it out. They're doing things on their own, but there are definitely shared challenges and obstacles that we all face as founders and supporting each other in terms of tools and lessons is key. We all have so many different skills, but we can't do everything. Sometimes when you're running your own business you have to wear all the hats at once. I think being part of that incubator really networked a lot of people together. Some people were in graphic design, some were in videography, and we all had something to offer each other in terms of skill sharing and bringing our experience to that table.

Really, one of the biggest things that I got out of The Refinery was consolidating what I wanted Third Nature Projects to achieve and understanding my niche in terms of the value that I bring with my expertise and pushing this sector forward.

I now understand this intersection of creative, ecological and community development, and really, I just gave myself permission to focus on building Third Nature for the three months I participated in that program. The biggest takeaway for me was to have self-belief and really think, "no, if I want this to be in the world, I need to focus on it." I need to back myself a hundred percent because it's what I believe in. That's so powerful when you're pushing something forward and bringing something into the world that doesn't exist yet. Actually being the one who wholeheartedly backs it and then is able to share that story with others in a way that they can then get inspired by and get behind you and support is crucial.

If you could give one piece of advice for people to more meaningfully connect with their environment and then conserve it for future generations, what would that be?

I think I would recommend looking through the eyes of children, the way that they just naturally are in awe of nature is because they're curious.

I would say to everyone out there, just maintain curiosity, because curiosity then gives rise to observation and questions, and as you start to take notice and question, then you can dive in to understanding more.

I think that's what drives a lot of my excitement behind my projects is that I maintain curiosity, it's like a superpower. I recently did a big project with Queensland Museum, that was all about invertebrates and the study of invertebrates in rainforests. I was just so curious to learn from the scientists who were involved in that project what they knew about invertebrates and then to learn from them that there's so many species and interactions that we don't yet know about in ecology that are endlessly exciting. That curiosity really draws people in and gets them excited. One thing that's really taking off in a big way is citizen science, and I really enjoy bringing citizen science into my projects too. A lot of those initiatives, whether they're backyard bird counts, Find a Frog in February or insect investigators are about inspiring local communities wherever they are to be observant, to record observations and to ignite that curiosity so that more data can be collected and more can be known on our national biodiversity databases to track changes in the environment and changes in species, behaviour, or prevalence. Definitely stay curious, keep observing, look out for citizen science opportunities and just take notice, because nature is so beautiful and it's constantly changing.

I think a lot of people throughout the last couple of years in our different experiences of lockdown were really drawn back into their local environment, and maybe the thing that kept them going that one particular day was a flutter of butterflies that they spent some time within their backyard when they couldn't go anywhere else. Maybe they were really noticing birdsong that they'd been too busy to listen to before and then wondering what are those birds, how many are there, what are they doing and what do their different calls mean? That observation is so enriching and each door that you open into each little bit of knowledge just leads into a room with more doors in it, and that's incredibly simple in a way, but very complex as well. People can take that as far as they want.

What other organisations have you seen that are creating a strong social impact and are improving communities?

Steering that question towards nature art, which is green art and ecological creativity, there are a lot of artists who I follow who I am inspired by and curious about, and there are some organisations that are really promoting this intersection. One is ANAT down in Adelaide, but there are certainly some opportunities that are starting to pop up in Southeast Queensland a bit more with Curiocity Brisbane and Botanica Brisbane. Heritage, museum and gallery opportunities are really starting to open up in this space of intersecting with science and place and responding through art to the challenges of our times. For anyone in their local communities, look out for the land care groups, monitoring opportunities, turtle care networks or catchment groups monitoring water quality, there are just so many environmental actors on the ground.

If more people, particularly creative people, come on board to really amplify their message and innovate the way that work is undertaken there are more opportunities.

It's hard to pinpoint one, two or three because each of us live in such different places and there's so many people on the ground just slogging away doing work for the environment. Community engagement I wouldn't say is a constant struggle, but it's a goal of those organisations to keep connecting with communities, so if that's something you're interested in, reach out to them, and if you're in the creative industries, ask how you can apply your innovative approach or your way of telling stories through your artwork in partnership with those organisations and really come up with innovative partnerships where magic can happen.

What books or resources would you recommend for our listeners?

Ask me next week, I might have a different answer! At the moment, I'm reading Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, I'm re-reading it actually. That's an incredible book from a First Nations perspective looking at systems theory, sustainability and definitely these cultural ecological connections. I mentioned earlier I work with children a lot; I think that adults should still stay connected to children's picture books because they're just golden. I was just reading again recently Uno's Garden by Graeme Base, which is a really simple fantasy story about the imbalance that can happen when humans come and take over the environment and biodiversity slowly declines. It also addresses how we can keep monitoring, keep our eyes open and keep valuing the environment and save seeds, save species and live in balance. It's very simple story, but obviously it has beautiful captivating illustrations for children to gaze at for hours.