Art, belonging, and sense and to whom nonsense belongs

The following chapter explores the ambition, challenges, and possible strategies in bringing change (through art and education) to established tropes of thought, particularly in respect of ecology and the environment—and how the methodologies and approach of contemporary art can function to facilitate this process. We examine pertinent case studies from our portfolio of international projects, addressing matters of interspecific relations, extinction, conservation, environmentalism, museology, forensics, and folklore, together with other examples of historic and contemporary waywardness. By this means, we hope in some modest way to indicate advantages in softening an inbuilt human resistance to epoch-determined cultural deviation and to point out at least by implication, that the absence, where it exists, of such license in the delivery of education is some form of betrayal.