The Lighthouse Project brings together music, stories, and beauty in a search for understanding, community and meaning

by Kathleen Martin

David Maggs believes that too often the environmental movement frames its discussion as “anti-human”—that the world would be better if humans just disappeared. “If you take that approach,” he warns, “don’t expect the co-operation of humans in the transition.”    

Described by CBC Radio’s Shelagh Rogers as “one of the most creative men in classical music today,” Maggs is a pianist and the founder of the acclaimed Gros Morne Summer Music Festival in Newfoundland. He’s also one of Canada’s most innovative environmental thinkers, drawn to the intersection of art, global sustainability, and what it means to be human—a discussion with a surprising suite of commercial implications. 

“This planet we love so much to explore is in trouble,” Maggs wrote in the introduction to a successful 2006 eco-tour he led in western Newfoundland called Earth to Human. “No other species on Earth has had to come to grips with the problem of being too successful.” Maggs says we have to reframe how we imagine ourselves in the world—not just what kind of light bulbs we choose but how we understand what it is we need. “The pain in the ass of sustainability is that you can’t get away from the fact that it’s an existential problem,” he says. “Art provides the existential reckoning: who are we, and what makes meaning for us? Mass media only allows us to tell certain kinds of stories—stories that often support the hyper-consuming instinct. If we decide that what makes meaning for us as humans is new stuff, we’re in trouble.”

As part of his doctoral studies in environment and sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Maggs has begun the Lighthouse Project. It involves six hectares of land at Woody Point, N.L., and an old church with “fabulous acoustics.” When it’s up and running, it will give people a chance to meld music and stories and questions of why, all within the towering beauty of Gros Morne. “The aesthetic experience really has us,” says Maggs. “If you start telling people a story, they can’t help but sit there and listen. You can appeal to somebody’s aesthetic sensibility in ways you can’t to their rational sensibility. You can use art to reach people who aren’t typically engaged in the environmental front. Art is dynamite in the logjam.”

But why would we want to be enticed into a world that turns consumerism as we know it on its head? “We need transformative change that’s about an order of magnitude bigger than we’ve ever accomplished before,” says David Robinson, Maggs’ doctoral supervisor. “Part of that change strategy has to be commercialization and market transformation.”

And so we find ourselves at the precipice of a new order. The Lighthouse Project and its sister project at UBC, Robinson’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), are helping map the future. “How many new building starts are sustainable?” says Robinson. “Every single unsustainable building that goes up is a 50-year mistake that will cost a fortune to retrofit. There has to be 100% penetration of sustainability in the building sector. At CIRS we’re partnering with companies that do commercialization, like Haworth and Honeywell and Corix.”

CIRS will be housed in what is being called North America’s most sustainable building. It’s a living laboratory of sustainable technology and practices. One of its current projects is a computer game that explores the existential questions Maggs describes. So far 16 cities across Canada have purchased the software, as have Denver and Chicago.

For sustainability to happen, says Robinson, the private, public, and NGO sectors need to partner. Sustainable cities are a springboard to the export market in urban infrastructure. Opportunities abound, says Robinson. “Art, combined with the environment surrounding a place like the Lighthouse Project, is fundamental to developing the will to engage.”

At the end of one of Magg’s eco-tours, musicians from the Gros Morne Summer Music Festival played an unfinished work by Bach. “When it was done, nobody clapped,” recalls Maggs. “No one said anything. We just sat there, listening to the sound of the ocean beating beneath where we had gathered. It was as if a truly collective moment had descended on us, and the only ‘person’ we wanted to hear from at that point was the sea. I don’t know what people took from that week, and what has stayed with them since then, but I feel we touched something quite profound in that moment.”

Kathleen Martin is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She can be reached at masthead@ns.sympatico.ca.