b"calculated that breastmilk created by Australian mothers is worth, on average, $AUD3.5 billion per year. Audiences of Not Now, Not Ever were forced to confront the pace of extracting milkthe time and effort that goes into this undervalued and invisible labour occurring for hours upon hours every day, all over the country and the world at large. If we as a society are to reverse climate change and its effects, we need a stronger understanding of how it is bound up with our social and cultural attitudes to the natural world. Intergovernmental organisations rarely agree on climate negotiations (or dont maintain their hard-won accords) and gender equality is slow to be achieved with issues such as domestic violence complexly bound up in our social pressures and predicaments. Many profit-driven businesses are primarily interested in green washing.Education doesn't reach all the generations and classes in the same way. Yet, the education of women and girls has been noted by organisations such as the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as pivotal to humanitys capacity to slow or halt global warming and to the resilience or even survival of our species. Art doesnt single-handedly save the world either, of course, but it is a vital component in educating and inspiring different kinds of people to take action. Art challenges us to see our current environmental predicament in new ways, a fresh and creative response to deep-set attitudes with a long history in the West. Art can stretch, warp and jump through time. Art can embody what some of us only know abstractly. Art can imagine the unimaginable. Art can put forward radically new possible ways of living and radically different visions of ourselves as a species and our place in the food chain.Lara Stevens is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne where she researches Ecological Theatre and Performance. She lectures in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of the books Anti-War Theatre After Brecht and co-editor of Feminist Ecologies. Images courtesy of Meredith Rogers and Drew Echberg14| Essence | Australian Breastfeeding Association December 2019"