Once the conversation began around arctic Listening Post and Climate Commons, I suddenly found myself having many more interactions and receiving many more emails in my day-to-day about the increasing interest in using art as a vehicle for expressing environmental concerns.

In the last five weeks, our book tour has stopped into eleven cities around North America. In the context of climate change, it’s an interesting time to be traveling around. Everywhere I go, the locals are talking about how “unusual” the weather is for this time of year. At the beginning of December it’s hot in Denver and snowing in Seattle; DC has tornadoes and rain has flooded numerous areas on both coasts.

My travels have also enabled me to visit more museums than I ordinarily do and it’s quite promising to discover that environmental art is hitting a 21st century zeitgeist. Unlike some iterations of the Earth art tradition - literally utilizing the land itself as a medium for creating art - much of the new environmental art is using various media to present commentary about the conditions we now live in and the kind of world we might be headed towards.

I’ve checked out the Massive Change show at the Chicago MCA, the Green House exhibit at the National Building Museum in DC, and a series of breathtaking photos of post-Katrina NOLA at the Met in New York. But a piece that perhaps struck me the most was one that surely wasn’t conceived as environmental art at all. In Daniel Libeskind’s newly opened Denver art Museum building, there’s a mid-nineteenth century oil painting by William Bradford entitled Whalers Working through the ice on the Coast of Greenland under the Midnight Sun. It’s a beautiful painting that captures the particular light of that latitude, season, and time of day with nearly photographic precision. The peach tones wash over huge glacial blocks that tower hundreds of times as high as the human figures standing down on the ice, around a gaping cavity through which they’re hunting whales.

It’s striking that this centuries-old little piece, hung by itself on a wall in Denver, can present such a powerful juxtaposition of culture and environment from 2006 to the date of its origin. In a way it’s accidental or eventual environmental art. Today, not only is whaling a strictly regulated and widely criticized practice (the plight of the whale has become perhaps the most recognizable rallying cry of the enviros), but the scene that Bradford painted could never be captured now, and never again. The mammoth ice blocks he witnessed then are likely melted down to nothing in Greenland, where explorers like Ben Saunders, who follow in Bradford’s footsteps, now hike shirtless and suffer sunburns in a climate severely altered by the human and industrial impact of the last century and a half.

It’s a bit frightening to think about this in our present circumstances, to consider what parts of the planet captured in a painting or photograph in 2006 might have disappeared by 2016. On the other hand, if we manage to start turning this ship around, images of pollution, destruction and extinction might be less familiar to people one hundred years from now than those of restoration, conservation and biodiversity.
[image courtesy of the Denver art Museum]

-- SarahRich