Hi, in thinking about the conversations of the last month I’ve been struck by the many interesting ways of connecting and seeing science and art together. In windows around the world one thing I’m always struck with is light and in one of Jane’s last posting she had a number of photos of light on winter days. light is a powerful part of the arctic as at certain times of the year the sun is not up and othertimes it’s always up. light is also a powerful aspect of art.

Though I study climate change and its impacts on the arctic landscape for living, I don’t really study what causes climate change and what we should do about it, and so have no special expertise there. My personal take on these differ from most people’s, so I thought I’d share them.

My family and I live in a small cabin in Fairbanks that is electrically off-the-grid, heated by local wood, and has no running water. Do I think this has any measureable or useful impact on climate? Not a bit. Driving hybrid cars, recycling, etc – I don’t think any of these things are going to help, as they just address the symptoms of the problem, not the causes.

I have been working at the Alaska Native science Commission for the past five years, and in the last two as its Deputy Director. In this position, I have the privilege of traveling to many Native and rural communities throughout most regions of Alaska. In these communities, the stories about climate change are the same. The list of observed changes can fill several pages, and many of them are alarming. There is no debate in any of these villages that climate change and global warming is here and intensifying in its effects. The State of Alaska has created a climate change Commission that will conduct hearings throughout Alaska. Many Native groups have already held several meetings and conferences where climate change was discussed. I also chaired the science Working Group of Snowchange, an international gathering of indigenous peoples from 8 arctic countries and no one disputes that climate change is upon us and describe many adverse consequences in graphic detail (see www.snowchange.org).

That friend is the Arctic, or so it seem to residents of the Arctic. The third point of focus for this project, this forum on the radiating effects of climate change, is the Arctic. The arctic is the very cold canary that tell us what is happening with our climate before we feel it in more temperate zones. The changes, as we have heard here from Larry Merculieff, are more drastic and hit home not just to the large community of people who live above the imaginary line that describes the arctic Circle, but also the the rest of the world’s land and people. Changes include the much reported: spring thaws are earlier. Fall freeze-ups are later. Sea ice is shrinking. Unfamiliar species of plants and animals are appearing. Intense storms are more frequent.

Happy new year everyone! Lets change the world this year, OK?

I’m still thinking about the questions raised earlier in the comments to various posts on this site, asking what kind of role art can play in climate change issues. As I plan out my year, I am trying to keep my feet to the fire of my focus this past year or two: thinking about how to continue creating projects that combine visual, technological, interdisciplinary, collaborative, conversational, and site-responsive works about our human impact on climate change in the arctic in the past and future. In a nutshell I think that I will be gathering much more information, perspectives, narratives, images, and collaborators, trying to keep a balance between my studio practice and a practice of aesthetic alliances with so many different people. I want to go to a science research station in the arctic (any ideas anybody?)–Toolik in Alaska has been suggested to me, so that I can do some work there in the actual landscapes and technologies of the site itself. I’m trying to create visualizations of what the deep arctic will look like in 2110? What kind of transportation will we use to get there and travel around while we’re there? Will we live there? And if so in what kind of house? How will we grow food? What kind of phones will we have to communicate with? How will we get pictures/news of the rest of the world? I want to imagine these things with the combined mind of a science fiction illustrator and a sustainable design innovator.
Will these efforts or their resulting art/activist/conversation projects make a difference? Still wondering. Probably its a one person at at time thing.

I chaired the science Working Group for an international conference of arctic indigenous peoples called Snowchange in August of last year (www.snowchange.org). There were several other working groups. Indigenous leaders from Greenland to Siberia gathered to share their stories of what they are seeing in changes to fish, wildlife and habitat. The list of observed changes grows longer each year:

–beaver are now in the arctic as the tree line moves north

–salmon are showing up with lesions and parasites in greater frequency

–weather is much more unpredictable, causing danger and death to hunters

–more and more salmon are appearing in the Chukchi Sea

–water levels in lakes and rivers are going down

–permafrost is melting

–reindeer are having difficulty accessing forage due to freeze-thaw-freeze cycles,

covering tundra with ice

–migratory birds are arriving earlier and leaving later

The November issue of The American Prospect has a wonderful article by Joshua Kurlantzick:

Some oil companies boast about their commitment to fighting global warming. But as the arctic heats up, these same companies are racing to drill in newly melted waters. The rush to exploit the melting ice cap is on.

Kurlantzick lays out a contradiction between what the oil companies are saying on the one hand, and placing themselves in line for on the other.

When I was up in the arctic for the filming of the NOVA program “Arctic Passage,” I and others of the crew wore cold-weather gear emblazoned with the phrase “Long Live Dreams”® – this had been the slogan of the “American Express Franklin Memorial Expedition,” whose parkas, down pants, and windsuits had been very kindly loaned to the film crew by Rebecca Harris, the leader of the expedition. In an age or corporate sponsorship, such a thing was as much a necessity as a GPS transponder, but the idea of such a phrase being trademarked by a company struck me as enormously strange. At one point after a long day’s shoot, Harald Paalgard, our director of photography, expressed his weariness by reading the phrase out in lugubrious tones reminiscent of the the Addams Family’s Lurch (”You rang?”), like this: Loooonnngg . . . .liiiivvvvve . . . . dreeeammmms. It reduced us all to tears of laughter.

Hi, I’m a biological oceanographer by training and most of my research is focused on zooplankton, the little tiny animals in the ocean. Much of my work is done in the Arctic. Two years ago, I was working in the Beaufort Sea and I had the opportunity to develop an education and outreach program. While I was trying to think of what to develop I thought about my feeling, Knowledge and impressions of the arctic and I thought about what people say when they hear I am traveling there. This ranges from wonder and excitement to pity. While I can tell people about the light in the arctic at midnight in the summer or blue twilight at noon in the winter or the golden glow in the fall, it’s hard to understand unless you see it. I wanted to develop a program that would let people see the arctic and give children a chance to learn about polar regions and how they are similar and different to other regions. In seeing this, the children would begin to see and learn about the connections between regions. With this in mind, my husband Jim Rich and I developed the Windows Around the World program (www.WindowsAroundTheWorld.org ), that lets children, teachers, parents and anyone come and see what it looks like in different areas.

I’ve been working on an interdisciplinary collaborative hybrid art/research project for the last year and a half. Its called Arctic Listening Post and includes a series of works that explore our cultural imaginary of the Arctic, particularly focusing on climate change. This networked conversation, Climate Commons, began as I spent a year in a research blog project, Deepnorth, a virtual expedition to the North Pole, in which I gathered from the internet each day an image, a fact, or a story, and slowly accrued a kind of narrative mapping of the representations of the North Pole, from science, history, sports feats, mass media, art, fiction, and politics.

Climate Commons, developed by Jane D. Marsching with Matthew Shanley, is an online conversation about climate change, sustainability, and the Arctic. The conversation runs from November 27, 2006 to February 28, 2007. Please join the conversation here by reading the posts and conversation threads or logging in as a new user to respond.

Climate Commons is part of a larger project by Marsching, Arctic Listening Post, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in the 2006 Foster Prize exhibition in which Marsching is a finalist. At the ICA Climate Commons can be viewed on laptops in the Climate commons Lounge, created with Justin C. Knapp and Christopher Wawrinofsky, provides a modular social space for conversation and inquiry. The Lounge’s furniture was created by Marsching with Justin C. Knapp and Christopher Wawrinofsky with upcycled materials from the construction of the new ICA.