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Into the ice: humans get closer to nature – in pictures.
From log trails to lava houses, from mud baths to melting glaciers, US photographer Lucas Foglia explores our relationship with the natural world in his new book Human Nature.
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Into the ice: humans get closer to nature – in pictures
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From log trails to lava houses, from mud baths to melting glaciers, US photographer Lucas Foglia explores our relationship with the natural world. In his new book Human Nature, he has captured off-grid families, climate scientists at work, and a hotel over-run with greenery
Tuesday 10 October 2017 02.00 EDT
Esme swims in a balcony pool at the Parkroyal on Pickering in Singapore. The hotel contains more than 15,000 square metres of greenery, amounting to twice its land area. Lucas Foglia’s Human Nature is at Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, until 21 October. Human Nature by Lucas Foglia is published by Nazraeli Press. All photography by Lucas Foglia
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Esme swims in a balcony pool at the Parkroyal on Pickering in Singapore. The hotel contains over 15,000 square meters of greenery, amounting to twice its land area.
Kurt guards logs, for export to China, on the Essequibo River in Guyana. Situated on South America’s North Atlantic coast, Guyana has one of the largest unspoiled rainforests in the world, parts of which are almost inaccessible to humans. In 2009, Norway offered $250m for protecting and maintaining the trees. At the same time, China is offering to buy any trees that are cut
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Kurt guards logs, for export to China, on the Essequibo River in Guyana. Guyana, a country on South America’s North Atlantic coast, has one of the largest unspoiled rainforests in the world, some parts of which are almost inaccessible by humans. In 2009, Norway offered $250 million for protecting and maintaining the trees. At the same time, China is offering to buy any trees that are cut.
Kenzie hangs from her safety rope inside a melting glacier. She is with the Juneau Icefield Research Programme, in which students assist scientists in climate research
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12 LucasFoglia HumanNature Kenzie inside a Melting Glacier
Matt builds an off-grid house, after a lava flow covered his land in Hawaii
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Matt builds an off grid house, after a lava flow covered his land in Hawai‘i. Construction after a Lava Flow
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Icebergs float away from the Gilkey Glacier in Alaska
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Icebergs float away from the Gilkey Glacier in Alaska.
Rachel immerses herself in the communal mud pit at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference in Louisa, Virginia. People from around the world come to the conference to talk about eco-villages, cooperative housing, and how to live closer to nature
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Rachel immerses herself in the communal mud pit at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference in Louisa, Virginia. People from around the world come to the conference to talk about eco-villages, cooperative housing, and how to live closer to nature.
New crop varieties are grown and tested in the Geneva Greenhouses at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. The USDA’s national and regional seed banks store hundreds of thousands of plant varieties, and crop scientists race to create a climate-change-resilient agriculture. As droughts, extreme rainstorms, and other erratic weather patterns intensify, farmers need crops that can cope with such stresses
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New crop varieties are grown and tested in the Geneva Greenhouses at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. The USDA’s national and regional seed banks store hundreds of thousands of plant varieties, and crop scientists race to create a climate-change-resilient agriculture. As droughts, extreme rainstorms, and other erratic weather patterns intensify, farmers need crops that can cope with such stresses.
A beach is restored after El Niño waves in Pacifica, California. With coastlines eroding close to houses, many coastal towns pay machine operators to rebuild beaches, even as waves wash the sand away
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A beach is restored after El Niño Waves in Pacifica, California. With coastlines eroding close to houses, many coastal towns pay machine operators to rebuild beaches, even as waves wash the sand away.
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Evan sleeps at Camp 18, overlooking the Vaughan Lewis Icefall. One of the greatest nonpolar concentrations of glaciers in the world, the Juneau Icefield spans 90 miles of southeast Alaska
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Evan sleeps at Camp 18, overlooking the Vaughan Lewis Icefall. One of the greatest nonpolar concentrations of glaciers in the world, the Juneau Icefield spans 90 miles of southeast Alaska.
Palm trees once marked the entrance to town. Now they are without water, during the prolonged drought in California
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Palm trees once marked the entrance to town. Now they are without water, during the prolonged drought in California.
Kate waits for a storm to pass. Researchers at the University of Utah, working under Dr David Strayer, are conducting studies measuring cognition in nature. The EEG cap and facial electrodes record brain activity as participants are exposed to different natural environments
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Kate waits for a storm to pass. Researchers at the University of Utah, working under Dr. David Strayer, are conducting studies measuring cognition in nature. The EEG cap and facial electrodes record brain activity as participants are exposed to different natural environments.
Honey bees trail water across a rooftop after rain in Portland, Oregon
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Honey bees trail water across a rooftop after rain in Portland, Oregon.
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Trees stand, marked for cutting by the National Park Service, in a forest burned by the Rim Fire that spread into Yosemite National Park the year before. The Rim Fire of 2013 was the third largest wildfire in California’s history and the largest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada mountain range
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Trees stand, marked for cutting by the National Park Service, in a forest burned by the the Rim Fire that spread into Yosemite National Park the year before. The Rim Fire of 2013 was the third largest wildfire in California’s history and the largest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
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Scientists jam with musicians, artists to stir public passion for nature.
Collaboration between the arts and science can help change the way we look at the environment - and spark debate on how to protect it.
By Megan Rowling
STOCKHOLM, Sept 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Norwegian artist Tone Bjordam was moved to tears when she heard an eminent Swedish scientist explain the relationships between nature, society and the economy at a 2013 workshop in Uruguay.
Displaying a diagram of three concentric circles, with the economy in the middle and nature on the outside, Carl Folke, science director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, argued that if the economy collapses, society and nature will likely survive, and if society implodes, then nature can stay intact.
But if nature - the planet's ecosystems, wildlife and climate - descend into chaos, then so will the society and economy it supports.
"He said, 'I have never seen anyone react so emotionally to something as dry and boring as this!'," recalled Bjordam at a recent conference in Stockholm where scientists discussed ways to keep the planet and its inhabitants healthy and in balance.
In a hall next door hung the inspiration from her Latin America experience - an installation suspended from the ceiling.
A large circle covered in vegetation shelters a smaller disc mounted with a river and fields above and a maze of city lights below, while beneath the two glitters a small globe fashioned of money with coins dripping from the bottom.
"If you cut the wires that hold nature up, everything falls apart," said Bjordam.
The artist spends a good part of her time outdoors observing and photographing landscapes of mountains, lakes and forests, and the rest in her studio, making paintings, graphic art and sculptures informed by the natural sciences.
Bjordam believes her art work can help bring the beauty and fragility of our environment - and by extension, the need to protect it - to the public.
"Real engagement often starts with an interesting and fantastic experience in nature or through art," she told scientific researchers in Sweden last month.
Nor does the 42-year-old artist pay mere lip service to biology, chemistry and physics - she has collaborated with scientists since one saw her 2009 video piece "Coral" in an art museum.
"As a scientist, you're trying to capture the essence of something in the world in a way that is really appealing, that nobody has thought of, that may change the way people look at it - and that is exactly what artists do," said Marten Scheffer, a professor at Wageningen University and director of the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies.
In 2012, Scheffer and Bjordam produced an art video, "Critical Transitions", which portrays processes constantly going on around us, and how a system can build up to a tipping point where it suddenly shifts. Three sequences, like abstract paintings in motion or landscapes in flux, are set to music composed and played by the Dutch scientist.
Scheffer has since worked with mathematicians crunching data to see if it is possible to identify a "critical transition" in the midst of turbulence, like the political, economic and climate instability the world is experiencing today.
Scientist and musician Marten Scheffer (centre) points up at Tone Bjordam's sculpture installation entitled "Nature/Society/Economy", exhibited at the Resilience 2017 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, August 22, 2017. PHOTO/Tone Bjordam
SOFTER REALITY
Brigitte Baptiste, director of the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in Colombia, has direct experience of such a transition, having lived amidst her country's civil war that ground on for five decades.
The transgender ecologist says that, with a fragile peace accord now in place, Colombia must change the way it approaches its future to avoid a repetition of conflict.
"We want to avoid a clash of truths," she told the Stockholm conference. "We can live with a certain amount of uncertainty and ambiguity."
Using art, music and new languages to portray the choices Colombia faces "gives us a softer way of seeing reality that helps us to build compromise", said Baptiste.
To that end, the institute has produced a set of tarot cards featuring Colombian plants and animals, to help people think differently about themselves and nature. And in December, it will start publishing a sci-fi graphic novel for young readers called "The Resilience Chronicles".
"Art is going to be one of the most important, inspiring forces for building resilience in our countries," said Baptiste, referring to the challenges facing Latin America.
Swedish musician Anders Paulsson of Coral Guardians plays his soprano saxophone at sunset on Danjugan Island, home to a coral reef sanctuary, in the central Philippines, February 12, 2017. PHOTO/Kaila Ledesma
CORAL SYMPHONY
Swedish soprano saxophonist and composer Anders Paulsson believes similarly that music can build bridges between people - from children to a former U.N. secretary-general - and inspire them to care for the planet and its natural resources.
After working as a volunteer diver counting invertebrates on Danjugan, a once-endangered coral reef in the Philippines, he co-founded an organisation called Coral Guardians.
It organises events combining science and music, where individuals meet to discuss the threats to coral reefs and ways to protect them.
After a performance held in a town square near the Danjugan Sanctuary, "we heard stories that people who hadn't spoken to each other for 10 years were actually speaking again," said Paulsson.
At other concerts, scientists have felt the emotional energy of their work for the first time, and at an event with similar aims organised by the Tällberg Foundation, Kofi Annan played conga drums, he said. "That levels the field, so anybody can talk to anybody," added the internationally renowned musician.
On Danjugan island, the Philippine Reef and Rainforest Conservation Foundation runs camps for children using coral reefs and the ocean as a marine classroom.
"It will take 10 years before these kids are community leaders, but eventually they will come with a different perspective than their parents," Paulsson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Following the world premiere in April of "Coral Symphony - Kumulipo Reflections", a tone poem composed by Paulsson after hearing a native Hawaiian chant telling how creation began with the coral polyp, Coral Guardians plans to work on a 10-year project with Conservation International, visiting coral reefs and collaborating with local musicians.
"I would like to hear some of this music on Top 40 radio," said the saxophonist, smiling.
"If someone is to sing about conservation and in a poetic way, not just a scientific way, and people... actually sing along, that would be a shift in consciousness."
(Reporting by Megan Rowling @meganrowling; Editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://news.trust.org/climate)
The Thomson Reuters Foundation is reporting on resilience as part of its work on zilient.org, an online platform building a global network of people interested in resilience, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation.
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A man on an eco-mission in mixed media.
The Brooklyn artist Justin Brice Guariglia has turned Greenland’s meltdown into a new show at the Norton Museum of Art.
Last year at the Telluride Film Festival, the artist Justin Brice Guariglia fell into conversation with a stranger.
“I got stuck on a gondola ride with a climate change denier,” Mr. Guariglia said recently. The stranger clearly had no idea who he was dealing with.
Not only had Mr. Guariglia previously talked his way into joining a NASA scientific mission over Greenland so that he could photograph melting polar ice caps. He also had even created a mobile app called After Ice, which allows users to take a selfie that is overlaid with a watery filter indicating the sea level projected in their geo-tagged location in the 2080s.
So when the man on the gondola said the earth’s warming temperatures were just part of a cycle, Mr. Guariglia recalled, “I took off my jacket and I said, ‘Does this look like a cycle to you?’”
Along his right arm is a tattooed wavy line that is actually a graph charting the average temperature of the earth’s surface over the last 136 years; on his left arm, a similar line reflects 400,000 years of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere. It shoots upward at the end and curves around his wrist.
Mr. Guariglia’s role as an alarm-ringer on such topics is more subtly evidenced in his coming exhibition, “Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene,” at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Fla., from Sept. 5 to Jan. 7. (The term Anthropocene was coined by the atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen to refer to the current, human-influenced geological epoch.)
Even though the issue is personal for him, the 22 large mixed-media works in the show — all based on photographs by Mr. Guariglia, a former photojournalist — are elegant, abstracted and somewhat mysterious.
It’s hard to tell at first glance what they depict. Stars in the sky? A moonscape? Some images appear from a distance like a three-dimensional sculpture but all are in reality perfectly flat, falling “somewhere between a photograph and a painting,” in Mr. Guariglia’s words.
All the works depict parts of the landscape that have been changed by the presence of humans, from the scars of strip mining to the shifting topography of ice sheets.
“They are beautiful but terrifying,” said Beatrice Galilee, a curator of architecture and design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who follows Mr. Guariglia’s work.
The largest piece in the show, “Jakobshavn I” (2015), is 11 feet by 16 feet and depicts the melting surface of the famous “galloping glacier” in Greenland, so named for the speed of its flow into the ocean. But the image is one ethereal stillness, showing a delicately pockmarked surface of white and gray.
“What’s interesting to me is how civilization can transform things in all different ways,” said Mr. Guariglia, 43, seated in his spacious South Slope, Brooklyn, studio. He seemed very pleased to be discussing his first solo show at a major museum.
Mr. Guariglia has marshaled technology in creative ways. Most significant is the 17½-foot-long printer that dominates the studio. Mr. Guariglia sold his apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in order to facilitate its purchase.
Mr. Guariglia calls it “a beast,” and picked this space precisely because the equipment fit there, though just barely. To hoist it inside, he hired the same riggers who install Richard Serra’s massive steel sculptures.
The printer, which is only one of a handful of this particular model in the United States, applies an acrylic ink to surfaces in a painterly manner, based on the photographic image that Mr. Guariglia has digitally manipulated. “It allows me to take the vocabulary of photography and expand it,” he said.
The works are all backed either by a type of durable plastic called polystyrene or by an aluminum panel. On top of that go multiple layers of gesso that Mr. Guariglia sands by hand. “I create a traditional painter’s ground,” he said.
To heighten the mottled, Pollock-like splotches of “Landscape Study II, Gold” (2015), he added a layer of gold leaf, a technique he learned over a few weeks from a local gilder.
Mr. Guariglia is part of a fairly recent movement that could be called environmental anxiety art, from the photographer Edward Burtynsky’s wrecked industrial landscapes to Korakrit Arunanondchai’s poetic films that associate recycling with the idea of human reincarnation.
“The cognitive dissonance on these issues is so great, artists like Justin can provide something to hold onto,” said Ms. Galilee of the Met, adding that it was an “urgent task” for artists and curators to address climate change and related topics.
Just having these works at a museum in Florida is a pointed move on the part of the Norton. As the photography curator who organized the show, Tim B. Wride, put it: “If you dig down three feet here, you hit water. So for us, sea level rise does mean something.”
Mr. Wride said that the deeply invested Mr. Guariglia was part of an artistic tradition that goes back at least to the early 20th century, with photographers depicting nature with an eye to its fragility.
“It’s not a mistake that Ansel Adams was a conservationist,” Mr. Wride said.
Mr. Guariglia grew up in Maplewood, N.J., and was a freelance photojournalist based in Asia for 20 years, taking pictures for The New York Times, Time, National Geographic and others. His stints living in Beijing, Taipei and other cities during the region’s economic boom attuned him to environmental concerns.
“I was feeling the physical impacts of years of living in China,” Mr. Guariglia said. “The air pollution was awful. My nose would be running black from the coal in the air.”
About eight years ago, Mr. Guariglia decided he wanted to transition to fine art. “I wanted to start engaging on a deeper level,” he said.
He knew that his photographs would be “raw material,” as Mr. Wride called it, rather than the finished product. Mr. Guariglia obtained his source images in different ways, some of them while he was 40,000 feet up on commercial airplanes.
Then, while surfing the internet, Mr. Guariglia learned about a NASA mission called Operation Ice Bridge, an aerial survey of polar ice caps. He made a cold call to NASA and eventually found the right person to talk to about getting on a flight, offering his photojournalist credentials and samples of his work.
“They said, ‘We’d love to have you, we can get you on a flight in a couple years,’” Mr. Guariglia said. But the conversation also revealed that a plane was leaving on a mission to Greenland in two days. “I said, ‘What if I can get there tomorrow?’” Mr. Guariglia said.
Two days later, he was flying just 1,500 feet above glaciers, lying face down at the foot of the pilot, taking pictures through a small square window in the bottom of the plane. He had to maintain that position for the better part of eight hours.
“It’s very taxing,” Mr. Guariglia said. “But it was thrilling. It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.”
To his mind, going to such lengths will be worth it if the Norton show narrows the gap between the public’s perception and reality, even a little bit.
“That gap has brought us to the great ecological crisis we’re in,” Mr. Guariglia said. “I want to bridge that — between what we know and what we don’t know.”
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These artists are trying to make climate change visceral.
Recognizing that people often act by heart rather than logic, these ten artists aim to help viewers understand the data while developing an emotional attachment that convinces them to do something about it - now.
Climate change data has its problems: It is often lofty and complicated, hard to digest, and even harder to conjure into feelings of urgency. But artists are stepping in to marry data with their crafts, bridging the gap between scientific information and human connection. Recognizing that people often act by heart rather than logic, these ten artists aim to help viewers understand the data while developing an emotional attachment that convinces them to do something about it—now.
Zaria Forman
Iceberg Antartica no. 1, 2017. (Courtesy artist, Zaria Forman)
Amid the dire reality of melting ice sheets and subsequent rising sea levels, Zaria Forman opts to spotlight the beauty: “A bombardment of terrifying news is paralyzing, but focusing on the positive is empowering.” Forman’s staggeringly realistic paintings capture the majesty and fragility of the icebergs. Look closer and you’ll see the finely painted ice fjords crackling, crumbling, and melting. Still, Forman’s message always leans toward hope and action. “I try to celebrate what is still here; to give viewers the sense that it is still possible to do something to protect this Earth that sustains us.”
Sean “Hula” Yoro
(Courtesy of Sean Yoro)
Growing up in Hawaii, Sean “Hula” Yoro was raised to respect nature. The surfer and self-taught artist creates murals usually involving portraits on hard-to-reach locales like ship docks and dams to illustrate the changing landscape. In some cases, he paints on natural surfaces like icebergs or forest trees, letting the figures rapidly melt or get washed away by natural forces to create a sense of urgency. “The idea of my art not lasting adds another depth to the message and feels more real,” says Yoro.
Jill Pelto
(Courtesy of Jill Pelto)
(Courtesy of Jill Pelto)
(Courtesy of Jill Pelto)
At 24, painter and environmental science student Jill Pelto is already establishing a new kind of art informed by scientific data and inspired by early 20th-century explorers like Edward Adrian Wilson. Pelto knows that her generation and those that follow are the ones inheriting the issues and that the research isn’t always simple to digest. “I also find that many people just don’t pay attention,” she says. Her illustrations depict the same kind of graphs you might find in a textbook (decline in glacier mass balance; ocean acidification; deforestation) overlaid with watercolor paintings of the affected natural wonders, bringing the research to life.
PangeaSeed
(Courtesy of PangeaSeed)
(Courtesy of PangeaSeed)
(Courtesy of PangeaSeed)
Murals can transform cities and inspire change. Photographer Tre’ Packard, who founded PangeaSeed with his wife to promote environmental activism through art and education, applies the same concept to ocean conservation. The organization’s Sea Walls festivals, hosted in cities around the world, unite artists with scientists to create abstract street art that encourages dialogue. “I’m not delusional,” says Packard. “I know we are not going to change the world, but small efforts add up. We want to lead by example.”
Courtney Mattison
(Courtesy of Courtney Mattison)
One of the challenges in communicating the scope of environmental change is that we mostly can’t see it. With coral reefs, though, the impact is clear: The water gets warmer, the corals bleach, and unless the temperature is stabilized, they deteriorate. “It’s like a city going bankrupt and letting the buildings fall apart,” says former marine biology student and sculptor Courtney Mattison. Her thousand-pound ceramic reef renderings show this process starkly, with white corals mixed into the vibrantly painted and meticulously detailed pieces. She lets her fingerprints show on the stoneware and porcelain corals, speaking to our potential role in recovering the fragile ecosystems by emphasizing the human element of the work. “If people see evidence of my hands in the work, they may relate more closely,” says Mattison. “I don’t want it to be too literal, because the point is to spark curiosity.”
Tamiko Thiel
(Courtesy of Tamiko Thiel)
Tamiko Thiel uses technology to illustrate the impact we have on the planet. Her Gardens of the Anthropocene virtual reality installation first appeared in Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park and depicts a world overtaken by mutated versions of regional drought-resistant plants that feed on everything in sight—phones included. As an engineer, Thiel felt compelled to include factual data, but as an artist she wanted to complete the picture and pick up where the science (which she notes is couched in conditionals) stops. The series, now on view at Stanford University, is meant to entertain while stealthily urging viewers to do their part. “Humans only change when they see no other alternative in order to survive,” says Thiel.
Justin Guariglia
(Courtesy of Justin Guariglia)
Justin Guariglia became one of the first artists in a decade to officially work with NASA when he joined the group on survey flights for operation Oceans Melting Greenland as a photographer in 2015. The aerial images obtained are impressive, but Guariglia takes it a step further by transforming the photos into tactile, topographical prints that pop off the canvas through a printing process he developed. His work will be presented in West Palm Beach, Florida’s Norton Museum of Art in September. This year, Guariglia also launched After Ice, a selfie app with a filter that shows how high sea levels will rise by 2080 in New York. (Spoiler alert: If you’re near the city, you’ll be swimming with the fishies.)
Eve Mosher
(Courtesy of Eve Mosher)
In 2007, artist Eve Mosher took to the streets of Brooklyn with a baseball field chalker to trace a 70-mile line around the city marking the projected reach of a flood that could hit the coast within three to 20 years. Mosher’s HighWaterLine project simplified complex data down to a clear-cut line that hit way too close to the literal home of thousands of New Yorkers. It got attention. Then Hurricane Sandy came along and proved the predictions true. Now, HWL has grown to include workshops, community outreach, and other public art installations in cities from South Florida to England. “Art can create the space needed to go from grief and shock of what is coming to action.”
Hannah Rothstein
(Courtesy of Hannah Rothstein)
“I have been worried about climate change for a long time, and when I saw the systems designed to fight it being dismantled, I felt my time to pull out the art guns had come,” says illustrator Hannah Rothstein. She drew from some of the most iconic images in U.S. history—vintage National Park posters—and reimagined seven of them to resemble their fated decline for 2050, only 33 years away. Although she stays away from politics, Rothstein has been pleasantly surprised to see people sending postcards of the prints to senators. “Instead of deepening our divisions,” she says. “I hope this project will inspire our country’s policymakers to put politics aside and focus on the greater good.”
Lisa Murray
(Courtesy of Lisa Murray)
Photojournalist Lisa Murray has seen firsthand how new weather patterns affect rural communities. She’s seen women in Kenya walk hours to get water for their families following periods of intense drought; healthy villages in South Sudan going hungry after flash floods wipe away the harvest; fishing communities in Indonesia disappearing due to erosion and rising sea levels. “In the West, climate change doesn’t impact on our lives the same way it does in the global South,” she says. “It’s easy for people to ignore it.” Murray launched Faces of Change to document how environmental issues impact the lives of real people without sensationalizing or harping on the negative. “Showing the impact climate change has on everyday people and everyday life enables us to understand the consequences of a warming planet on a human level,” says Murray.
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Bringing scientific data to life through art.
Jill Pelto constructs effective ways to communicate science through art.
Bringing Scientific Data to Life through Art: Jill Pelto constructs effective ways to communicate science through art
Gavenus, Erika, Pelto, Jill | June 29, 2017 | Leave a Comment Download as PDF
Jill Pelto | Climate Change Data. The full piece can be viewed at the end of the article.
Through the Arts Community space and weekly blog posts the MAHB has been highlighting artists who create work taking on the themes of sustainability and equity. We were pointed in the direction of Jill Pelto and her amazing work. A Masters student in the University of Maine’s Earth and Climate Science Department, working with Dr. Brenda Hall on paleoclimate research in the Antarctic, Jill also holds an undergraduate degree in Studio Art. Jill’s creative work incorporates scientific research and data into striking pieces to raise awareness about important environmental topics, particularly Climate Change. I was lucky enough to connect with Jill for a quick interview.
Hi Jill, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. To start off can you share a little about yourself: who you are, your interests, and how you came to be a scientist and artist?
I am 24 years old and graduated from the University of Maine in December 2015 with a double major in Studio Art and Earth Science. I grew up with a family who loved the outdoors, which fostered my love of nature, and with a twin sister with whom I could constantly draw. Aside from making art, my favorite things include cross-country and downhill skiing, reading, running, camping, traveling, and spending time with my friends and family.
I have assisted with research on the mountain glaciers of Washington and British Columbia, in the Dry Valleys and Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, over the rolling hills and carved cirques of the Falkland Islands, and around the aqua lakes and ochre mountains of New Zealand. These wonderful experiences worked with my interdisciplinary track (taking painting and climate change courses simultaneously at UMaine), and made me realize I could use my creative skills to communicate information about extreme environmental issues with a broad audience. I create artwork about the research I have been involved with as well as a myriad of other important topics. I believe that art is a uniquely articulate lens: through it I can address environmental concerns to raise awareness and inspire people to take action.
Jill Pelto conducting glaciological research.
I have had the chance to look through some of the amazing artwork on your site (jillpelto.com), and found your incorporation of data into them so captivating. Was this a technique you have always used, or was it something you have developed more recently?
I developed this more recently, while working on my Undergraduate Honors Thesis Project titled Art as a Tool to Communicate Science. I had been struggling for a long time with how to make art about the important issues I read online, or see while doing fieldwork, but in the summer of 2015 I was so blown away by the effects of global warming in Washington, that I finally hit upon using actual data. August 2015 was my 7th consecutive year working on North Cascade National Park glaciers with my father, Dr. Mauri Pelto, and his North Cascade Glacier Climate Project (NCGCP). That year the drought in Washington absolutely devastated the glaciers, the water supply, and the surrounding ecosystem; I returned home to Maine determined to create a series that could show people just how drastic these changes are. The NCGCP has been working on these glaciers since 1983, and this year when I was looking at the data collected and calculated over 33 years, I realized this sharply declining graph line would translate really well as the profile of a glacier. This idea became Decrease in Glacier Mass Balance, and uses measurements from 1984-2014 of the average mass balance for a group of North Cascade, WA glaciers. Mass balance is the annual budget for the glaciers: snow gain minus snow loss. This idea lead to a data-inspired portfolio.
Jill Pelto | Decline in Glacier Mass Index. This piece uses measurements from 1980-2014 of the average mass balance for a group of North Cascade, WA glaciers. [2] Mass balance is the annual budget for the glaciers: total snow accumulation minus total snow ablation. Not only are mass balances consistently negative, they are also continually decreasing.
I sometimes find that my interactions with the natural world are influenced by my understanding and interests in ecology. I am curious, do you find how you experience nature as a scientist differs from how you experience it as an artist?
I really like this question. The way I experience nature as an artist and as a scientist has become intertwined. For example, when I visit North Cascades Glaciers in Washington, I simultaneously see their major retreat just over the past 8 years and the new forms of beauty these changes bring. A lack of snow on the glaciers in the summer means that a lot of old and stunning features in the ice are exposed, yet I also know that because they are exposed, they will melt away. For me there is no comparison to being immersed in nature, and it fosters a deep relationship that is as important as that with family and friends. So when I see crevasse fields, lake sediment cores, and old moraines, I want to share with others how incredible it is to step outside and observe how the past has shaped the beauty of the present
Jill Pelto working on a sketch in the field.
Are there ways that these lenses complement each other? How does being a scientist influence your art? How does being an artist influence your science?
Art and science both require a lot of creative thinking and are driven by observation: what is happening in the world and how it can be depicted in art, studied through research, and shared and communicated with people. Scientists and artists are both passionate about understanding our world, but go about it in different ways. The scientist makes new discoveries and gains knowledge, and the artist can use their visual and/or audio skillset to share this.
You have expressed that you wish to use your creative skills to communicate information about extreme environmental issues with a broad audience. Can you explain the role you feel art has in communicating science, especially in the realm of environmental issues? Do you find that art reaches a different audience than typical science communication?
I think that art is so powerful because of the importance of the visual, many people respond more to this than to the writing in a scientific paper. My art can show the essential information of an environmental issue, but is also expressive through its beauty and its story. My hope is that this combination of intellectual and emotional content will be meaningful to a lot of people.
Jill Pelto | Habitat Degradation: Deforestation. This piece uses data showing the decline in rainforest area from 1970 to 2010. [3] These lush ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes, and with them, millions of beautiful species. Jill is quite certain that anyone would agree that a tiger is a magnificent creature, yet how many people realize that they are critically endangered? For this series Jill chose to separate the animals from their habitat, because that is ultimately what we are doing. The tiger is trapped outside the forest, cornered. He is defensive and angry that we are sealing his fate.
Are there audiences that are still not reached by either? Are there ways we could broaden the reach?
Definitely. And I guess that is an answer I am pursuing with my career, and don’t yet know. To find out how to broaden the reach I have to keep making art, keep communicating science, and learn, based on reactions, what different people respond to. My goal is to inspire as many people as possible to care about environmental responsibility, so it is a huge win for me if anybody who does not necessarily take any action to protect our world is touched by my art.
One reason why the MAHB has launched this initiative, is because of the potential for art to illicit a more emotional response than something like a table of data. Have you experienced the ability for your art to connect with people in a different way than your science?
I certainly have, people have responded a lot to the way I elicit emotional content from data and graphs. The trend line is starker. A graph with the declining volume of glaciers becomes the profile of a glacier, and suddenly the visual makes the data come to life. That is ice painted under the graph, and people can see it decreasing with the line, people can understand the loss. When I read a scientific paper or article detailing, for example, sea level rise estimates for the next century, I am floored. I want to share this scary but true reality with others, because knowledge is a power in itself. But I find that most people I know don’t take the time to read these articles, so I am trying to inform them in a way that I hope catches their attention more.
Jill Pelto conducting glaciological research.
What is next for you? How can people follow your work?
I am working on my Masters in UMaine’s Earth and Climate Science Department, working with Dr. Brenda Hall on paleoclimate research in the Antarctic. The project focuses on understanding how sensitive the Antarctic Ice Sheet is to factors such as sea level rise, and increasing oceanic and atmospheric temperatures. Additionally I am planning to be a part of several exhibitions this summer, including Art of Climate Science featuring work by UMaine’s Climate Change Institute in Belfast, Maine, and a show in UMaine’s Hudson Museum on campus. In August I will work with the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project for my 9th consecutive year, and in December I will be heading down to the Antarctic for the second field season of my Masters research.
People can follow my work at my website (jillpelto.com), or for more continuous updates through my Instagram (instagram.com/jillpelto).
Jill Pelto | Climate Change Data. This piece uses multiple quantities: the annual decrease in global glacier mass balance, global sea level rise, and global temperature increase. The numbers on the left y-axis depict quantities of glacial melt and sea level rise, and the suns across the horizon contain numbers that represent the global increase in temperature, coinciding with the timeline on the lower x-axis.[1]
It sounds like you have a lot of exciting opportunities coming up to expand on the incredible pieces you are creating and your efforts to reach more people. Best of luck with your exhibitions, and thank you for taking the time to share your work.
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Considering 'Mad Max' and other Hollywood dystopias after Trump's exit from Paris accord.
Film and literature — to say nothing of our private insecurities — resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.
Since the plagues of the Old Testament, we have contemplated the Apocalypse, the world rising in vengeance as men, women and children scurry across the brutal landscape of a lost paradise. Skies rain hail, locusts swarm, rivers turn to blood, darkness falls.
Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast.
Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity’s amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature — to say nothing of our private insecurities — resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.
Images of glacier walls crashing into oceans, arid lands, smudged skies and Hollywood disaster scenarios have reverberated across social media since President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. The president said the pact, signed by 195 nations to reduce carbon emissions, would undercut business, hurt American workers and “weaken our sovereignty.”
“The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States’ economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense,” said Trump. “They don’t put America first. I do. And I always will.”
Perhaps more than any other moment in his presidency, Trump’s action highlighted a Darwinian world view in which the planet is less a community than an unforgiving marketplace for countries to compete and barter. Terrorism, Russia’s cyber meddling in the U.S. election and the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un taunts like a despot in an end-of-days movie, have unsettled Americans. But exiting the climate pact has raised larger existential questions at a time of rising seas, droughts and melting ice caps.
Hollywood for decades has spun science fiction and horror out of environmental calamity. In 1973, the thriller “Soylent Green” ventured to the year 2022, when the Earth was endangered by pollution and the greenhouse effect. Natural disaster movies related to climate change and pollution became a staple, including “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004), about storms raging across the globe in a new ice age, and the Mad Max series going through “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), where roving clans fight over gasoline and water on a crazed and poisoned Earth.
These stories foreshadowed and articulated the anxieties of a new century marked by wars and multiplying images of environmental degradation. The planet seemed to be shrinking, and every click of the screen — every YouTube rant, beheading, cyclone and story uttered — made us intimate with the ills that for so long seemed foreign and safely beyond our borders.
The world in these films is dark and unredemptive, a landscape of memory and rage where pictures of beaches and fields of green are eerie artifacts of humanity’s hubris and capacity to imperil what gives it life. Man becomes cast against himself in a cruel struggle for survival, such as the father and son who roam, scavenge and hide beneath slate skies in “The Road” (2009). The mood and tone are similar in “Children of Men” (2006), set in a desolate and violent London after pollution and other evils, which prove just as devastating as an asteroid strike, have rendered humanity infertile.
As the science of global warming has matured, and documentaries like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) have explored its devastating consequences, the planet’s frailty has come into sharper focus, even as many Republicans, including Trump, question the causes that could spell our undoing. That dilemma and Trump’s decision on the Paris treaty will figure in Gore’s upcoming follow-up: “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”
The preoccupation over the planet’s future and its increasing interconnectedness have, according to novelist Junot Diaz, made dystopian themes “the default narrative of the generation.”
“The steady drum beat of reports from our best and brightest scientists has made it explicitly clear that, whether we like or whether we want to admit it or not, we have damaged our planet in ways that have transformed us into a dystopian topos,” he said in a podcast with the Boston Review. “We are making the genre in which we are living, and we are making it at such an extraordinary rate.”
Trump’s election and the bitter political and societal chasms it revealed has brought back into vogue a number of dystopian novels, including George Orwell’s “1984,” Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the story of infertility and turning women into slaves, which has been adapted for a heralded Hulu series. As in “The Road,” the exact cause of cataclysm in “The Handmaid’s Tale” is nebulous, a frightening, creeping concoction that plays with our imagination.
There is little doubt about the cause of ruin in “Chasing Coral,” a Netflix documentary on climate change and the death of coral reefs. The film, which opens in July, focuses on how warming waters around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia are bleaching the reef’s colors — imagine a rainbow turning to ash — and ability to sustain life.
“Our oceans are dramatically changing and we are losing coral reefs on a global scale,” director Jeff Orlowski said. “We spent three years with divers, underwater photographers and experts to reveal the majesty of our oceans and the rapidly changing reality of our world. What we witnessed while making this film reshaped my understanding of the world.”
The film is likely to intensify the debate around global warming and how filmmaking and other arts challenge and speak to conflicting agendas. A timely, if seemingly satirical, blurring of the lines between our fictions, politics and realities comes to mind in “Dystopian Visions,” a new class former presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul will teach at George Washington University.
Such visions haunt and often remind us of nature’s splendor and fragility, and what happens when species go extinct and winds howl arid and foul. They also leave us (and Hollywood) with questions: How does one generation explain to the next that their birthright is jeopardy? That chaos sprung from folly or chance is irreparable, and that destiny is bound in dereliction?
In her 1826 post-apocalyptic novel about a plague, “The Last Man,” Mary Shelley, who also gave us “Frankenstein,” pondered: “What is there in our nature that is forever urging us on towards pain and misery?”
Kevin Costner’s interminable “Waterworld” (1995) imagined a planet where the polar ice caps melted and everyone lived on ships and floating outposts, hoarding jars of dirt like relics while searching for mythical dry land. In “Blade Runner” (1982), a revolutionary work by director Ridley Scott, Los Angeles of 2019 is a garish and desolate landscape where cops battle synthetic humans known as “replicants.” Earth has become shades of grays and neon, tree-less and shadowed by Orwellian industrial towers. Not surprisingly, a sequel, “Blade Runner 2049,” will open this year.
But man is a creature of hope, cunning and delusion. Waste a planet, find an escape; or in biblical terms, endure banishment from the Garden of Eden. That is the theme of “Interstellar” (2014), when a team of astronauts seeks a wormhole in space to deliver humanity from the shriveled crops, blowing dust and the environmental catastrophe Earth has become. It seems our ingenuity to find someplace new is stronger and more fierce than it is in fixing the place we are.
“We didn’t run out of planes and television sets,” says one character, “we ran out of food.”
That is too pessimistic an epitaph for many Hollywood films, where even in demise there’s a promise of resurrection. A scientist played by Michael Caine, whose soothing voice can make a lie sound like the truth, adds: “We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.”
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A Maine artist learns, through trial and error, to use art to communicate about climate change.
For Laurie Sproul the transition from artist to activist wasn't easy, but it was necessary.
LIFE & CULTURE Posted Yesterday at 6:56 PM Updated June 18 INCREASE FONT SIZE
A Maine artist learns, through trial and error, to use art to communicate about climate change
For Laurie Sproul the transition from artist to activist wasn't easy, but it was necessary.
BY KATE MCCORMICKMORNING SENTINEL
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Laurie Sproul poses for a portrait with her sunflower wood sculpture in her studio at her home in Canton on Friday. Sproul is one of two Maine artists working to create a visual language for the Citizens' Climate Lobby. Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans
CANTON — For most of Laurie Sproul’s career as an artist, she created art for art’s sake. Over the last 20 years, Sproul has been carving finely detailed flowers from large blocks of wood, often driving to Portland to buy beautifully grained woods shipped north from Virginia.
But five years ago, Sproul decided to try something a little different. Deeply concerned about what she was learning about the impending effects of climate change, Sproul was desperate to address the issue in whatever way she could. Naturally, she began with her art.
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“I started getting more involved in speaking out and playing a role in society so it started reflecting through my art,” Sproul said in an interview Sunday. “Realizing it wasn’t just a sunflower, it was nature is awesome, now it’s in trouble, now we have to do something about it. So it became more the art was a means to an end rather than an end itself.”
By her own admission, Sproul’s first attempts to incorporate messaging into her art were not terribly subtle. One of her first pieces, titled ‘Your Move,’ depicted a bleeding heart wrapped with a black chain representing carbon. Over time, however, and through her involvement with a climate advocacy group called the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Sproul’s approach to using art as a means of communication has become more nuanced and, Sproul believes, more effective.
While much of her art still focuses on the beauty and richness of nature, and what we stand to lose if we fail to protect the environment, Sproul has also begun using new types of imagery to describe some of the realities of climate change. In recent shows she has put on with Winslow artist Jean Ann Pollard, who also uses her artwork for climate activism, Sproul included two series of shrinking wooden discs with contrasting messages about climate, One series, called ‘The North Pole,” depicts the melting of the Arctic ice cap. The other, titled ‘Lifeline,” is made up of discs marked with the names of Maine organizations that have committed to reducing their carbon footprints.
“The point was to help people see there is a lifeline out there,” Sproul said. “There is a community effort and it’s not totally hopeless.”
Even Sproul’s wild flowers have changed in their purpose and presentation. One of her more recent sunflower carvings, titled ‘From the Woodshed,’ speaks to Sproul’s attempts to reduce her impact on the planet. Instead of traveling to purchase wood for her sculptures, Sproul has turned to trees in her own backyard, cutting down on her carbon emissions and removing herself from the Virginia to Maine supply pipeline.
As she has undergone this transition from artist to communicator, Sproul has realized that if she can create something attractive that draws in an observer enough to start asking questions, she can help spark broader conversations. Once someone has engaged her about one of her pieces, Sproul is ready to offer them literature from the Citizens’ Climate Lobby that describes the carbon fee and dividend model the group believes to be the most effective and market-driven approach to reducing U.S. carbon emissions.
Sproul said she has also learned that people come to the issue of climate change with different concerns. Where some may focus on the harm being done to the planet, others may worry more about how climate policy will impact their ability to support their families. Effective art and communication, therefore, must speak to a wide array of people about the things they value most.
In her trip last week to Washington, D.C., for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s annual climate conference, Sproul reached out to members of the group’s conservative caucus to work on imagery that might speak more effectively to conservative concerns about climate change. The first image members of the caucus sent Sproul surprised her. It was a picture of a bald eagle.
As a Mainer, Sproul has had the pleasure of watching eagles in the wild and it was those experiences that came to mind when she saw the image. She realized, however, that even if someone else looking at the picture primarily saw one of the most iconic symbols of American strength, they could share in their appreciation of the majesty of the bald eagle. She hopes that type of common ground can lead to common purpose in the urgent push to preserve the best of this country, and planet, for the future.
Kate McCormick — 861-9218
[email protected]
Twitter: @KateRMcCormick
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