Tag Archives: Climate Change

Tree Veneration in the Time of the Anthropocene: Why Trees Matter and Why a Cultural Response Matters Too

This article introduces the Tree Veneration Society (TVS), an interdisciplinary charity of eco-artists and scientists dedicated to fostering cultural and ecological awareness of trees. While scientific research clearly demonstrates the essential role of forests in climate regulation and biodiversity, the article argues that meaningful environmental action also requires shifts in perception, values, and cultural narratives. Drawing on Deep Ecology and eco-art practice, the article presents tree veneration as a relational framework that reconnects humans with the living world. TVS’s exhibitions, workshops, and public programs are discussed as practical models for cultivating ecological care and responsibility.

Foraging as a way of life

Maria Medina-Schechter (born Pasadena, California, 1976), is a bio artist whose work is informed by the natural world, including Middle Age illuminated manuscripts, scribes, and recipes. She is inspired by Hildegard of Bingen, a German mystic of the High Middle Ages. Maria works primarily with bio materials, mycelium, tree resin, and foraged botanical materials. Her early work involved the use of living organisms, such as bacteria and fungi, as art materials, creating sculptures and installations that were alive and growing. In the 1990s, she began to integrate digital technologies into her work, exploring the relationship between virtual and organic.

Our Once and Future Wetlands: Art, Ecology and Engineering

Lindsay Olson’s artistic practice grows out of an intense curiosity about the ways our society is supported by science and technology. She has worked as Fermi National Accelerator’s first artist in residence, with the CMS experiment at CERN in Switzerland, with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the Field Museum, the Chicago Botanic Garden and with the Center for Acoustics Research and Education at the University of New Hampshire.

In 2022/24, she worked as the first artist in residence with The Wetlands Initiative, a scrappy wetland restoration group working in the Midwest,USA.

I’m an artist using scientific data as an artistic medium − here’s how I make meaning

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores the entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative terrains. Her current project, “shroud for an ancient sea”, draws on a diverse terrain of subsurface meteor craters, fossilized reefs, and exhumed mountain ranges. These ‘archived’ landscapes are often observable only through fossil records, artifacts, or recorded data. Still, they are inextricably layered within contemporary landscapes, creating entangled strata of geologic and human histories. The site-responsive works in “shroud for an ancient sea” vary from expansive textiles to experimental vocal performances, becoming surface layers that point to complex records of deep time within the geo-anthropic landscape.
She is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Practice in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Binghamton in New York. Nance has previously held professorships in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely, including venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S.

The Sacred Balance: blending Western science with Indigenous knowledges, David Suzuki’s influential book has been updated for this moment

Jana Norman is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. Jana also teaches in the English, Creative Writing and Film Department at the University of Adelaide. Jana’s research interests in environmental humanities and legal theory focus on critical and creative approaches to collaborating across difference towards reparative shared futures. Her book, ‘Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene’ (Routledge 2021) received the Socio-Legal Studies Theory and History Book Prize in 2022 and the Chris Beasley Prize for Gender and Sexuality Theory from the Fay Gale Center for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide in 2021.

Paul Walde: Requiem for a Glacier

Paul Walde is an artist, composer, and curator. Walde’s body of work suggests unexpected interconnections between landscape, identity, and technology. In 2013, he completed ‘Requiem for a Glacier’, a site-specific sound performance featuring a fifty-five-piece choir and orchestra live on the Farnham Glacier in the Purcell Mountains. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses this work as well as his other projects.

ART FOR YOUR WORLD

Art For Your World is a new campaign for WWF, led by curatorial practice Artwise, to mobilise and unite the art world in the fight against the climate crisis. From practising artists to commercial galleries, cultural centres to museums and beyond, this is a wide call to action for the cultural sector to come together with a united voice to say that climate change matters and we must act now. As part of the Art For Your World campaign, WWF commissioned three limited edition prints from acclaimed artists Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Heather Phillipson and Bob and Roberta Smith.

Jason deCaires Taylor’s Underwater BioCulture Sculpture at the Museo Atlantico, Lanzarote Island

A leading figure in art and ecology, John K. Grande is author of a range of books that include ‘Balance: Art and Nature’ and ‘Art Space Ecology’. In this article he discusses the work of sculptor and environmentalist, Jason deCaires Taylor, in particular his major project Museo Atlantico, a collection over 300 submerged sculptures and architectural forms in Lanzarote, Spain, the first of its kind in European waters. His pioneering public art projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation, but works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness, instigate social change and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world.

Arctic Ocean: why winter sea ice has stalled, and what it means for the rest of the world

Jonathan Bamber is Professor of Physical Geography, University of Bristol. His main areas of interest are in applications of satellite remote sensing data in the polar regions. More specifically, he has been working on the use of remote sensing data to study the behaviour of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, glaciers and ice caps in the Arctic, Patagonia and to use these observations to test and/or improve climate and Earth System models. He is also using satellite and ground based data to investigate past and present variations in sea level.

The changing acoustic environment of the Arctic

Dr. Kate Stafford is a Principal Oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab and affiliate Associate Professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has worked in marine habitats all over the world, from the tropics to the poles, and is fortunate enough to have seen (and recorded) blue whales in every ocean in which they occur. Stafford’s current research focuses on the changing acoustic environment of the Arctic and how changes from declining sea ice to increasing industrial human use may be influencing subarctic and Arctic marine mammals.