What Art Can Do for the Environment

We belong to a generation of children who were taught first hand to do our part to singularly alter the inevitable path of climate change. Our elders, teachers, and leaders constantly told us to turn off the tap while brushing our teeth, switch off the lights in empty rooms, unplug unused technology, and recycle any and all plastics. Most of us participated in these activities, inspired with a sense of do-goodness and hope for our future. Recently, however, it has become clear that we as a generation do not understand our future or what it will look like. It is simply too difficult to envision America without its current coast lines, supermarkets void of bee-pollinated produce, or the world’s borders bending beneath the burden of the U.N projected 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

As adults of that generation we have begun to witness, slowly but surely, the tangible effects of climate change. The consequences of climate change do not always flood our first worlds, but they have creeped up to the edges of our lives in headlines, viral videos, and amber alert-like storm warnings. Rob Nixon, author of “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”, describes these evolving issues as a form of slow violence. He defines slow violence as something that “is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”. It isn’t immediate and spectacular, but rather a subtle echo ringing out somewhere in the background.

 The casualties of slow violence, and the disasters that cause them, occur over great spans of time and space. Slow tragedies such as the dumping of toxic waste, movement of air pollution, rising sea levels, and increasing greenhouse gasses. Our collective actions have begun to cause natural disasters, drought, and food shortages that cause present, future, and unborn generations to suffer in ways that are unseen. They manifest in famines, long-term illness, displacement, and slow death over the course of generations. In order to create art that can do the political work of representing this slow violence, Nixon believes that what he calls “writer-activists” can transform these slow moving disasters into imagined narratives and realized images. For these narratives and images to feel real to readers and consumers of this art, those disasters must have main characters, they must feel tangible, and they must feel imminent.

In order for writer-activists and artists alike to achieve this tangible and imminent narrative, they must make these narratives perceptible to the senses of readers. As American author and environmentalist Aldo Leopold once said, we can be ethical only towards what we can see. The slow violence that is temporally and physically evolving outside of our field of vision is not something we can currently be ethical towards. It is the same reason why reading the names and one sentence stories of 1,000 individuals who died from Covid-19 on the front page of the New York Times is more emotionally effective than reading a numeric statistic. Writers allow us to envision what we cannot see, they allow us to become ethical towards things we weren’t aware we had an obligation to.

Student artist Jenny Norcross combines her studies in environmental science with her ceramics work to create this artist-activist effect. Her work is both functional and informative and aims to provoke those who might otherwise go unprovoked. “I decided to start making more environmentally centered ceramic work because of the current and worsening atmosphere surrounding environmental issues.” Norcross explained.  “I love making functional pieces, but I’m also an Environmental Studies major and I love to incorporate both of my passions into one product.” By combining political work with her love and talent for art, Norcross embodies the type of artist-activist Nixon calls for. 

This is all to say that art in the form of literature can, does, and will continue to perform environmental work. Literature and art are sources of imaginative information and mechanisms for feeling emotions surrounding the violence and destruction that is yet to come. These writer-activists participate in the environmentalist movement out of passion, anger, and the drive to instill a sense of urgency and fear in their readers. Like brights cutting through fog, they extend our vision into the future. Art makes the inevitable consequences of slow violence known with the hope that they might be acted upon with the same sense of urgency that would be expected from an ordinary act of visual violence. Visual art and writer-activist literature ultimately aim to bring the outsourced, unequal, and purposefully inflicted slow violence of climate change to the forefront of the environmentalist movement.  

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The Aesthetics of Climate Change

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