What Art Can Do for the Environment
We are the generation raised to believe we could individually alter the course 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 by a sense of do-goodness and hope for our future. Yet, as we transition into adulthood, it becomes painfully clear how uncertain that future remains. It is simply too difficult to envision America without its current coastlines, supermarkets void of bee-pollinated produce, or the world’s borders bending beneath the burden of the UN's projected 200 million climate refugees by 2050.
As adults of that generation, we are now witnessing, slowly but surely, the tangible effects of climate change. These consequences rarely engulf our lives entirely but instead creep into the edges through 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 periods 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 led to disasters, droughts, and food shortages that harm present and future generations in unseen ways. They manifest in famines, long-term illness, displacement, and slow death throughout generations. To create art that could do the political work of representing this slow violence, Nixon believed that what he calls “writer-activists” could 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.
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 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 headlights 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 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.
