This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

“What is your presentation about?” Clara asks. Like most undergraduate science majors in this lecture hall, Clara has never seen a one-person performance art piece. Without stage lights or a sound system, I set up in the multi-purpose room. A console the size of a small car serves as lectern. Two hundred students sit in tiered seating above me. I tell myself, “It is just like an Amphitheater in Ancient Greece.”

I tell her, “Everything is Connected is a one-person play. Don’t take notes; just enjoy.” She must be thinking, “I could be doing real work right now.” A professor introduces me, “Peterson is a quirky queer Quaker, a playwright, actor, performance artist, Bible scholar, LGBTQ rights activist, and host of Citizens’ Climate Radio.” A handful of students applaud. I begin.

“What you are about to see is a performance lecture in three acts. These acts may seem unconnected. l will talk as myself and also perform in character.” I don’t tell them this type of presentation rose out of the tensions I feel being an artist, an activist, and an academic. These roles pull at each other, competing to take a prominent place. My shows attempt to give them each equal pull, like the cords that enable a tent to hold its shape.

I seek to use my skills as a playwright and actor to take on LGBTQ issues, justice, privilege, and climate change while revealing the interconnectedness of these issues. I also throw in a Bible story. Within these different frames, I repeat core concepts knowing audience members will begin to see patterns emerge. In first performing my own very personal story, then an ancient Bible story, and finally the unfolding global story of climate change, I lead them to a synthesis of abstract ideas as outlined in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning.

Act One
The first act of Everything is Connected includes me talking about my weird coming out experience coupled with a scene from my one-person play Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House. The play comically exposes the dangerous world of gay conversion therapy—programs promising to “cure” LGBTQ people. As someone who survived seventeen years of this before coming out as gay, I want to highlight both the foolishness and the destructiveness of these “straight camps.”

The main character, Chad, a campy gay man who cannot tamp down his fem side, addresses the audience as if they just arrived for a tour of the house. This relationship heightens the audience’s experience; Chad addresses them as if they are totally on-board with the misguided facility.

Act Two
Something similar happens in Act Two where I talk about discrimination within the LGBTQ community—racism, sexism, and transphobia. I perform a scene from Transfigurations—Transgressing Gender in the Bible about Joseph and his famous dream coat; I suggest it might actually be a princess dress. I narrate the scene as Joseph’s butch, gender-normative Uncle Esau. Scornful of Joseph, he never once makes eye contact with the audience until the final line. There is a pause and deep breath as Esau lifts his head and in a husky whisper admits, “He saved us all.”

I imagine Clara is thinking, “What on earth does any of this have to do with climate change?” I am performing stories about outsiders rejected—a white gay man who loses male privilege in an Evangelical church and brothers who assault and exile their gender non-conforming sibling. I reference the HIV/AIDS crisis, Ancient Egypt, and my own working class Italian-American family. I’m throwing out threads and asking, “Aren’t we all in the same boat together?” I’m setting Clara up for Tony Buffusio in Act Three who weaves it all together.

Act Three
Tony, a working-class, bisexual, Italian-American from New York City, pokes fun at polar bears, explaining coffee is also an endangered species. He jokes how he came out bisexual and vegan at the same time; his family struggles more with his diet than his sexual orientation.

Talking about queer responses to climate change, Tony revisits the Joseph story as a climate narrative, reveals how early responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis serve as a model for climate advocates today, and stresses climate change is about justice and human rights, “We’re all in the same boat together—just not on the same deck.”

Then in an explosion of emotion ranging from rage to frustration to fear, Tony demonstrates what many people feel today. He next admits he’s been hearing voices from people in the future. “You don’t expect they have anything nice to say to us. But I’m confused by what they’re saying. They’re telling us,” and he looks out an audience member, “Thank you!’” He looks at another, “Thank you,” and another, “Thank you for everything you did for us!” He scrunches up his face puzzled, and ends the show, “So I’m thinking, what the hell are we about to do that they’re going to thank us for it?”

In a proper theatre, there would be a black out. Exit Tony. In this multipurpose room, I slip behind the lectern and say, “We have time for questions.” Deep, thoughtful questions emerge. They are hungry for solutions, to discover their role.

For fifteen years, I have been doing theatre for clients in venues that usually never hosted a queer theatrical production. These include the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Hartford City Social Workers, Offices of Sustainability at Penn State, University of South Carolina, and Villanova, Haverford College’s Office of Religious Life, Boston Public Schools, Britains’ National Health Service, the Church of Sweden, the Norwegian Christian Student Movement, the Lambeth Conference, Vanderbilt School of Religion, Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia Theological Seminary, and a Mennonite Church in Pittsburgh.

The solo stage work of Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, and Lily Tomlin taught me marginalized people can use comic storytelling and character acting to communicate personal and political messages. These comic actors shape-shifted and embodied multiple personalities as they developed immediate and intimate relationships with their audiences. Unlike a traditional play with multiple actors interacting while the audience observes, the one-person comedy turns the audience into a character. We speak directly to them, casting them in roles.

Since I take on hot-topic issues in front of diverse audiences, I always expect someone to leave offended in a huff or to start an argument during the Q&A. Climate Change presentations can overwhelm audiences or they can become defensive. Instead after my shows people stick around. I hear laughing and chatting. I see people connecting with each other. Some approach me just to thank me. Others want to tell me their stories. There is a lightness in the audience as they disperse.

As I pack up, Clara smiles. “I get it now, and you gave me so much to think about!”

(Top image: Courtesy Peterson Toscano.)

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Using theatre, comedy, and character-driven one-person shows, Peterson Toscano explores LGBTQ issues, privilege, religion, and climate change. Peterson’s unique personal journey led him to performance art. After spending seventeen years and over $30,000 on three continents attempting to de-gay himself through gay conversion therapy, he came out as a quirky queer Quaker concerned with human rights and comedy. In 2017 Peterson produced Transfigurations—Transgressing Gender in the Bible, a film about gender non-conforming characters. Toscano studied theatre at City College of NY and has authored eleven performance pieces. He is also the host of Citizens’ Climate Radio.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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I’m interested in water and the different pathways it takes. Not only the recognizable flow of rivers and glaciers, or global currents of air and sea water, but the obscure shifts of water from one state to another or across cell membranes. I’ve been tracing water pathways and their stories while developing ways to create environments as art installations.

I was given the opportunity to mount my first installation, Catch of the Day, at the Contemporary Art Museum in Mazatlán, Mexico. The exhibition consists of a 45 x 7 meters suspended fishing net. Woven into the net is a school of plastic fish and plastic water bottles with notes inside of them. A series of 11 monoprints hangs on the wall and at the entrance there are 10 wooden boxes containing children’s toys accompanied by lost and missing posters. Catch of the Day opened March 15 and runs until May 11, 2018.

Catch of the day is derivative of the work I started at an artist residency in Rota, on the southern coast of Spain. My objective during this residency was to investigate how the tide could leave marks on paper. This was to be an extension of work I started in Ireland but I soon realized my plan was physically impossible. What I did instead was start a deep listening practice. For 2 months, just before sunrise, I walked the beach for several hours documenting the tideline marks and collecting plastic and other shoreline flotsam.

Photo credit: Joyce Majiski.

In effect, each tideline is a drawing, telling the story of that day’s tides through the marks on the sand and what has washed up on shore. I discovered that the variety and abundance of plastic landing on the world’s shorelines is astounding. Each day’s harvest was strangely and inexplicably unique, revealing plastic toy shovels one day, bottle caps, colorful plastic straws, and cutlery the next. For an entire week I witnessed lines of persistent oily brown foam, which was suddenly replaced by huge amounts of white Styrofoam that disintegrated and flew along the length of the beach. Some items became buried in the sand or pushed further away from the water line with successively higher tides, but most of the garbage was carried away by the wind or returned to the water, in an endless cycle. When clothing and shoes tangled in bits of fishing nets appeared I was alarmed enough to speak to the authorities about the possibility of refugees capsizing in boats offshore. But I was assured that the currents and the refugees’ countries of origin made it almost impossible for this to be the case.

Day after day I returned to the tideline while researching current marine ecology issues. This led me from plastics and global dumping of refuse to over-fishing, habitat destruction, changes in salinity, and dead zones. I discovered that despite the many innovative solutions that are being developed to mitigate our destruction, the problems we have created are massive and seem beyond our capacity to repair.

In Mexico, I began to look at the situation from another point of view. What if a collective of creatures such as whales, seahorses, and coelacanths decided they were fed up with humanity using their homes as dumping grounds or with their fellow tuna being overfished – creatures fed up with the toxic waste, the thoughtless plundering of resources, the accumulation of garbage, and total disregard for sea life on this planet of water? This Ocean Administration would be comprised of the Departments of Plastics, Human Relations, Toxic Waste, Lost Objects, General Neglect (to name a few), and would address the issues, sending messages back to us in our own discarded plastic bottles. This became the first component of the exhibition Catch of the Day and I included eight letters from various departments of Ocean Management. Each letter is signed by one of the ancient sea goddesses, stamped with the Ocean Management crest and suspended throughout the fishing net for people to discover.

Photo credit: Miguel Angel Roman.

Also interwoven in the net are schools of plastic fish that I created using a technique developed by Canadian artist Laurel Paluck, which involves ironing plastic bags together to create “ocean leather” fish, beautiful and tough.

We often overlook that plastic degrades in the ocean, becoming a particle soup almost impossible to clean up. Microscopic filaments are ingested by microscopic creatures, which are in turn eaten by larger invertebrates and so on. The chemicals (and the plastic) bio-accumulates and since we eat the largest fish in the food chain, we ingest more plastic/chemicals than we know.

I wanted to reinforce this idea so I included a tray of gelatinous fish-shaped h’or doers at the opening reception that had people wondering “What exactly did I just eat?”

Another component of the exhibition is a series of 10 “precious” boxes containing intact children’s toys that I found washed up on the beach in Spain. (See photo at the top.) Lost and missing posters that depict these toys as precious objects accompany the boxes, alluding to the fact that if we took better care of our things, perhaps we wouldn’t lose or discard them. Our thoughtlessness leads to more consumerism.

Photo credit: Miguel Angel Roman.

The final element of the show is a line of 11 monoprints mounted side by side on the wall behind the fishing net. These multi-layered pieces start in the light blues of the shoreline, and gradually get darker as we move towards the ocean depths. The last two monoprints feature images of plankton and the shadow of a coelacanth rendered with glow in the dark ink. The monoprints represent the intricacy and beauty of nature, reinforcing the interconnectedness of all life. Ironically the viewer cannot get very close to this work because the net is blocking their way.

I was heartened by the many conversations I had during the installation and exhibition opening, often referring to a collective consciousness about how we exist in this world and what we leave behind for future generations. My aim is always to walk people through an environment with the hope of raising awareness and posing questions from different perspectives. I believe that humanity has the capacity to make change as long as there is a clear direction and the public and political will to support it.

I am grateful to all of the individuals who helped me during my research and hanging of the exhibition. Special thanks to Cecilia Sánchez Duarte, Director of the Museo de Arte de Mazatlán, for her vision, and to the Canada Council for the Arts for travel support.

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Joyce Majiski’s work examines connection to place within a context of global environmental concerns. Past careers as a biologist and wilderness guide and several artistic residencies have taken her to remote wild places contributing to her artistic practice. Moving between wilderness and urban landscapes, she seeks out connections between these environments and how humans live and find connection within them. Joyce’s North of Myth exhibition travelled to Finland, Sweden, and Northern Ireland. Her current investigations about water have been exhibited in Spain and Mazatlán, Mexico. She lives in the Yukon

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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When I was small, like most kids I loved to draw and was obsessed with animals. But as I grew up, my fascination never went away. I instinctively knew that art had to be an integral part of my life. I applied to schools and was lucky enough to be accepted into a prestigious college where I spent my first year immersed in foundation studies — drawing, painting, and sculpture. At the beginning of my second year, the time came to choose a major. Without giving it too much thought, I and the majority of my class chose illustration.

And so I began my artistic education in earnest. I learned to accurately represent people, places, and things on paper. I learned to boil down the concept of a magazine article or book and draw it in one frame. I learned pen and ink, watercolors, acrylic, and oil painting. I learned how to work with clients who needed to sell a product or an idea quickly and effectively. My work was not deemed successful unless the message and intent were easily gleaned in three seconds or less. Although I am grateful for the education I received, the career path this training led me to ultimately left me deeply unfulfilled.

Not wanting to live an unsatisfying life, I tried to figure out the reason for my discontent. It seems obvious now, but it took me about eight years to find that what I was missing was the ability to be regenerative to self and society. The concept of creating easily-digested images felt like I was fueling the capitalist machine and reinforcing our ever-shortening attention span. The more I researched, the more I realized I was not alone. Even the college that I went to, Rhode Island School of Design, now offers an MA in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies. The burgeoning fields of social practice and interdisciplinary art indicate to me that there is a whole generation of dissatisfied artists looking for ways to use their skills to find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

I chose to radically change the course of my artistic practice when I enrolled in an Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Hartford. I sometimes find it hard to believe that both this program and my course in illustration fall into the same category of “art.” The artists that I have been introduced to in the last year, such as Mark Dion, Hope Ginsburg, Ernesto Pujol, and Linda Weintraub, have reminded me how art can be a powerful tool for social change, not just another trade to further the destructive goals of capitalism.

Through these and other artists, I have discovered the importance of making open-ended and sometimes ambiguous art. They have demonstrated why making work that requires contemplation and interpretation is so important in today’s fast-paced world. Slowly, I am learning to let go of the control over my own work that I cultivated for years as an illustrator.

Why is it so important to release control over your message? I have asked myself this many times over the past year. As a trained illustrator, it seems so fundamental that the point of art is to communicate. I still believe this to be true, but my understanding of the word “communicate” has evolved. An illustration conveys the client or illustrator’s point of view. It supports a campaign, article, or written piece. If it is successful, an illustration evokes the same response in most, if not all, viewers. The viewer understands that this is what they are meant to think or feel, and they move on. This happens to each one of us hundreds of times a day as we are bombarded with all forms of media. I believe it creates a numbing effect that cancels out the very intention of the work. Instead of feeling a certain way about an idea, we get so overwhelmed that we feel nothing at all. Apathy becomes a coping mechanism for most people just to survive the day.

When we create work that requires interpretation, we ask the viewer to stop, think, and most importantly, engage. Although we may not reach everyone, those who accept the challenge and create their own narrative begin to feel agency over the work. It becomes a collaboration through the mere act of a viewer’s engagement and interpretation. This connection is important because those who feel agency can begin to feel empowered to engender change on their own. It opens up dialogues that would not have occurred if everyone agreed on the subject and intention of a given work of art.

With many of my most recent paintings, I begin as an illustrator would with a specific story or idea in my mind. My painting E Pluribus Unum (2017) was conceived of when I read an article about the Trump administration’s decision to reverse the ban on lead bullets for hunting on federal grounds. This decision has led to thousands of raptors, including bald eagles, to die of lead poisoning in the wild. When I show the painting, I have rich and deep discussions with viewers because they see different things depending on their own experiences. Some latch onto the imagery, some to the text, others just to the colors and textures. Through this one piece, I have been able to discuss environmentalism, public policy, Greek mythology, race relations in America, the gun debate, and so much more. Although much of what has been brought up was not my original intention, I still feel a sense of satisfaction and success that I have never felt with an illustration, precisely because of these conversations.

Art in its myriad forms has many levels of power. It is often used as a tool for propaganda, but I believe its most potent use is to connect people through dialogue. I still use the skills I learned as an illustrator to point the conversation in a particular direction, but I no longer see any value in choreographing the conclusion to that conversation as well.

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Sophy Tuttle is an artist from Boston, Massachusetts whose work reflects her interest in politics and the environment. She received her BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design and is currently working on an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Hartford Art School. Her work has been shown extensively in New England, as well as nationally and internationally. Influenced by artists such as Walton Ford, Mark Dion, Alexis Rockman, and J. J. Audubon, her work calls attention to the environmental consequences of humankind’s collective values and decision-making in the Anthropocene era. 

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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We humans have been harvesting the wind for at least 5,000 years. A clay vase dating to 3500 BCE from Egypt’s pre-dynastic Naqada II period depicts what is considered to be the world’s first clear image of a boat under sail. The square sail illustrated on this vase, presumably made of linen, was used to propel early Egyptian rudderless boats upstream on the Nile River, catching the northerly winds against the flow of the river.

Photo of the pre-dynastic Naqada II vase. Reprinted with permission from the British Museum online.

It would take another three millennia before humans transformed the wind’s kinetic energy into mechanical energy to operate machines to pump water, grind grain or mill wood. Early records suggest that by 200 B.C., simple windmills in China were pumping water. In 9th century Persia, vertical axis windmills with woven reed sails were grinding grain. In 14th century Europe, horizontal axis turbines were reclaiming land from low-lying marshland. By the 17th century, the Netherlands was home to approximately 9,000 windmills. Rembrandt’s The Mill, part of the National Gallery of Art’s Widener Collection in Washington, is widely considered to be one of his most famous paintings.

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606 – 1669), The Mill, 1645/1648, oil on canvas, Widener Collection 1942.9.62, National Gallery of Art.

But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that sapiens finally figured out how to convert the mechanical energy generated by a windmill into electricity. In 1887, the Scottish electrical engineer James Blyth built the first battery-charging wind machine that powered his cottage for 25 years. Later that same year, the American inventor Charles Brush built what is considered to be the first automatically operated wind turbine. It took another 100 years before multi-megawatt wind farms became commercially viable, prompted in part by the oil crises of the late 20th century.

But who, you might be asking, was the first artist to incorporate wind energy into a work of art? We may never know. Perhaps it was an ancient musician, who created – accidentally or intentionally – wind chimes of shells, bone, or bamboo. Wind chimes, a type of percussion instrument, are an example of chance-based music due to the randomness of the wind, which acts simultaneously as composer and player.

Or perhaps it was an Egyptian or Persian architect. Windcatchers (malqaf in Arabic; badgir in Farsi), also known as wind towers or wind chimneys, were a traditional Persian architectural roof-top structure designed to catch the prevailing winds to provide top-down natural ventilation and passive cooling within thick-walled buildings (often constructed partially or completely underground) in desert environments. So effective were windcatchers at cooling buildings that they were routinely used as a form of refrigeration in ancient Persia. The beautiful photo below of abandoned windcatchers near Yazd in central Iran was taken by Dave Ways.

Photo by Dave Ways, reprinted with permission from The Longest Way Home.

For a stunning contemporary interpretation of windcatchers, look no further than avant-garde Paris-based Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut’s The Gate Heliopolis, currently under construction in Cairo. Callebaut’s design includes nine oval “mega-trees” which function as giant windcatchers to suck prevailing winds deep into the heart of the building as natural (and free!) air conditioning in Cairo’s hot urban environment.

Another example of a contemporary artist inspired by wind energy is the renowned American sculptor Anthony Howe. I first wrote about Mr. Howe’s hypnotic wind-powered kinetic sculpture back in 2014. Since then, whenever I needed a creative fix – to be carried away by the beauty of his hypnotic artworks – all I had to do was visit his YouTube channel and start clicking away…

A 2016 headline in the Dallas News says it all: “Anthony Howe creates art that seeks to slow your heartbeat down and make your life better.” I promise you: this is not hyperbole!

In case you missed the opening ceremony of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, here is a video link of Mr. Howe discussing his massive two-tonne cauldron being “lit” by the olympic flame.  In an interview with PR Newswire, Mr. Howe explained that his olympic vision was “to replicate the sun, using movement to mimic its pulsing energy and reflection of light. I hope what people take away from the cauldron, the Opening Ceremonies, and the Rio Games themselves is that there are no limits to what a human being can accomplish.”

We Canadians are the lucky recipients of one of Mr. Howe’s most recent installations, right in the middle of downtown Montréal. Last year, Concordia University’s chancellor Jonathan Wener and his wife Susan donated Di-Octo II to their alma mater in honor of the 375th anniversary of Montréal and the 150th anniversary of Canada. This eight-meter-high kinetic sculpture now graces the northeast corner of De Maisonneuve Ouest and Mackay Streets.

Photo by John Mahoney, Montreal Gazette, September 2017.

Although most of Mr. Howe’s sculptures are powered by the wind, they do not (yet!) generate electricity. Perhaps we will have to leave this challenge to the next generation of kinetic sculptors. In the meantime, the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is leading the way: encouraging artists and architects around the world to adopt “solution-based art practice” by designing public art and sustainable infrastructure that generate renewable energy within urban environments. One of their visions: clean power stations as tourist attractions.

We’ve come a long way since 3500 BCE. In fact, we’ve come full circle, back to the future: the very first energy revolution was renewable (wood, wind, water); the second was coal; the third was oil; and the fourth – which we are currently living through – is renewable once again. But tighten your seat belts! This time around, the 21st century version of the renewable energy revolution portends virtual power plants, energy democracy and the break up of energy monopolies within our lifetimes. The Holy Grail is finally within reach: a post-carbon economy. Artists can help get us there faster by creating positive stories of clean abundance and endless possibilities.

(Top image: Wind turbines by Joan Sullivan.)

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Joan Sullivan is a renewable energy photographer based in Québec, Canada. Since 2009, Joan has focused her cameras (and more recently her drones) exclusively on the energy transition. Her goal is to create positive images and stories that help us embrace the tantalizing concept that the Holy Grail is finally within reach: a 100% post-carbon economy within our lifetimes. Joan collaborates frequently with filmmakers on documentary films that explore the human side of the energy transition. She is currently working on a photo book about the energy transition. Her renewable energy photos have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, Italy and the UK. You can find Joan on Twitter and Instagram. 

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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The eighth in a year-long series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances and publications that are popping up in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Although most commonly known as the author of Silent Spring, the 1962 book that is credited with starting the environmental movement, Rachel Carson was also what historian and author Jill Lepore described as a “scientist poet of the sea.” In her recent article in the March 26, 2018 issue of The New Yorker, entitled “The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson,” Lepore describes Carson’s enduring love of the ocean and its shorelines. Lepore notes that all of Carson’s books prior to Silent Spring, including Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951) and The Edge of the Sea (1955), focused on her decades of research on the life of the sea and her daily observations of ocean life. Carson’s lyrical and captivating writing style, which reinforces her own sense of herself as a poet of the sea is reflected in this excerpt from her first published work, “Undersea,” an essay that appeared in a 1934 issue of Atlantic Monthly.

Who knows the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where the sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night.

In 1964, right before she died and after Silent Spring brought environmental issues into public consciousness, Carson had been observing another puzzling phenomenon that, unfortunately, she did not have the chance to pursue. She wrote presciently: “We live in an age of rising seas…in our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of the climate.”

Rachel Carson observing the sea.

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is an internationally acclaimed poet and spoken word artist who was born and lives on the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of coral atolls located in the Northern Pacific Ocean halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Although she is not a scientist like Rachel Carson, Jetnil-Kijiner shares Carson’s love of the sea and her use of poetic language to express her feelings and concerns about the environment, especially her acute alarm about the rising tides that Carson had observed 54 years ago.

Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry is focused primarily on her beloved Marshall Islands, which lay only six feet above sea level, the same six feet that scientists predict the seas will rise by the end of the century, and which are already experiencing significant tidal flooding once every month. According to Marshall Island Foreign Minister Tony de Brum, the island of his childhood is “not only getting narrower – it is getting shorter…There are coffins and dead people being washed from graves – it’s that serious.”

A seaside cemetery on the Marshall Islands that has been eroded due to rising tides. Credit: New York Times.

In 2014, Jetnil-Kijiner was catapulted from her relatively obscure presence as a “YouTube poet” into a highly sought-after global poet/climate activist after she was selected to perform as the Civil Society Speaker at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City. In the poem she recited that day, “Dear Matafele Peinam,” Jetnil-Kijiner promised her baby daughter that she and an army of others would work ceaselessly to ensure that her homeland would not be overcome by the rising tides threatening its shores and that she would not become a homeless climate refugee.

This excerpt from “Dear Matafele Peinam” is followed by a video of her 2014 UN presentation.

dear matafele peinam,

you are a seven month old sunrise of gummy smiles
you are bald as an egg and bald as the Buddha
you are thighs that are thunder and shrieks that are lightning
so excited for bananas, hugs and
our morning walks past the lagoon

dear matafele peinam,
I want to tell you about that lagoon
that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging against the sunrise

men say that one day
that lagoon will devour you

they say it will gnaw at the shoreline
chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees
gulp down rows of your seawalls
and crunch your island’s shattered bones

they say you, your daughter
and your granddaughter too
will wander rootless
with only a passport to call home

Since her breakout 2014 performance, Jentnil-Kijiner has been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts, including CNN, Democracy Now, Mother Jones, The Huffington Post, NBC News and National Geographic. In 2017, her first collection of poetry, entitled, Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter was published by the University of Arizona press, giving her the distinction of being the first published author from the Marshall Islands. Not limiting herself to poetry as her only form of action against the dangers of climate change, though, Jetnil-Kijiner has co-founded Jo-Jikum, an organization empowering Marshallese youth to “seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island” and has spoken all over the world on climate change including at COP (Conference of the Parties) 22 in 2016 and COP 21 in 2015.

As she warns in her poem “Butterfly Thief,”:

But what if we don’t save Tuvalu
what if bees and butterflies become extinct
what if our/my islands don’t survive

just who
do you think
will be next?

I’m taking you with me

As a poet lover of the sea and environmental activist, Kathy Jentnil-Kijiner is a legitimate heiress to the spirit and work of Rachel Carson.

(Top image: The Marshall Islands during a King Tide.)

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides caused by climate change, the trillions of pieces of plastic in our oceans and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog