By Susan Hoffman Fishman

For over four decades, New Mexico-based environmental artist Basia Irland has created projects about water that focus on rivers, waterborne diseases and water scarcity. Her extensive body of work includes sculptures, installations, books, essays and videos that have connected with, engaged and educated local communities in Africa, Canada, Europe, South America, Southeast Asia and the United States.

In our recent phone conversation, Irland admitted that she is obsessed with water. She describes it in her artist’s statement as “marvelously mysterious” in all of its gaseous, fluid and frozen states, complex in its science and behavior and endlessly nourishing to her soul.

Irland’s interest in water began as a child growing up near Boulder Creek in Boulder, Colorado. She would often go to the creek for solace and contemplation, and developed a deep personal connection to water that continues to this day. Similarly, on visits to her grandfather’s farm in Texas, where a water pumping windmill drew the family’s only available water from the ground, Irland observed in real time what happens when drought occurs and access to water dries up. Although these experiences informed her work, she insists that the water itself was the greatest influence on her career as an artist. For a 2018 interview in Interalia Magazine she explained, “I am a humble student constantly learning from tiny rivulets, dammed streams, wild and scenic river systems, or major waterways.”

Since Irland is such a prolific artist and doing justice to all of her work would require a full-length book (Ireland has already written two comprehensive books on her career: Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland  (2017) and Water Library (2007)), I’ll focus here on three projects that represent her commitment to integrating art with science, her method of successfully engaging community participants and her ability to imagine how water would speak for itself.

Ice Field

Ice Field, one of Irland’s early projects, anticipated by many years the more recent alarm over glacial melting. Twenty years ago, when climate disruption was a non-issue for most of the world, Irland spent time hiking on a number of glaciers, including those at Lake Louise, a lake fed by meltwater from nearby glaciers in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.

Inspired by these hikes across glaciers and her observations of meltwater, Irland began thinking about a future when there would be no more glaciers on the planet and meltwater would be the only way scientists could study them. Knowing that meltwater contains microbial populations, nutrients and metals that escape from glaciers and feed downstream ecosystems, Irland developed an installation entitled Ice Field. She used some of the instruments of scientific research – petri dishes, vials, test tubes and flasks filled with water and stones – as both an artistic interpretation of a future scientific study set in a pristine lab and an ode to the melting glaciers themselves. A second version of the original Ice Field was installed in 2015 as part of a major retrospective of Irland’s work at the Museum De Domijnen in the Netherlands.

Ice Books

In 2007, Irland was invited to participate in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art entitled “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change.” The exhibition was curated by renown American activist, feminist, author and art critic Lucy Lippard, who asked the participating artists to create new pieces about climate change in collaboration with scientists.

Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of what is now more accurately referred to as climate disruption or climate crisis, Irland wanted to do something that would both call attention to an important environmental issue within a positive framework, and promote activism. A sculptor at heart, she chose to carve a 250-pound block of frozen river water into the shape of an open book in honor of the nearby Arapaho Glacier. The glacier is melting rapidly and, along with the snowmelt, provides drinking water for the town of Boulder. Imbedded into the ice book was its “text,” comprised of the seeds of plants native to the Boulder Creek ecosystem.

Irland worked with a local botanist to determine which seeds to use. Ultimately, the seeds of mountain maple, columbine flower and blue spruce were selected. (See image at top of this article.) As Irland describes, “the seeds form the ecological language of the book and just as we learn from books, we can learn from the river.” Once the ice book had been carved and the seeds had been added, the book was released into the water with the participation of the local community. As the ice melted, the seeds would implant themselves into the riverbank to restore the ecosystem as they traveled downstream.

That first book in 2007 became the prototype for an on-going series of ice books, entitled “Ice Receding, Books Reseeding,” which Irland continues to make in consultation with stream ecologists, river restoration biologists and botanists. In several locations, Irland imbedded other materials into the ice books instead of seeds when local river conditions would benefit from that change. For example, she used chunks of limestone at Deckers Creek in West Virginia in order to reduce the high level of acidity in the river water that had been caused by acid mine drainage. She also incorporated krill into the ice book released into False Creek in Vancouver, Canada so that smaller fish that ate the krill would attract salmon into the river again.

The creation of subsequent ice books always included participants from the local communities around the globe where she had been invited. Whenever possible, Irland also partnered with Indigenous tribes in the area. Participants assisted with implanting the seeds into the books and launching them into the water. In recognition of their gift of participation to the project, Ireland provided gifts in return, such as seeds, maps of the river’s watershed and other items of relevance. The video below provides an overview of Irland’s innovative global Ice Book projects.

River Essays

In 2014, Irland was invited by Sandra Postel, director and founder of the Global Water Policy Project and Freshwater Fellow at the National Geographic Society, to write an essay on her Ice Books for the Society’s blog “Water Currents.” That first essay led to a series of 17 additional pieces that she wrote for the blog from 2015-2017, entitled “What Rivers Know.” (Irland has written additional essays in the series not published in “Water Currents”).

Each of the essays is written in the first person from the point of view of a particular river. The essays give a voice to the rivers and the sense that they have knowledge, memory and mythic powers equal or greater than our own. An excerpt from the February 2016 River Essay on the Ping River in Chiang Mai, Thailand and the video “What Rivers Know” below provide examples of the river as subject/speaker:

On the night of the twelfth lunar month during the full moon at the end of the rainy season, communities gather along my banks to pay homage to me, and my water spirits. They thank the Goddess of Water, Phra Mae Khongkha (พระแม่คงคา), which is the Thai form of Ganga, the Hindu goddess of the holy Ganges River, India. It is also a way to beg forgiveness for polluting and abusing me during the past year.

This festival of lights is called Loy Krathong (ลอยกระทง). The name is translated as “to float a basket”, and refers to the tradition of making krathong or buoyant, banana-stem sculptures that are decorated with folded banana leaves and contain flowers, incense, candles, and coins (an offering to the river spirits). These sculptures are floated on my moist skin in the evening forming a candle-lit parade dancing downstream. Lights hanging from trees and buildings, and a multitude of hot-air lanterns rising up into the night sky reflect on my body, creating a myriad of new constellations…

Basia Irland is a pioneer in addressing the complex issues affecting water. Before many artists and certainly the general public were focusing on climate disruption, she was already thinking about the eventual absence of glaciers and the interconnectedness of our global waterways. All of Irland’s work encourages each of us to become better recipients of the deep knowledge our rivers have to offer. It is her personal commitment and passion for the wonder of water, though, as well as the impact of her work on local communities all over the world that should inspire us all.

(Top image: TOME 1. Ice and seeds of the mountain maple, columbine flower and blue spruce, Boulder Creek, Colorado. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and videos are courtesy of Basia Irland.)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate disruption a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the US and she has received numerous grants and commissions. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and drawings have focused on water and climate change. She co-created a national, interactive public art project, The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and has inspired thousands of adults and children of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to protect this vital resource. Her most recent body of work calls attention to the growing number of rampikes along our shores – dead trees that have been exposed to salt water as a result of rising tides.

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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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I was thrilled to talk with Rajat Chaudhuri, author of The Butterfly Effect (September 3, 2018, Olive Turtle, Niyogi), which Scroll.in describes as a novel that “blends mystery, eco-fiction and a Russian doll narrative.” Truly this story is a wild ride, with brilliant and Ballardian descriptions and actions of a future world that I don’t think we want to be in, but which are vibrant and alive as well as deadly. The story jumps around the map, beginning in India.

A self-obsessed Calcutta detective who goes by his last name, Kar, an enigmatic internet cafe hostess in Seoul, and a hotshot geneticist laboring away on a top-secret corporate project: these are just a few pieces in the puzzle that need to be put together to explain a world sucked into the whirlpool of the butterfly effect.

In the decaying capital city of a near-future Darkland, which covers large swathes of Asia, Captain Old – an off-duty policeman – receives news that might help to unravel the roots of a scourge that has ravaged the continent. As stories coalesce into stories – welding past, present, and future together – will a macabre death in a small English town or the disappearance of Indian tourists in Korea help to blow away the dusts of time? From utopian communities of Asia to the prison camps of Pyongyang, and from the gene labs of Europe to the violent streets of Darkland – riven by civil war, infested by genetically engineered fighters – this time-traveling novel crosses continents, weaving mystery, adventure and romance, gradually fixing its gaze on the sway of the unpredictable.

The genre-blurring tale left me hanging on edge as I discovered a new world through Rajat’s imagination, and I would recommend this book highly. I talked with Rajat about his new novel. He explained that The Butterfly Effect is a transcultural novel, which crosses borders while also switching back and forth in time. The major settings of the book are India (present and near-future Calcutta), England (London and southern England), South Korea (Seoul and other places), North Korea and China (minor setting). 

What motivated you to write this novel?

The book has an eco-dystopian theme centered around the dangers of genetically modified (GM) crops and the inherent threats of this technology.  It also has a climate change backdrop in a near-future setting. The double whammy of climate change disaster and a GM experiment gone horribly wrong is what triggers the disastrous circumstances portrayed in the book.

I have been an environmental activist for many years now. I have been a climate change advocate representing civil society groups at the United Nations in New York, and have spoken and written about climate and environment issues in international and national forums and publications. I am also a past contributor on sustainable consumption issues to the World Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Program in New York.

This activist background motivated me to translate my learning to my creative work, especially through the vehicle of a novel. The so-called realist novel, because of its debt to the Enlightenment, has shied away from engaging with Nature and issues involving large collectives, and focused instead on what John Updike calls an “individual moral adventure”. This focus, Amitav Ghosh points out in his seminal work on climate change, The Great Derangement, has ghettoized all other kinds of writing, placing them in genre fiction.

I, like some others, feel the time has come  to change this as climate threats have been growing in exponential proportions and dangerous technologies are being pushed into our lives and food plates without proper testing and without the use of the “precautionary principle,” which is a foundational principle of the Biosafety Protocol. There are, however, writers in the West, like Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Liz Jensen, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, and others who have been engaging with climate environment and disaster issues. In my country, these issues are rarely handled in creative fiction.

All of the above influenced me to write The Butterfly Effect. Above all, the challenges and difficulties of creatively engaging with the unimaginable aspects of worldwide disaster caused by human actions in the Anthropocene have driven me to write this book.

This book is not far-future science fiction about intergalactic wars, nor will you find teleportation here. Rather, this is speculative fiction of a very possible future, amplified for the purposes of creativity and dramatization.

How do you feel climate change and/or environmental crises play a part in the places in your novel – and how do you feel that they might be unique compared to the rest of the world?

My setting is both the developing and developed worlds (India, Korea, UK, etc.). Each of these places will be affected by a runaway bio-technology disaster (as in my book), but impact will vary according to preparedness. Climate change, which is a backdrop for the book, will affect all these places in similar and different ways. So in my book, we find hot summers in England, fertile crop-growing regions in Tibet, the disappearance of island nations like Sri Lanka, and the flooding of Japan. These are backdrops in the story. As we all know and have begun to see with increasing regularity, climate change will have unpredictable consequences from increased storm activity, desertification, extreme temperatures, and crop failures, among several other crises.

The uniqueness of the affected region in my story is that it covers large parts of Asia and essentially constitutes the developing world. Because of a lack of preparedness, vulnerable populations, limited resources, corruption, the business-as-usual mentality, lack of awareness, and the attraction of high-consumption life styles, these regions will definitely be worse off once a worldwide disaster begins to unfold.

I also want to mention Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan incidents, which are rare (hard to predict) incidents of devastating consequence. A Black Swan incident – such as the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster – is very hard to predict but can be understood in retrospect. Just as the Fukushima disaster and meltdown was the result of a chain of incidents that were too rare for the designers of the reactors to foresee, so in this book we find a concatenation of rare and almost unpredictable events. The bottom line is: Change high-consumption lifestyles and stop employing dangerous and unpredictable technologies, even if for welfare. There are always simpler solutions.

Is there anything else you want to tell us about the story?

Environmental disasters are often borderless, and so is my story. This is why the plot travels from one place to another and the characters are drawn from many countries.

The book benefited from a number of international fellowship grants (Korea, UK, Scotland) which helped me research these places and people and set up the scaffolding of the novel. There is a long section in the book which has to do with North Korea, and important characters from that country, and I feel what the story is telling us is that risky technologies become bigger threats when they are contested by powers which lack the checks and balances of a functioning democracy – corporate power and totalitarian regimes to give you two examples.

This book is also about the tug-of-war between reason and faith, or reason and its absence. This duality is portrayed through the character of the detective Kar, who is a man of reason led into strange circumstances where faith and magic fight a losing battle with the all-consuming power of science. It is in the character of the detective that we find a reflection of this age-old contest.

Thank you, Rajat, for the in-depth background of The Butterfly Effect.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change(Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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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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By Joan Sullivan

This is our decade.

By “our”, I mean everyone: all consumers, all professions, all industries, all nations, all beliefs. As Roddy Clarke articulated so passionately in his recent Forbes article The Twenties – The Most Important Design Decade Yet, “We have one common denominator: the power to create change. And, through courage, collaboration and co-operation, we can achieve this.”

Clarke describes, among other things, the Duke of Cambridge’s recently announced The Earthshot Prize, the multi-million pound prize that will be awarded to five winners per year over the next ten years. By 2030, the Earthshot Prize intends to provide at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest problems.

According to its website, the Earthshot Prize wants:

to motivate and inspire a new generation of thinkers, leaders and dreamers. Our prizes will reward progress across all sectors of industry and society, not just technology. The prizes could be awarded to a wide range of individuals, teams or collaborations – scientists, activists, economists, leaders, governments, banks, businesses, cities, and countries – anyone who is making a substantial development or outstanding contribution to solving our environmental challenges.

The Earthshot Prize is inspired by the concept of moonshots, in reference to U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 moonshot speech about “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” before the end of that anxious decade. This historic speech unleashed a decade of unprecedented innovation and collaboration that inspired a whole generation. Despite technological challenges, political obstacles and naysayers, Kennedy’s audacious dream was achieved within nine short years, even though he did not live to witness its moment of glory.

Kennedy’s generation achieved the impossible, in less than a decade. We can do the same. We must do the same. This is our decade.

Which is why, for my inaugural post of this brave new decade, I am inspired to write about a woman whose audacious vision has the potential to radically transform our lives and our homes before the end of this anxious decade.

Meet Dr. Rachel Armstrong, the pioneering architectural designer, synthetic biologist, and sustainability innovator who is blurring the lines between art, architecture and science in her quest for alternative technological platforms to solve third millennium challenges.

“The fundamental units of design must be reconsidered,” Armstrong argued during her 2019 talk at Design og arkitektur Norge in Oslo. “The fusion of biology, technology and art speaks of different kinds of beginnings, where we can imagine, build and explore futures that may one day entirely wean us off our umbilical attachment to fossil fuels while diversifying the metabolic richness and flourishing on earth.”

Originally trained as a medical doctor at Cambridge, Armstrong earned a PhD in Architecture at University College London. She is currently Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, where she founded and directs the Experimental Architecture Group. She is also Coordinator of the multi-country Living Architecture Project, funded in part by the European Union. Her collaborative work has been exhibited widely, including major installations at the Venice Art and Architecture Biennales, the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, the Trondheim Art Biennale, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, among others.

Known by her popular Twitter handle @LivingArchitect, Armstrong believes that “we are in the midst of a transition from an industrial to an ecological paradigm of architectural practice.” This transition involves, among other things, embracing permeability to allow chemical exchanges between buildings and the natural world, as well as within our living spaces.

The concept of permeability is anathema to the dominant Victorian top-down architectural philosophy, which favors the use of “hard” inert construction materials – masonry, aluminum, glass – to hermetically seal our buildings. Architects choose these energy-intensive inert materials to prevent the outside environment (heat, cold, precipitation, dust, pollution, disease) from getting inside.

“Impermeability was, and is, the driving goal,” Armstrong wrote for FastCompany. But impermeable design has a major flaw: it requires a one-way transfer of energy from the outside environment into our homes and cities, followed by a one-way transfer of unprocessed waste products back out into the environment.

New research suggests, however, that these waste products can become a source of renewable energy for buildings. Armstrong and her Living Architecture colleagues propose an alternative technological platform that can holistically recycle, re-use and reintegrate household waste products in a variety of new contexts. This technology has been around for 3.6 billion years: life itself.

“We are blind to the incredible work that nature does!” Armstrong exclaimed during her Oslo talk. She is convinced that the only way “to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it.”

In its earliest stages of experimental evolution, the Living Architecture project successfully demonstrated the potential of using semi-permeable “living bricks” (see image below) to catalyze radically different approaches towards how we think about the nature of our homes, our relationship with microbes, sustainability and resource management.

In an email, Armstrong describes these living bricks as different “species” of bioreactors, e.g., microbial fuel cell, algae bioreactor, genetically modified bioprocessor. When “fed” by human liquid wastes (notably urine and grey water), the resident microbes living within the different bioreactors are programmed to perform different “household chores” such as removing organic matter from wastewater, generating oxygen, making usable biomass (fertilizer) and producing clean electricity.

Moreover, since each bioreactor performs a different task, their end products can feed each other. For example, the production of electricity within the microbial fuel cell can be boosted by oxygen from green algae in the photobioreactor system. These products can either be fed back into the household system, or released as nutrient-rich streams back into the natural environment to increase soil fertility in our cities.

Future iterations of “living brick” technologies could transform our homes and commercial spaces into environmentally sensitive, renewable production sites. For example, interior wall partitions in our bathrooms and kitchens could be replaced with bioreactor walls (see video below) that can “recycle detergents from domestic wastewater, produce fertilizers for the garden, and synthesize new, biodegradable detergents – just from grey water, carbon dioxide and sunlight,” Armstrong wrote. In these scenarios, cleaned water will be recycled back into our bathrooms and kitchens to reduce overall water consumption, while zero-carbon electricity will charge our portable devices.

According to Armstrong,

Future bioreactors could generate bioluminescent lighting, produce nutrient-rich food supplements, and remove problematic estrogen-mimic compounds such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from drinking water. In commercial spaces, these living walls could recycle water, fertilize green roofs, and purify air to make building interiors healthier and more like natural environments.

“The home of the future isn’t smart, it’s living and green,” claims the headline of a recent article in the SingularityHub. Another article describes five ways that buildings of the future will use biotech that may ultimately wean us off fossil fuels: 1) buildings that grow; 2) buildings that heal; 3) buildings that breathe; 4) buildings with immune systems; 5) buildings with stomachs.

For example, Living Architecture researchers intend to install integrated bioreactor walls – designed to function like a cow’s stomach – in real homes by 2030.

It may all sound like science fiction, but these are the kinds of bold, cross-disciplinary, solutions-oriented initiatives that will surely be recognized by the Earthshot Prize in the coming decade.

In my next post on this same subject, I will explore the role of artists collaborating with Living Architecture scientists to re-introduce microbes back into our homes, our buildings and our cities.

(Top image: Rachel Armstrong and Cécile B. Evan’s installation “999 years 13sqm (the future belongs to ghosts)” at Whitechapel Gallery’s Is This Tomorrow 2019 exhibit. All images from the Living Architecture project reprinted with permission by Rachel Armstrong.)

This article is part of the Renewable Energy series.

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Joan Sullivan is a Canadian photographer focused on the energy transition. Her renewable energy photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows in Canada, the UK and Italy. She is currently working on a documentary film and photo book about Canada’s energy transition. In her monthly column for Artists and Climate Change, Joan shines a light on global artists, designers and architects experimenting with renewable energy as an emerging art form. You can find Joan on Twitter, Visura and Ello.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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