Global Art Project Focuses on Impacts of Climate Change

Editor's note: for a huge event like eARTh, the Justmeans Climate Change team thought it would be great to publish multiple perspectives on the implications for the fight against climate change. Please see Brian Kahn's post for another take on eARTh.

For decades climate scientists and activists have tried to drive home the need for action on global warming by citing alarming facts and statistics about climate change. Yet while scientific information is very important, facts alone have not inspired the kind of sweeping worldwide action needed to avert a climate catastrophe. In fact, some studies indicate trotting lists of scary facts (no matter how true they might be) can actually backfire if your goal is to convince people to take action for the climate.

That's why I'm so encouraged that more and more activists are taking up art as a way to inspire those around them to build a low-carbon future. The past few years abound with examples of people using art to send a climate change messageon a local or regional scale. This month, thanks to the work of groups like 350.org and TckTckTck, climate art has soared to truly global heights. In the final week before international climate negotiations begin in Cancun, Mexico, teams of artists engaged in the global eARTh art project are creating what is probably the first art exhibit big enough to be visible from outer space. And each installation sends a message about the need to address climate change.

The action began Saturday, in the desert of New Mexico and in Spain's Delta de Ebro region. In the Delta de Ebro, a low-lying region in danger of being flooded by rising sea levels, a team led by the artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada built a an enormous image of the face of a girl from the local community whose home and community are at risk. Meanwhile the desert outside of Sante Fe, New Mexico is suffering from too little water, not too much. In the nearly dry bed of the Santa Fe River, more than fifteen hundred activists created an artistic representation of a flash flood by using blue painted cardboard held above their heads to make the river appear temporarily full.

Each installation in the eARTh project is designed to be big enough to be visible from a satellite orbiting the Earth, and uses art to convey a message about the local impacts of climate change. On Sunday giant art actions took place in British Columbia, the Dominican Republic, and Los Angeles. Over the next several days other actions are scheduled to take place at locations around the world.

Of course artwork visible from space isn't going to spontaneously cause global policymakers to take the kind of action on climate change that we need. "[W]e don't think these [actions] are going to have an immediate political effect," says 350.org founder Bill McKibben, who has been experimenting for years with combining art and activism. But art drives home the message about climate change in a way that line graphs and tables of statistics simply cannot do.

I for one hope we'll continue to see art activism taken to new levels in the months and years ahead, as an essential tool to help the world come to grips with the global challenge of climate change.

Photo credit: Flickr