Climate Change brings to mind emissions, which require solutions, such as futures with bikes and more car free highways. The planet Earth is calling us to bring nature to the negotiation table. These are the verses for the new year.
"Nature's rhythm is different from the pace of the contemporary society."
What we don’t seem to realize is that nature is in fact offering space without asking us to limit our dreams. Two years into the pandemic has changed our everyday perspectives; we have voluntarily moved our lives more outdoors. We suddenly pay attention to dear little details that we see in nature, and think about the future livelihood and living on this planet.
Nature’s rhythm is different from the pace of the contemporary society. This is also something that this pandemic has taught us oh so well. Did we ever imagine that we would be capable to pause, and start dreaming of a different future? Some of us did dream, at least.
"Looking at the birds in winter, as they descend to a freezing environment."
Let’s take birds in the winter as an example. What is it in their circumstances, the birds in suburban environments, that is causing us to pause and consider if the animals have enough food.
Cars, parking lots, people going shopping in their vehicles, trains, commercial projects surrounding geese habitat. What is so special about these animals living next to human habitation, geese in our urban and suburban parks. They make us think changes in season, and how the big birds used to migrate someplace warmer.
Humans are responsible for destroying wilderness, wetlands, populations, to name a few. With geese, as their extinction was more evident due to destruction of the species natural habitat – the birds were brought into urban areas where they had never been living before. The natural migration cycle stopped and the geese stayed in their new settings. Humans have since then found that the birds’ new existence is perhaps too close, birds taking over parks and parking lots.
"We can be thankful that they still have some wilderness to roam and be birds."
A question of food for geese is a problematic one, since feeding and making them accustomed to vacate human habitat eventually means that nature’s own cycle is being interrupted. Not because geese themselves were opting for these new environments. We can be thankful that they still have some wilderness to roam and be birds.
"Future perspectives do imply stricter and more compassionate approaches, when it comes to ever busy air and street spaces."
"Biking is an old fashioned green new deal. It also goes together with the nature's rhythm. The pace is one of wondrous."
To participate in a green new deal, cutting back emissions is of course not just an act of love for many of us who like to travel and seek far away adventures. Yet, future perspectives do imply stricter and more compassionate approaches, when it comes to ever busy air and street spaces. Cutting down greenhouse gas emissions is easily a foreign language concept or theory that stay away from the realities of modern individuals, who can count cars in the garage. Everybody needs their own car just to get around. How to explain this in simple terms, how to change this pattern?
"The awakening is bringing nature closer to our communication, forming new communities."
Futures hold promises for the world in the form of awakenings. Climate coalitions and awakenings for earthy subjects are thankfully becoming one kind of new normal.
"World, in which constant profit is a standard, and where sustainability and co-creation are like dialects of foreign languages."
When it comes to art, fundraising is meeting with auction house practices to make equity and ethical planetary standards meet in the productions. How much sustainability can we create with these methodologies, is yet to be discovered – not just in the form of capital, but as acts of recycling, repurposing, and meeting circular economy standards.
World, in which constant profit is a standard, and where sustainability and co-creation are like dialects of foreign languages. Co-creation implies a communal aspect of creating together. As such it is somewhat strange to Western notions, which rather highlight the success of ego-driven selves.
At its best, the awakening is bringing nature closer to our communication, forming new communities. Community and art can meet in various ways. The art works that take over public spaces are a great example.
Outside the Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts is a Stone River, a large wall created of sand stones. A sculptural serpentine project created by artist Andy Goldsworthy (2002), is blending with its campus environment, growing naturally in the landscape of trees and meadow, bringing joy for people working and visiting the campus and the Art Center. These stones are remnants of campus buildings. The stones had fallen during two earthquakes that hit the bay area in 1906 and 1989.
The Stone River was inaugurated in 2002 at the campus. Goldsworthy found out that the campus had remnants of historic earthquakes that shook the area, in 1906 and 1989 respectively, forming stone rumble that had fallen off the buildings. He instantly gained a feeling that stones could organically return back to earth, forming a flow which almost seemed that it had archeological origins. As if the stones had been there for a long long time.
Goldsworthy is referencing rural Scotland, where there is archeological presence of people layering stones, layer after layer like this.
In Stone River, the stacked stones in the sculpture, set in a nearly 3 1/2-foot trough dug in the earth, rise from a 4-foot wide base to an almost impossibly precise undulating line. “I call it a river, but it’s not a river,” Goldsworthy said. The sculpture is “about the flow. There’s a sense of movement in the material, through the individual stones, so you just see this line.” –Barbara Palmer, Stanford Report
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