Still from Food for Thought Exhibition Video

The Big Picture, Up Close:
An Interview with Robert Dash

Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Robert Dash is a widely recognized and accomplished photographer and a great admirer of the natural world. As a naturalist, artist and educator, Robert uses micro-photography to provide a new dimension of depth to our common understanding of the world around us. Through these incredible photographs, Robert emphasizes the complexity and importance of nature and stands as a reminder that there is so much to discover. Providing an important intersection between scientific inquiry and artistic expression, Robert’s work epitomizes a necessary relationship between study and discovery. In this interview, Robert takes us on a journey through terrains the size of a pinhead and gives incredible insight into reflection and intimacy with the natural world. 

Hummingbird Feather Detail from Micro Climate Change

Robert, your work stands at the intersection of art and science. By looking at objects in your surroundings very closely, you present mesmerizing photographs. What is the greatest wonder that you have found in this micro world? What do artists have to learn from looking at things extremely closely? Many artists were historically also scientists, how do the two disciplines interact?

Science (fact) inspires art (metaphor) which stimulates imagination, curiosity, inquiry (and new facts…)  Remarkable textures and patterns in nature are beautiful in their own right. They can also inspire deep questions, observations, perhaps a lifetime career or Nobel prize.

Look at the underside of this hop leaf and olive leaf. I was stunned when I first saw these. These structures are a fraction of a pinhead wide.

Hop leaf detail

Olive leaf detail (underside, with trichomes) 

I love to hike when I come upon views and perspectives that I’ve never seen before. Most of the time, I’m on a trail that thousands of people have already visited. Macro photography and SEM imaging are like micro-hikes, going to micro landscapes which few (if any) have seen before. Some of what I find is mind-blowing, design-wise, and overwhelms my imagination.  On the other hand, looking closely represents an aesthetic and personal choice to settle down, observe, and patiently contemplate a subject, which is counter to so much of modern frenetic lifestyles. My first book, On an Acre Shy of Eternity, was a three-year quest to look at all the layers of beauty I could find on the three-quarters of an acre where I live. It’s what started my work with a scanning electron microscope. Slowing down for that period inspired contemplation and poetry.

Both science and art deal in awe, wonder, surprise, and creativity, but for the sake of conjecture and over-generalizing: art leans toward the infinite, imagined, nebulous, while science leans toward the finite, provable, precise. Maybe art makes us feel, first, while science makes us think, first.

In your TEDx talk, you discuss the topic of “eco-intercourse” that happens when breathing in air in a forest surrounded by leaves that create oxygen. Can you expand on this shift in perspective and the consciousness that it creates?

I’ll answer with my poem:

Primal Exchange

There’s a whole ocean in the sky:
drops sucked from lakes where we swim,
clouds at dusk that leave us breathless,
salty residues of our grief and toil.
All of it
filters through pinpoint cells on leaves and plants
over and over each year.
They barter pure air for our exhalations
in the primal exchange.
Every stomata
on all plants of the world could match in number
stars in the sky
and like stars, they need songs and sonnets of their own.
Bring a loved one out beneath the trees
send your breaths up to constellations and galaxies of stomata
and receive their breaths in reply.
What could be more intimate than the truth
that our bodies are made of each others’ atoms
And those of the world?
                
Robert Dash, On An Acre Shy Of Eternity, ©2017

Poplar Stomata

Your metaphors are so intimate and reflect this feeling of awe when encountered with wild landscapes. How has this eco-intercourse driven your most recent work, Food For Thought, where you present extreme close up images of climate resistant crops and of compost?

Three years ago, my images were all about climate threats to staple foods such as corn, beans, wheat. Drought, floods, disease, nutrient depletion–there are many grim stories. The more I studied, the more I learned about carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, and I became excited about how these practices could help reverse climate change. Since scanning electron microscope work is so labor intensive, I only took food samples to the lab which had either a connection to these climate perils or promises. I looked at hundreds of samples, and then chose the ones which made my jaw drop when I first saw them.

More than an individual plant that creates climate resilience (and there are many, including agave in deserts, kelp in coastal areas, fava beans and clover cover crops on croplands), by far the most impactful practices are the rebuilding of soil, by storing more organic matter (carbon) there. The film “Kiss the Ground” explores this. My biochar image helped me understand why adding compost and biochar to the soil is so significant. Biochar is sometimes called a “microbial hotel” because of all of the hiding places it provides for microbial organisms and decomposers so important to rich, organic soil. The crystalline structure displayed in this image floored me, especially when you consider that the piece of biochar depicted is roughly the width of a pinhead.

…macro and micro, color and monochrome, fact and metaphor, surreal and hyper-real, serious and whimsical, flat and dimensional. Just like life, which is so layered and complex.

Biochar

Really beautiful and insightful! How do you decide to integrate your microscopic images into artworks? What methods do you use?

Master photo composite artist Jerry Uehlsman uses the term “assets” when describing the separate elements which comprise his work. These assets come together on a “canvas” and present a shape, color, texture, pattern, or metaphor. The trick is to discover what conversation these elements can have to make a unified image. Does the image suggest a story or world? Does it invite deeper study? Does it “work”, without feeling forced or contrived? Some of these images took years to resolve. For example, I was stuck with the potato image for the longest time, until I saw the starch granules, magnification 1000x, as tiny potatoes. By pairing macro potatoes with “granular potatoes”, the image finally clicked. 

Potato Starch

I have noticed that many of your works for Food For Thought take place on a black background, with monochrome microscopic imagery and highly defined and saturated imagery. How did you decide on this aesthetic?

The simple answer is, I love how it looks. A black background creates a dramatic contrast to the macro and micrograph images, and that drama mirrors the impact of awe and wonder I feel in nature. Then there are the pairings of macro and micro, color and monochrome, fact and metaphor, surreal and hyper-real, serious and whimsical, flat and dimensional. Just like life, which is so layered and complex.

I’m not a digital native. My native comfort zone as a child was hanging out with salamanders, frogs, snakes, insects, and tadpoles.

You speak and write compellingly about the importance of investing in nature. What do people need to know about the natural world? How do you think growing dependence on digital technology is helping and hurting this relationship?

Having been born deep inside the last century, I’m not a digital native. My native comfort zone as a child was hanging out with salamanders, frogs, snakes, insects, and tadpoles. This cemented my fascination with tiny life. Humans have an ancient, intimate relationship with nature that is spiritually vital. A huge range of modern anxieties–alienation, depression, isolation, rage–are connected to syndromes like Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD), where we’ve lost that contact.

I spend far more time with screens than I ever thought possible. Much of it is an attempt to translate, through art, my lifelong love for nature. Our attention spans have been fractured by the juicing of brain chemicals that come from digital surfing, and this damages our ability to think deeply, and to create. I worry that this is numbing us to the ancient joys of belonging to wild things, and to caring enough about them to protect them. Digital tools can help promote conservation–think drones that disperse seeds over wide deforested areas, or that document poaching in remote lands. Beneath it all is a question: how does this technology serve the cause of balance, restoration, health?

Requiem for the Pollinators

Lastly, what are you working on now?

The Food for Thought work is issue-based, looking at climate change impacts on food. All of my text for this (upcoming) book is about documenting climate/food perils and promises. It’s a very different focus from my first book. Each image reveals layers of stories, but this is a narrative rather than a poetic journey.

The ecoartspace March 2021 e-Newsletter is HERE

Meet Kimberlee Koym-Murteira: Artist, Video Sculptor, & Educator

Interview with SHOUTOUTLA, February 15, 2021

Hi Kimberlee, we’d love to hear what makes you happy.

Walking through a forest, by the sea side, up a grassy hill, the physical act of moving brings me joy not just for the beauty of the surroundings, but for the alteration and enlivening of my thoughts as I become active. Bubbling liquids, moving light, studies of water, trees, and people, help me ask: How are we embodied? I wonder how do we activate our lives and how can we be more present in our physical world in order to be more connected with ourselves and others? Studies show physical activity positively affects brain cognition, but it still seems an issue for so many. Some of my favorite activities are drawing, walking, and cooking. I create videos to capture the process and the power of movement and connection. I bottle it up for study. I house my Video Sculptures in mason jars containing water. I use water as a lens like a kid with a magnifying glass, pulling things – in this case transparent layers of video imagery- apart to observe. I choose to work with liquids – for their transparency and because they’re too slippery for me to fully control. The glass mason jars preserve precious memories, life’s seminal moments, and challenges to be used when someone needs to call on them -my grandmother cooking, inspirations from Maya Angelou, remnants from the wildfires. I play with veils of transparency to speak to the act of perception and sight(vision), the ability to see in, to discover. The physical and virtual intersections, matter and media, hold somatic resonance. Virtual refers to media but also thought, imagination, perception, psyche, and spirit. In our ever more virtual and disconnected existences, my video sculptures, projection machines, installations and prints on metal comment on the complexity of what is to be in a body, and to be pulled into virtual realms. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” — Carl Jung. I love art & art making: In my art practice, as in my home, I love to mix high and low tech, I achieve this meeting of virtual and physical with something like a video playing behind a mason jar filled with water. The placement of the image behind water acts as a lens, creating a hologram effect. As you walk around the sculpture the three dimensionality of the bottle, water, and image lends an additional sense of movement and wonder to the video sculpture. I am now exploring disorienting imagery by using a 360 camera to simultaneously give a sense of enclosure and expansion. This filming technique also creates a disembodied sense of floating. During the pandemic the wildness of nature has been a vital connection.

Continue reading HERE

SHOUTOUTLA

Interview posted February 21, 2021

Hi Yevgeniya, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?

It wasn’t so much a deliberate decision as it was a natural course of evolution for me. I was never interested in pursuing anything that did not involve making things, be it a hobby, an education or a career. Growing up, drawing and making things with my hands was a source of great joy and a way of learning about the world, so it never occurred to me to stop. I think a lot of it had to do with my family which has a lot of people in creative fields, so developing my interests and skills in that direction was encouraged and nurtured from early on. That’s not to say that I had a particularly clear idea of what a career in the arts would look like, I’m still figuring it out! No two paths are alike in the arts and not having a clear roadmap is both a point of anxiety and a thrill. But I never had a plan B because I never really questioned that I would make art or be in a creative field of some kind, which over the years has included teaching as well as making sure other people’s art gets seen.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.

I work primarily in drawing and painting. I’m interested in our methods of connecting and identifying with the natural world, and our role in and responsibility to the fragile ecosystems that comprise it. A lot of my work addresses landforms and plants as beings, as a way to create a connection between these entities and our own experiences, and to consider the same kind of kinship and empathy for the evolving environment as we are capable of experiencing with each other. Following an artist residency in Ireland early last year, my exploration of this land-body connection has become more concentrated on prehistoric burial and ritual sites – mounds, barrows, dolmen – and their history, mythology and symbolism. These sites talk about the afterlife, or the passage between worlds, but often present as pregnancies in the landscape – swellings containing bodies. They highlight a connection to and a reverence for the natural world that the people building them had, and the immediacy of that connection is a striking contrast to our current disconnect, which is something I’m trying to explore in my work.

Continue reading HERE

Close up of Bee hologram installed in 'First View' exhibition at Garter Lane Art Centre, Waterford City, Ireland, 2019. Digital image.

Sensory Response: Susie Kelly’s Holograms

Interview by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Through multi-sensory works that enrapture and bring the viewer into a space beyond the imagination and into the real, Susie Kelly addresses both environmental and geopolitical topics that grip the whole sensory body. She brings eco-art into the digital era through holographic works and new media. The inspiration she takes from her environment and as a grandmother brings home that human-made climate issues are prevalent and will be passed on to the next generation. Through her daring body of work, she reverberates and heightens the discussions within her community to create a global and existential grip that only art can accomplish.

Miasma, 2020, Installation, media includes recycled plastic, recycled net, wire, wool (used to sew recycled plastic fibre to net), holographic imagery in lightbox.

In Hologram, you tackle the oil industry with a large cloud of smoke made from recycled  materials. What created the inspiration for this piece? Has your area also been affected  by rigging and air pollution?

In a way, Miasma is a celebration of Ireland doing the right thing. Ireland is a tiny,  naturally beautiful island, yet gas companies have caused landslides and untold environmental damage on the west coast. Peat was excavated from bogs by the state and individuals until very recently, destroying natural habitats, local flora, and fauna. Our  Environmental Protection Agency has carried out environmental impact studies for fracking. In 2013 oil was discovered off the coast in areas of natural beauty. Opinions were split, with some foreseeing great wealth but much more anticipating destruction of natural habitats and damaged biodiversity. In 2019, Ireland announced the decision to end exploration for fossil fuels at the UN climate summit making us one of the first countries worldwide to get out of oil and gas production due to the impact on climate. I  suppose that announcement coupled with Irish visual artist John Gerrard’s virtual artwork, Western Flag, was my inspiration for creating Miasma.

As an artist I believe part of my job is to engage people’s imaginations, to inspire affection and empathy for the ecosystem of which we are all part. 

You describe how your interest in ecologies and ecological destruction stems from  concerns revolving human impact and your grandchildren’s future. Can you discuss what  your hopes are to counter those impacts? 

Artists and young people are where my hopes lie to counter the causes of rampant biocide and consequent climate change. As an artist I believe part of my job is to engage people’s imaginations, to inspire affection and empathy for the ecosystem of which we are all part.

People like Greta Thunberg, groups such as Extinction Rebellion, and blogs such as ecoartspace offer hope and action. Young people are more aware and engaged with the issue than ever before. For example, 33 European governments have been ordered by the European Court of Human Rights to respond to a ground-breaking, crowd-funded climate change court case initiated by four Portuguese children and two young adults.  They argue that governments are not moving fast enough to decrease climate destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. To protect their “future physical and mental wellbeing, to prevent discrimination against the young and protect our rights to exercise outdoors and live without anxiety”. Should the court decide the young people are correct, states will be legally compelled to act and enforce action to address emissions for which they and multinationals operating within their borders engaged in operations such as extractive activities, trade, and deforestation are responsible.
    
My next body of work is about symbiosis and how we are all part of a  whole. I think that the crux of the problem is that as technology has progressed,  western civilization has separated itself from nature. I hope that by highlighting interdependencies we can move forward symbiotically. 

Close up of hologram exhibited at GOMA, Waterford City, Ireland, Dec. 2020 - Feb 2021. Digital image.

What atmosphere would you like to create with your hologram installations and videos? Would you like people to feel intimidated or forewarned or informed? 

Strangely, I anticipated people might feel a sense of foreboding or oppression when viewing the cloud, prompting a review of their contribution to climate change, and perhaps curiosity with the holograms. The temptation to be didactic could be bubbling under the surface but I am happy if viewers take away a sense of wonder and curiosity, a  wish to know more, an instinct that there is more to know. The experience is that the cloud provokes play, inviting people to touch it, lie under, and be photographed with it. People also relate it to mental health or the pandemic. With Hologram, people are charmed, mesmerized, and curious.

 

In the end I felt the idea of birdsong and oil combined well with the ability to touch the materiality of the cloud. They caused that incongruent, disruptive sense of something not being quite right that might prompt further reflection. 

Hologram is a multi-sensorial work using smell, sight and sound. How has your  experience been working with sensorial curation? How has your approach been  different while working with multiple senses? 

The idea of a multi-sensorial exhibition was something I had been percolating for some time. I had previously worked with sound and incongruence and wanted to stretch that further to include olfaction and touch senses. Creating a relatively calm, uncluttered space was important, to allow the soundscape and olfactory elements to be experienced. Accessibility is something to be seriously considered when creating an exhibition, particularly a visual one. Whether someone with sight or hearing challenges attended, they would get something from it. The olfactory element was something I  grappled with, whether to go ahead with the scent of burning oil or to try to incorporate natural smells. In the end, I felt the idea of birdsong and oil combined well with the ability to touch the materiality of the cloud. They caused that incongruent,  disruptive sense of something not being quite right that might prompt further reflection. 

Maya process shot, 2020. Digital image.

What do you find most inspiring about the pumpjack? What was your process in digitizing and animating it? 

The pumpjack is a strong visual shape and structure. It is almost universally recognized as something to do with oil and fossil fuels. It also evokes in my mind the human heart,  its automaticity, the cyclical nature of the pumping mechanism. So, for me, the cyclical, visceral nature of the movement evokes the human microbiome. You cannot help but be mesmerized by it. All of the parts in synchrony.  The pumpjack was created using Maya software in three distinct phases, Modelling,  Texturing, and Animating. This process was repeated for the iterations where it appears to transform from pumpjack to playground. Each was rendered and exported to Adobe  Premiere Pro as png groups and edited into sequences. Following that, I copied each of the sequences x4 to create the holographic video. I used two methods to play the holograms, a trapezoidal acetate projector I made to fit a 19” square screen and a  hologram fan. I have a slight preference for the acetate method. There are many more technical modes of projection, but I felt those two were most suitable for this artwork.

Reusing materials that do not cause further environmental damage is something I adopt as an artist to minimize my personal CO2 number. This remains a priority in my practice.

How has working with digital technology and installation helped you create your message? 

Creating works of a relatively monumental scale, reflecting the “hyper-objectness” of the climate change/symbiocene issue, reusing materials that do not cause further environmental damage is something I adopt as an artist to minimize my CO2 number. This remains a priority in my practice. The idea of creating digital work that augments and speaks to that priority came from a desire to communicate the circularity of the issue, and possible solutions, without exacerbating in any way, the problem. It was something I needed to resolve for myself as a practicing artist.

Audiences are more open to digital work now than in the past. Learning to use various software applications enabled me to be nimble, to adapt my practice. I find that working with digital technology enables unlimited experimentation when compared to physical material outcomes in the studio. A common misconception is that making digital work is easier than the physical. As somebody who makes both, I am keenly aware that it takes high skill levels and knowledge of the principles of visual art to create successful digital artworks in much the same way as it does physical works. Granted, mistakes are relatively straightforward to rectify, I often thank the universe for backups and the undo button!

Process shot creating pumpjack structure in Maya. 2020. Digital image.

What have been the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of this work? 

Most rewarding has been two aspects. The first is having the model work as a  somewhat believable entity. There was a huge amount of work involved. Bearing in mind  I was learning the software ‘on the fly,’ I spent over 500 hours working on screen, so it is rewarding when it comes together. The second is the genuine interest and enjoyment people experience while looking at the hologram. It is quite simple looking when displayed in a gallery, yet for many viewers, it is a source of fascination and hopefully thought-provoking. The most challenging aspect was probably to do with convincing people that holograms are legitimate media to employ when making visual art. While holography is not new, it is certainly niche. Having researched the history and arguments surrounding stereography/ holography in the art world, I believe that there is a place in my practice that can be fulfilled only through holographic imagery. There is a long history of the art world resisting new media, going back to photography. It does not neatly fit into any category, although now with “new media” including VR there is a chink in the wall.

susiekelly.com

The ecoartspace February 2021 e-Newsletter is HERE

Image Credit: Christopher Reiger

Familiars

By: Christopher Reiger

Written by Christopher Reiger for Humans and Nature, Chicago

In the fall of 2019, a little over a year after my family moved from San Francisco to Sonoma County, I looked up one morning while driving my two young boys to daycare and preschool and saw the familiar “V”-formation, or skein, of Canada geese flying over Route 12. I’m a nature nerd, and I’m forever trying to excite my kids about natural history; I pointed the birds out to the preschooler and I asked him what species they were. He answered correctly, and I felt that wonderful surge of daddy pride that’s really just my ego being stoked.

But the good feeling didn’t last long—my son asked me where the geese were going. I didn’t know. I hazarded a guess that, perhaps because the birds were flying west, they were headed to graze on the dairy farms near the Laguna de Santa Rosa wetlands, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t give him a more sure answer.

Growing up, when a flight of geese passed overhead, depending on the species and time of day, not only could I tell you, with confidence, where they were headed—a salt marsh, perhaps, or a farmer’s field—but I could usually name the specific spot. I could tell you the geese were heading for the tidal estuary at the outlet of Rattrap Creek, or Buck Lane’s winter wheat field behind the post office. When a child spends as much time outdoors as I did, and they have a parent or parents who are deeply invested in the local ecology, it’s almost inevitable that they will become intimately acquainted with the land and the other animals, the nonhuman animals, that also call the place home.

As a kid, I regularly explored our nearly 300-acre coastal Virginia farm, and at times it felt as though I could summon an animal. Not literally, of course, but I’d find myself in a loblolly pine grove on a warm afternoon with the sun slanting just so, and I’d “feel” that I was going to encounter a black rat snake. Then there it would be. I don’t believe I was actually sensing these creatures before I spotted them, but I was so in tune with the farm that I knew—even without thinking about it—when and where I was likely to encounter different species.

But that was thirty years ago on the other side of the country, on the Delmarva Peninsula, the narrow strip of land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. My parents still live there, and my family visits at least once a year, but I’m no longer rooted there. Frankly, I’m no longer rooted anywhere—which is, for most of us, typical.

My father lived in two dozen places before he married my mother. In 1970, they purchased the farm on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and, a few years later, abandoned their professional and personal attachments to Washington, D.C., and New York City, and settled full-time on Heron Hill, the name they gave to the Virginia property. My father is a writer, and in one of his books, a 1994 memoir about his stewardship of the farm, he writes about continuity in our American imagination.

Continue reading HERE

Below are the recordings for the Memorial Zoom event for Amy Lipton (1956-2020) and two readings by ecoartspace members presented in the second recording. You can view the list of speakers HERE

Part One: (click on image)

Part Two: (click on image)

E.J. McAdams:

Mother Tree Elegy (For Amy Lipton)

Consider a forest:
each tree transforms
sunlight into sugar.

Consider a forest:
each tree connects
through mycorrhizal threads

sapling to standing tree
sharing carbon and nutrients.
Often, at the center, there is

what scientists call a “mother tree”
a towering giant source
sinking resources sufficient

for the benefit of kin,
seedlings, injured older trees,
the shaded, and severely stressed.

No scientist has the technology (yet)
to say what it is like to be in
cooperation like this and what it feels

like to lose the mother tree in a forest,
any forest, even a forest of artists.
The scientist simply makes field notes:

When a tree dies, the trees still live.
When a tree dies, the trees still live.
When a tree dies, the trees still live.

Aviva Rahmani:

Sue Spaid asked me to write a prompt about friendship for Amy for my recent project, the Hunt for the Lost. That project pivoted on another important election, the one we are still skirmishing over. I wrote:

We lost a friend and found a sorrow.
Finding a friend is always like growing a new part of myself.
Losing a friend is an amputation.
Conversations linger in memory like phantom limbs.
Time claims us each and every one of us in death.
Loss is tempered by recalling your gifts but still,
Lost and gone.
Farewell dear friend.
Last conversations unfinished, the next show stillborn.
Or.
Peacefully sleeping, dreaming-in-waiting for someone to pick up your torch.

Kim Stringfellow, The Mojave Project; Image courtesy of the artist

Documenting the Desert

mojaveproject.org

Written by Genie Davis for Art and Cake, Los Angeles

Captivating and inclusive, artist Kim Stringfellow’s latest documentary work, The Mojave Project, takes viewers on a compelling ride into the Mojave desert. Evocative images show us beautiful and lonely places, tourism in off-beat locations, the people who inhabit those locations, and the culture they create. It is both intensely real and dream-like, inviting us to step inside a world we might not otherwise see.

I’ve long visited many of the desert locations Stringfellow explores, and met some of its denizens. Her evocation of place is dazzling; it’s both a return for me and a deep dive.

According to Stringfellow, The Mojave Project “pretty much continues my interest in documenting culture, history, environment and geography of the American West’s arid regions.” However, she says it differs from past bodies of work because this time around she shared her documentation as she researched and produced it via a long-form blogging platform. That platform “allowed my audience to suggest tips or subjects for upcoming field dispatches or comment on past ones.” Prior to this project, she conducted and complete her research before releasing a finished project, whether that was an audio tour, a book, or exhibition. But the “open format” this time around worked well for the artist, who also began creating short documentary films.

Read the rest of the article HERE

submitted by Aviva Rahmani

Kim Stanley Robinson's new book is, The Ministry For The Future. It is a long utopian novel that begins in our collective immediate future by tracking the consequences of environmental neglect. Starting from the Paris Agreement, he then tracks one woman’s life as the minister of the Ministry of the Future on a wild ride through economics, animal corridors and decreasing populations. Because it is a novel, he doesn’t need to be realistic as he meticulously details decades of work trying to salvage not only a manageable but a celebratory future. His initial view is dire. As the book progresses, he gathers momentum for vastly optimistic possibilities. I admire his writing, which combines solid science, flights of poetry and trenchant insights into human nature. He is less convincing in character development for me but more than makes up for that weakness with a lively thread of dialog which unspools as continual exposition. The most delightful aspect of his writing is not just the ease of his discourse between people but clearly with himself, as he pursues an imaginative line of possibilities only to crash back to Earth with a caveat.

It happens that much of the action unfolds in Switzerland, where I lived for several years and particularly Zurich where I completed my PhD so I found myself visualizing many of the locations he references. He seems enamored of all the good qualities of the Swiss, whom I found to be somewhat more complex and often problematic, much as the world he foresees turning to willingness, might be critiqued as a view through rosy glasses. The Switzerland I know, for example casts a blind eye on xenophobic racism. The scale of discrimination is comparable to the United States. The glaring connections between racism, immigration miseries and capitalism aren't even mentioned in this book. The relative facility with which immigration is solved in his story lines, albeit it takes many years, is a noticeable reflection of glossing over those reflections.

The area of environmental science that gave me most pause was in his references to oceanic habitat, which doesn’t seem to interest him as much as the resurgence of land mammals, especially charismatic fauna. This bias creates a very photogenic backdrop for the narrative but in the context of his ecological arguments is a more serious elision than the dark side of Zurich. These elisions may be nitpicking because it is all written so beautifully. Publication was timed before the American presidential election, which I presume was deliberate and the opening passage is a horrific account of the consequences of American withdrawal under Trump, from the Paris Agreement.

It also happened that while I was working on my own work memoir, I carefully studied the structure of his earlier novel, 50 Degrees Below Zero, noting how he meticulously builds his arguments for how consequences unfold. He has a phrase in that book, that I’ve often quoted, to the effect that, ‘we are terraforming the Earth but we don’t know how.’ That is a good example of his astute observations. Both novels are heavy on good science, light on realistic solutions but they both effectively employ art to draw attention to the role of discourse in finding solutions to climate change. Both are good reads.

But neither one has noticeably moved a critical mass of the mainstream to budge the dial towards adequately shifting public opinion, as the Earth’s clock ticks down. If it had moved the dial in October 2020, 46.8% of the American electorate would not have voted for oligarchic fascism.  What is my takeaway from that observation? The world needs a lot more brilliant art to break through the media gatekeepers and entrenched confirmation bias before we are safe from the warning of his opening scenes of disaster. Still, this wonderful book will encourage the faithful and intrigue the skeptical and that will help. It is such a good piece of writing that it stands alone as a literary masterpiece and that alone may create a megaphone for his message: ‘act now. It is almost too late.’

©Aviva Rahmani, Red Sky, 2010, digital image, 48 x 48 inches

Vicki Robin Resilience interview with the author HERE (March 23, 2020)