Sustainability

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. It analyzes contemporary visual culture-popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects-to consider how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. This book argues that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of a neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geoengineering as the preferred-but likely disastrous-method of approaching climate change. To democratize decisions about the world's near future, we urgently need to subject the Anthropocene thesis to critical scrutiny and develop creative alternatives in the present.

The first survey of its kind to explore contemporary art that focuses on ecology. From land art and earthworks in the 1960s to conceptual art of the new millennium, ecology-focused art has been a prominent genre in the art world for decades. This book offers a look into the recent explosion in contemporary art that deals directly with nature, the environment, climate change, and ecology.

"Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists use polar art to illustrate our current environmental crises as well as to reimagine our world and the ways we engage with it. Examining a wide range of contemporary art, photography, and film, Lisa E. Bloom shows how these works demonstrate the ways that our planetary crises are linked to climate change as well as a long history of colonialism and capitalism. Bloom insists on linking racial, sexual, and gendered discriminatory violence to wider environmental destruction, and she engages feminist, Black, indigenous, and non-western perspectives to address the exigencies of what we are experiencing now as the Anthropocene, or the new geological period characterized by ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations"--

Inspired by artist Otobong Nkanga’s suggestion that "caring is a form of resistance," this richly illustrated book highlights the ways in which artists are helping to reframe and deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the climate crisis, hoping to inspire joy, empathy and a reenchantment with the world. The artists featured—including Andrea Bowers, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Agnes Denes, Otobong Nkanaga and Hito Steyerl—explore ecologies, ecosystems and climate-vulnerable communities across the globe. Newly commissioned essays by Rachel Thomas, Rebecca Solnit, and Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes investigate the notion of radical care and the history of climate-concerned art, while a tapestry of influential texts—old and new—weaves together the voices of the featured artists with other practitioners from the worlds of literature, climate activism and philosophy.--publisher's description

While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists? widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe?and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North?Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.

"What is the responsibility, or the task of the arts as we face environmental crisis? Ecologies in Practice is an edited collection of dynamic and multi-formatted contributions that explore the ways in which cultural production informs perceptions, communications, and knowledge of environmental distress in a Canadian context, pointing to the significance of the arts in the creation and sharing of crucial counter narratives and alternative possibilities. Ecologies in Practice identifies the arts as an important mode of inquiry for reimagining, and for public engagement and understanding of pressing environmental and social concerns, while acknowledging the ways in which it contributes important work to the growing interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities. Bringing together artistic perspectives from a range of lenses and voices, including artists, writers, scholars, activists, curators, theorists, and makers, Ecologies in Practice offers important tools for artists, scholars, students, and research-creators invested in arts and the environment. Contributors present artistic methods as alternative sites of understanding that contribute significant and affective work to environmental scholarship, while thinking outside of the disciplinary borders and confines of the artworld. Ecologies in Practice aims to initiate vital conversations among practitioners, and together with readers, consider what environmentally engaged arts lend differently to these conversations."--

The Ethics of Art attempts to describe how artistic imagination can produce new situations, based on the potentials and limits of the singular ‘body’ within its environment. It addresses performance and dance in Europe, but embeds this in the larger context of eco-art practices by also providing striking examples from the USA and Canada. The first section Ecosophy, discusses eco-art practices and how the ethical turn in the arts implies a greater receptivity for the environment we live in. The second section, Caring for the Body, focuses on dance and the renewed interest in ‘the body’, body politics and collaboration. This structure allows the specificity of an art-inspired ethics to emerge.--publisher's description

Finding Form with Fibre contains a collection of fourteen Australian contemporary basketry artists working with a variety of plant fibre and recycled materials showcasing their basketry sculpture. It includes a detailed plant list and other recycled textiles that can be incorporated into sculptural basketry work; along with instructions for basic basket making techniques to develop ideas for sculptural art pieces. The book also encourages sustainable art practices by working with recycled materials and plant fibres.--Australian Design Centre.

"Julie Andreyev explores agency and consciousness through her encounters with other lifeforms—companion dogs, wild birds, mineral beings, plant life, and forest communities—to illuminate the ways creativity can play a part in generating a renewed sense of wonder and kinship with nature. Drawing from her extensive work in interspecies collaborative art, each chapter weaves together personal reflection, interdisciplinary research, and critical thought with new media, sound, generative, indeterminacy, and other art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding through reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing, which provide an expanded sense of the world and underscore the imperative to act. This book invites readers to step into other worlds, re-sense life, and re-think their relationship with the planet and all of its inhabitants. In proposing an expanded field of aesthetics, Andreyev offers new applied approaches from interspecies art to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions, and actions."--publisher's descriptions

"The People's Action against the Nordic Áltá-Guovdageaidnu Waterway (c. 1978-82) radically shook the course of history in the region. Its call to "let the river live" clamored against the construction of a large dam across the Alltáeatnu river in Norway. The action grew to an unexpectedly broad movement of solidarity across civil society--Sámi and Norwegian, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples internationally--in which Sámi artists played a pivotal role. Let the River Flow takes this eco-Indigenous rebellion, the first in Europe and inspirational worldwide, to reflect on events at the time and their correlations with international artists' eco actions today. It is conceived as a reader, and addresses innovations in political organizing, new influences of Indigenous thinking on contemporary politics and the centrality of artists within the constellation of these activities. It also considers other Indigenous artists' protests that happened in parallel to the actions mentioned."

"For more than a decade, the Outdoor School project has provided a framework for interdisciplinary artists to come together and share projects that reimagine ways of relating with the landscape. The experiential and community-based art projects described in Outdoor School present an alternative to scientific, commercial and colonial conceptions of land and nature in the face of climate change and mass extinction. These art practices include activities like mushroom foraging, water witching, trespassing, pumpkin-boat sailing, cloud identifying, ravine running, honey extracting, spell conjuring, rabbit hunting, coyote walking and more. The project calls attention to creative, counter-cultural works that are focused on education, community and place, and blur the boundaries between art and life, nature and culture. Featuring interviews, essays and over 150 photographs, Outdoor School is an important contribution to discussions of contemporary art and ecology, foregrounding work that is marginal and ephemeral by nature. Artists featured in Outdoor School include Alana Bartol, Diane Borsato, Bill Burns, Carolina Caycedo, Sameer Farooq, FASTWÜRMS, Ayumi Goto, Maggie Groat, Gabrielle Hill, Peter Morin, Public Studio, Helen Reed, Genevieve Robertson, Jamie Ross, Aislinn Thomas, Vibrant Matter, Jay White, Tania Willard, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson and D'Arcy Wilson."-- Provided by publisher.

"This pottery book is built on the foundation of extensive carbon footprint research and offers invaluable insights into greening your ceramics practice. But it's not just about numbers and data – it's a treasury of wisdom and case studies from eco-friendly ceramicists worldwide."--publisher's description

"Technology and science alone are not enough to save our planet. Environmental solutions need to firstly be found in politics, culture, and aesthetics. Humanity faces an escalation of ecological catastrophes, with no quick solutions in sight. We seem to be trapped in a spiral of health issues, sensory overload, social tensions and power struggles. In the face of these multiple crises, artists offer ways to articulate the ongoing emergencies and explore possibilities of affirming life while also understanding that their travels are part of the problem. Acknowledging that there are different ways of being an artist and that these crises are experienced differently depending on where you come from, Sensing Earth presents essays, interviews, poetry, manifestos, choreographic prompts, speculative fiction and case studies that operate at the intersection of art and environmental activism, culture and nature. What sensorial foundations are necessary to address today's systemic failures, and what new cultural routes could keep us moving on this planet, physically, emotionally, intellectually and ecologically?" -- Back cover.

"Artists are increasingly interested in producing work that is not only beautifully designed and produced, but is also environmentally friendly and socially responsible. In Sustainable Ceramics, pioneer Robert Harrison draws on more than four decades of making, and a wealth of experience shared by other artists to present practical possibilities for ceramic artists.
This book covers all the factors to consider when going 'green', from fuels and alternative firing technology to energy-saving methods, sustainable ways to collect and use clay itself, and ways to deal with or recycle waste materials and save water. He suggests simple and achievable methods by which to reduce the carbon footprint of ceramic art, and draws on interviews and examples throughout by practitioners who reclaim, reuse and recycle in their studio or work."--publisher's description

Vitamin Green provides an up-to-the-minute look at the single most important topic in contemporary design: sustainability. This new attention to the life of the things we make is changing the way design is practiced at every scale and will be at the center of discussions about architecture, landscape architecture, and product design in the twenty-first century.--publisher's description

"Art about the climate crisis that calls for justice and systemic change while raising funds to help tackle the problem. We are in a climate emergency. The polar bears are starving, Australia is burning. Climate anxiety--like sea levels--is rising to unprecedented levels. In response to this, poet and editor Kathryn Mockler created a website where writers and artists could post creative works that respond to this crisis. Watch Your Head curates the best poems, stories, essays, and images related to our environmental crisis. The work is ranty, mourning, desperate, in-your-face, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. It calls out hypocrisy and injustice to inspire you to do whatever you can--volunteer for a climate justice organization, support land and water defenders, call out the media--and it'll make you feel less alone in your worry."--

How can art, science and institutional practices counteract the negative consequences of climate and ecological breakdown? How can these practices and ideas advance systemic change? Worlding Ecologies serves as an anthology of examples and wayward navigational tool, assembling eighteen authors exploring this question from their diverse backgrounds - as scientists, artists, philosophers, activists, theorists and curators - to rigorously approach urgent ecological challenges, including climate breakdown, pollution, biodiversity loss, environmental and social justice. This book emphasizes the fundamental role of art as a vehicle and support structure for intersectional ecological thought. Whilst navigating imagination, worlding-possibility, science fact, social justice and climate action, the book prompts a fundamental role for art to create the blueprints for regenerative and sustainable more-than-human worlds. Structured alongside three sections - Science and Climate Truth; Activism and Climate Justice and Social Justice in Institutional Ecosystems - Worlding Ecologies moves from fieldwork-taking to patchwork-making, unifying the arts with science, politics and ecology into a field of synthetic thought and commitment.