Literature, Art, and the Environment

Although we mostly think of writing and thinking about the environment as the work of scientists and scholars, important contributions have also been made by artists, writers, painters and photographers.

Art can also be found on Multimedia page.

See also Writing page

Science fiction dealing with the environment can be found on the Ecological and Social Utopias page

Nonfiction

Wikipedia book list ,

Wikipedia author list

E. Abbey Desert Solitaire

W. Berry, Unsettling America video of him reading a poem

Mike Davis City of Quartz McHenry Stacks HN80.L7 D38 2006 summary
excerpt on urban space
critique

Aldo Leopold A Sand County Almanac is a 1949 book by American ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold's "The Land Ethic" (from Sand County Almanac) Link.

Poetry

(See also Multimedia)

Robinson Jeffers

Jane Hirschfield

Mary Oliver "Straight Talk from a Fox"

Gary Snyder Beat poet (Kerouac based a Dharma Bum character on him), now the subject of a film (video intro). See also The Practice of the Wild. video of conversation including Wendell Berry. extensive interview on poetry and ecology.

Billy Collins poem on why we need to protect nature. TEDtalk video with animations.

Film

Many anime movies by Hayao Miyazaki carry a hidden environmentalist message. The best-known is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but also well known is Pom Poko as well as Princess Mononoke, which is based on a conflict between technology and nature

Photography

Ansel Adams. Jonathan H. Spaulding, Cowell '82 Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, U. of California Press, 1995

The Roots of California Photography [videorecording] : The Monterey legacy c2002 McHenry Library Film & Music VT8907

Edward Burtynsky

Art

Can Art save cities? For example, Dr. Dirt: Street artist scrubs images into the urban landscape. 11/11.

350.org Art on climate

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of art created by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers will collaborate to create ongoing, live-made art. The responses will come daily, with artists having only twenty-four hours to respond to each others’ work. Here, Rebecca Lindenberg responds to Rebecca Campbell 's "For Fever Babies."

Questions About Beauty

How wind finishes
wood into bone socket,
breath-only intoning over
and over it. How
summer's fevered mind
gathers spool and frond
into nests lovely as they are
curious - I have
so many questions
about beauty. How black
shimmers in a wing,
why crickets remember light
in their shrill purr,
how unstill is any given leaf,
how many words there aren't
for the idea of green. Why
does beauty elicit longing,
for what god? What if
splendor's not in things but
transformations? The same
wind tarnishing a trunk,
thin reeds can capture into song.
Chrysalis, snakeskin, bay
wreath, splendid remnants
of change not wrought,
just witnessed. Attention
into ecstasy, feather
into moonrise, stem
into instrument and branch
into artifact, itself, again.

See Greenmuze for Art, and Waste and Space

Vik Muniz, Atlanta and Hippomenes after Guido Reni (Pictures of Junk)

Artist Dianna Cohen shares some tough truths about plastic pollution in the ocean and in our lives. TEDtalk video

Music

Symphony

UCSC's Elliot Anderson and Jennifer Parker are featured artists in Groundswell. Parker and Barney Haynes present a new media installation that interactively engages gallery viewers with solar wind data. Anderson examines the technological landscape with a hydroponic garden that phytoremediates water polluted with mercury and other heavy metals left from 19th century mining operations.

Local singer-songwriter Vienna Teng, whose songs are hauntingly beautiful, has raised money for green efforts and walked her talk on merchandising; she's going back to school to study green business but performing 5/17 in Santa Cruz Link

Laura Veirs often writes about the joy of being in nature, inspired by farmers' market peaches and canoe river trips.

Cuyahoga On June 22, 1969, an oil slick and debris in the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland, Ohio, drawing national attention to environmental problems in Ohio and elsewhere in the United States and led to the Clean Water Act. Recently, the reclamation of the river was celebrated.

Sculpture

Environmental art

Jellyfish made out of plastic bottles

Giant robot elephant from recycled materials (from Greenmuze)

elegant sculpture with sticks

"Without a doubt, with no hyperbole: Theo Jansen is an absolute genius. Listen to his talk about the new creatures he builds from 'plastic tubes and lemonade bottles'"...Link

Polar Bear suicides

UCSC Digital Arts bio-art [1]

Images

Oil Spill portraits

A Muir Web is a complex mapping of an ecosystem. The term was coined by the Mannahatta Project, which has an amazing recreation of New York City. (here are some images). Here's an artist's interpretation of its symmetry, beauty and complexity.

UCSC has produced at least three world class nature photographers: Gordon Wiltsie (NPR audio interview), [http://www.lanting.com/worldview.html Frans Lanting (a TEDtalk video), and Kennan Ward.

Jim Balog won the Rowell Award. Here he documents global warming. Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change.Link

Five Gyres project is sailing to all major subtropical oceanic gyres (North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean) in order to study the every growing problem of marine plastic pollution. See slideshow

In this image-filled talk, Yann Arthus-Bertrand displays his three most recent projects on humanity and our habitat -- stunning aerial photographs in his series "The Earth From Above," TEDtalk video. Download his amazing new movie Home.

Andy Goldsworthy uses natural materials for his sculptures/photographs Interview Rivers and Tides (video)

More nature inspired art, but groovier

Crop circles another one

Frans Lanting presents The LIFE Project, a collection that tells the story of our planet, from its eruptive beginnings to its present diversity. Hoping for a glimpse of the world the way it was in the age of photosynthesizing stromatolites, "back before the sky turned blue," Lanting journeyed to a remote lagoon in Australia, the only place in the world where stromatolites still exist. The story moves forward from there, via a lyrical collection of photographs set to a soundtrack from Philip Glass. TEDtalk video

Stunning images of accumulated consumer goods and resources by Chris Jordan. TEDtalk video PBS episode. Chris Jordan's heart-rending images of Albatross chicks who starved to death with their stomachs full of plastic.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky documents how humans alter the world, and to a lesser degree the people engaged in doing the work (example). Video of TEDtalk accepting his award. A video, Manufactured Landscapes, (trailer) was made about his trip to China and its factories and the Three Gorges Dam. Excerpt.

Eco-disaster slideshow

Jesus Bubu Negron, a Puerto Rican artist, made this rug out of cigarette butts found on the streets. link

"Empty Los Angeles" pictures remind me of best-selling book The World Without Us multimedia

60 Stunning satellite images of Earth

Valerie Ucumari's photos of animals

Sophie Gerrard's images of e-waste in India

Other Media

Graphic Novel on Diane Wilson Wilson's book, An Unreasonable Woman

Webcomic by XKCD

Course Themes

Ecological and Social Utopias

Literature, Art, and the Environment

Environmental Science and Skeptical Challenges

Activism and Entrepreneurship