Since 2004, Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Sussman has explored harsh climates from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert to photograph the world’s oldest living organisms. This includes Pando, an aspen colony in Utah with a root system around 80,000 years old, and the Llareta plants in South America, which grow 1.5 cm annually and live for over 3,000 years. Despite their longevity, such ecosystems face threats from climate change and human activity.

Her photographs are meditations on “deep time” – timescales that are outside of our human, physiological experience of time – and often show the most versatile adaptation to the harsh climate conditions these organism are living in.

Agnes Denes (*1931 in Budapest) is a pioneer in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. One of her most striking installations is “Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan” from 1982. During a three month period the artist and volunteers planted a wheat field in one of the last undeveloped sections of Manhattan. An area right next to the Twin Towers and Wall Street called Battery Park City. The artist gained more attention recently, but is still overlooked in her prophetic art.

Nick Newman captures a billboard advertising the release of the new Diablo IV computer game while New York is being hit by heavy smoke from wildfire smoke in Canada.

In this article Rebecca Solnit shifts the perspective on climate change: Instead of framing the shift towards a green future as abundance to austerity, we should look at it as freeing from a flagellating state. By getting rid of “deadly emissions[…], nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction.” We could shift to a “sense of security, social connectedness, mental and physical health, and other measures of well-being are often dismal.” She shows how this would be an opportunity for “a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy.”

November 2022 hatten Aktivisti der Letzten Generation im Wiener Leopold Museum das Schutzglas eines Klimt-Bildes mit Öl beschüttet und sich daran festgeklebt. Der Museumsdirektor Hans-Peter Wipplinger hatte die Aktion damals als inhaltlich richtig aber formell kontraproduktiv kritisiert.

Nun hat das Museum eine eigene Form der Aufmerksamkeitsgenerierung gefunden und 15 Kunstwerke schief aufgehangen. Die Neigung der Bilder skaliert dabei mit dem Temperaturanstieg in den entsprechend gezeigten Orten.

Churchill is a town in northern Canada that is famous for migrating polar bears. The shortfilm (14’, 2022) documents clash between human infrastructure and animal, but also the tourism resulting from the spectacle. It leaves you with the question who the nuisance is.

The film is produced by The New Yorker and is available on Vimeo and YouTube.

The shortfilm (2022, 25′) documents walrus haulouts – large gatherings of walruses seeking refuge on shore when their search for remaining sea ice forces them to swim much farther and farther distances.

The marine biologist Maxim Chakilev records these dramatic gatherings in Cape Serdtse-Kamen, Russia. Living together with the scientist in a small, wooden hut surrounded by thousands of walruses, the film team captures the intense atmosphere and suffering of the animals. And the helplessness of Maxim.

The film is produced by The New Yorker (which provide valuable background information on the film), is shortlisted for the 2023 Oscars and premiered 2022 at Berlinale. It is currently disabled on YouTube, which might be due to the Oscar nomination, but is still available at Yahoo.

A team of scientists from the University of Würzburg published an updated estimates of weight of biomass on earth by category. Wild land mammals have a total biomass of 22 million tons. Marine mammals account for 40 million tons. These numbers are far overshadowed by 390 million tons of human biomass and 630 million tons of livestock and other hangers-on such as urban rats.

Reading the list of numbers in the article makes me wish for a visualisation, that would make the relations and categories much clearer.

But at the very end, the article reveals another insight. But this time, it’s about the thinking of one of the involved scientists, which could be read as representative of Western thinking about nature in general: “We can only conserve what we understand, and we can only truly understand what we can quantify.”