Last week, I wrote about my reverence for nature, my decision to make it my artistic subject, and my distress about our climate emergency. In examining how my paintings and my concerns overlap, I put forth the notion of my paintings as “potential memorials.” It’s a dark idea, and considering the very likely physical and ecological impacts that will be irreversible without significant action, I find that darkness appropriate.
For those of us who are privileged (admittedly, like me, as I am a white, cis-gendered, straight person born in America to white cis-gendered parents who had college degrees, owned a home, and were able to send me to college) the consequences of global warming feel abstract. Even as these consequences become more concrete (like Houston having 3 “500 year floods” in three years, aka 3 floods that had a 0.2% chance of occurring) we go on, perhaps rebuilding, perhaps buying better insurance, perhaps thanking our lucky stars it wasn’t us.
When we talk about climate change, there’s this idea it’s just change, and the world is always changing, isn’t it? Change is normal, something we can write off as outside our control or responsibility. It becomes easier to brush these troubles under the rug or outright deny. And thank goodness, as it frees us from feeling the anxiety that can consume us when we see, believe, and contemplate what’s happening. Anxiety is bad for our health, so it seems almost healthy to ignore or deny the issue. But our uneasiness doesn’t disappear when we keep quiet. Keeping it buried deep down, we not only feel the anxiety, but the depressing isolation of experiencing it alone.
It’s scary to talk about the climate emergency, and the big emotions we may have because of it. But is the conversation actually scarier than the issue itself? What if talking could help us find solutions, build resilience, and feel less alone?
While I unpack my feelings about an altered climate as an artist, a parent, and a citizen, I will be exploring complicated and sometimes uncomfortable subject matter. It is not my desire, goal, or duty to censor my art or my speech to keep others ensconced within their own comfort zones of perceived safety.
Lastly, I’d like to share two articles I enjoyed this week:
6 Tips For Talking To Kids About Climate Change (I listened to the podcast version of this by NPR’s Life Kit)
How Should We Talk About What is Happening To Our Planet? (A Washington Post piece that examines how the language we use to talk about things impacts how we feel about them)