Environmental activist Bill McKibben once remarked, “We can register [climate change] with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?”
Two years ago, I was looking for an escape from the humid New Jersey summer and went inside Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment at Princeton Art Museum. In the first room, I enjoyed looking at beautiful oil paintings of pristine landscapes. Yet, as I moved through the gallery, the pieces began to shift from peaceful scenes to far grimmer ones. Finally, I came to the last room, which was filled with art about protecting the environment. Something clicked in my head, and I began to understand how hundreds of years of colonization and industrialization led to our current climate and environmental crisis.
I was so fired up after seeing this exhibit that I went home and started looking up other climate art shows to attend. I bothered my friends by incessantly sending pictures of pieces that I liked. As I became immersed in the climate art community, though, I saw a problem. I loved the art, but I already loved art in general. I loved learning more about the environment, but I am a tree-hugging, granola-eating liberal. What would this same art mean to someone who is not predisposed to finding it meaningful? To what extent could viewing art about nature and climate influence how someone understands their relationship to the environment?
Climate communicators have been using images for a long time to try to elicit emotions from the non-scientific public about climate change. One of the first climate images that you might think of is the sick polar bear atop a melting glacier. If you can picture that in your mind, you are in the majority, as 97% of American survey respondents associate this particular scene with climate change. And yet, despite the strong image recognition, 60% of respondents ranked their perceived risk of climate change as moderate to low. These images are still too steeped in the politics of climate science to create room for reflection.
Art seems like a logical next step. Art is more abstract than images or data, so it parallels the abstract nature of climate change. It has a long history of interaction with social change movements (Hello, women’s suffrage). Art shows instead of tells, which could allow the viewer to come to a realization without the accompanying political narrative. As Bertolt Brecht said, “art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
I decided to put climate art to the test for my senior thesis project. I collected three sets of art — one that was made up of “climate” art, one that was “nature” art, and one that was a mix of both. Each was shown to a different, randomized group. Then, I did a between-subjects comparison of the groups to see what changed. Did the groups respond differently? Did they emote in different ways? Did they report a greater will towards future action?
This is my favorite piece from the climate set, Breathe by Kathelijne Roosen. The photo collage was inspired by a scientific article that explained how rising temperatures in the ocean lower the atmospheric concentration of oxygen. This level of detail is not abundantly clear in the image without an accompanying explanation, but what is clear is that she is getting consumed and she is unable to breathe.
Breathe’s interpretation of human interaction with the ocean is directly contrasted in this piece, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. This period of art was all about reverence and awe towards the natural surroundings. It does present nature as beautiful, but it also portrays human beings as dominant. Whereas Breathe has humans and nature in a struggling relationship, this one shows humans as superior to nature. Both pieces have humans interacting with the ocean, but one is towering above while the other gets consumed.
(These two pieces came from the climate and nature set, respectively).
This is what I thought about these pieces, but I wanted to know what my peers would say. I opened up my survey to the Subject Pool and collected qualitative and quantitative responses from other Stevens students. Here is what I found:
When confronted with climate art, people often suggested negative emotions, such as anxiety and anger. When they had nature art, they were notably much more positive, opting for words like peaceful or happy. When they saw a mixture of both, their responses were multifaceted and showed the most understanding of human’s role in nature and climate.
Even word choice affected one’s willingness to self-report emotions. When I asked them their opinions on climate change, nobody was willing to report positive emotions, but a subtle word change to nature caused the exact opposite response, with only positive emotions.
I compared the responses with the participant’s reported partisanship. As the participants were more right-leaning, they began to see each treatment more similarly, whereas left-leaning viewers had a wide range of emotions across the treatments.
Here you can see that phenomenon with self-reported peace after viewing the treatments. Left-leaning participants who viewed the nature set (Treatment 2) felt very peaceful, whereas right-leaning participants felt significantly less so. Politically left people viewed the mixed set (Treatment 3) more like they saw the climate set, whereas politically right people saw it more like the nature set.
When I asked people to describe their set of images, most people used emotions and feelings in their responses without being prompted to do so. They had verbose responses, detailing specific pieces of art that they remembered. When I asked them to share their emotions in the following question, respondents were much more reluctant to do so, even though they had in the previous question without prompting. This was also matched with partisanship, as right-leaning respondents were more likely to say “indifferent” or “no change” in emotion, even if they had previously listed emotions.
When I probed the participants on their intent to act in the future, much of their willingness came from preexisting attitudes or actions. However, a small change was found in participants who reported anger after viewing the art. If they were angry, they were much more likely to take action.
It also became clear that works of art were more effective when they had an obvious narrative. Many people talked about Breathe in their responses for this reason. Even though their ideas about it varied from “terrifying futuristic horror film” to “inspired me to protect the ocean” to “very weird weather stuff,” it is evident that people remembered this work due to how often it was mentioned. Even though the responses were not all promising in terms of changing behaviors or attitudes, they were reflecting on the piece regardless of their stance.
I hope to continue this project in the future and do ethnographic research about site-specific environmental art. There are so many wonderful climate creators, and their work should be explored on a wider scale. It is clear that emotion is part of both climate change communication and art, and should remain in both. As climate artist Agnes Denes said, “making art today is about assuming responsibility for your fellow human beings.”
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