Treaty obligations: science and art in Antarctica

In this chapter Mike Pearson takes us to Antarctica. This continent is a vital record of past climate patterns, and our future depends on the fate of its covering of ice. Pearson considers how international treaties have imposed strict environmental controls on what is permissible on the continent, and discusses its unique status as an area where military activity is banned. These controls cover the scientists who are stationed there and the relatively small number of visitors that will arrive in cruise ships. He notes that science holds an unchallenged hegemonic position and that the Treaty makes no acknowledgement of the arts and that the advent of tourism was unforeseen. In this context, he considers how more recent programmes have aimed to promote understanding and appreciation of the values of Antarctica through the contribution of writers, artists and musicians. He considers how such initiatives as the Antarctica Pavilion at the 56th Venice Art Biennale have challenged the scientific domination of the continent by claiming Antarctica as a cultural space.

Symphonic pastorals redux

Our experience of the environment relies on all the senses. In this chapter, Aaron Allen introduces non-musicologists to the relatively new field of ecomusicology. He argues that for musicology, the genre/idea of the symphony is laden with prestige; for ecocriticism, the pastoral has similar stature and is a genre/mode central to the discipline. In the concise juxtaposition of these two terms, Allen illustrates ecomusicology, which connects ecocritical and musicological scholarship, and further outlines a brief critical history of selected symphonies in relation to the pastoral. He makes the case that symphonies – ostensibly a textless genre of music conceived as abstract – can relate ideas about nature. Such connections between disciplines, approaches, and materials contribute to the larger effort in the environmental (post)humanities to break down humans’ problematic and the self-destructive nature-culture binary.

Signs and sentiment in British wildlife art

Wildlife art does not receive the critical attention that it deserves. In this chapter, William Welstead considers how the images made after close observation in the field incorporate the signs and visual clues that enable us to identify the species, have some idea of what the individuals are doing and how they relate to the wider environment. These are all important factors in building an informed view of the non-human world and establishing how we feel about it. Wildlife artists tread a difficult path between serving science and catering for the affective response of viewers and between the representational and the abstract in depicting their subject matter. Welstead suggests that the way we recognise wildlife by its overall look or ‘jizz’ means that drawings and paintings can capture in a few lines and shapes the essence of the creature. This economical application of lines and colour therefore allows for at least some level of abstraction. The subject would merit further attention from ecocritics.

Two familiar paths well-travelled

In this chapter photographer John Darwell, reminds us that big environmental issues and Homo sapiens’s problematic response to them are also evident in the mundane experience of our day-to-day environment. Darwell, who until fairly recently had based his photographic practice on post-industrial landscapes of Sheffield and Manchester, and the area around Chernobyl, has now turned his attention to the ‘edgeland’ of his twice-daily dog walks. This immersion in the landscape throws up new subjects for his work. One aspect that stands out is the phenomenon of discarded dog-shit bags. Dog owners have taken the trouble to clean up after their pets, but then discard the bags by hanging them in trees or just throwing them away. Bringing photographic aesthetics to what is a disturbing subject has allowed him to develop a typology of this practice. While we may prefer to look away, these images do pose big questions for environmentalists. How can we solve the big issues of climate change and loss of biodiversity, if we can’t even carry through to its conclusion this modest attempt not to despoil the environment?

The word among stones

In this chapter Peter Barry explores poems about stones, on stones and as stones. He shows how our ancestors had a special regard for stones particularly those that seemed out of place, such as glacial erratics. The Ringing Stone on Tiree is one such, bearing numerous cup marks from Neolithic times. He considers how poems have been placed in the environment on trails and paths, sometimes with a didactic purpose as part of an environmentalist interpretive scheme. Some of these have taken advantage of the expressive potential of the stones themselves, and of letter carvers who blend this with their own artistic heritage. Collaborations between carver and poet can make best use of the space between the words that come closest to Barry’s interest in avant-gardeorneo-modernist poetry(especially ‘concrete’ and ‘visual’ poetries). Barry also considers poems in urban settings, in projects involving close collaboration with councils, NGOs and communities, where the words have been incised on bridges, monuments, paths, or pavements, as by Alyson Hallett in Bath, Lemn Sissay in Manchester, Bill Herbert near Darlington, and Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke in Tonypandy.

ARTlines: three walking artists in Iceland

Artist Patti Lean gives an account in this chapter of a walking and camping tour of Iceland in the company of two other artists. The three artists, in sharing the experience of close contact with the sublime landscape of the island, each responded in their own way to produce art work. Lean’s art practice focussed on this compelling landscape, but all three artists also engaged with the rich Icelandic culture and the chapter includes discussion of writer Halldór Laxness, film maker Benedikt Erlingsson and artist Louisa Matthíasdóttir. The challenge for Lean is to reconcile her training in Art History and the associated narrative of the sublime, with the environmental concerns that she met during this tour, for example the failure of breeding for arctic terns as climate change has left too little food in the surrounding sea.

Ecocriticism extends its boundaries

This chapter maps out the richness of ecocriticism as it has extended its boundaries during the past decade from environmental literary texts to the wider environmental humanities. The still growing sense of environmental crisis and climate change is significantly influencing both creative methodologies and outputs, and critical responses, in the humanities and beyond. In particular, there is an increasing trend towards collaboration between the creative arts and the sciences, and between writers and artists in different media. At the same time, disciplines from social science and heritage interpretation are finding common cause with the creative arts. These themes are further explored in the introduction to subsequent chapters.

Halfway-to-whole things: ecologies of writing and collaboration

Philip Gross explains how he started to explore the creative process at the same time as the terms ‘ecocriticism’ and ‘ecopoetic’ made an appearance. Although he writes about the natural world, he is wary of being seen as an ecopoet, on the grounds that it does not feel like his own experience of the writing process and that it implies a specific moral-political stance. In this chapter Gross looks at several collaborative projects that he has been drawn to, sensing that they too hold clues to this process, not just in the subject matter but in the process itself. In one such collaboration he joined a multi-disciplinary group that brought him into contact with people with a professional interest in ecology and the social sciences as well as with a visual artist who bases her work on walking. Subsequently he walked together with the same artist at the Newport Wetlands. He uses examples of his own poetry to explore how the creative and collaborative process works for him in an environmental context.

Aesthetics as ecology, or the question of the form of eco-art

In this chapter Clive Cazeaux argues that eco-art poses a problem to classification because its two terms have such a broad meaning: after conceptual art, there are no restrictions on the material form art can take, and ecology covers notions of environment, nature, interactions with nature, interconnection, and the fundamental, ontological condition of belonging. He considers recent attempts to classify the field, and suggests that, while they can be helpful, the full force of the problem of categorisation is better addressed by turning to the position given to aesthetics by phenomenology. This takes categorisation down to the level of how categories can be applied to experience when conventional, subject/object frameworks have been suspended. Although this leaves the classification of eco-art open, it nevertheless shows that the openness is a result of the complexities of our aesthetic rootedness in the world, where ‘aesthetic’ is understood in sensory, causal and metaphorical terms.

Nature matters: notes on Ackroyd & Harvey, ecocriticism and praxis

In this chapter Eve Ropek claims that to approach any artwork ecocritically, it is necessary to bring to it some knowledge of current scientific thought regarding the biosphere. Indeed the breadth and complexity of the ideas and issues of humans' place within the Earth's ecosystems encourage an interdisciplinary approach; to join together methods and insights in order to inform the next steps at what is seen to be a crucial global point is an urgent and daunting task. Artists working today are very well aware of the narrative of change and of environmental issues. Ropek considers how this inter-disciplinary approach can be applied to selected artworks by British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who practise in partnership as Ackroyd & Harvey. The examples she discusses include such artefacts as: photographs in which the negative image is projected onto grass as it grows, so that the resulting portrait is developed on the grass itself; an artificial diamond made from a polar bear bone; and an installation based on the skeleton of a minke whale. These artists create works that are directly related to climate change and its impact on the biosphere.