Drawings that show the beauty and fragility of Earth

Today, millions of individuals across the globe regularly encounter works of art. Whether, in the museum, the city-center, or on the web, art is an omnipresent part of human life. Underlying the fascination with art is a uniquely impactful experience. When individuals describe noteworthy art or explain why they go to museums, most often they refer to a complex mix of psychological events (Pelowski and Akiba, 2011). Art viewing engenders myriad emotions, evokes evaluations, physiological reactions, and in some cases can mark or alter lives. Reactions can also differ greatly between individuals and settings, or evolve within individual experiences themselves.

This really resonated with me, and helped me understand both scientifically, and spiritually, why I (and most of us on this Earth!) are drawn towards water.

An all around beautiful account of the far north that I highly recommend!

This article discusses the potential role that emotions might play in enticing a lifestyle that diminishes climate change. Climate change is an important challenge for society. There is a growing consensus that climate change is due to our behavior, but few people are willing to significantly adapt their lifestyle. Empirical studies show that people lack a sense of urgency: they experience climate change as a problem that affects people in distant places and in a far future. Several scholars have claimed that emotions might be a necessary tool in communication about climate change.

The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change is becoming more widely understood in scientific and policy circles, but public awareness lags behind. The potential of visual communication to accelerate social learning and motivate implementation of the substantial policy, technological, and life-style changes needed, has begun to be recognised.

Many actors—including scientists, journalists, artists, and campaigning organizations—create visualizations of climate change. In doing so, they evoke climate change in particular ways, and make the issue meaningful in everyday discourse. While a diversity of climate change imagery exists, particular types of climate imagery appear to have gained dominance, promoting particular ways of knowing about climate change (and marginalizing others). This imagery, and public engagement with this imagery, helps to shape the cultural politics of climate change in important ways. This article critically reviews the nascent research area of the visual representations of climate change, and public engagement with visual imagery.

If carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels continue unabated, the vast West Antarctic ice sheet could begin to disintegrate, causing the sea to rise by five to six feet by the end of the century, destroying coastal cities and low-lying island nations and creating environmental devastation within the lifetimes of children born today.

Polar temperatures over the last several million years have, at times, been slightly warmer than today, yet global mean sea level has been six to nine metres higher as recently as the Last Interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) and possibly higher during the Pliocene epoch (about three million years ago). In both cases the Antarctic ice sheet has been implicated as the primary contributor, hinting at its future vulnerability.

No empirical evidence is offered to document the principle of cognitive appraisal as a necessary precondition for emotional arousal. The contrasting view of an affective primacy and independence, however, is derived from a series of findings and phenomena including the existence of neuroanatomical structures allowing for independent affective process.

In July 1869, American painter William Bradford, alongside photographers John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson, embarked on the first expedition to the Arctic devoted principally to art. In August 2012, I lead an expedition mirroring Bradford’s journey. You can read about it here.