From: Issue 30 Categories: environment
Art d'Eco
A ship moves slowly through the icy waters of the Davis Strait, navigating the rocky western coastline of Greenland. On board, geologists, atmospheric scientists, and oceanographers are collecting scientific data. But this is not your standard arctic expedition. Also on board is a crew of artists—musicians, sculptors, poets, photographers, and filmmakers—here to observe and communicate the urgent message of a planet in distress.
Their voyage is made possible through Cape Farewell, a UK-based charitable organization that takes artists, educators, and scientists to the landscapes where climate change is most visible. British designer and photographer David Buckland is the man behind the project.
“There was a big frustration among [climate scientists] because they were stuck using scientific language,” he says. “The idea was to charter a schooner, sail it high into the arctic with scientists and artists on board, and come back to say, this is our human-scale story.”
In 2003, Cape Farewell took its maiden expedition to Svalbard, an archipelago located off the northern coast of Norway and far north of the Arctic Circle. Since then, there have been eight trips—seven of which have spanned the reaches of the high Arctic.
In the past six years, Cape Farewell has attracted many internationally-renowned artists, including British author Ian McEwan, Toronto’s own songstress Leslie Feist—who took part in the 2008 expedition to Disko Bay, Greenland—and Yann Martel, best-selling author of Life of Pi, who joined Cape Farewell’s most recent expedition through the Amazonian Cloud Forest of the Andes in 2009.
For Martel, the union of the artistic and scientific communities offers a much-needed holistic approach to climate change.
“Climate change cannot be a purely scientific issue, as most of us tune out because we can’t understand the science. It can’t be a strictly political issue, because most of us feel disempowered on a daily basis,” he says. “It has to become a cultural issue so that we can create a dialogue that moves beyond science and politics.”
“If you can turn the issue into an emotional activity, then you get into the notion of ‘care’,” Buckland says. “Why do I care for my children, my parents, my loved ones? Why do I care for the planet? That is the question we need to get people involved with.”
