Tag Archives: Poetics

Environmental Poetics

James Sherry

Ligorano and Reese’s art renders environmental risk as an immediate message that we all understand, THE FUTURE melting_away. But the practical solutions beyond art engage the primary cause of global warming, HUMAN DESIRE, that doesn’t melt. Desire continues.

We have the technology to arrest climate change. We have the political systems to transform society. But we lack the will to change. Art, poetry, music supply our will, the justification, if you will, to change. Environmental change engages human endeavor broadly: political change, social change, change in how we imagine ourselves in the world, economic change, new art, more realistic views of risk. The list is thorough. Our understanding is partial and filled with error. Error is why we cannot rely on a moral principle to arrest climate change. We must deal with each component and model it against a world art and poetry imagine. And at each step in imagining we compare what we have made to the model. Is it working, what are the consequences, whose interest is served, how can we distribute the risk?

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