Every few years, the U.S. government releases the National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report on the effects of climate change in the U.S. The most recent report includes something unexpected – an online art gallery.
Lustig: “Art has the ability to engage people emotionally in a way that perhaps a 2,000-page scientific document does not.”
Allyza Lustig is a senior staff manager with the U.S. Global Change Research Program and a landscape painter. She helped curate the gallery’s 92 works of art.
They include paintings, drawings, collages, and even beadwork and address a range of issues.
For example, a set of photographs shows the charred branches of oak trees after a wildfire. A painting depicts a young woman drawing trees and clean water in front of polluting smokestacks. And a fabric wall hanging uses different colors of string to illustrate the disproportionate amount of carbon emitted by the world’s most polluting countries.
Lustig: “Art is its own way of knowing. It’s its own way of documenting, understanding, interpreting, observing, imagining, creating, etc.”
So Lustig says seeing art alongside the science can give people a deeper understanding of climate change.
Reporting credit: ChavoBart Digital Media
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