Category Archives: Art & environment

Wishing you were here, Berta Cáceres

Roger Waters, a member of Pink Floyd, sings “Wish you were here” for Berta Cáceres.

Minamata film explores a key moment in environmental history

One of the great turning points in environmental history –a  “Silent Spring” moment — involved the environmental catastrophe in Minamata, Japan that started in the 1950s but shocked. the world in 1971.

Fifteen years into the catastrophe,  the now-famous photos from Minamata  re-aligned perceptions of how dangerous chemicals can have devastating  effects on human health.  No one could look at the photos of Tomoko Uemura and  doubt that.

Tomoko Uemura, W. Eugene Smith, 1971.

The story behind the Minamata photos, and the price that  American photographer W. Eugene Smith paid for taking them,  is the subject of a new film (released Feb. 2021)  starring Johnny Depp, Hiroyuki Sanada,  Jun Kunimura, Ryo Kase, Tadanobu Asano and Bill Nighy.

It’s not a well known story, possibly because Smith was one of the most exasperating artists who ever picked up a camera.  In fact, a PBS  documentary about his life was entitled “Photography Made Difficult.”

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The founding of Greenpeace


On Sept. 15, 1971, the Phyllis Cormack sailed out of Vancouver to confront nuclear testing by the US government in Amchitka. The boat was renamed the Greenpeace and the concert to help fund the expedition, with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, sailed into legend.

Feather heist

A pattern for a fishing tie. Flute player Edwin Rist stole hundreds of Alfred Wallace’s bird specimens from the 1860s to resell to obsessed fly tiers.

A million dollars worth of exotic bird feathers, collected in the 19th century and kept in a scientific museum, was stolen by a flute player in 2008.   An extraordinary story about under-funded science, over-amped fly tying, and indifferent police.

See This American Life, Jan. 19, 2020. The story is based on the book “The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century” by Kirk Wallace Johnson.

Hidden in old paintings, a clue to past climate.

By Lindsey Konkel
The Daily Climate, March 25, 2014

 

 

 

Deep red sunsets offer more than just a stunning backdrop for Old Masters’ paintings: They can tell how dirty the air was when the painter picked up the brush.

The degree of red in the skies depicted in historic paintings offers a proxy for pollution levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere, according to a study published Tuesday. What’s more, artists’ sunsets have gradually gotten redder over the past 150 years, likely reflecting increased manmade pollution.

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