Learning From Trees: Artists and Climate Solutions

Welcome to “Learning from Trees: Artists and Climate Solutions,” a panel discussion at this 112th Annual College Art Association Conference that seeks to center trees and their world as a way for us to reorient ourselves and our relationship with the living beings that surround us. 

I need not tell you that I am worried about our planet and our future within it. You are aware that we are leaving the stability of the Holocene and entering the unpredictable future of the Anthropocene. You already know that we are reaching critical tipping points of no return. What has brought us to this point is carbon emissions from burning ancient trees and plant life from the Carboniferous period, 360 to 286 million years ago, and the unprecedented destruction of our modern-day trees. 

Since the time of our earliest known civilizations—the Neolithic era and the beginning of agriculture ten thousand years ago—we have felled about a third of the planet’s forests, and the speed of loss has only accelerated; as much forest has been lost in the past hundred years as in the nine thousand before. Jill Lapore describes how, with the loss of forests, we lose “worlds within those woods, each habitat and dwelling place, a universe within each rotting log, a galaxy within a pine cone.” More than this, we lose our connection to trees and forests and, therefore, ourselves and our ability to understand the world. 

What we need is a paradigm shift, a re-setting of values systems, and a new understanding of how to live in this world. We have forgotten–because of their erroneously assumed abundance–that trees are what makes life possible here on Earth. They are ancient and intelligent beings with much to teach us if we relearn to listen. How do we return to knowing trees? Through patience and careful observation, from silencing what we think we know to listening to what trees have to say.

For Full Infomation about the 2024 CAA Panel, click here.

• “Sun Eaters: How do we relate with the non-human plant world if our invisible similarities are made visible?” Grace Grothaus
  
• BEING [with] TREES, Kendall Reiss, Tufts University
  
• Inhaling Consciousness: Talking Through Tubes, Clarissa Ribeiro, Roy Ascott Studio SIVA DeTAO
  
• Tree as Monument: Catharsis in Artistic Relationships Between Humans and Trees, Prof. Shana Garr, MA, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
  
• The Mesquite Mile: Learning from Mesquite on the Llano Estacado, Travis Neel, Texas Tech University – School of Art
  
• Eccentric Grids : Mapping the Mannaged Forest, Katerie Gladdys, University of Florida, School of Art + Art History