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There are works that go even a step further and become self-regenerating
ecosystems: the American artist Betsy Damons Living Water Garden" was completed
in Chengdu, China in 1998. It is a fish-shaped 5.9-hectare public park, whose
design as a natural wetland cleaning system cleans 50 000 gallons of polluted water
from the Funan river per day, within the artistic project. The Living Water Garden
was also repeated in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and it inspired several other
environment-revitalizing projects (Hubbell — Ryan 2022: 155).
One of the above-listed key features of eco-art is establishing a dialogue with
scientific concepts, principles, and methods. Both art and science rely on
observation and interpretation, which may bring the two closer to each other.
Ruth Wallen’s definition (eco-art is “grounded in an ecological ethic and systems
theory, addressing the web of interrelationships between the physical, biological,
cultural, political, and historical aspects of the ecosystems”, Wallen 2012: 235)
suggests that environmental art relies on scientific results. Bullot expressly declares
that cooperation between the sciences and the arts, and a sincere dialogue between
diverse fields of scholarship are necessary. They especially stress its importance
because this cooperation might enhance the viewers’ interest and awareness, making
them want to possess the social and natural scientific knowledge required for
understanding the artworks and participating in them (Bullot 2014). At this
juncture, we return to the question of the role art can play in mediating scientific
knowledge and in understanding environmental questions, problems, and possible
solutions: science appears in these works as the authentic source which can be
mediated most effectively through artistic means. This is why art is so important
for the study of EH. On the other hand, EH’s approach aids translation between
the two — scientific and artistic — languages.
In the past two decades in eco-art, several new trends and methods have appeared in
response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the increasingly more severe ecological
crisis (summed up: Hubbell — Ryan 2022: 160-165). These have all been greatly inspired
by the essay What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art by the activist Bill McKibben
(2005).'8
Climate change art (cli-art)
Its aim is to impart cultural, social, emotional, and spiritual meaning to scientific results.
For example, artists use climate change data to render them understandable and to
exert an emotional influence on the audience. See, for instance, Eve Mosher’s project
High WaterLine: Visualizing Climate Change (2007), in the course of which she designates
with a painted line the areas all over the world that — owing to climate change — will
be underwater in the not too distant future.!”
Multispecies art
It involves diverse species, forms of life, and organisms in the artistic process, regarding
them as active participants and co-creators. The most rapidly growing branch is plant
art, art working with plants. An early example is Laurent Mignonneau and Christa
7 https://www.keepersofthewaters.org/living-water-garden
https://grist.org/article/mckibben-imagine/
https://highwaterline.org/
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