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232 JUDIT FARKAS 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/ 18 19
