1998 Fall

I have just returned from an experience that is a perfect example of how Art and Ecology are interrelated. The trip was called "Singing and Hiking with Joanne Rand (in the Ishi Wilderness)." It was organized by Common Earth, a non-profit organization sponsoring wilderness trips for women. During this five-day outing, in between singing and hiking, I informally interviewed Joanne Rand as well as Angie Curtes (a Co-Director and trip leader of Common Earth) on the topic of Art and Ecology. I also pondered the subject myself while sitting under giant Ponderosa Pine and on a boulder beside the roaring river.

So how do art and ecology intermingle? What is their dance about? Art is a form of expression; a way of expressing oneself creatively. It is creative in that it does away with our primary spoken or written language as the way of communicating or it alters how we use that language. Singing takes language and blends it with rhythm, tune, emotion, and harmony--all things present within ourselves and the rest of the natural world. Art as a form of expression implies it is also a form of communication. When you express yourself you communicate what is going on in your soul. Through art we can communicate with nature. We can express what is within us and we can also channel the expressions of other life forms and energies in nature. Art, in its essence, increases our connection with the natural world.

Prior to the European migration to North America, Native Americans partially experienced their aural world as a symphony of natural sound where all the creature voices performed as an integral part of an animal orchestra. With their habitats radically transformed by deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization, and with many tribes displaced by war and disease, numerous families lost their direct source of sonic natural textures in a relatively short period of time. This produced a gap between a direct association of their music to the natural world and the subsequent breach created as the wild natural became so profoundly transformed. In some isolated areas of the planet, however, this natural fragile link still exists. Older forest-dwelling humans are keenly aware of the impact of natural sound on the totality of their lives and integrate it into nearly every spiritual and non-spiritual aspect.

As an artist and naturalist, I have long been intrigued by the ways in which night time hunters from non-industrial societies determine types, numbers, and condition of game and other creatures hundreds of meters distant through dark undergrowth by sound where nothing appears to the Western eye or our untrained ear to be especially distinct. It is astounding how closely their music reflects the complex rhythms, polyphonies and sonic textures of the habitats where they live and hunt. Unlike these highly sophisticated groups, we are primarily a visual culture; no longer connected spiritually or aesthetically to what the wild natural can tell us through sound. As a consequence, we've lost a certain aural acuity once central to the dynamic of our lives, profoundly impacting our view of the natural world as abstract and distorted. For me, some insight into our ancient aural past began to unfold about 30 years ago.

It had been a long night on the Amtrak train bringing me back home to Oregon. After three weeks camping out in Baja, California, I was having a hard time adjusting to being shut up inside a train car for a full day and night. I was aware of the incessant rumble of the wheels on the tracks, the strange temperature- controlled atmosphere, the comfortable but by no means sleep-inducing seat, and the culture shock of being among US citizens again--some of them with cellular phones. Though the daytime scenery was beautiful, the monotony of my sensory environment (after the refreshing lack of monotony of those three weeks) made it very challenging to get to sleep. I attempted to coax myself to sleep with a sandwich, then with some gorp, then with some other food I had packed (though I'd already had dinner). No luck. Within a few sleepless hours, I had surrendered to the idea that I would only feel better again physically, my body back in balance with itself and with the earth, once I had gotten off that train. Instead of distracting myself with more food, I distracted myself with other thoughts.

I'd been an organic gardening instructor for several years. Other staff at the educational center I worked at had been encouraging me to write a book about gardening, and this had become one of my wintertime goals--but I couldn't help but be bored and vaguely uncomfortable with the idea. What could I write that hadn't already been written elsewhere? For someone in his mid-thirties with barely over a decade of gardening and farming experience to pretend to be more expert than the thousands of lifetime gardeners who have never written books seemed presumptuous at best. Short articles and newsletter contributions were more up my alley, not a book.

In my sessions of pre-school creative movement classes focusing on fairy tales, we were dramatizing "The Frog Prince," the well-loved story of the frog (actually a prince under the spell of an evil witch) who was metamorphosed back into a prince through the love of a beautiful princess. When we finally arrived at the magic moment, however, Willie and David rebelled: "We don't want to be princes; we want to stay frogs!" The only solution was to improvise an alternative ending, with the help of two frogs and several princesses. In our version, the princess and the frog remained good friends, and the frog introduced the princess to his world. He taught the princess to swim in the palace pond, to jump through the palace gardens, and to sing on warm summer nights. And they lived happily ever after, with the princess happy and fulfilled--even without a prince charming!

The story of our revised "Frog Prince" was itself an example of metamorphosis. Grimm, the author of the fairy tale, had assumed that frogs would prefer to be princes. Willie and David had helped us stretch our imaginations through their raucous croaks and their energetic jumps around the room, so that, indeed, being a prince began to seem a little boring. They helped us all--even the little girls, who definitely wanted to "stay princesses"--understand that human beings are part of the circle of creation, including princesses, pools, frogs, and the flowers climbing the castle wall. (The truth is that, given the choice, it is unlikely that any frog today would change his place for a prince, especially in this day of tabloids and paparazzi!)

One of the most interesting developments on the international art scene today is the growth of so-called Ecological Art--art created in direct response to the environmental crisis. Everywhere, artists are voicing their concern, creating works to dramatize this concern, and working directly on the earth itself--sculpting it, transmuting it-- to repair the damage done.

Ecological art springs from a long tradition--one that, in the United States at least, dates back to the 19th century. Landscape painters from the Hudson River School were among the first to warn of the danger of "the wilderness passing away and the necessity of saving and perpetuating its features," as Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School expressed it. Their panoramic vistas romantically documented the wilderness they sought to preserve and occasionally contained foreboding images of industrial encroachment as well. In Andrew Melrose's "Westward the Star of the Empire Takes its Way," the blinding glare of a train's searchlight shines out against the darkening evening sky with prophetic implications. However obscured by the self-referential painterly traditions which culminated in Abstract Expressionism and Post Expressionism, both impulses of the Hudson River School--the celebration of nature and the depiction of technology's encroachment--have lived on through Ryder, Homer, and Hopper, to name just a few, well into our times.