Maritime artists address environmental issues

Reasoning with a psychopathic culture hasn’t been much fun
for environmentalists. It’s probably futile anyway—if you wanna
change minds, you gotta touch hearts first. And touching hearts is the
work of artists, not policy wonks.

“Art hits us viscerally,” explains spoken word artist Laura Burke.
Burke, known for dropping earth-loving rhymes, will compete as part of
Halifax’s national slam team in Victoria this November. “It does
something typical education can’t do.”

The hard part is saving sermons for preachers. “The first draft of
my novel was too didactic,” says New Brunswick novelist Carla Gunn. Her
debut novel, Amphibian (which just got picked up by Random House
Germany), is the story of nine-year old Phin, a David Suzuki in
training—if he can survive the anxiety of saving the world from
grown-ups. “The most challenging thing was to make Phin engaging and
interesting, but not preachy. He has a lot of knowledge to share, but
that can alienate an audience.”

The solution was to lighten Phin’s earth obsession with the humour
inherent in a child’s frustration with the adult world. “Phin is very
funny,” Gunn says. “He’s so observant in a raw and sarcastic way, which
helped when he was over-the-top. Much of what he says is dark and
disturbing, but those messages are balanced by humour and hope.”

Hope is a word environmentalists increasingly struggle with as
predicted outcomes of climate change become more dire. Phin finds hope
in locusts, which live in isolated pockets until the right
environmental conditions arise. Then they swarm together. “Phin
imagines swarms of people who care like he does, in massive mobilized
units,” Gunn notes. This image helps Phin channel his anxiety into
action, something Gunn thinks we all need to do.

Like Phin, she takes her motivation from nature. She grew up in the
Miramichi, near a large field, a forest and a river. “I was motivated
to write about the environment because of my experience with nature,”
she says. “As I wrote I became more passionate about protecting
it.”

Gunn became involved with a citizens’ group fighting the University
of New Brunswick, which was hawking off large chunks of its forested
wetlands to big-box stores. “They’re the experts on helping people with
the most pressing problems and they’re doing this,” she says. “We look
to experts to help us out of crisis without understanding that the
experts themselves are limited. Until we’re all involved, we won’t
solve the environmental crises we face.”

Some have given up hope altogether. As author Derrick Jensen puts
it, “the most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists
anywhere are, ‘we’re fucked.'” Humanity being fucked is a major theme
in the video art of Halifax native Emily Vey Duke and her partner
Cooper Battersby. It is prevalent in the duo’s most recent project,
Beauty Plus Pity, which showed as part of the Nova Scotia Art
Gallery’s recent Forces of Nature exhibit. “This view is stated
explicitly in much of our work: we are beyond redemption, we have
reached a hopeless place environmentally,” Duke says.

Despite her own neurotic, “almost superstitious” tendencies to
recycle and seek sustainable means of transportation, she says “the
efforts of the environmental movement are largely futile.” Duke doesn’t
consider this message bleak. “It is a source of great satisfaction, a
relief to recognize that humanity is not going to go on as a blight
infinitely. Whatever organisms survive us will rebuild this planet with
relative harmony.”

Like Gunn, Duke and Battersby temper a difficult message with
humour. Duke adds that shameless anthropomorphizing also helps. “We’re
unabashed about making animals or inanimate objects things with which
we can sympathize.” Allowing, or forcing, that emotional response and
sympathy is the goal of the work, rather than getting people excited
about the “nuts and bolts of the environmental movement.”

Laura Burke also aims heartward, but she dares hope her audience
will also pause to think on whatever they feel. “With my poem,
Water, I wanted to relate how we treat ourselves and each other
with taking care of the environment. Hopefully the poem hits home for
people and they see that when we don’t take care of ourselves we don’t
take care of the world. Some people think I’m too idealistic, and for
some it really speaks to them.”

For Burke, staying off the pulpit is as simple as checking with
herself to make sure she’s speaking from the heart. “I stay abreast of
environmental issues, but when I write I start with the personal, with
having a relationship to the natural world.”

Send poetry, novels and visual art to chrisb@thecoast.ca.

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2009.