Storm cloud: picturing the origins of our climate crisis

Abstract

"Against a backdrop of industrialization and scientific development that reshaped humanity's relationship to the planet, nineteenth-century artists and writers began to express a novel perception of humankind's place in, and impact on, the natural world. This essential volume traces, in art and literature, the growing understanding of the industrial world's effect on the environment. It features works from both sides of the Atlantic, including paintings, photographs, scientific illustrations, and books by Mary Hunter Austin, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, John Constable, Henry David Thoreau, and Carleton Watkins. These are discussed by experts, including artists, art and literary historians, scientists, environmental activists, and representatives of Indigenous knowledge. Examining a nascent environmental awareness through the intersection of art and science, contributors highlight this intertwined historical dialogue and what it can tell us about today's climate crisis." -- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Directors' foreword / Sandra Brooke Gordon and Christina Nielsen -- Essays -- Seeing through the storm cloud / Melinda McCurdy and Karla Nielsen -- Forms of water : infrastructure and improvement in the nineteenth century / Nicholas Robbins -- "They fetch the year about to me" : Thoreau's ways of knowing / Kristen Case -- Short essays -- Patterns of strata / Jan Zalasiewicz -- Imagining distorted scale : learning from the Hitchcocks / Gillian Osborne -- Hoping for John Brett's Glacier of Rosenlaui / M Jackson -- Viewing stations in the English Lake District / Karen Lloyd -- Skying / Rachel Storer -- The Hope Lands, Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica, in 1826 : an agent of climate change / Veront M. Satchell -- There is no painting over a colonized ecosystem / Suzanne Pierre -- Thomas Cole's Portage Falls on the Genesee / Dennis Carr -- Thoreau speaks to us about climate change / Richard Primack -- John Muir in 2024 / Kim Stanley Robinson -- A paya (water) story / Alan Bacock -- Awakening to the Anthropocene : understanding soil, a critical resource / Nicole Cavender -- The promise of smoke / Kristen Anthony -- The unlovely forests of Los Angeles / Jonathan S. Blake -- The storm-cloud of the twenty-first century / Rebeca Méndez.