‘Weathering Change’
An artful response to the warming climate
“What am I supposed to do now?”
Figuring out how to answer this question is perhaps one of the greatest difficulties faced by people distressed by the rapidly changing environment, says Devin Jacobsen, M.Div. ’18. Jacobsen served as editor for “Weathering Change,” an anthology of art created in response to climate change and been released by Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS).
The compilation of poetry and art was sourced from a range of 21 diverse students, faculty, staff, and alumni. It includes original work from renowned writers such as writer-in-residence Terry Tempest Williams and Amanda Gorman ’20, America’s first Youth Poet Laureate. For other contributors, such as Christian Schatz ’18, it was the first time their poetry was selected for publication.
“The art in this small volume evinces humanity’s commitment and ingenuity in searching for an answer to ‘What am I supposed to do now?’” wrote Jacobsen in the anthology’s preface. “My hope is that rather than drowning in despair or letting ourselves become charred with anger, we begin to unearth some kind of answer by asking the question together.”
Flipping through the pages of the anthology uncovers a range of emotions and experiences. The OFS commissioned the collection to amplify the voices of artists across campus, and to “reinforce the important role that the humanities play in helping us understand and advance our collective responsibility to address the global sustainability challenges facing this generation and future generations,” according to OFS Managing Director Heather Henriksen.
Contributor Aaron Ellison, the senior research fellow in ecology at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest, touched on a theme in many of the anthology’s pieces in the last sentence of his introduction. “In the face of change, Nature has been, is, and will be, resilient. Can we learn to be resilient, too?”
“In the Eye of”
Amanda Gorman
Listen to Gorman (pictured) read:
a hurricane ripens / like an iris / gasping clumps / of air, heat / coiling thick / like a dirge / soon enough / a basket brimming / with destruction / swoops across ocean / and country one wind / bleeding into / wet earth / i tell you / i see / cows bobbing / bodies drowned pale as damp / paper and / electricity nowhere / to be found / sky heavy / with deaths and thunder / laughing bitterly / at its drunken / self when / will they learn these disasters aren’t natural
“City of Sand and Chrome”
Caroline Silber
“Vatnajökull”
Kathleen Ong
Listen to Ong (pictured) read:
I lagged behind and dimly saw
your receding back
and the nearing glacier
Springing over crevasses,
you flew with the invisible wings earned by
praying to be mythical
Me? I—
Moulins.
I stared into its depths and
dissolved and became
the meltwater
streaming down sliding
roughly swerving;
passing glacial caverns
down down
until I saw the volcano beneath
and wished to be
vomited out to sea but I
reacted with the elements
and ossified;
nugatory fragment,
silently screaming
for the rest of history
while you still stand there,
terrible and sublime.
“When I Think”
Christian Schatz
Listen to Schatz (pictured) read:
When I think
of the passing wind in chaotic
dance moves a single hair
of my head, moves the ocean,
pushing it up against continents
and my head
till finally it takes a breath
and all is released in
unpredictable hurricanes in
predictable cycles that
make the earth warmer
until the wind becomes rain
washing away what it
once did to me, this
drop of sweat rolls
down my face.
“Plunge”
Ariella Ruth
Listen to Ruth (pictured) read:
white fur engulfed by icy
water sways delicate
wavy to accompany her body
she treds
swims a floating
head bobs in frigid
currents her home
is packed down layers
of snow she knows
when the weakness
of floorboards splinter
there is evacuation
resting place dissolves
her endless
months to follow
are for worn muscle
unswerved movement
“Contested Landscape”
Aaron Ellison
Listen to Ellison (pictured) read:
Blue-bottles stream in on the hot north wind
windrows drift in Hi-lux treads
fetid bladders snap underfoot
The roaring surf drowns out
the diesels thrumming down
the beach and across the dunes
while the dingoes echo
a faint Butchulla dream
Sand streams from the shores of K’gari
World Heritage disappearing
grain
by
grain
“Storm Approaching”
Mary Kocol
Untitled
Jina Choi
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bright, seductive flames
foolish moths risk everything
are we not the same?