Arts of the Environment [antikvár]

GYORGY KEPES ART AND ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Tlie forces of nature that man has brought under a measure of his control have again become alien; they now approach us menacingly by avenues opened by science and technology. This does not mean that we have freed ourselves from nature's old scourges, earthqualces, volcanic eruptions, floods, and other "acts of God." The recent tidal wave in the Bay of Bengal left over half a million dead. What we face now are destructive forces of a completely new kind—man-generated, cumulative, and of almost cosmic proportion. A tvildly proliferating man-made environment has shrunk living space, dimmed light, bleached color, and relentlessly expanded noise, speed, and complexity. We have contaminated our rivers and lakes through the unrestricted dumping of human and industrial waste, and poisoned our sky, sea, and land with radioactive waste. We have shaved barren our mountains, hills, and fields and exterminated their birds, fishes, and beasts. And it is not only the destruction of the physical environment that is involved. Aldous Huxley's comment that by mistreating nature we are eliminating the basis of half of English poetry expresses a deep truth. The world around us—the mobile, luminous richness of the sky, the infinite wealth of colors and shapes of animals and flowers—provides the essential basis for all our languages, verbal and visual, and constitutes the means of attaining a higher, richer sensing of life. We have had many warnings. Again and again, men in the past have lamented the destruction of their environment and the consequent loss of poetry and beauty. They satv and felt the ruthless impoverishment of life. A hundred years ago John Ruskin said: In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is notv defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires: their very glacier ivaves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore. These are no careless words—they are accurately, horribly, true. . . . Ah, masters of modern science . . . you have divided the elements, and united them; enslaved them upon the earth, and discerned them in the stars. Teach us, now, but this of them, which is all that man need know—that the Air is given to him for his life; and the Rain