Imaginary

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

• Mountain Patrol: Kekexili: a group of Tibetans isolate themselveson a mountain four miles above sea level to protect the endangered Tibetan antelope from poachers, who have no qualms about killing the animals or the men
• Avatar: a soldier loses function in his legs and undertakes a missionin an alien world, only to discover that he belongs in spirit with the nature-worshiping “aliens”; the film’s celebration of violence mars and blurs the message, though.
• Walkabout: on the “contrast between civilization and man’s more natural states”; “a statement on the exploitation of the natural world and native cultures by European civilization”
• First Reformed: the film’s inner meaning is enigmatic, even to the filmmaker but the message on climate change cannot be ignored.

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Nawang Khechog, “Caring for Our Mother Nature”

Poetry

Grey and furtive in the final twilight, he lopes by, leaving his spoor along the bank of this nameless river that has quenched the thirst of his throat, these waters that repeats no stars. Tonight, the wolf is a shade who runs alone and searches for his mate and feels cold. He is the last wolf in all of Angle-land. Odin and Thor know him. In a commanding house of stone a king has made up his mind to put an end to wolves. The powerful blade of your death has already been forged. Saxon wolf, your seed has come to nothing. To be cruel isn't enough. You are the last. A thousand years will pass and an old man will dream of you in America. What use can that future dream possibly be to you? Tonight the men who followed through the woods the spoor you left are closing in on you, grey and furtive in the final twilight.

[Jorge Luis Borges, “A Wolf”]

Poems:

• Robert Frost, “A Brook In the City”
• Robert Frost, “The Exposed Nest”
• William Wordsworth, “Proud were ye, Mountains”
• William Wordsworth, “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway”

Books of poems:

• Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octupus Museum: Poems (Knopf, 2019): “posits an apocalyptic future that looks a lot like now, an extension of our current dystopia in which food, water, housing and medical care are scarce or too expensive to access.”
• Margaret Atwood, Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020): “Much of the book is concerned with ecology and with time: most interestingly, with how the present moment, 'our too-brief history,' will look in the future.”
• Jorie Graham, [To] The Last [Be] Human (Copper Canyon, 2022): “. . . an omnibus edition of Graham’s four most recent books, originally published between 2008 and 2020, years during which she has invested sustained attention in the ongoing climate crisis and humanitarian disasters.”
• Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021): “The collection is separated into five sections, each one offering more clarity about the historical reality of Hmong displacement and the lives lost to chemical warfare, the unwillingness of the United States to acknowledge the use of chemical weapons, and the generational trauma resulting from forced displacement, massacre and global denial.”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Compositions:

• Rolnick, “Oceans Eat Cities”, about global warming
• Spears, “The Tower and the Garden” (2018), a “four-movement setting of poems by Keith Garebian, Denise Levertov and Thomas Merton exploring religion, technology and conservation”
• Martin Bresnick, String Quartet No. 4, “The Planet on the Table”, “inspired—instigated is perhaps a better word—by the poetry of Wallace Stevens”; along the same lines is Bresnick’s “Bird As Prophet”.
• Steven Stucky, “Silent Spring” (2011), inspired by Rachel Carson’s book.

Albums:

• Bruce Wolosoff has composed works for cello and piano, which he presents on the album “Paradise Found”, with cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio. The main works are Cello Sonata No. 1, “Paradise Found”, evoking the experience of witnessing nature in its splendid beauty; the second is Cello Sonata No. 2, “Requiem for the Planet”.
• Yolanda Kondonassis describes her solo harp album, “Five Minutes for Earth”, as “a project that both celebrates our planet and illuminates the challenge to preserve it. In 2020, I asked each of the composers featured in this collection if they would consider contributing a work for solo harp of approximately five minutes in length that expresses a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres.”
• Renée Fleming, “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene”: “ . . . Fleming reflects on the climate crisis, and the urgent threat to the natural world, and, implicitly, to our existence.” [Neil Fisher, Gramophone magazine, November 2021 issue, p. 77.]
• Ros Bandt, “Medusa Dreaming”, “a site-specific water symphony”, presents “a sonic archaeology of the site and a desperate plea for international water care in the time of global collapse”.
• Iro Haarla Electric Ensemble, “What We Will Leave Behind”
• Kaleiido, “Elements”: in four parts – sky, land, ocean and ember – like a prayer for Earth
• Sushma Soma, “Home”, with tracks about consumerism and elephant hunting
• Yarn/Wire, “Little Jimmy” (2022): the album contains three compositions by Andrew McIntosh. “Little Jimmy incorporates field recordings of a wilderness that has since been decimated by wildfire, creating a unique autobiographical and climatological context for the piece while unintentionally archiving a natural setting that no longer exists. The sonic landscapes of the forest, mountains, wind, and birds are echoed by Yarn/Wire’s soundscape of piano and percussion, inviting meditative reflections about humans and nature that both connect and contrast the two worlds.”
• Christopher Tin, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra & Voces8, “The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy” (2022) (46’) is a mournful tribute to species made extinct. In the liner notes to the album, Tin writes: “It’s a celebration of their beauty—as symbols of hope, peace, and renewal. But it also mourns their absence—through the lonely branches of a tree, or the fading echoes of distant bird cries.”

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

• Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander: A Novel (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021): “This is climate fiction at its most urgent and gripping.”
• Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun: A Novel (Hogarth, 2021): “imagines a highly imaginable California so ravaged by drought and wildfires that only the rich can afford to survive.”
• Matt Bell, Appleseed: A Novel (Custom House, 2021) “employs myth, magic and science to give a damning account of the narrative of American exceptionalism and the relentless post-conquest exploitation of this country’s vast natural resources.”
• Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “It’s a book about ecological salvation that somehow makes you want to flick an otter on the back of the head, for no good reason at all.”