American artists Helena Mayer Harrison (1929) and Newton Harrison (1932), pioneers of eco art, have been working together as a team since 1969. Their work is characterized by a deep understanding of ecological systems and great empathy for the Earth. Early in their work, they made a decision not to create works that did not benefit ecosystems. The issues they address span many disciplines, but at their core is always ensuring the good eco-social well-being of a given place, context, or situation. For more than 40 years, they have collaborated with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, and other artists to initiate dialogues that uncover ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and develop communities. The Harrisons' visionary projects have often led to changes in government policy and to expanded dialogue on previously unexplored issues. Their projects focus on river basin restoration, urban regeneration, problems in agriculture and forestry, and since the 1990s increasingly on the climate crisis. Among their works are: Making the Earth (1970), Works of Survival (1970-72), Visions for the Green Heart of Holland (1984), Endangered Meadows of Europe (1984), Peninsula Europe (2000-2008), etc. See: www.theharrisonstudio.net, www.centerforforcemajeure.org. Published in the magazine Sedmá generace, 3/20176, pp. 43-46.
In the face of a growing ecological and climate crisis, we are now beginning to understand in all areas and at all levels that the essence of our lives is relationships: that we are all interconnected and that through our activities we participate in the life of a larger earthly community. According to Paul Raskin, director of the Tellus Institute, our planet today represents an ecologically, ontologically and epistemologically irreducible whole. Raskin argues that the world can no longer be understood as a set of separate entities – independent states, autonomous ecosystems and distinct cultures. By all accounts, a new global socio-ecological system is emerging. We are at the beginning of a new era, a planetary phase of civilization that is transforming the Earth and us."As traditional geographical and cultural boundaries dissolve, nations and places across the global system are intertwined with a shared destiny."
According to Charles Eiseinstein, we are beginning to shift"from a cluster of separate, disparate, and competing organisms—states, nations, religions, cultures—to a multicellular social meta-organism that could work together as a single whole." Research by a number of social researchers also shows that behind the layer of national and ethnic cultures, a new ecologically, socially and spiritually sensitive global culture is emerging today, which we could call the culture of the whole Earth; according to Paul Hawken it is connected "a fundamental understanding of the Earth, how it works, and the necessity of justice and equality for all people who share the planet's life-support systems." Evidence of this worldview shift to a new story of cohabitation, The main focus of the movement towards a new form of human culture, which, in the words of Thomas Berry, would be able to live in harmony with the larger community of life, is today primarily the activities of major social movements (Transition Town, Fair Trade, Occupy, Earth Democracy), global and local civic initiatives, ecological associations, activist platforms (350.org, AVAAZ, Limity jsme my), inventive communities (Tamera, Gaviotas, Findhorn) and creative teams.
The historic opportunity to mitigate the current trend of ecological and climatic destruction that threatens our very survival, or rather the chance to give birth to a new coherence within the planet as a whole – that is, to create a new just world of sustainability for all human and non-human beings – in any case represents the most attractive vision for the 21st century. It could be a fundamental shift from the current greedy corporate globalization, exploiting natural resources for exclusive private gain regardless of the negative impacts it has on the ecological functioning of the planet and local ethnicities or communities, to a positive vision of civilized globalization for the entire human, or rather, the entire earthly family.
Living within Force Majeure
The work of American artists, the founders of eco-art, husband and wife Helena and Newton Harrison, who work with the planet as a sculpture and truly deal with the ecological problems of the entire Earth, is a very inspiring example of a creative approach that is moving us in this new direction. In their projects such as Peninsula Europe and Tibet, they are high ground The Harrisons focus on inventing new large-scale ecological adaptation systems that respond to the extreme environmental changes brought about by climate change. Their research is based on the premise that we must address the climate crisis on the global scale on which it operates.
The Harrisons state that in 2007 they came to the understanding that in most planetary systems, entropy has accelerated as a result of our civilizational activities, setting in motion large and difficult-to-control forces that they characterize as a "higher power" or Force Majeure. In other words, in our attempt to become civilized, we as humanity have collectively, with great effort and ingenuity, arrived at the current global ecological crisis without realizing what a large and increasingly destructive global force we have become. Only recently have we begun to acknowledge the possible negative impacts of this uncontrollable power that we have fueled through our activities. In their Manifesto for the 21st Century, the Harrisons write:“Everything we have created in the global landscape has put together conditions that have accelerated global warming, working in concert with massive industrial processes of extraction, production and consumption that have reduced forests and depleted topsoil, drastically reduced ocean productivity and caused massive chemical pollution in the atmosphere, on land and in water, all of which together constitute this ‘Force Majeure’.”
In 2009, the Harrisons founded the Center for the Study of Force Majeure at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with the aim of finding ways to adapt to the coming radically different world. The center focuses on studying the increasing entropy of planetary ecosystems and on designing projects, conceived as a team effort of artists and scientists, that should reduce this entropy. The Harrisons characterize Force Majeure metaphorically as an approaching storm front, as two emerging and exponentially developing variable boundaries before which we are forced to retreat: the boundary of water that rises to the ground at the edges of all continents, and the rising heat wave, affecting and affecting the entire planet and all life on it. These two entropic forces, which will cause extreme stress in the life systems of the entire planet in the coming years, cannot be stopped by any mechanical force in the way we have done before. However, the Harrisons believe that through the collaboration of art and science, we can reimagine this situation and discover a counterforce that will allow us to adapt to Force Majeure at the scale at which it operates and learn to live within it; the key, they say, is that this process is applied correctly over the next fifty years.
At the heart of the Harrisons' vision is the idea that the functioning of human-made systems—legal, social, economic, productive, etc.—which strive for permanence and therefore often violate the laws of conservation of energy, which causes entropy, must learn from the basic principles of how natural systems work. Just as natural systems, human cultural systems must learn to nest within each other; thanks to this, they can then contribute to a collective system of survival within the framework of symbiosis. This would allow us "to unite the currently so contradictory natural and human paths of invention."
Eco-cultural Peninsula Europe
The Harrisons are exploring ways and strategies for how we can cope with the climate crisis in four projects – two in California and further in Europe and Central and East Asia. The key model project is Peninsula Europe, which has gone through three phases of change since 2001. According to the Harrisons, its goal is to "the birth of a new state of mind" – has the potential to unite Europe anew. The Harrisons define the European peninsula, which stretches from the Russian plains in the east to the British Isles in the west and is bordered to the north and south by the North and Mediterranean Seas, as a very coherent territory and a kind of proto-icon of Europe. They consider its typical feature to be a complex ring of terrain, consisting of mountain ranges, forests and river drainage basins and stretching from the Pyrenees through the Alps, the Dolomites and the Apennines to the Carpathians. They define this extraordinarily diverse and complex terrain as a new type high ground (elevated areas) whose lower limit is where rivers begin to spill out; they see it as a characteristic pattern of Europe that has made possible its great biological and cultural diversity and which is the basis of its ecological stability – the basis for "developing a new trans-European discourse on nature and the evolution of Europe's future well-being."
This emerging geographical pattern delineates territories that, according to the Harrisons, have the potential to achieve their own autonomous stability of sustainability; it is defined as networks of processes that could cluster and cluster together, feeding each other with value. However, today, peninsular Europe has far fewer original ecological places than in the past. The overproduction of the same monoculture crops and procedures has been imposed by the market even in previously ecologically managed areas, leading to a loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity and ultimately to a loss of cultural identity; this sameness is also reflected as a potentially destabilizing pattern in the production of goods and media.
The Peninsula Europe project therefore proposes an alternative future by shifting the whole concept from fragmentation and unification to essentiality and diversity – it conceives of the Peninsula (or rather the “island”) of Europe as an eco-cultural entity, an ecological and cultural network to which individual cultures contribute their improvisation and creativity, their diversity and uniqueness. According to this idea, the Peninsula Europe could become so complex that it could reorganize itself as a dissipative structure (a complex system in a state of extreme imbalance) that survives by constantly regenerating itself. The Harrisons believe that this eco-cultural entity could eventually function in the way that living systems nest within each other to support each other; that, according to the laws of nature, self-organization could transform into a complex multiple identity, each part of which would contribute its value to the whole, which would thereby become more complex.
From Portugal to beyond the Carpathians
The Harrisons believe that such an evolutionary shift is being driven by climate change today. In Parts II and III of this project, the Harrisons therefore examine how Peninsular Europe might respond to climate change over the next fifty to a hundred years: to droughts spreading from Spain to central Europe, to rising sea levels, and to a massive loss of water to riverbeds as mountain glaciers and annual snowpack melt, making river flows completely unpredictable. According to scientists’ predictions, these climate changes will cause two-thirds of the 2.3 million km2 of agricultural land to become minimally productive, as will one-third of all grassland, while most of the monoculture forests at higher elevations (a total of 560,000 km2) will succumb to insects, disease, drought, and fire. As a result of drought and flooding of about 95 thousand km2 of coastline, about 23 million people will have to migrate within Europe.
The Harrisons therefore propose an intervention that aims to shift the entire geophysical system towards greater ecological and thus cultural stability. They propose to develop on the area of these newly defined high ground – that typical complex geographical pattern of the European Peninsula with an area of 1.4 million km2 – a new trans-European forest that will spread across Europe from Portugal to the Carpathians and beyond. It should be a mixed forest, consisting of old tree species capable of surviving future climate change, whose root systems will create a huge water reservoir (1 trillion cubic meters of water), which will generate clean water for agriculture in the valleys and lowlands.
The aim of the Peninsula Europe project is therefore to maintain water supplies, continue to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and encourage and maintain biodiversity in the face of climate change. Such a project would be a major test for the individual countries of the European Union – whether they can sufficiently give up their autonomy and narrowly understood power and collectively create a new form of government capable of confronting climate change of this magnitude. In any case, this challenge could move Europe as a whole into a new phase, into the form of that Einsteinian multicellular metaorganism cooperating as a whole.
Tibet is high ground
The Harrisons also reach a similar strategy and conclusion in their project Tibet is high ground; They examine the consequences of the melting of 80% glaciers in Tibet and surrounding areas due to global warming, which glaciologists predict will occur in the next twenty-five years. They show that the impacts of this process – in the form of drought, floods, desertification, sandstorms, the breaching of mountain lake dams, etc. – will have a far-reaching impact on the river systems of seven major Asian rivers that flow through eleven countries in East and Central Asia, which will ultimately deeply affect the lives of one-sixth of humanity, i.e. 1.2 billion people. The Harrisons argue that it is unclear whether countries like China, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, Kashmir, and Pakistan, with their propensity for conflict and governance, will be able to overcome cultural, racial, and religious differences, including differences in legal systems and border disputes, to be able to create an effective counterforce to these risks on a truly continental scale. So they come up with an unlikely but logical proposal: to create a new common government of the people of all the countries affected by the impacts: "The people of all the countries affected by the course of these rivers must come together to create a new form of government, indifferent to national boundaries, whose purpose is to define and then protect the shared commons; a government responsible for the well-being of these seven rivers and their watersheds, and for the well-being of all those whose lives depend on them." … a form of government that will allow … the migration of entire ecosystems to replace or restore those that are now under immense stress, and that will begin to normalize river systems with these new forests, which will primarily replace the water-holding properties of glaciers. Long-term survival requires a fundamental shift in cultural beliefs and legal structures away from the current valuing of profit and extraction towards a revaluing of nourishment and care.”
Both of the aforementioned projects by Helena and Newton Harrison indicate the level of empathy, coherence and mutual cooperation we will have to move to and what new values we must adopt in order to be able to pass through the climatic Scylla and Charybdis of today's planetary transformation. The current era presents us with a fundamental challenge to develop a new story of cohabitation on a global scale, which has never happened before in human history. We are entering challenging times for which we should carefully prepare and which will deeply test each of us. A good guide to them can be the words of Zen master and leading representative of engaged Buddhism Thich Nhat Hanh:“When we recognize the virtues, talents and beauty of Mother Earth, something is born within us, some kind of connection – love is born. We want to be connected. That is the meaning of love, to be in unity.… If you do something for the benefit of the Earth, the Earth will do something for your good being.”
George Zemanek
The author is an art historian, cultural activist, and translator.