Sounding the climate ALARM
Environmental exhibit at TheMuseum confronts climate crisis at nexus of art and science
KITCHENER — If you had to sum up the urgency behind TheMuseum’s environmental warning exhibit “ALARM: Responding To Our Climate Emergency” in a few lines, it would be this:
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Humans have existed for 100,000 years.
And it seems like we have until next Thursday to solve the climate crisis before the scales of evolution tip irrevocably against us.
“As (comedian) George Carlin put it, the planet is going to be around forever,” jokes chief executive officer David Marskell, linking TheMuseum’s multifaceted festival to declarations by Waterloo Region’s three cities of a climate emergency or “crisis.”
“It’s the people who need to be scared. The planet could shake us off like a bad rash.”
Once all those glaciers melt and the temperature ticks upward a few more degrees, Carlin quipped before his death in 2008, we’ll be just one more species that flowered briefly, then faded into oblivion.
“It’s almost arrogant of us to say we’re saving the 4.5-billion-yearold planet after ice ages, floods, meteorite hits and so on,” insists Marskell. “We need to save the people! . . . and the koalas!”
The bottom line, he says, is that Earth loses hundreds of species in a natural way all the time.
“But what’s happening now — look at the bush fires in Australia — isn’t natural. It’s biblical. 2030 is the tipping point.”
To inspire people to get off their butts and make change, ALARM will feature media art installations, a melting ice photo exhibit, live habitats that include frogs, bee colonies and an octopus, and an immersive climate change pop-up in uptown Waterloo.
“It’s a big deal for us,” Marskell says of what is billed as the largest exhibit hosted by TheMuseum since “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,” a decade ago.
“Doomsday is coming. We’re hearing it all the time. We want to lay it all out in front of people. This will allow them to experience it and see the results.”
Much of the exhibit is educational, and the nexus where art meets science offers a compelling look at Earth’s shrinking ecosystem.
“People don’t know what a glacier is,” notes Cambridge photographer Brian Riddell, who travelled to the Arctic Circle — including Greenland and Iceland — to document the gradual erosion of the 10,000year-old shifting ice tracts.
“You look at these things — they’re just massive. They’re in their own weather systems.”
Riddell, a seasoned drone photographer, made four trips between 2012 and 2019 and positioned remote-controlled cameras over vast stretches of ice to capture arresting images of glaciers on the run.
“The temperature in Iceland is going up,” he notes. “As the glaciers melt, the water level goes higher. The biggest piece of ice that broke off was the size of Manhattan.”
In this rapidly changing environment, he says, artists play a crucial role.
“I’m not an activist. I’m not a scientist. I’m a visual artist.
“My idea was to let people visualize them and see them through my work. It’s educating people and making them aware what’s happening.”
For Waterloo’s Ben Eby, whose photographic exploits led him to the Earth’s opposite pole, Antarctica, it’s a matter of capturing beauty before it disappears.
“You’re on a boat in a part of the world very few people get to see and smell, going past an iceberg that really shouldn't be there — it should be attached to the land,” he says.
“But it’s beautiful and blue and gorgeous and has shape and texture. It’s captivating. Where I struggle is that it shouldn’t be there.”
Capturing this dissonance, he says, is key.
“How many places have I been where I’ve gone in and photographed glaciers and then you go back a few years later and there’s a new road in there?
“It’s the responsibility of photographers to take these images, to get our work out in front of people.”
It’s less about preaching than opening people’s eyes.
“I don’t have answers,” he says. “I don’t pretend to know everything, but I like capturing it and I think there’s a conversation to be had about balance.”
With bush fires in Australia, extreme weather disasters and melting ice caps, the timing for ALARM couldn’t be better.
“I find it mind boggling that people can deny this anymore,” insists Marskell.
“We just wanted to weigh in, to stimulate transformative connections so people go away and say ‘I’m going to make a change.’”
Tova Davidson, executive director at Sustainable Waterloo Region, points out that “as a community we have a short-term carbon reduction target of six per cent below 2010 levels by 2020, and a longer-term target of 80 per cent reduced by 2050.
“The ALARM exhibit is an important step not only in creating greater awareness of the sources, impacts, and urgency of the climate emergency we’re facing, but one that helps draw more members of society into the solutions we’re creating.”