Freeway trailer Before

Freeway trailer

Before publishing Silent Spring in 1962 a book that went on to factor heavily in the launch of the modern American environmental movement, marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote evocatively in Under the Sea Wind 1941 and The Edge of the Sea 1 The human imagination and the arts have been inspired by water in both liquid and solid form. A rich body of literature exists based on high adventure to the far-distant frozen Antarctic. In 1816, Thomas Erskine s novel Armata envisaged a utopian world in which a sister planet was attached to Earth by two navigable sea channels flowing in opposite directions from the South Pole. Many nineteenth-century works supported the hollow Earth theory, most notably and influentially Edgar Allan Poe s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 1 After Captain Robert Falcon Scott s 1868 1912 ill-fated second expedition to the Antarctic, stories appeared based on whaling adventures, historic expeditions, science fiction, and murder mysteries, Hammond Innes 1949 The Survivors, loosely based on Sir Ernest Shackleton s 1914 expedition in which his ship, The Endurance, was crushed by ice. Since the 1970s, most Antarctic fiction deals with themes of worldwide catastrophe and survival, from war to under-ice volcanic eruptions and breaking ice caps. Since the first Earth Day April 22, 1970, environmental literature, as it often is called, has become a major genre around the world. Today s environmental literature denotes a written work that investigates the relationship between people and nature. This may include oral readings, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Contemporary environmental writers such as Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Nelson, Robert Michael Pyle, Scott Russell Sanders, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest Williams fundamentally link the literary arts with environmental awareness and responsibility, often rooted strongly in a sense of place and community. A Call to Action: An Ecological Bill of Rights and Responsibilities Enviroarts, 1995 challenges the American arts community to forge a creative, national response to erosion, poisoned water and air, among other social and environmental threats. In ancient art, water was often represented by stylized curvilinear forms, such as the spiral as evidenced by the Minoans of Crete or a horizontal zigzag as found in the art of ancient Egypt. In the famed eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry, the English Channel is represented by embroidered wavy black lines. Distinctive indigenous art components include Oceanic Arts, that is, the visual arts of the southern and northwestern Pacific Islands. Rivers, lakes, and seas were once the great highways of the world, and much art shows water as a backdrop to everyday life. Royal barges are painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs dating to 1360 Ships and ports appear on medieval manuscripts and Renaissance frescoes. The brilliant Renaissance painter, sculptor, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci 1452 1519 was fascinated by water, which he described as vetturale di natura the vehicle of nature. He drew it in detail, studied it closely, was in awe of its power he had witnessed terrible floods and storms, and designed complex canal systems and locks. A tradition of Dutch marine artists dates back to the seventeenth century, and led to the proliferation of professional marine artists in Britain. Of the French seascape painters, arguably the most significant was Claude Monet 1840-1926, whose oil-sketch Impression: Sunrise 1874, portraying The riverboat era was romanticized by various painters in the nineteenth century. This print by Currier and Ives shows a Mississippi riverboat loading logs. the harbor at Le Havre, gave its name to the Impressionist movement he founded. Monet went on to paint beach and river scenes in France and England. The nineteenth-century Romantic tradition emphasized bold, dramatic paintings of nature for example, seascapes by the English painter J. Turner 1775 1851, or dramatic events such as Th odore G ricault s The Raft of the Medusa 1819 and its portrayal of despairing shipwrecked sailors. The Hudson River School 1835 1870 housed the first great school of American landscape painters, who produced romantic and naturalistic renderings of the landscape of the Hudson River Valley and beyond. Earthworks or land arts, dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s, are works in which natural elements are directly employed or the landscape rearranged and the resulting artwork tempered by exposure to the elements. Robert Smithson s Spiral Jetty 1970, a huge rock and salt crystal spiral created in the midst of Utah s Great Salt Lake, is no longer visible beneath the rising waters. The water world provides inspiration for folk art art produced by mostly self-trained artists or for the preservation of traditional ethnic cultures including functional and decorative hand-carved wildfowl and fish decoys, decorated sea chests, scrimshaw s, ship s figureheads, and nautical ornaments. In America, the zenith of traditional folk art flourished in the nineteenth century prior to the rise of industrialization, but a rich contemporary tradition continues of naive, outsider, and memory artists. Traditional Vietnamese water-puppet performances continue a rich and ancient folk art theatre tradition, in which the puppeteers stand behind a screen in water up to their waists, with the floating bamboo water-puppet theatre occupying the middle of a pond. The arts encompass the environment of sight, word, and sound. The aesthetics of sight and sound come together architecturally in decorative water fountains and in Frank Lloyd Wright s famous house Fallingwater. Popular everyday art involving water can find expression in unlikely places, such as elevated water towers. Even a fire hydrant can become a painter s palette, as evidenced during a community-sponsored event in Oldenberg, Indiana. Just as the arts recognize a visual landscape, the modern soundscape is the creative concern of This networking and resource information project focuses in part on human-induced environmental impacts on the oceans, and emphasizes the art of soundscape production creative interpretations of the sounding world. Ecological concern is also the driving force behind Musicians United to Save the Environment.