Professor connects global issues and art
The worlds of science and art will be brought together through USU assistant physics professor Rob Davies’ work with the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art to generate awareness of social issues that affect the planet.
The current exhibit in the art museum, called “EcoVisionaries- “Designs for Living on Earth”, displays works from Ant Farm and Helen and Newton Harrison, who museum curator Deb Banerjee said are considered Eco Artists. This exhibit focuses on environment and issues within ecology in the form of art.
It is because of this exhibit Banerjee said she wanted Rob Davies to come speak on Tuesday. After hearing about issues of climate change and global warming, she said she thought “he would be a great person to get the conversation about change started.”
“I feel like Davies work is related to the art exhibit. It is really important to talk about social issues because talking is the first step to finding a solution,” Banerjee said. “Dialog can bring about change.”
Eco Artists strive to find solutions to problems, the same as scientists, and Banerjee said this work will bring a new audience of scientists to the museum and have them see that the exhibit “gives science emotion, which scientists are sometimes surprised by.”
“It is interesting because it is art and science, which you don’t see combined very often,” Banerjee said. “This is why we wanted a scientist like Davies to be a part of our exhibit.”
Davies said getting the arts and science together can be very beneficial. He said the world of art has a huge role to play in educating, not just in an abstract way, but in a “very real way of providing the right visuals in the right message.”
“One segment of society does very well with fact-based information,” Davies said, “but a very large segment of society doesn’t do well with that, they communicate through an emotional level. You can’t communicate complex messages through just one avenue.”
Senior Elise Beck, an art education major, said she finds the combination of science and art very interesting because it is something that doesn’t happen very often.
“I think it is beneficial because art and science feel so far apart and don’t seem to really understand each other,” Beck said.
Davies said the intention of his presentation is to engage the arts community and help them understand the scale of the climate situation, as well as the scale of the solutions. He said there are all kinds of barriers that come with the topic of climate change, barriers that can be “effectively communicated.” He said he is going to overview the science but also what kinds of creative levels are used to communicate the issue.
“There is a way to communicate this message not on a rational level but on an emotional level and this is what artists do,” Davies said. “All art communicates to us in an emotional way and really touches people in our society.”
Davies said he is a science communicator and his goal is to explain that society is “doing a bad job at assessing the risks and coming to terms with the complexity of the issue.” He said the scale of the issues are now global, and scientists are not the only ones who are good at communicating that message.
“It is not very often artists are looking at science and communicating science,” he said, “let’s put them to work to try to communicate the important science in very creative ways.”
Davies said students need to realize the media has done a “terrific job of confusing the issue.” He said there are several problems with the media’s role, one being the reporters.
“Most reporters don’t have a scientific background and when they paraphrase they get things wrong. Another issue is that media has no interest in accurately portraying the issue, it is built into the system,” Davies said.
As far as the current media debate over global warming is concerned, Davies said the media is making it seem like there are two sides to the issue, the first being that there isn’t global warming or there is nothing to worry about, and the second is that there is something to worry about. However, Davies said scientists aren’t debating over those two things. They are debating over whether this is a “big problem, or a catastrophic problem.”
Beck said the only things she knows about global warming comes from what she hears on the news.
“I don’t know much about it, and since I don’t do my own research on global warming I just believe what the news is telling me,” Beck said.
Davies said there are two motives behind the media’s response to climate change: “One is financial, the more hits it can generate on its website, the better, which is why they make it seem like scientists are fighting over the issue. The second motive is ideological, some people greatly fear any kind of government action and rather than acknowledging there is a risk and debating on what policy should be created, they try to convince people there is not a risk at all.”
“This is why the public is confused, the media is really good at what they do. In reality, scientists are not questioning whether or not global warming is happening, they are questioning how big of an effect it is eventually going to have,” he said.
Davies said in 2000, a political operative was telling a candidate from a certain party to use ‘climate change’ instead of global warming because it “doesn’t sound as threatening.”
Global warming is “the direct thing humans are doing,” Davies said. And when it comes to saying climate change is a less threatening term, he said it is, in reality, more threatening.
“When you change the temperature you change everything else in the environment. Sea levels change, storm frequency and strength changes, where it rains and how much, where animals live and what crops people grow all change when you change the temperature,” Davies said. “Change the temperature and everything else about your living environment changes along with it.”
Davies said that although climate change happens naturally, it is by studying the past thousands and millions of years that scientist can realize the current climate change is not happening for the same reasons as before.
“Past climate change makes it very clear that this current climate change is happening because of humans. The human tug on the environment is becoming much larger than the natural tug,” Davies said.
He said there are two broad categories when it comes to the current climate change. The first is changing the composition of the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses. The second is changing the surfaces of the planet. He said “changes we make to land surfaces have an impact on the temperature, but the largest impact is happening because of greenhouse gasses.”
Davies said the environmental ‘green’ movement going on is something to make people “feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t really help in general.”
“The challenge with a risk this large is we can do small things that make us feel better but they don’t really help. People say ‘if everybody just does a little it adds up to a lot’ but that just isn’t true,” Davies said. “If everyone just does a little, it adds up to a little. We don’t need to replace our light bulbs, we need to replace our power plants. This is a political and societal issue, the way we address it is politics.”
He said it is hard to not get cynical when it is looked at that way, but cynicism “elevates human frailties and completely ignores human virtues,” which won’t help the problems.
“This is a do-able,” Davies said, “it’s not going to be easy, but it’s not impossible.”
– megan.b@aggiemail.usu.edu