Art as Climate Action with Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris

01/21/22 • 43 min

Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.
Adapting Kolbert’s investigative strategy, Ed and Susannah initially set out to photograph places around the world being impacted by climate change - in order to call out a warning, as the name Canary Project suggests. (Though the photographs themselves or the installations that ensued were subsequently renamed History of the Future.)
Since then, Susannah and Ed have worked on numerous projects, from Green Patriot Posters to the more recent Toolshed, and helped coordinate works of fellow artists tackling climate change. They also both teach in the Dept. of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.

As a former student of the arts (more the literary kind than the visual kind, but who’s quibbling), I was curious about the ability of art to engage in climate activism. What can the artist achieve that the scientist and the journalist cannot, I wondered? And, conversely, what are art’s limitations?

To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.net

To check out Susannah and Ed’s latests project go to https://tool-shed.org

To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.net

To check out Susannah and Ed’s latests project go to https://tool-shed.org

Previous Episode

On the Origins of Christmas Trees with Judith Flanders

In time for the winter solstice, we revisit our episode on the history of Christmas trees with historian Judith Flanders, author of Christmas: A Biography (2017) as well as numerous books on the Victorian period, including The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime and The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.

Flanders helps us to parse history from myth, as we discuss the origins of Christmas and the practice of bringing evergreen trees into our homes to decorate them for the holidays.

Guitar rendition of “O Tannenbaum” by Dave Larzelere.

Next Episode

Air Travel, Climate Change and Don’t Look Up with Chris Schaberg

Chris Schaberg, whom you might remember from my episode on SUV commercials, has written a number of books on air travel. I wanted to talk to him about the impact of air travel on climate change but also about what air travel - and, increasingly, the fantasy that we can be tourists in space as well - reveals about the relationship between us human animals and the sophisticated technology that drives globalization (and, as a fall out, climate change). I was also itching to talk about Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up, in which a comet hurtling towards the earth serves as an analogy for climate change, and Chris was kind enough to indulge me.
in-the-weeds.net
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