Week 3 Responses

Social Change

http://www.ilovemountains.org/communities/c274?feature_id=10

I was interested in Mountain Top Removal issues before Ying Kit Chan brought it up in class the other day. Last year a fellow student brought it to my attention, and it really resonated with me that this was an issue directly affecting the people of Appalachia, which means it is affecting Kentuckians. I found ilovemountains.org through a series of links that started with Google Earth and ended there. The tool that I find to be most impressive on this site is the one that allows you to type in your zip code and see what area of mountains is being affected by our region. As it turns out, Louisville gets its coal energy from the top portion of Tennessee, and the interactive map on the website allows us to look closer at the impacts on those individual communities. The site allows you to slowly narrow it down to the voices of the people, which allows us to understand the problem on a more intimate and emotional level. The area that the link to the article I’m writing about is an explanation of what is happening near Zeb Mountain, TN. Something that struck me about the article was the fact that the corporation is trying to fix it by putting it back together again after the damage has been done. They say they will do it by storing the mountain bits in facilities until the job is done. They’re attempting to dumb down the issue in a way that is almost insulting. It is a mountain with a corresponding environment. That environment will not be fixed from, as the article phrases it, “put[ting] humpty dumpty back together again.” The issue is not that simple, the explosion, machinery, and removal of resources will all adversely affect the environment. One of the primary issues that most mountain top removal opposition activists focus on is the pollution of the water that occurs because of these abrasive removals. That adversely affects the entire environment in that region, because that is where animals receive their needed portions of H2O, as well as many humans who use the rivers for assorted needs. This mountain top removal issue is not as simple as saying that the people are upset because you messed up the way the mountain looked, it is about the problems it creates for the communities and the environment.

Art

http://www.treehugger.com/culture/top-5-environmental-artists-shaking-up-the-art-world.html

When I thought of environmentalist art, there was only one artist that popped into my head, Andy Goldsworthy, the artist who makes art purely out of nature with no other materials than what he can find in the woods. I tried to think of other artists that I knew, but none came to mind. So I found this article (which happens to start with Goldsworthy) that lists the top five environmentalist artists today. I hadn’t heard of all of them but Goldsworthy, but I found their work to be equally if not more intriguing that his in some cases. The one that really stood out to me was on the second page of the article, wherein the lawyer turned artist, Chris Jordan, Creates an image that is 2 million plastic bottles, which is from a statistic that says Americans use that many plastic bottles every 5 minutes. He couples the startling statistic with a visual reference to help us wrap our minds around the number. It is difficult for us to imagine the amount that is until he put it right in front of us. These works all are trying to portray different environmental issues, but all of them are trying to show that the environment is important and we should treat it as such.