TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK – PART THIRTY-EIGHT: MISSING IN ACTION

What do Joni Mitchel and Maya Lin have in common and what does either have to do with climate change?  A lot.

Consider the lyrics to Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi from 1970:

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

They took all the trees, and put ‘em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
No, no, no
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot

Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT
I don't care about spots on my apples,
Leave me the birds and the bees

Please
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Hey now, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot
Why not?

You can see and listen to Mitchell in concert here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIuP7zEVeM

Maya Lin echoes Mitchell’s 1970 anthem to loss with her latest exhibition Ghost Forest, which opened this month in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park (May 10 through November 14, 2021).  The exhibition is an offshoot of Lin’s interactive project What is Missing? (www.whatismissing.net), a user-generated archive that focuses attention on habitat and biodiversity loss.

In an interview in Whitewall, Lin describes What is Missing?

The website is massive amounts of information, but simplified. One part of the site is a map. It’s called the Map of Memory, ecological history of former abundance coupled with personal memories. It becomes a global online community bearing witness to what we’re doing. There is a phenomenon that scientists refer to as “shifting baselines.” We actually don’t recall what we’ve lost because with every generation we accept a lower and lower amount of biodiversity. Our baselines keep shifting, and we don’t realize that a cod was bigger than a man in 1895. We don’t realize that the [Dutch] settlers [of Manhattan], when they first came into the harbor, came across sturgeon that would collide with their boats, they were so powerful. Or that lobsters were six feet tall, oysters were a foot in diameter.

Or, frankly, that the New Jersey Pine Barrens were once full of majestic Atlantic white cedars.  Now many of those trees are dying, having fallen prey to poor logging practices without sustainable replanting strategies, beetle infestation caused by warming temperatures, and salt water infiltration caused by rising sea levels.  Lin’s response to the cedar species and Pine Barrens habitat loss was to use it as an opportunity to make Ghost Forest, a site-specific, public art installation right in the middle of downtown Manhattan.

Lin is probably best known for her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., but in the tradition of land artists from the 1960s and ‘70s such as Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Smithson, Richard Long, and Christo, she has also created monumental earthworks like Wavefield at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York (below).

For Ghost Forest Lin took trees—49 five-story tall, dying Atlantic white cedars from the Pine Barrens slated to be felled as part of a regeneration plan for that fragile ecosystem —and instead of putting up a parking lot in New Jersey, she brought them to Madison Square Park in New York City. 

Madison Square Park describes Lin’s vision and the impact of her Ghost Forest installation.

Lin brings her vision as an artist and her agency as an environmental activist to this project, a memory of germination, vegetation, and abundance and a harsh symbol of the devastation of climate change. The height of each tree, around forty feet, overwhelms human scale and stands as a metaphor of the outsized impact of a looming environmental calamity.

Lin, in an interview in Artnet, describes Ghost Forest in the context of personal, as well as human and planetary loss.

Debuting as New York City looks to rebound from the pandemic—as well as in the wake of Lin’s own personal loss, with the death of husband and noted photography collector Daniel Wolf of a heart attack in January—Ghost Forest has also taken on added meaning since its initial conception.

“We’ve all shared in this pandemic. You can’t not think or look at these in a different way than a year ago. That does become part of the piece,” Lin said. “There is a sense of mourning.”

“There is a parallel between a global pandemic and climate change which is also a global threat to humanity,” she added. “By 2100, 50 percent of all species may go extinct due to climate change.”

Artnet continues:

The trees arrived on site last month, before the leaves had begun to bloom in the city, and will remain on view until they fall again in autumn. “They will bear witness as the park goes from spring to summer and fall,” Lin said. “They’re sentinels.”

Each trunk was buried eight feet at its base, two feet deeper than recommended by a consulting engineer. Foresters snapped off all the lower branches and any limbs that appeared even slightly insecure, adding to the stark, Spartan appearance of Ghost Forest.

Lin’s aim with Ghost Forest, as with her other climate-related installations, is not to sadden, but to enlighten and inspire to action.  As she says, “I didn’t want to talk about [climate change] without offering solutions.  I do believe there is hope we could turn this around.”  To that end, Ghost Forest includes a public education program, featuring climate activists and experts on wetland remediation, forest restoration, and other conservation efforts.  Additionally, as noted on the Madison Square Park website, Lin’s installation has an audio component.

Lin created Ghost Forest Soundscape highlighting the sounds of some of the native species of animals once common to Manhattan. To listen, click the audio button to the left [Please go to the website link] or view the accompanying text and credits here. It draws from the Macaulay Library sound archive of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Thanks to Lin's artistic manifestation of loss in her compelling memorial to trees fallen victim to climate change, balanced by her forward-looking suggestions of countermeasures, we know what we’ve got before it’s completely gone.  Joni Mitchell must feel like singing. 

Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn