What the warming world needs now is art

An article asking why it is that we are producing no great art about the climate crisis or environmental degradation. And once the question is raised it's a case of 'there's a point'. Yes there is art that is environmental but none of it really leads to action in the way that Dicken's fiction did with urban poverty in the Victorian period. "Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action. Otherwise, the only role left to us -- noble, but also enraging in its impotence -- is simply to pay witness. The world is never going to be, in human time, more intact than it is at this moment. Therefore it falls to those of us alive now to watch and record its flora, its fauna, its rains, its snow, its ice, its peoples. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born onto, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet."What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art | By Bill McKibben | Grist Magazine | Soapbox | 21 Apr 2005: