art+environment

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Guy Abrahams:  Art + Environment

Welcome to my website. This is going to be a work in progress, providing information on what I am doing and also, I hope,  opportunities to learn from each other. You may also want to have a look at the website of an organisation I have recently Co-Founded – CLIMARTE: Arts For a Safe Climate.

What has art got to do with the environment?

After working as a lawyer for a couple of years I changed career and had the extremely good fortune to work as Director of Christine Abrahams Gallery for twenty-two years. There I was privileged to observe, and in a small way participate in, the creative contribution that the visual arts makes to the cultural and intellectual wealth of this country.

In recent years, as I became increasingly concerned about our planet’s grave environmental and social problems, I decided to leave the gallery to learn more about these issues. One only needs to see NASA’s latest scientific data to be reminded that most currently observed indicators of climate change, such as temperature increase, sea level rise, ocean acidification and glacier and ice sheet disintegration, are tracking at or above the worst case projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I have now spoken to hundreds of people about sustainability and the causes and impacts of climate change and  it has become apparent that many people cannot or will not accept, internalise, or act on the dire warnings that members of the scientific community have been trying to convey for at least the last twenty years.See for example, the briefing by Dr James Hansen to the US House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming on 23 June, 2008, twenty years after his first testimony alerted the world to the ramifications of global warming.

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