Climate Change Effects Are Local and Global

© 2011 Ruth Wallen. All Rights Reserved.

I enjoyed meeting artist Ruth Wallen, a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, with an art exhibit Listen to the Trees at San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery from March 12  - April 3, 2018. The hours are MTW 11 am - 4 pm, TH 11 am - 7 pm, closed Fridays, weekends and college holidays. Visitor parking info is here, and a map is here.  It is in building D1.

The ad for the Exhibit notes, "Since 2010, over 100 million trees have died in California alone--ravaged by beetles, drought, fires and more. Humans and trees are bound in reciprocity.  In addition to shade, shelter and food, trees produce oxygen and take up the carbon dioxide that we increasingly spew into the atmosphere.  In many cultures, trees are a symbol of life itself.  What does it mean that the trees are dying?"

My favorite part was "A tree stump with an ipad display[ing] diagrams of trees rings with historical data and models projecting climate to the year 2100. Tree rings are often labeled with historical events and pressing on selected rings reveals information about a local ecological event that has occurred or might occur in that year."  This science-based show was revealing and haunting. Check it out by visiting the Gallery or clicking the Listen to the Trees link.  Her exhibit began at the Weather on Steroids project at La Jolla Historical Society, the same group that sponsored my book launch of the climate change poetry collection Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems.

Update: All are invited to a 4 p.m. March 22 poetry reading complementing Ruth Wallen's Remember the Trees art exhibit at San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery, room D101. 

Students from the first two terms of Scott Starbuck's Honors Climate Change Poetry Seminar 247 / 247B will read ecopoems, and other poems.  The students' book Earth-Rent is in the LRC, and the course will be offered fall term 2018 Thursdays at 6:35 p.m.

Coffee and cookies! [ . . .]

Alessandra Moctezuma, Gallery Director