Introduction: If diversity is a sign of vitality, the environmental movement is bursting with good health. As evidence, consider the mélange of environmentally-related strategies for assuring the vigor of the planet. Only ten representative approaches are identified in this volume.
Another volume would have been needed to include Blue Greens (eco-capitalists), Red Greens (eco-socialists), Wild Greens (youth activists), as well as eco-imperialists, eco-pagans, eco-feminists, eco-warriors, eco-fascists, eco-terrorists, permaculturists, and more. Each group is bolstered by its own experts, members, funders, and artist advocates. As a result, the chambers of the contemporary environmental movement are reverberating with pronouncements of contrasting gospels. Reasoned arguments are heard amid impassioned pleas and warnings. They are all grappling with an ever-expanding data base demonstrating the effects of human behavior upon aquatic systems, animal populations, atmospheric conditions, soil composition, and plant growth. Each distinctive position promotes a particular course of ethical/practical/social/emotional/scientific action. Thus, all environmentalists are advocates. As a movement, environmentalism represents diverse and numerous advocacies. The following identifies ten archetypical eco approaches.

Conservation

PROJECT: This project focuses on a particular challenge to conservationists who attempt to consider the needs of snowy owls, coyotes, salmon, mangrove trees, pinion pines, wild orchids, etc. while also fulfilling human wants and desires.

Conservationists are managers of the planet’s resources. They attend to the future by making judicious use of the living and non-living environment in the present.

Continue Reading »

Deep Ecology

PROJECT: Create a deep ecology work of art that elicits at least two kinds of sensory experience from an outdoor situation that are typically experienced indoors. Your work should commune with a non-human force, condition, and/or entity.

Deep ecologists strive to heighten humanity’s sensual capacities and awaken aspects of its suppressed intelligence.

Continue Reading »

Ecosystem Ecology

PROJECT: Everything on Earth exists within an ecosystem, but it is not practical to include ‘everything’ in a student project exploring ecosystem ecology. Instead, this project focuses on ‘soil’ which is selected because it consists of biotic entities, abiotic components, water, and air – basic ingredients of every ecosystem.

Continue Reading »

Human Ecology

PROJECT: Desire accounts for one part of human behavior. The capability of fulfilling this desire accounts for the other. The goal of human ecology is to add a third condition – protecting and restoring the environment.

Humanity’s past serves as a vast, ready-made test site for ways of acquiring food, shelter, fuel, and delight.

Continue Reading »

Industrial Ecology

PROJECT: “Widget” is a noun economists invented to refer to any manufactured product. Supersonic jets and fly swatters can both be referred to as widgets. For this assignment, instead of widgets, a peanut in its shell will represent any manufactured product. Use it to demonstrate the closed loop system, a core principle of industrial ecology.

Continue Reading »

Preservation

PROJECT: Create a public service ‘edutisement’ (education + advertisement) that promotes a preservationist’s “let it be” approach to either one form of life that has been neglected or abused because it is not useful to humans (e.g. a cockroach, poison ivy, or a rat), or one non-living component of your landscape that is neglected or abused because it is not useful to humans (e.g.

Continue Reading »

Restoration Ecology

PROJECT: The fact that fine art conventions interfere with the pursuit of restoration mandates explains why many of the artists in this section have eliminated and replaced many of these conventions. Apply as many of the characteristics of restoration art that are indicated below to complete this project.

Continue Reading »

Social Ecology

PROJECT: Select a cultural value or choose one listed below. Then imagine that this value has been indicted in a court of environmental law for its role in violating Mother Nature. You can pose as the defender or the prosecutor of this value. Provide compelling evidence to convince the jury of its guilt or innocence.

Continue Reading »

Sustainable Development

PROJECT: Promoting sustainability is complicated by the fact that the benefits of sustainable behaviors are enjoyed by future generations, not the person who enacted them.

Sustainable development and design emerged in the 1960s, many decades after the preservation and conservation movements were established. It signaled growing alarm regarding news stories reporting the destructive capacity of atomic weaponry, chemical pesticides like DDT, mono-agriculture, the diversion of watercourses, the extraction of minerals, the emission of heat and noxious gases into the atmosphere, commercial forestry, to name a few.

Continue Reading »

Urban Ecology

PROJECT: Your project consists of fast-forwarding along the evolutionary time scale. Create an anatomical model of a human who has evolved to survive in the noisy, polluted, crowded, frenetic urban environment.

Traffic, smog, litter, and noise comprise some of the energy flows and cycling patterns in the sprawling ‘studio’ where urban eco artists sculpt.

Continue Reading »