WHAT’S A&E?

This new Internet space aims to be a meeting-place for both artistic and ecological awareness. Today, our planet Earth confronts a profound environmental crisis, caused by the accumulation of years of industrial activity, now affecting the entire planet, and which has come about mainly through the use of fossil-fuels, first carbon and then petroleum. One of the parameters for measuring this crisis is the average temperature of the planet, which is rising due to the greenhouse effect of carbon particles in suspension. Never before has a single generation been able to grasp the effects of climate change, because these were natural changes, not anthropic, and which needed a period of time much longer than a human lifespan. Today, however, in just one hundred years the temperature of the Earth has risen by one and a half degrees, and the figure that forms the curve of global warming is accelerating exponentially.

The divulging of information about this global phenomenon, with its unforeseen effects and many local derivations (extreme weather events, species extinction, human exoduses, desertification, melting of glaciers, rises in sea-level) had been made by extremely specific scientific publications which journalism, of a specific kind, disseminated. But there is not enough of this.

From the beginning of activity at the Centre of Art and Nature (CAN) in Farrera, we have observed and promoted the work of artists committed to environmental and critical awareness through their own work: The Landscape in Modern Art; Ireland-Äland-Pyrenees: A Walk Across Islands and Mountains; Nature, Shape and Creation; Pyrenees: Art and Ecology up to the 21^st century (Evolution of landscape, climate change and art), or Frontiers in Retreat, are CAN programmes or CAN is taking part in them, where the encounter between artists and researchers is favourable, so that research and creativity, science and art, may meet, interact, and influence each other mutually, and reach the wider public.

What we want, therefore, is that this portal should contribute to communicating and to becoming aware of the most important challenge that we, as human beings, have ever had to face: to transform our present way of living into another sustainable one, that may guarantee the survival of a rich and diverse biosphere in which human beings, as one more species, may continue to play a part.

Art-Ecology.net wishes to win over people’s awareness by means of a global change model towards sustainability. And wishes to do so by weaving a web of the local and the everyday.

Welcome!