How Climate Changes Art

This week we tackle the intersection of art and our changing climate. Throughout history, art has helped reveal the climate around us and highlight our fragile relationship to it. We look at navigational charts from the Marshall Islands, Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow”, Mali’s Great Mosque of Djenné, the Ise Shrine in Japan, steadily sinking Venice, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, among others.

Ecosia Tree Update

Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees.

Their latest tree update comes from one of Ecosia’s first grown forests in Borneo, Indonesia, where their searches are helping restore the habitat of endangered wildlife species like the orangutan. Ecosia started planting trees in Indonesia only two and a half years ago. Today, the forest is slowly coming back, which is creating economic value for the local farmers whose livelihood depends on forest goods like nuts, fruits and medicinal herbs.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, and after the first nine months of collaboration with Eden Reforestation Projects in Haiti, they have planted 230,000 trees. These trees will protect watersheds from erosion and, as they grow over the years, their roots will absorb rainwater, halting floods that damage people’s houses and farming lands.

Their tree-planting partners in Burkina Faso are now also working in Mali. Hommes et Terre is applying the same techniques in this neighbouring country who shares their climatic conditions. Half-moon shaped holes have been dug up in the planting sites and in the following months Ecosia-financed seeds will be planted in them, waiting for the next rainy season to start growing and re-greening the desert.

Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees. Every month they invest at least 80% of their surplus in tree planting projects all over the world.