A Beautiful Death

Abstract

In ‘‘Spring has Gone,’’ Aram Kim, this issue’s featured artist and winner of the 2010 Biennial EcoHealth Art Competition, uses striking imagery to explore the correlated dynamics of humans and nature. In a sort of alternative still life, she grasps the beauty of magnolia flowers frozen in mid-air, before they light on the ground and begin their inexorable journey to dust. A commentary on the harsh reality of life, this image reminds us that from the moment the buds first swell, they start to die—a beautiful death, but death nonetheless. ‘‘Spring has Gone’’ lets us glimpse a private moment in nature, and also in emotion, as the central character weeps and hides her face. What saddens this mystery figure? Is it grief at the loss of a friend, a relative, a lover? Is it ennuie over the passing of the seasons? Or is it the return of sad memories from last year’s spring? The subject of Aram Kim’s etching weeps for all of the above, and more. She weeps over the loss of spring itself. In this autobiographical piece, the artist invites us into her own perception of the impact of climate change as it seems to shorten the transition between seasons. Just like the magnolia petals, as spring fades, it seems to lose its dignity. Capturing these long-term dynamic changes in a static image is hard for an artist, and likewise we have our own difficulties in seeing them. Aram Kim lives in New York where winter is long, and as the snow falls it is hard to even remember what summer is like, let alone how the seasons’ dynamics have changed during the past few decades. As a species, it is to our advantage to focus on the next few days, or this season, or next year. We seem to have evolved a poor skill set for interpreting environmental changes on intergenerational scales. Anthropogenic environmental changes, such as habitat loss and climate change, seem to be just beyond the cusp of our perception. We are always caught up in the moment, absorbed in our own immediate environment and community. We marvel at the brevity of an ant’s life or the passing of a storm, just as we sail magnificently toward our own demise. The irony is that it is only as we each approach our own demise that we start to see some of the more subtle, longer-scale changes that are happening on our planet. We revisit our childhood haunts and find that the frog pond we used to wade through is now an apartment complex, or that the willow tree we climbed is now paved over. We look around and realize that each generation is born into a smaller space, with nature squeezed between our expanding reach—a thin layer of cement between the cold bricks of our cities and farms. We think back to our youth and remember the great Appalachian storm of 1950, the big freeze of 1963 in Europe, the Midwestern U.S. snowdrifts of 1975, the 100-year floods of Queensland in 2011. We think about how much more rain falls each spring, or how we don’t get the same amount of snow that we used to. With their historical memory, it’s the older generations that can see this change, but mobilizing action needs the attention of all. EcoHealth DOI: 10.1007/s10393-011-0679-9