When science is concerned with art, it is because art is doing things right.
When art is concerned with the environment, it is because all of us, as a society, are doing something wrong.
It is precisely then that art and science should go hand in hand.
Everyone is now aware that most of today’s growing environmental problems are not only due to natural disasters, currently on the rise. There are anthropogenic causes as well, derived from an entrenched cultural notion in Western societies that physicists and ecologists have been trying to dispel since the start of the postmodern era: for more than two centuries, we have believed that we can thrive without taking nature – which we inevitably belong to, but to which we cause damage – into account.
We have grown accustomed to worsening living conditions, to illnesses caused by factors that are now part of our everyday lives and seen as completely normal, such as greenhouse emissions, the destruction of ecosystems, the food we eat or the products we make, always in a hurry.
The environmental threat we are facing is primarily a cultural one, related to our poor understanding of, and interaction with, the world. If our society could put those three ecologies (social, mental and environmental) in order, the current climate crisis would most likely not be taking place.
