9. AESTHETICS

In the autumn of 2008, Unity College organized a program called “The Art of Stewardship.” We brought 50 artists, scientists, and sustainability activists to campus, and asked them to envision the college as a canvas for environmental art. They presented us with ideas including mandala sand paintings, murals on the sides of buildings, recycled-materials art sculptures, soundscape designs, native-plants sculptures, an arrow of time to represent geological events, and landscape artwork that captures the movement of water, grass, and pollen.

These project ideas can be constructed at minimal expense, while providing local and regional artists with a venue to display their work. They also represent terrific opportunities to get students, staff, and faculty engaged in taking great pride in the campus, as well as making the landscape much more interesting.

There is also a deeper cognitive advantage. At the core of understanding sustainability, biodiversity, and climate change is a perceptual challenge. Art projects use imagination to convey scale. They are a bridge to scientific understanding. Further, art projects catalyze some of the emotional responses surrounding these issues, from despair and grief to wonder, celebration and gratitude. Ultimately, this kind of collaborative art allows the campus to experience reciprocity between the built environment and the natural world.

Sustainability should entail aesthetics every step along the way. The people who live in a place should have the opportunity to make it their own through ephemeral and permanent artistic installations. This has the great virtue of making a campus a more vital and dynamic place. Even better, every art project contributes to the sense that the campus is a place in space and time, a living and working environment that creates an aesthetic mark in the bioregion.

Mitchell Thomashow is president of Unity College. He is the author of two books, Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist (The MIT Press, 1995) and Bringing the Biosphere Home (The MIT Press, 2001) and he is a Steering Committee Member of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment.