This Vital Earth encourages an ethical recentering in human consciousness of the approximately 4.5-billion-year-old “pale blue dot” (as scientist Carl Sagan described the Earth). In the mere 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have evolved, our planet’s centrality has become eclipsed by humanity’s view of itself as the center of life. Artists represented here revel in the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving things and return our gaze to the biodiversity that supports healthy and balanced ecosystems.
Trees, which store carbon dioxide and push it into the ground with their roots, are the predominant motif in this section. Arboreal life helps to cool the atmosphere, like a kind of natural air conditioner, while also releasing necessary oxygen into the air. Assuredly, human life is contingent on the existence of trees and other living beings. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposes that one large tree can provide a day’s supply of oxygen for up to four people. In recent years, scientists have learned about the intricate social networks trees have evolved, and some ecologists have posited that trees are even intelligent beings. Yet, deforestation—the result of agricultural expansion, cattle ranching, and commercial production of such goods as palm oil and timber—continues to threaten the plant life that has evolved over 400 million years. During just the last 12,000 years, humans have cleared nearly 50 percent of the planet’s trees, threatening to destabilize ecosystems and life forms of all kinds.
This section is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.
