Rising Mitigation
Watercolor, Colored Pencil, and Acrylic, 2021
I created Maine in collaboration with Halcyon String Quartet, an ensemble who lead community driven multimedia performances by pairing the emotions evoked by their music with imagery about climate change. Halcyon shared with me Barber's Adagio for Strings as inspiration. While creating this painting, I tried to tap into the beauty and grief of this song, to help me feel the emotional reality of sea level rise in Maine. My painting will be featured during a full-length program Halcyon will perform in 2021, accompanied by their rendition of that song.
A mix of sandy beaches, dramatic cliffs, and salt marshes line distinct sections of the Maine shoreline. These places are all vulnerable to sea level rise: Maine focuses on the effects of the unstoppable ocean on marshes and infrastructure. The unique ecosystems of coastal wetlands is at risk as waters rise. So too are the beach houses dotting the coastline of Maine. Maine depicts a lone beach house in front of a salt marsh; the roof is covered in solar panels, as the individuals seek to mitigate their environmental impact. Behind the house is a stacked bar graph, representing Maine’s increasing use of renewable energy from 1960 to 2018. Encroaching on the house and the marshes is sea level rise data from 1880 to present. Global oceans have risen over 8 inches since 1880 (140 years ago). Low to intermediate projections for added rise by 2100 (in 80 years) have a large range that directly correlates with how fast we take action to switch to majority renewable energy consumption. The dashed lines on the right of the data represent how drastic and severely different this outcome will be. Another 8 inches of rise is the lowest prediction by 2100, an intermediate-low estimate jumps to 19 inches, and an intermediate estimate to 47 inches. This stresses the vital importance of ending fossil fuel use now.
https://www.halcyonstringquartet.com/
Data References:
Renewable Energy Consumption in Maine - https://www.eia.gov/beta/states/states/me/data/dashboard/renewables
Global Sea Level Rise - https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level