Art and ecology
I’m in the Other Side Café, which is its usual punk rock chaotic self (god, I love this place). As usual, the espresso’s really strong and the music’s really loud. It’s a nice counterpoint to the stuffiness at the Museum of Fine Arts, where I just was. How funny it is, that art museums manage to take some of the most vibrant offspring of violent souls and make them an object of quiet reverence. Maybe 50 years hence their will be a retrospective on this whole scene here in the Other Side Café, and it too will become 2-D. History is always about those who emerge from a certain victorious vantage point, that of the winners, the famous. We who listen to history always know how the story will end, and so we don’t experience the utter craziness, the soul-wrenching uncertainty of not knowing whether your ideas are worth anything. Instead the historical narrative makes it seem like one long march to greatness.
Several works stood out this time at the MFA: Copley’s famous portrait of a man being eaten by a shark; Turner’s slave ship sinking; Stella’s Old Brooklyn Bridge; Calder’s cow. Beautiful objects all, that left me feeling a little inspired. I feel a bit guilty saying that somehow, as if as an ecologist I should only be inspired by wilderness.
On the walk over here I took the oblique turn off Huntington Avenue onto Hemingway Street, a beautiful long residential neighborhood interspersed with Northeastern University and Berkeley Conservancy buildings. It was like discovering a new little world in my familiar Boston.
I once focused on nature in my ecological research, and believed Thoreau’s saying that “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” But now I’m interested in how our urban way of living affects that nature, and so while I still believe Thoreau, I also say that “In cities is the preservation of civilization.”
Several works stood out this time at the MFA: Copley’s famous portrait of a man being eaten by a shark; Turner’s slave ship sinking; Stella’s Old Brooklyn Bridge; Calder’s cow. Beautiful objects all, that left me feeling a little inspired. I feel a bit guilty saying that somehow, as if as an ecologist I should only be inspired by wilderness.
On the walk over here I took the oblique turn off Huntington Avenue onto Hemingway Street, a beautiful long residential neighborhood interspersed with Northeastern University and Berkeley Conservancy buildings. It was like discovering a new little world in my familiar Boston.
I once focused on nature in my ecological research, and believed Thoreau’s saying that “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” But now I’m interested in how our urban way of living affects that nature, and so while I still believe Thoreau, I also say that “In cities is the preservation of civilization.”
