Art and Environmental Awareness

An example is the  Reverberations  online exhibit and midwestern  cohort , which focuses on spoken word, poetry about place, electronic music and hip-hop.  Cesar Almeida , based in Chicago, leads hip-hop workshops with youth. In Minneapolis, James Everest coordinates “ sound gardens ”—speakers hidden in natural spaces, such as the urban banks of the Mississippi River, playing an original symphony mixed with the sound of the wind and the rustling of the trees in a mix influenced by the listener as they move through the space.

Several other projects have integrated music and dance with visual forms, such as  artist Takuma Itoh’s work on the collaborative  Symphony of Hawai’i Forests , a two-day event bringing together 3,000 students from 45 schools to view traditional hula performances alongside animation of folk tales. These performances were delivered along with teaching materials and resources for teachers, including native seed packets, to be used in O’ahu schools.

Julie has written about her own personal experiences connecting with nature as a child and its importance in shaping her career (see  The Caretakers of Place: Better Understanding Stewardship with Resources from the USDA Forest Service NYC Urban Field Station ). As an adult, participating in this and other programs has further opened her eyes to how the arts can help people foster personal connections with the natural world. As part of her graduate work, she worked with a community in Mexico, co-creating a children's book with the aim to preserve and teach their Indigenous knowledge to the youth of the community. Now, coming full circle, Julie supports programs that integrate dance, hip-hop, graphic arts, soundscapes, and more as people create what Julie calls “foundational memories” by producing art in green spaces. 

The Lower Grand River Organization of Watersheds (LGROW) seeks to understand, protect, and improve a cluster of subwatersheds along  the longest river in MI –now known as the Grand River, or O-wash-ta-nong, meaning Far-Away-Water–near where it drains into Lake Michigan.

"Since the end of the Ice Age, the river has been and remains home to Native American tribal communities across the region, including the People of the Three Fires, an alliance of the Ottawa (Odawa), Chippewa (Ojibwa), and Pottawatomi (Bodewadmi) tribes."

LGROW’s  Adopt-a-Drain program  is meant to inspire residents to keep their drains clean, mitigating flooding in their communities and removing pollutants that otherwise would enter Lake Michigan untreated. Residents are able to interact with the LGROW website to adopt individual storm drains, receive information and storm drain cleaning kits, and submit reports about trash and pollutants removed. The interactive nature of the website allows people to take ownership of the storm drains, even naming them.

Ella Carr, Watershed Programs Associate, and Rachell Nagorsen, Stormwater Programs Manager—like many people involved in this kind of work— feel personal connections to the arts and are excited about using art to connect with communities. Ella shared  an experience in sixth grade, when her school focused on the environment as part of the curriculum, encouraging the students to spend almost every day outside. Similarly, upon moving to Grand Rapids, Rachell was struck by the public presence of art and its value to community life. She expressed gratitude that she gets to work for an organization that values paying artists for their time and creativity and making engagement through the arts a reality.

The  Pájaro PhotoVoice Project  is a project to empower residents in the town of Pájaro, California to use photography to tell stories of climate resilience in their town. Pájaro, a small farmwork town populated with immigrants who speak primarily Spanish and Indigenous languages, faced catastrophic flooding in 2023. Recovery has been an uphill battle made worse by a lack of infrastructure and general underinvestment in the town.  About a year after the flooding in 2024 , the community based environmental justice organization Regeneración Pájaro Valley launched the PhotoVoice Project.

Eloy Ortiz, Special Projects Manager at Regeneración Pájaro Valley Climate Action, was an architect of the project. While in grad school, Ortiz was engaged by an environmental justice organization in Huntington Park, CA that was interested in doing a PhotoVoice project to tell the story of how Huntington Park residents were impacted by pollution. After the flooding in Pájaro, Ortiz wanted to find a way to amplify resident voices and their experiences with the flooding and impacts of climate change. Inspired by the PhotoVoice project he had participated in during grad school, Ortiz brought the same concept to Pájaro. Oritz shared, “The highlight was just having residents being able to tell their stories. Not all the stories were about the flooding [...] there are also positive images [...] There are slices of life about Pájaro itself.” 

Originally, the project was targeted at high school students as a way of engaging youth, but after initial outreach, Regeneracion made the decision to open the project to the larger community. In the end two high school-aged youth, two young adult mothers who have worked as farmworkers, and one adult community leader joined the program. Through the project these 5 Pájaro residents worked to answer the question “How is climate change impacting the town of Pájaro?” Over the course of several months the group of residents took cameras into their community and documented the impacts of flooding, nature, water, and their community as a whole. Throughout the project the participants met 3 times to discuss photojournalism, share photos, and create written context for their photos. 

“The goal of the project is to use photojournalism techniques to help give individuals in the underinvested community of Pájaro an opportunity to tell lasting stories and express their fears, hopes, and dreams in the real face of climate change.”