Climate and Consciousness

As a species we are capable of extraordinary things but are we conscious enough to act in our own best interests when it comes to climate change?  

Every day we stand at a crossroads. Every day as individuals and as a community we must choose either to do the difficult work of striving for climate justice or to sit back and fail in our duty to each other.  

Every morning I wake up, look out of the window and take stock of what I see. How the edges of the leaves have changed since yesterday or how the light is evolving over lake Michigan. Sometimes change is subtle, requiring real work to see them. Sometimes change is dramatic - bizarre even. There are days when I wonder if anyone would believe what I just saw.  These experiences fill me not only with a sense of the sheer beauty of life but with a renewed determination to do whatever I can to help move culture forward towards a better relationship to our environment.

And that’s why we created SkyDay a volunteer collaboration of artists and scientists united to do the right thing for future generations. At Sky Day we are inspired by our magnificent climate and sky, It makes us want to paint it, do science about  it and create imaginative initiatives and rigorous new climate curriculum to ensure that our students come to fully understand how climate functions what its vulnerabilities are and why it is so very important they come together across cultures and borders to achieve positive outcomes.

I wonder how often you notice the dynamic, ever changing show right above our heads? It must be one of the greatest shows on earth and yet perhaps easy to forget about as we lead our busy lives looking always ahead, focussed on the tasks at hand and nowadays perhaps increasingly distracted by the dynamic content on our screens instead of the dynamic life all around us.

But of course the sky isn’t only above us, is it? It is also all around us. We don’t live beneath a beautiful sky but in it.  We swim through it. It’s in this beautiful chapel, it’s in our classrooms, in our homes, its the air we breathe and the water we drink. 

And of course our sky is beautiful - and not just to look at but beautiful in the way it supports all life and protects us from the harshness of space.  Beautiful in the way it wraps completely around our planet so everyone can see it and share it. Our sky connects us all as one global family. We live and breathe under one shared sky. 

No other natural resource is shared by us all in quite the same way . You can’t say we all share ocean experience or rainforest experience or desert experience but we all sharet our sky.  All you have to do is look up, or just breathe in.

At SkyDay we are very lucky to have astronaut Nicole Stott on our team. Nicole has experienced our planet from the depths of the oceans to the heights of outer space as few humans have. Not only has she made two trips to the space station, one of the making an historic and very dangerous repair to the robotic arm working tethered to a cable outside of the space station, she is also a NASA aquanaut,(detail)  and she’s an artist! Paints - art.  

Nicole tells us that seeing our beautiful planet from space changes you - a kind of cognitive shift takes place within your heart and fills you with love of people and of planet.    She says it is obvious from space that the only border that really matters is the thin blue line of our atmosphere that blankets us all.  

From space, she says, you can see just how thin our sky, our atmosphere is - really thin.  I know down on earth our sky looks like it goes on forever and ever, like you could never fill it up with enough junk to hurt it, but we now know you can and we are. 

Nicole compares our sky to being like our planet’s space suit. Thin like a space suit and yet containing within it everything we need to sustain life.   Obviously an astronaut’s life can depend on taking great care of her space suit. You don’t smoke in your space suit.

Our sky, our space suit gives us a beautiful invitation each day that say - “come together,  as one global family living and breathing under one share sky for everyone’s benefit.” 

We are still destroying our environment and changing our climate. Climate change isn’t coming. It’s already here, already impacting the species living in our local parks, in our Lake and in our gardens. Lake MIchigan is increasing in temperature at a greater rate than climate change which is very concerning. We inhabit a rapIdly changing environment AND how we respond to that changing environment is the greatest issue of our time. How will we respond?  How will you respond? 

I have great hope for the future. What gives me hope?  Well for a start we now know what is happening to our climate and why and how to fix it .  But the greatest thing to give me hope is the next generation. They are already leaders in this field, already creating a community of action takers who understand the importance of being honest with each other about what is at stake and understand the importance of coming together to fight for global change.

There is an understandable tension that exists today between our generations and I would like to take a moment to address it.

It is the job of every generation to move culture forward. My own generation made some strides in the realms of feminism and civil rights and technology (for which I take no personal credit) but we did not adequately grapple with pollution and climate change. and I do accept my responsibility for that. Many of my generation are deeply dismayed by that fact but dismay alone won’t fix it..

Yes,  we now know what is happening to climate and why and what must be done to achieve positive outcomes. But any positive steps forward must begin with honest conversations about the facts. Forgive me if the following already obvious to you but I feel an obligation whenever  I give a talk to re-state the facts because apparently an enormous number of people especially in the US still have doubts and confusion about this and as an artist, I was one of them. 

One of the most exciting things for me about creating SkyDay is that we have amazing experts on our team, like Dr. Daniel Horton who leads the climate Research Group at Northwestern and Dr. Don Wuebbles a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois, and lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (he even shares in a Nobel Peace prize for his work on that committee). So an artist like me has leading experts I can talk to to ask questions about things I’ve heard and see if they are in fact true. Like how do we know for sure its US causing climate change and not something else. I mean haven’t we had ice ages and natural climate changes before?  

The answer is yes. Our climate is changing today because of us. Science has advanced greatly in the last 20 years with new technologies being put to work and data has been pouring in from all over the world showing us what caused climate to change in the past and what is causing it now. In the past we now that very small variations in Earth’s orbit have changed the amount of solar energy our planet has received. And we know that these orbital changes have caused our climate to change. Evidence for this can be found in ancient tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. We also know that massive volcanic eruptions or massive asteroid impacts can cause our climate to change by throwing up massive amounts of ash and other matter into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun for long periods of time.  We call these things climate forcing agents - things that force our climate to change. But none of these things are happening right now and haven’t been since we started measuring global average temperatures rising beginning around 1880.  This is a time when the industrial revolution was really revving up - the beginning of the time when we began to burn fossil fuels for a whole host of daily activities like driving cars, producing energy to turn on our lights, heating and cooling our homes and schools, harvesting and transporting food to our grocery stores and many other things. Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas releases greenhouse gases (mostly carbon dioxide). These elevated levels of greenhouse gases are causing global warming which in turn is causing our climate to change.2  In fact between now and 1880 we have seen that warming is happening 40 to 50 times faster than natural climate change and if you plot the acceleration of our emissions with the acceleration of global warming it is amazing to see how closely they mirror each other.  Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show how closely Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels

So what does climate change mean for us right here and right now? Too often climate change is framed as something happening in a land far, far away, only a problem for polar bears and penguins.  But our climate is changing too and our seasons are shifting and this is causing climate stress to species all around us that we know and love.

Take our own Rusty Patched bumble bee for example - an Illinois native species that is now on the endangered species list.  You see the queen rusty patched bumble bee doesn’t die off each year like her worker bees do, instead she must hibernate through the winter and to do this she needs flowering plants in late summer so she can gather the energy she needs to make it through.  And then when she comes out from her hibernation in the spring she needs early flowering plants to feed her so she can set about laying her eggs. But now, between our building over her habitat and because our greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate so that our seasons are changing and the timing of flowering plants is being collapsed into a shorter season, not to mention our storms are gathering more energy and doing more damage - all these things are having such a negative impact on her habitat that the rusty patched bumble bee is in real danger of becoming extinct - just like the other 200 species that are becoming extinct thanks to us every day. And why should you care? Because bees are busy pollinator. They move around pollen and seeds that aren’t going to be moved around like they used to be without them and that causes lots of things of other things to change change and those changes cause other things to change and other species to die out too. Because everything in nature is connected.

So here’s the exciting part. We still have time to fix this. Only 11 years before the tipping point when thigs get really out of control but still time. We developed the technology just in time to see all that is going on and fix it,  If only we apply ourselves to the task. Are we conscious enough as a species to seize this opportunity for us for our children for future generations? Are you conscious enough to do what you must do?

It’s not about saving the planet. Planet’s going to be fine. We’re just a blip on its massive time frame. It’s about saving us. 

There are two categories of thing we must do. We must take care of all growing things - especially our trees because as we are reminded by George Monboit in Greta Thunberg’s wonderful video Nature Now - jungles, mangroves, marshes, and especially our trees are all examples of Natural Climate Solutions  because they take carbon out of the atmosphere and then lock it away. They are sky cleaning machines and they build themselves! All we have to do is plant them and protect them and they will help us. So every tree you plant, every forest preserve you volunteer for, every prairie and park district you support you are helping all us all fight climate change. And if you do get out there to volunteer for such organizations you will discover something else amazing too. 

You’ve probably noticed how relaxing it is to be out in nature and now we know the science of why. The natural rhythms of grasses waving in the breeze, of cloud movement and of waves forming and breaking on the shore, those rhythms and frequencies stimulate something called the dopamine pathway of the brain and make us feel good.  You see we are evolved for that kind of experience, to be in nature and part of it, not isolated from it.  And you should know that the same science shows that the frequencies of digital media - like videos and screens - actually do the opposite. They make people feel depressed and in some cases alarmingly so.  So get out there! and makes sure you have plenty of connection to nature in your life. It’s important for your physical and emotional health

Taking care of nature then is the one big thing we must do and the second is we MUST reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and that means taking a number of actions. 

If you are students then study hard. Learn about science and engineering but also about history, language and the arts because these combinations of knowledge and critical thinking, of imagination and creative collaboration, these are the skills you will need to come together across cultures and borders to move our world forward. 

And then, of course, there are a number of actions we can take from calculating your carbon footprint using one of the on-line carbon footprint calculators like the terrific one hosted on the EPA website at  so you will understand what your stake is in the carbon cycle and be able to make smart decisions about how to reduce it and maybe make a donation to a worthy cause to offset the carbon you use. And then there are a host of other actions  like switching to a healthy but eco friendly diet many of which are listed on the SkyDay website

But perhaps the most important thing you can do is use your voices to lead the leaders by making it clear to them - all of them - that climate change is a priority for you and that you will vote accordingly. Because the biggest ways to help us move forward are wise energy policies, wise nature conservervation policies and wise international agreements.  Leaders WILL respond if they believe climate change it is a voting priority for enough of us. So write to your Congressman, your Senators and Representatives and tell them you want them to take action on climate change. And then make sure you turn up and vote accordingly.  

Here’s more good news -  The inevitable transition from unsustainable economies to sustainable ones - and that transition is inevitable - is nothing but the greatest opportunity of your lives - opportunities for new leadership, for entrepreneurship and for innovation.  Everything from the way we move our bodies around to the way we build our structures  and generate energy must be re-thought, re-designed, re-imagined. And that means new industries and new jobs and we need your vision and your voice.

Light coming from a star almost 93 million miles away right now is passing through our magnificent and thin atmosphere and then through this beautiful stained glass window. It only take 8 mins and 20 seconds for light from our sun to reach us. I see a dove, I see the waters of the earth and I see sea creatures. Its beautiful and like the sky above us - this window is an evolving experience  as the seasons change and as our relationship to the sun changes so does this artwork. Let this amazing window continue to stand as a symbol for all who see it of the beauty of creation and a daily reminder to each of us to do more to protect our climate and environment.