Video

Human beings have alway wanted to understand the environments they live in and encounter. Since 1962 with the publication of the ground-breaking wake-up call of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson we have sought to understand how our societies, industries and life styles impact those environments. Probably no crisis is more important to understand and communicate than human-caused climate change. Warming skies are melting glaciers and icecaps, and thus raising sea levels. Coastal communities are being affected. In other parts of the world drought and fire are more common. Oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide. The habitats of many species are threatened. Many are likely to go extinct, thus threatening the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, farmers and urban dwellers ultimately. These are some of the reasons we have created Vispoems.

Vispoems seeks new and immediate ways to communicate our understanding of climate change and the necessity to act to prevent it from becoming worse in forms immediately accessible to another’s heart and mind. Digital videos combining poetry and art is one such form. For millennia, poetry and art have conveyed difficult subjects in accessible ways; video allows us to add other dimensions of time and sound. Our video poems present climate change science, and the observed effects of a warming and degraded climate directly and metaphorically. It is our hope that either or both speak to you and encourage you to act to help prevent more warming.