Environmental Amnesia: How to Navigate Losses in Nature by Looking at the Past

Catalog description

As our environment deteriorates and the biodiversity we coexist with declines, each generation is born and normalized into new sets of ecological conditions. We continue to perceive environmental problems and solutions, and develop new ways and technologies to adapt based on these shifting and degrading baselines. Meanwhile, narratives about past environmental conditions and past interactions between humans and their environments provide channels for us to reimagine parts of nature that have been erased from our collective memory, and the forgotten traditional practices in which we interact with nature. We will interrogate the effects of archaeological and historical narratives, based on scientific research, materiality, oral histories, legends, and art recounting past environments on our collective memory and imagination of nature in the midst of species loss and environmental degradation.