COPENHAGEN CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE

DECEMBER 2009

Before I left for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I attended a holiday sale featuring our books. Two young girls around six years of age raced around the room stacked high with titles, pressing their noses to the covers and commenting to each other how each book “smelled” like whatever was pictured on the cover of the book. “This book smells like a tree.” “This one smells like a waterfall.” Their imaginations ran wild, and I enjoyed spying.

Stopping before a stack of copies of The Last Polar Bear one girl looked soberly at a mother with cub alone upon a vast field of broken ice.

CLIMATE CHANGE COLOR

December 10, Copenhagen. Six-foot whimsical globes encircle the square at KGS.Nytorv. The human scale allows for a more intimate relationship with the people who pass by.

Public art in public spaces engage in ways that a museum cannot duplicate. The chance encounters with something unfamiliar are provocative, and engaging. Is the experience also fleeting, and trivial?

Perhaps some remnant of the humor and irony will trigger a lingering mantra. A failure of political will begins with a failure of the imagination.

There is an abundance of public art at COP15—perhaps it might provide the gift of a more poetic reverie to those who have become burdened during this plodding process.

ANIMALS HAVE CLIMATE CHANGE ADVOCATE

December 10, 2009
Copenhagen Climate Change Conference
World Wildlife Fund
ARCTIC TENT, Nytorv Square
The life-size ice sculpture of a polar bear in front of the WWF Arctic tent has been slowly melting. The translucent white ice has disappeared in places to reveal projections of a skeletal bone structure of the great white bear. Envisioned by renowned wildlife sculptor Mark Coreth, this must be the most photographed piece of public art in the city. The dynamic dripping and alterations fascinate—and the metaphor is both blunt and literal. The Arctic is melting.

The WWF invited Braided River photographer and adventurer Steven Kazlowski to do two public presentations based on our book THE LAST POLAR BEAR: Facing the Truth of a Warming World. His images are also featured in the public square outside the giant WWF Arctic Tent. It’s a way to let the delegates to COP15 and citizens of Copenhagen hear the story of the turmoil facing this remote and highly impacted region.