Fossil fuel beginnings explored in art, words at UC Davis Lake Tahoe environmental lecture

Art and science collide in April at the Lake Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences with a lecture and display of paintings that chronicle Anthropocene, the beginning of the fossil fuel era that sprouted in the late 1700s.

The "Art of the Anthropocene” will be presented Thursday, April 18 at 5:30 p.m. by William L. Fox, director of the Center for Art (plus) Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. The presentation provides an illustrated journey of art made during the Anthropocene, an informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. The artwork ranges from landscape painting to earthworks and beyond.

The presentation begins in the 1790s to understand through exploration and science that the Earth is a set of interrelated physical systems. By the 1990s we began to understand how profoundly we had perturbed those systems.

Artists have made work all along in response to our evolving sense of living in the Anthropocene, the epoch from 1790 onwards that is defined by our increasing consumption of fossil fuels. At first artists sought to represent the systems of the world; now they want to change them.

Fox has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published 15 books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Fox has researched and written books set in the Antarctic, the Arctic, and the deserts of Chile, Australia, and the United States.

He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club, and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, the Australian National University, and National Museum of Australia.

UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) hosts science lectures each month with experts in topics pertinent to the region. Speakers include authorities on various environmental issues, scientific research and related regional topics of interest. For additional information go here.

— Writer Heather Segale is the Education and Outreach director for the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. She can be reached at (775) 881-7562 or hmsegale@ucdavis.edu.