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How can looking at art help us solve the global crisis of climate change?
Looking for Tomorrow argues that spending time with art—looking slowly, with climate in mind—offers lessons indispensable to achieving a sustainable global civilization. Solving the climate crisis will require technical and political solutions, certainly. But it will also demand the remaking of some of our most basic beliefs. We cannot build a twenty-first-century society on unsustainable ideas inherited from industrial modernity.
Turning to modern art, Joshua Shannon shows how its creativity and innovation can ignite necessary transformations in our thinking. Across seven lessons, each grounded in deep engagement with a single artist, this book explores how art can help us unlearn the philosophies, myths, and fantasies that brought on our current crisis. It shows how art can now guide us toward new (and sometimes very old) ideas capable of supporting a sustainable and just civilization.
Art, Shannon argues, can be a guide toward connection, well-being, action, and balance. It can help us reconceive our world.
Joshua Shannon has worked on art and climate change with universities and museums around the world. He is Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland.
“There’s no question that one cause of the climate crisis is a failure of vision—really, of seeing. This fascinating book helps us overcome that blind spot and look, clear-eyed and clear-hearted, at what’s happening to our earth.”—Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun
“Shannon offers a fresh and hopeful perspective on the climate crisis, showing how art can help us reimagine our relationship with the living world. This thoughtful and inspiring book reminds us that imagination, beauty, and wonder are not distractions from change—they are essential to it.”—Dame Christiana Figueres, Chief UN Official for the Paris Agreement climate convention and host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism
“The way this heartfelt book weaves ecology together with race is utterly outstanding and for that reason alone it’s wonderful. And there’s more. From high school readers on up, this gentle and powerful book will help you make sense of your world.”—Timothy Morton, author of Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
“The best art history writes art into existence. Joshua Shannon’s Looking for Tomorrow has taken works I thought I knew by heart, by Vincent van Gogh, Stephen Shore, Nancy Holt, and many others, and given them a whole new being—a being uniquely suited to the times, and crises, we are living through today.”—Blake Gopnik, author of Warhol and contributing critic to The New York Times