As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand that, at some point, we have to accept that it is our collective impact that is putting the whole planet in jeopardy.
Interpretation
Artists have a responsibility to convey the message of environmental impact and collective responsibility to society.
In this quote, Edward Burtynsky emphasizes the role of artists in raising awareness about the environmental issues that humanity faces. He suggests that through their work, artists can help society comprehend the critical nature of our shared actions and their consequences on the planet, advocating for a collective acceptance of responsibility in addressing these challenges.
In practice
In a speech at an environmental conference, you could say, 'As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand their collective impact on the planet.'
Water, like many other resources, is harvested, transported and used throughout all aspects of society. Unlike other resources, water is critical to the survival of all forms of life. The underlying question that sits at the core of my exploration is to what degree can we shape water before it begins to shape us.
Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.
Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.
We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.
I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.
Even now, nature is the only flame, on which the poetic spirit feeds; from it alone it draws all its power, to it alone it speaks even in the artificial, in the man engaged in culture.
The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Writing is a spiritual practice in that people that have no spiritual path can undertake it and, as they write, they begin to wake up to a larger connection. After a while, people tend to find that there is some muse that they are connecting to.
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