Just read a New Yorker article about Maya Lin's Ghost Forest exhibition in Madison Square Park. A Ghost Forest "is an entire stand of tress that has been killed by climate change." The project is a "grove" of forty-nine Atlantic white cedars from a ghost forest in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The exhibition would also have a soundscape made up of twenty audio recordings from Cornell University of woodland scenes and animals "that used to roam Manhattan." The audio recording and a documentary are at the exhibition link above.
The exhibition website notes:
In nature, a ghost forest is the evidence of a dead woodland that was once vibrant. Atlantic white cedar populations on the East Coast are endangered by past logging practices and threats from climate change, including extreme weather events that yield salt water intrusion, wind events, and fire.
Interviewed in the New Yorker article, Lin asks, "How can I make you aware of things that are literally disappearing right before our eyes?"
The Ghost Forest work is related to Earthwork artists of the 1970s. It is part of her ongoing "What is Missing" interactive project which documents ecological loss across the globe. The web project is one way to make viewers "aware of things that are literally disappearing right before our eyes."
"With every successive generation, we accept what we know," she says. "In the eighteen-nineties, a cod was bigger than a man. And now we now think a cod is this big" holding her hands a foot apart.
The website is a remarkable collection of sounds and images and short articles about species loss, like a world-wide companion piece to Elizabeth Kolbert's Sixth Extinction.
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