Transcript of the Interwoven Tapestry of Nature, Science, and Art: A Journey Through Environmental Protection and Climate Change Sarah Kapnick GLOBAL HEAD OF CLIMATE ADVISORY, JP MORGAN FORMER CHIEF SCIENTIST, NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION I have been a fundamental researcher for most of my career. Most recently, I served as the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but I’ve also spent time in business. I’ve spent time at banks. I’ve spent time not only doing fundamental science, but also trying to use that science to understand what’s going to happen in the future and give people advice about how to best plan for that future. My relationship with nature, my love of nature, is what has always driven me forward, and driven me to be a scientist. It’s also driven me to work in financial services to make sure that we understand what the future holds because of climate change, that we understand the value of nature, and how we can make sure that we have the future that we want to see. I was always jealous of artists and their creativity, of them being able to spend time creating something. It wasn’t until many years of being a scientist that I realized that science and art are actually very similar. In science you’re trying to discover something, to understand something, and you’re being creative figuring out what the solutions are — to be able to have the natural world reveal itself in science, to understand the laws of how nature works, or what the future holds, and you’re trying to be creative in that same way. I think art and science very much have a lot of overlap The Sun’s Migration* By Rob Jackson We wandered forty years, settling in a house on a hill that stared east from the back porch. I watched the sun rise daily across the valley, tracking colors and lines of clouds that made up dawn. I knew the sun moved, or appeared to, a gray whale swimming north in spring and returning south in fall, always in sight of land. Still, I’d never tracked its journey, watched it leave the fins of mountains behind, lighting paintings on our southern walls. I grasped desire for the first rock cairns that became Stonehenge, the solstice window of the Incan Torreón, chronicling not just the sun’s return but the Pleiades and scorpion’s tail, a plumb line’s shadow sundering an altar to mark the beginning of the end of winter. The sun swings its arc, solstice to solstice, a pendulum with a period of a year. Each sweep carries away people we love. When our time comes — by fluke or wear, near or far — when the last stone is placed on our cairns, we surface for a last breath and descend, a shimmer in the wake of our daughters and sons, a ripple spreading outwards to the shore. * Published in the literary journal, Kestrel, Issue 43, Summer 2020 HUMAN TIME Much Has Changed Rob Jackson MICHELLE AND KEVIN DOUGLAS PROVOSTIAL PROFESSOR SENIOR FELLOW AT THE WOODS INSTITUTE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND AT THE PRECOURT INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY DOERR SCHOOL OF SUSTAINABILITY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY Much has changed in the four decades since Tony Foster began his remarkable series of nature paintings en plein air. The Maldive Islands that Tony captured in his WaterMarks Journey are disappearing. More than a dozen formerly inhabited islands in the Maldives have been abandoned because of climate-induced sea level rise. That’s not surprising when the highest point in this thousand-island archipelago is only two and a half feet above sea level. Much of the coral that Tony painted so beautifully in watercolor would now require no color at all because of coral bleaching. For people in the Maldives — and perhaps for us all — the time that Tony chronicles so elegantly is running out. Change is afoot even in the most remote corners on Earth that he painted: the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest in his Searching for a Bigger Subject and Kaieteur Falls in Guyana’s Amazon Basin for his landmark WaterMarks series. The Grand Canyon is drying like paint on one of Tony’s canvases. Himalayan glaciers are turning meltwater blue. The Amazon was on fire last year. My response to Tony’s paintings isn’t despair, it’s hope — hope that we have time to right the climate ship, hope that we can provide clean energy to the world’s rich and poor, hope that we can restore the earth’s biodiversity, ecosystems, and atmosphere in a lifetime. Tony honors the world’s beauty. Will we? 102
