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| What does "Art for Impact" mean? |
Some of it was on a stage at the Sheen Center, where I was asked a question I thought I already knew the answer to.
The panel was Art for Impact, and the question was simply, "What does that mean?"
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| The czar's former empire became a union |
I found myself talking about the old
Soviet Union (
USSR), which tried to
overtake Buddhist Afghanistan with its
Bamiyan treasures.
Because if we look back at the USSR, artists were forbidden.
Writers could not write certain songs or paint certain images. A poem could get one
sent to Siberia to a gulag to freeze and be forgotten. None of that happened because anyone thinks art is decoration.
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| Beauty attracts attention. Art makes an impact. |
It happened because people in power understood something about art that the rest of us have largely let ourselves forget.
The people in power are not afraid of it because it is beautiful. They are afraid because it works.
I have been turning that over all week. Art is not a way of illustrating what we already know or believe. It is one of the few things that changes what a society comes to know, see, or believe without asking anyone's permission.
Every law that has ever protected a forest began as a feeling held by enough people at the same time. Art is how a feeling like that becomes shared, so that once enough of us are carrying and sharing it, it stops being an opinion; it becomes something everyone simply assumes and takes as obvious.
That is what I mean by "impact art." It is also what those rooms at the UN are quietly waiting for. Targets are written by people, and people keep them or abandon them depending on whether what is being protected feels worth the trouble by the time a deadline arrives.
The frameworks are real and necessary, and I'm glad they exist. What decides their fate is whether enough of us care when they come due. That part is not written into any of those documents. It is the part I think artists are for.
I've talked about fire for days, so I won't repeat myself. Only that on stage I realized I had spent the month painting the same thought.
I learned it in Altadena, site of the massive
Eaton Fire (2025).
[That massive
Eaton Fire mural now sits prominently inside the north wall of The Free Store inside
The Collaboratory on Woodbury in
Altadena.]
One woman pointed to her friend across the mural in the making. She had lost her home to fire and had not smiled in six months. There she was with a brush in her hand saying, "I should paint more."
No target was written that day, but something changed anyway.
The UN panel also asked, "What is the hardest part?" On purpose I look at what is happening to the living world. And more than once it has taken my hope away. One night, I could find no light at all. All I could do was be grateful for one breath, that single breath, then the next.
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| The Buddha had a big heart for everyone. |
I think
that is the whole practice. We do not have to wait until something is nearly gone before we love it. The Earth's wildlife is still here. The soil. The people.
The flora, the fauna. Gratitude is not a soft feeling; it is where protection begins.
This is why clean air and clean water (rivers and oceans), healthy soil and healthy trees (forest) have never sounded like a modest thing to receive or hand down. They are our entire human inheritance.
Most of what holds them is still standing. The people living alongside forests have protected them for generations without ever needing instructions, only support.
There's one more thing before I go. Artful Impact is back, opening the new season with Robert J. Dellinger on why climate science needs storytellers, which turns out to be the same question I was asked on stage. But Artful Impact approaches it from the other side.
Here is what I would love from you, readers. Tell me about a piece of art that changed something in you and what you did afterward. This second part is what I am collecting. Post it below in the comments.
With love,
P.S. If this message makes you want to put your hands into something right now, see
165 Trees:
ourlifeforce.org.
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