“Northanger Abbey” is the least beloved of Jane Austen’s six novels. It also appears frequently in university-level literature classes. These two things are related.
On a Sunday morning in New York in 1989, a few women perused the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hidden among the regular punters, the anonymous feminist art collective, the Guerrilla Girls, went unnoticed as they carefully counted the number of female artists versus the number of naked women depicted in the artworks. They were on a secret mission to make people care about the racial and gender unfairness of the art world.
But why would a random compound detected on a planet so far beyond our reach be a strong indicator of life? Well, let's consider the story of DMS on Earth, a story of the strange and poetic ways life appears and reappears in different guises — and with different scents.
The island's evolution into a globally renowned open-air museum and international contemporary arts hub was all but assured in 1994, when Yayoi Kusama's yellow and black-spotted Pumpkin was added to the landscape's growing collection of public artworks. This iconic work has since become emblematic of Naoshima itself.
"[The] initial goal wasn’t to promote tourism," said Soichiro Fukutake's son, Hideaki, who now helms the Fukutake Foundation. "But rather to revitalise the region through art and help locals feel a renewed sense of pride in their hometown."
For climate activist Mike Tidwell, when the trees in his suburban Washington, D.C. neighborhood began to die en masse from record heat waves and rainfall, he felt their loss keenly. “You look at the Miller Tree before she died — arms outstretched in graceful pose,” he writes of a neighbor’s tree, “and you don’t see a soul?”
In “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street,” Tidwell explores the myriad impacts — emotional, physical, spiritual — of the climate crisis on the people, and the trees, who inhabit his block in Takoma Park, Maryland, a city of about 18,000 people. In the process, he writes, he discovers that “what was happening here, in the middle of Takoma Park, was probably a pretty good proxy for city streets and stressed-out societies everywhere.”