Why Ecology Must Be at the Centre of Artistic Practice Today

Most people encounter nature today in curated fragments: a potted plant on a desk, a weekend hike, a floral-print skirt, a wallpaper on a screen. Nature is everywhere as inspiration and increasingly absent as reality.

Can I water my garden enough to heal the world?

Meanwhile, forests are razed for data centres, mountains are quarried for limestone, landscapes are flattened for palm oil plantations (IYKYK), and rivers are redirected in the service of growth. Despite possessing more information than any civilisation before it, we appear to be forgetting a rather important fact: our dependence on the living world, unfortunately for us this forgetfulness has consequences.

We have become accustomed to viewing everything through an extractive lens. Nature is valuable for what can be taken from it. Relationships are valuable for what can be gained from them. Time is to be optimised, attention must be monetised, even rest is expected to justify itself through productivity. This also happens to the lesson we're passing down often unconsciously, to the generations that follow.

And then there is the curious case of the modern economy, markets, corporations, billionaires, and GDP is recounted as though they are the primary engines of life itself. The structure is convincing. It encourages us to believe that the economy sits at the centre of existence, in reality, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of ecology.

Paper money begins with trees, concrete begins with mountains and the electronics begin with minerals buried beneath within the belly of the planet earth. Every object you own begins as a gift extracted from the earth. We cut down forests to print money, spend the money to build cities, and then wonder why there are no forests left. The absurdity would be amusing were it not so expensive.

This modern life performs an extraordinary feat of concealment, it hides the origins of things. A notification arrives, a package appears at the door, a building emerges from the ground, and the chain of extraction that made it possible disappears from view. We're loosing perspective in tandem with biodiversity, we've shifted the base line yet again.

Before landscapes are destroyed, they are forgotten. Before rivers are polluted, they are reduced to abstractions. It is difficult to protect what one can no longer see.

This is where artists matter.

Not because artists possess special answers, but because they remain among the few people whose work depends upon sustained attention. In a culture increasingly organised around distraction, attention has become a radical act. The artist's task is to notice. To reveal relationships that have become invisible. To restore a sense of scale in a culture obsessed with immediacy. To remind people that they live not above nature, but within it. Robin Wall Kimmerer offers a compelling image through the work of Franz Dolp, an economist and writer who spent decades restoring an old-growth cedar forest on a clear-cut plot of land in Oregon. Dolp viewed restoration not merely as forestry but as art. The arrangement of trees, he argued, was no different from composing a piece of music, painting a landscape, or revising a poem.

He called for "artists as foresters", a phrase that deserves to outlive him. Dolp believed ecological restoration required a "forestry of intimacy"; a relationship of care, reciprocity, and affection between people and place. In healing the land, one also heals the self. The lesson extends far beyond forests.

Ecological crises are not merely failures of science, policy, or management. They are failures of relationship, something that all of us seem to be constantly struggling with. Data can tell us what is disappearing, art can remind us why it matters. Kimmerer herself writes of the asters and goldenrod that bloom together in fields across North America. One scientist saw separate species. The artist saw beauty. She eventually concluded that both perspectives were necessary.

Science explains the world while art teaches us how to love it. The challenge before us is therefore not simply to reduce emissions, protect habitats, or preserve species, important though those tasks are. It is to rebuild affection for a living world that has been reduced to scenery, resource, and commodity.

Artists are uniquely placed to do this work. Not because they can save the planet single-handedly, but because culture changes when perception changes. The stories we tell, the images we create, the poems we write, and the objects we make shape what societies choose to value and what they choose to ignore. Every species has gifts to offer the world. Ours include language, imagination, music, story, and art. These are not luxuries. They are forms of reciprocity. They are how we give something back, perhaps this is what an ecological artistic practice ultimately means.

Not making art about nature. But making art in service of relationship. To become, in Dolp's sense, artists as foresters: caretakers of attention, cultivators of wonder, restoration ecologists of relationship.

In an age defined by extraction, that may be among the most necessary forms of creation we have.

The most important artistic question of this century may not be what new worlds we can imagine. It may be whether we can learn to see the existing one clearly enough to care for it.