Imagining a world without trees: Using great art to define the presence of absence

摘要

Edinburgh University's lain Woodhouse has recreated some famous landscape paintings to draw attention to the value of woods and forests.There can be no doubt that the rapid loss of forest cover worldwide is a serious issue. The World Wildlife Fund has even recently set an ambitious target of Zero Net Deforestation and Forest Degradation (ZNDD) by 2020 to reflect the scale and urgency with which threats to the worlds forests and climate need to be tackled. As both an educator (as a senior lecturer in the School of GeoSciences at Edinburgh University) and a businessman (as CEO of Carbomap, a new forest survey company) I fully support WWF's target and do what I can to spread the message of the importance of forests. But there is one challenge that I have always found difficult - how do you communicate the severity of forest loss to a wide, non-scientific audience. More specifically, how do you convey the increasing absence of trees. My most recent attempt at this was to take famous works of art and to digitally remove the trees. Constables The Haywain, Seurat's Sunday afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte, and Van Gogh's Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun.