Art on Climate Change Illustration Competition

Today the Green Hub hosted a very fun competition on climate change. It was an open art competition! Anyone was welcome and materials were all provided. There were also good talks and discussions on fast fashion, perspectives on climate and sustainability as well as hope, and how to change. Though the format to work on was mainly canvas, I brought some preprinted material to work with as I wanted to connect my entries to countering the extinction of knowledge, our theme for our walkshops. 

If we design a climate change adaptation measure, who are we designing it for? If you want more vegetation in your surroundings because you heard it helps against climate extremes, what local vegetation would you want to implement and maintain and what related ecosystem species would you want to attract? This means at least the people involved in designing measures need to know about their local species, and at least, the ones that used to be local. But here we often find a lack of knowledge. 

Already back in 2002 a British study showed that elementary school children were far better at recognizing randomly drawn Pokemon cards than their local wildlife. [An experiment involving 109 primary school children aged between four and 11 found that by the age of eight most were able to name 78 per cent of the 150 Pokémon characters such as Pidgeotto, Pikachu and Jigglypuff. The same age group could manage correctly to identify only about half of the pictures of animals and plants, such as "beetle", "deer" or "oak tree", displayed on cards shown to them by the scientists.] The important message from that study was "why should a child care about the extinction of a species if he or she has no idea what it is?"

With this in mind I used local data from the freely available observation of wildlife tracker and selected  species to make Pokemon style cards from using a freely accessible tool. Rather than attacks or abilities, I used this space to include a description of their appearance and behavior that appeared to me the most striking, with text from Wikipedia (in Dutch). Now we can enjoy a fun format of actual local creatures, to learn more about them and maybe recognize them outdoors. You can view all the entries in the Vrijhof until 22 June. This event is even featured on the local Uit In Enschede website of events.