Image: New York’s Battery Park | Shutterstock
Wendy Abrams founded her exhibit “Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cool Planet” back in 2007, but it hasn’t lost one bit of relevance. The traveling art installation has visited cities around the world, from Los Angeles to Geneva to Jerusalem, and now, with support from the office of Governor Andrew Cuomo, it has rolled into New York City’s Battery Park.
Twelve globes by twelve artists, each five feet across and mounted on a cement pedestal, will stand in an arc across the park through November 20th. Each globe illustrates either a step anyone can take to help reduce global warming, like line-drying clothes or recycling, a larger effort like global wind generation or a national train system in the US, or the outcome if nothing is done, like the melting of the ice caps.
The project hopes to increase awareness of the effects and causes and remedies of climate change, said Abrams. She didn’t want her platform only to say that climate change is real, she wanted it to put solutions into people’s minds.
Whether or not the tiny steps that private citizens can take, like turning down the thermostat and wearing sweaters (represented here by a globe wearing a sweater knitted by artist Lindsay Obermeyer), can make a meaningful difference until the same level of restrictions are put on major industry, the cause of awareness is a good one. 93% of the world’s climate scientists agree that climate change is in the works.