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SPENCER WEART ON DEPICTING GLOBAL WARMING

HOW CAN PEOPLE visualize a future at risk? The dangers of global warming have not deeply aroused the American public, and one reason has been a lack of images appropriate to the problem. Of the many potential harms that scientists foresee, only one has shown a potential for imagery capturing the truly global nature of the problem: future sea-level rise. Recently, one powerful artistic work addressing this has appeared, the large mural painting Manifest Destiny by Alexis Rockman. 1	1
"Manifest Destiny," (2004), reproduced with permission of the artist.
Rockman, a 1985 graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, was already well known for paintings addressing bioengineering and other issues of the relations between technology and nature. Perhaps most famous is The Farm (2000), widely reproduced by opponents of genetic manipulation, which depicts a squared-off cow, a multi-winged chicken and other grotesquely engineered organisms. 2 Manifest Destiny is far larger and artistically deeper.	2
The mural looks toward Brooklyn 3,000 years in the future, following a sea-level rise caused by global warming. An orange sunrise lights up a half-drowned, semitropical world. Gulls and other local flora and fauna that have survived are joined by migrants from the tropics. Humans are conspicuously absent except for the remnants of their constructions, most prominently the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge. Wrapped with tropical vegetation, the wreckage resembles the classical ruins of many earlier paintings—but in a lurid light and largely submerged. (A portion of the painting is reproduced in color on the cover of this issue.) The painting has caused a considerable stir, with prominent features in the media and reproductions showing up on environmentalist websites. 3	. . .