They’re back: Blue mussels and menhaden have returned to Long Island Sound this year in huge numbers. On this 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, many of us are celebrating their homecoming as a sign of the progress made reviving the sound. More needs to be done, but this welcome news of cleaner waters opens the opportunity to begin farming the urban sea.

Aquaculture has rightly earned a reputation for growing low-quality seafood at the expense of the environment, but a new form of ocean-friendly farming has emerged right outside of New York City. These small-scale vertical farms — some of the first in the country — are designed to grow multiple species of seaweed and shellfish, have small footprints, and provide an array of environmental benefits. Picture them as three-dimensional gardens, where seaweed, mussels, and scallops grow at the top of the water column, stacked above oysters and clams below. (Full disclosure: One of the authors of this article runs such a farm. There are also several others currently in
the permitting process.)

Eating local seaweed may seem exotic, but it’s coming to a plate near you. While shellfish have seen turns as both delicacies and a staple food source in our region for hundreds of years, the seaweed that grows alongside them is less familiar. It shouldn’t be, though: A native seaweed like Nori contains more vitamin C than orange juice, more calcium than milk, and more protein than soybeans. And it might surprise those of us on the hunt for omega-3s to learn that many fish do not create these heart-healthy nutrients — they consume them. By eating the plants fish eat, we get the same benefits. Already restaurants such as Beyond Sushi in Manhattan have crafted entire menus around these sea vegetables, and a bevy of gourmet chefs are working on recipes to make locavores swoon.

The best news is that these farms do more than grow food: In every sense, they restore rather than deplete. Matched up against land-based farming, these new ocean farms win every time. Seaweed and shellfish require no inputs — no land, no fertilizer, no fresh water — and since they grow three-dimensionally, they use space more efficiently than their land-based counterparts.

Shellfish and seaweed also act as filters, drawing out nitrogen and heavy metals — the primary objective of the Clean Water Act. While an important nutrient for humans, excess nitrogen from residential and agricultural runoff into the sound regularly triggers large-scale algae blooms that deplete oxygen levels, killing marine life and forcing beach closures. With a single oyster filtering up to 50 gallons of water a day, even small farms can have measurable impacts on water quality. Farms in waters polluted by heavy metals are cultivating shellfish and seaweed not for food production, but for the continued rehabilitation of the sound. One local initiative, spearheaded by the Bronx-based nonprofit Rocking the Boat and Charles Yarish of the University of Connecticut, grows kelp and mussels in the Bronx River to filter out mercury and other pollutants. Other local projects are even building oyster reefs to protect New York from storm surges and flooding.

Still not convinced? Local ocean farms are also emerging as a viable source for alternative energy. As the fastest-growing plant in the world, kelp is capable of producing over 2,000 gallons of biofuel per acre annually — five times more than the ethanol produced by corn and up to 30 times more per acre than soybeans. With companies like RPM Sustainable Technologies already working with Long Island Sound farmers to source kelp for their biofuel operations, the promise of growing alternative energy in local waters is on its way to becoming a reality.

Ocean farms open both new and old pathways for economic development. A decentralized system of small-scale operations could revitalize life along the shoreline, first by creating new green jobs on farms and in the biofuel industry and then, as the sea recovers, perhaps opening up old fisheries and bringing back traditional means of making a living. In April, the New Amsterdam Market staged a one-day outdoor fish market at the old Fulton Docks in lower Manhattan, demonstrating that the neighborhood has the potential to be home to local seafood, not just financial markets.

The urban sea promises to be one of New York’s great comeback stories. After 40 years of slow but steady progress under the Clean Water Act, it is time to deputize a new generation of ocean farmers to protect our sound and grow the green economy.

A new insurgent force has joined the climate wars: planet Earth.

This summer, she’s blanketed two-thirds of the country in drought; turned New Mexico and Colorado into blazing infernos; crumbled roads in Alaska and Texas with record-breaking temperatures; and, in biblical fashion, shut down a nuclear plant by clogging cooling pipes with dead fish.

Armed with an arsenal of extreme weather, the earth has taken to the battlefield and single-handedly trounced the climate deniers by convincing an overwhelming number of Americans that climate change is a real and imminent threat. Texas, the axis of Big Oil, experienced one of the largest opinion shifts in the nation, with belief in climate change climbing 13 percentage points from March to July. Even more stunning, 77 percent of Americans now believe the government should limit the amount of carbon dioxide that businesses can emit.

After decades of climate stalemate, the earth roared and people listened. Of course, Americans are fickle — concern about climate change will surely wax and wane. But the Earth’s decision to usher in the climate crisis a century ahead of schedule fundamentally changes the dynamics of the climate wars.

If this summer is any indication, it’s looking like we’re heading into an era shaped less by politicians and more by floods, hurricanes, and droughts. In the wake of each extreme weather event, long-standing political frames and alliances will begin to fracture as distraught — and increasingly angry — voters across the political spectrum demand action. Calls for smaller government, long the rallying cry of conservatives, will resonate less and less with farmers bankrupted by drought, wealthy voters who lose their homes to fire, and shoreline neighborhoods wiped out by hurricanes. Because bad weather is nonpartisan, the age of small government may be over for whole range of constituencies.

And as Americans begin to experience climate change in economic rather than environmental terms, the fossil-fuel industry’s jobs-vs.-environment frame will slowly lose potency. We’ve already seen unemployment spike along the path of storms, state budgets drained by infrastructure repair, and food and electricity prices driven up by drought. As the economic impacts pile up, climate change will emerge as the real “job killer.”

Political elites understand that crisis breeds change. During the financial collapse, Rahm Emanuel famously quipped, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Recall how both parties emerged as socialists overnight, nationalizing huge swaths of the banking sector (while most progressives stood idly by). If the Earth has indeed decided to disrupt politics-as-usual, this is the opportunity for climate activists to step into the breach.

Those concerned about water resources have already begun turning the drought into possibility. In his recent New York Times op-ed entitled “Don’t Waste the Drought,” journalist Charles Fishman writes, “We’re in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it.” We have an “opportunity to tackle long-ignored water problems and to reimagine how we manage, use and even think about water.”

Climate activists have been slower to respond. Some groups have begun to pivot away from their “don’t talk about climate change” strategy and are now encouraging the public to connect the dots between extreme weather and greenhouse gas emissions, but if we are serious about saving the planet — and its people — we need to be bolder. Here are four modest proposals for organizing in the age of extreme weather:

• Create a rapid-response network: With state budgets shrinking, first responders being laid off, and social services being cut, communities affected by climate change will increasingly be left to fend for themselves. Politically neutral groups — ranging from the Red Cross to the United Way — work to fill the gap by providing emergency services and other relief at the community level. But there is also a long tradition of unions, civil-rights organizations, progressive churches, and left political parties organizing similar relief efforts. The climate movement could create a national network charged with providing direct aid and services in damaged areas. This might include trained teams of activists to coordinate on-the-ground disaster relief, a national database of volunteers categorized by skill and region, and grassroots fundraising tools to raise money from thousands of small donors. But unlike the Red Cross, our strategy is to build political power, not just provide short-term relief. So our disaster plan also needs an organizing plan. On-the-ground local networks of grassroots groups, labor unions, students, and others need to be ready to frame the debate, organize town-hall meetings, knock on doors, and pressure politicians. Our goal is to help people in crisis, but also help them understand that to save their lives and livelihoods, we need to come together to defeat the enemies of the planet.

• Pre-disaster community-labor agreements: In places like California and New York, community-labor agreements have been used to ensure that poor and working-class people benefit from large private and public construction projects, both in terms of targeted hiring requirements and job quality. Extreme weather events require massive rebuilding efforts that could put the unemployed back to work. Before the storms hit, the climate movement needs to team up with labor and community groups to negotiate pre-disaster community-labor project agreements with state and local officials to ensure reconstruction jobs are union jobs and open up new opportunities for low-income people. Beyond job creation, these agreements could include a wide range of community benefits, including investment in affordable housing, green building requirements, and mechanisms for community involvement in development plans.

• Develop an alternative economic program: Whether it’s the solar company Sungevity, whose revenues grew by a factor of eight in 2010 and doubled again in 2011, or the just-transition program for coal workers in Washington state, all around the country the climate movement is hard at work turning the promise of a green economy into reality. It’s time to take these experiments and prepare a robust alternative for communities damaged by extreme weather. After Katrina, developers swooped in with their wish lists for new casinos and luxury condos while progressives scrambled to paste together alternatives of their own. In the future, we need to be ready to present storm-torn regions with a full-blown green alternative economic program. Elements of such a program could include green development banks; environmental-restoration jobs programs; new public transportation systems to reorganize metropolitan regions on a more sustainable basis; and new energy systems based on conservation and renewables. At the same time, the climate movement needs its own version of the conservative Koch brothers’ ALEC to prepare model legislation, talking points, and other resources for state and local legislators trying to rebuild their communities.

• Build a broad-based climate movement: Now is our chance to make the climate movement an everybody movement. The upside of the early arrival of the climate crisis is that it will affect every segment of the population, thereby opening up the opportunity for activists to develop new organizing strategies. Many of the constituencies who have had little interest in the environmental movement — ranging from the poor and working class to small business people and veterans — will increasingly have a stake in mitigating climate change as disaster strikes. This means shifting our organizing focus from college campuses and liberal bastions like San Francisco to union halls, low-income neighborhoods, small business associations, and other areas previously ignored by the climate movement.

Maybe the bad weather has arrived just in time. For the last few decades, the possibility of addressing the climate crisis was limited by a political climate governed by polls and election results. But the earth has changed the rules of the game. While politicians debate modest technical fixes, ordinary people left desperate by floods, fires, droughts, and other disasters will increasingly demand action. If the climate movement prepares now, each disaster opens an opportunity to advance new organizing strategies and alternative agendas. Out of crisis we can forge a better future. In an era of extreme weather, what appears unrealistic and radical before a storm may well appear as common-sense reform in its wake.

Last year, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee decided to investigate Big Oil’s jobs claims — and it turns out the industry has gone on a firing spree in recent years. They discovered that despite generating $546 billion in profits between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP reduced their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees over that period. In 2010 alone, the top five oil companies slashed their global workforce by 4,400 employees — the same year executives paid themselves nearly $220 million. But at least those working in the industry as a whole get paid high wages, right? Turns out that 40 percent of U.S oil-industry jobs consist of minimum-wage work at gas stations.

With job numbers like these, it is no wonder the fossil-fuel industry needs to spend millions ensuring they are not branded as “job killers.” As Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said, “Oil companies that make record profits and then cut American jobs strain their own credibility when they claim to be huge job-creators.”

And it gets worse. In what must rank as one of the greatest boondoggles in history, Big Oil is leveraging its taxpayer subsidies to rake in profits that, in the words of The New York Times, are “being continuously recycled to win the support of pliable legislators [and] underwrite misleading advertising campaigns.”

There is also a bigger, far more insidious way that Big Oil is killing jobs and undermining our economy: The industry remains hell-bent on denying climate change and obstructing climate action.

But the planet appears to be running a campaign of its own to persuade Americans that the oil lobby is leading us ever closer to economic ruin. Over the last year alone, hurricanes, floods, and droughts have had a devastating effect on American jobs. After tornadoes hit the area around Tuscaloosa, Ala., in April of last year, more than 6,000 people applied for disaster-related unemployment benefits. In Vermont, the number of workers filing unemployment claims went from 731 before Hurricane Irene to 1,331 two weeks afterwards. For the U.S. economy as a whole, 2011 was a historic year for expensive weather-related disasters, costing taxpayers $52 billion.

Consider one of the centers of U.S. oil production: Louisiana. Economists have been studying the long-term economic effects of Hurricane Katrina [PDF] in hopes of modeling the risks for the rest of the nation’s coastal regions. They found that Katrina wiped out 129,000 jobs in the New Orleans region — about 19 percent. Three years later, in 2008, 47,000 of the jobs lost in Katrina had returned, but 82,000 had not — and that doesn’t even consider the tens of thousands of new jobs that likely would have been created had there been no Katrina.

Our nation is in desperate need of jobs. Instead of bankrolling an industry that is laying off workers and threatening our economic future, why not take the billions in subsidies going to oil companies and invest instead in a sector that both creates jobs and protects the planet? It will be money well spent: According to the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, investment in a green infrastructure program would create nearly four times as many jobs as an equal investment in oil and gas.

Big Oil has spent millions positioning itself as the ultimate job creator, while branding those of us pushing to end fossil-fuel subsidies as “job killers.” But we are the ones fighting to put people back to work and ensure that we have a sustainable economy for generations to come. The oil and gas industry may have an army of 786 lobbyists, but we tally in the hundreds of thousands. This is the year we are coming to take our money back, create jobs, and protect our planet.

Real strides were also made to bridge the divide between environmental groups and unions. While Republicans relentlessly attacked environmentalists as “job killers,” groups like 350.org, Sierra Club, and NRDC reached out to unions early and often, and as a result, six labor unions came out in support of President Obama’s decision to oppose the permit. Not since the “Battle in Seattle” have we seen such diverse and robust coalitions.

But the Keystone campaign also exposed the perennial Achilles’ heel of those who are fighting against climate change: We are often painted by our opponents and perceived by the public as caring more about the environment than about jobs. In a press release titled “U.S. Chamber Calls Politically-Charged Decision to Deny Keystone a Job Killer,” the Chamber of Commerce said President Obama’s denial of the KXL permit was “sacrificing tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs in the short term, and many more than that in the long term.” And its messaging worked, with the media repeating the jobs vs. environment frame again and again. NPR’s headline was typical of many: “Pipeline Decision Pits Jobs Against Environment.”

Where should those proposals come from? As the six labor unions that opposed the KXL pipeline permit pointed out, one source can be the jobs programs that Republican politicians are currently blocking in Congress, like the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, which would boost employment by almost 2.3 million jobs in 2012 and almost 3.1 million jobs in 2013; the extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide for critical infrastructure repair; and initiatives to fund jobs for teachers, firefighters, and police. It’s time for the environmental movement to put the spotlight on the way climate-denying politicians are crying crocodile tears over a few hundred or thousand jobs while blocking millions of jobs unemployed American workers could be hired to do right now.

If we fail to become the voice for both the planet and workers, our movement risks losing the support of increasing numbers of workers, unions, and their political allies. The fossil-fuel industry and its allies know that working families are likely to prioritize bread-and-butter issues over environmental protection, especially in recessionary times. Right-wing forces are counting on the “job killing” message to drive ordinary Americans into the arms of the climate-denying Republican Party. Together, environmental and labor movements can defeat them by presenting a better jobs program to American workers — one that addresses the climate and economic crises at the same time.

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish: They are all in trouble if global warming continues unabated.

Put down your fork — Whole Foods is not telling you the whole story. The dirty little secret of their seafood rating system is that it ignores the largest and most imminent threat to our oceans: greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if every human on the planet miraculously decided to buy only seafood stamped with the Whole Foods seal of “sustainablity,” marine species will still be doomed.

This is not a secret threat: Just last month, the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) — a consortium of 27 of the top ocean experts in the world — declared that effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and oxygen depletion have already triggered a “phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.” According to Dr. Alex Rogers, director of the IPSO [PDF]:

The findings are shocking. As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the ocean the implications became far worse than we had individually realized … We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime.

Sadly, in the era of climate crisis, overfishing and other forms of unsustainable harvest are the least of our problems. Rising carbon emissions are radically changing the chemical composition of our seas, having already contributed to the destruction of more than 85 percent of the world’s coral and oyster reefs. Rising air temperatures are changing wind patterns, which is a major cause of more than 400 ocean “dead zones” devoid of oxygen and sea life. Species ranging from gray whales to plankton are fleeing their native habitats for the first time in nearly 2 million years as water temperatures rise.

In other words, while some marine species are threatened by overfishing, our entire ocean ecosystem is in peril — and all of our “sustainable” eating will be ashes in our mouths unless we urgently address the climate crisis.

So if buying tilapia from sustainable farms in Peru will not save the oceans, what will?

One modest first step is incorporating seafood’s carbon footprint into sustainability rating standards. More than 80 percent of our seafood is imported and the fishing industry burns through millions of gallons of fuel chasing declining fish stocks in ever more remote regions of the globe. Whole Foods and organizations like Seafood Watch, which produce consumer sustainable seafood guides, need to incorporate the emissions produced by the harvesting and transport of seafood into their rating systems.

Inclusion of the carbon footprints into rating systems will encourage consumers to seek out local, as opposed to global, seafood. Groups like FishChoice have already developed online mapping tools to help retailers and restaurants connect with fishers in their region. And more than 60 community-supported fisheries programs have sprung up in the last two years, allowing residents to buy a share of their local shellfish farms and receive fresh, hyper-local seafood in return.

But rescuing our oceans from the grip of the climate crisis will require more that editing seafood pocket guides. Instead of saving whales we need to save entire ecosystems.

This will require dedicating portions of the ocean to farming — while reserving large swaths for marine conservation parks. These farms need to be small and decentralized. Industrial aquaculture farms have rightly been branded as large-scale polluters producing low-quality food. Simply replacing destructive fishing fleets with destructive global fish farms will only hasten the demise of our oceans. Guided by principles of sustainability, our shorelines of the future can be dotted with organic fish farms servicing local communities.

But our ocean farms can do more than grow food — they can also produce green energy. Wind and algae farms need to be integrated with oyster and salmon operations. With some careful planning, this is our opportunity to build a decentralized network of alternative energy and seafood farms growing food, generating power, and creating jobs for local communities.

Such transformation of the oceans will surely be controversial. Our oceans are revered as some of the last wild spaces on Earth — ungoverned and untouched by human development. But all those who love the blue sea need to confront the brutal reality that unless we reimagine our waters as agrarian eco-spaces designed to curb seafood’s carbon footprint, our wild oceans will be dead oceans.

See related slideshowThroughout history, artists have joined forces with political movements to battle injustice and demand a better and more beautiful world. Picasso’s “Guernica” captured the horrors of the German bombing of civilians in 1937. “Solidarity Forever,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “Give Peace a Chance” expressed the optimism and power of the labor, civil rights, and peace movements. Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” embodied the utopian fervor of the French Revolution. Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” silkscreen during the 2008 election captured America’s yearning for a more visionary politics.

Great upheavals demand great art. And now humanity faces the gravest of threats: climate change. The climate clock ticks ominously onward, but thus far we have been unable to marshal what Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein describe as the “bodies, passion, and creativity” required to avert impending economic and environmental disaster.

But passion comes from the heart, not the head, and climate activists have largely been targeting people’s upper organ, pleading their case with statistics, policy platforms, and poll-driven messaging. Maybe it’s time to aim lower. McKibben, the founder of 350.org, is one of the few climate activists thinking seriously about the relationship between art, activism and social change. He views artists as “antibodies of the cultural bloodstream” and key to social movement vitality:

[Artists] sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity. So when art both of great worth, and in great quantities, begins to cluster around an issue, it means that civilization has identified it finally as a threat. Artists and scientists perform this function most reliably; politicians are a lagging indicator.

In its finest moments, art reveals our shared experience of pain and struggle, letting us know we are not alone. As Theodore Dreiser observed in 1917, “Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.” It has the ability to transform politics from a dry to a celebratory affair, using tools of laughter, sexuality, and beauty to coax people to cultural events where they experience, often for the first time, the power of social solidarity and political awakening. Art can help us digest and make sense of what is happening in our world — a process essential for spurring political action.

Deployed carefully, art can also provide a potent way to persuade troubled peoples that another world is possible. It appeals to our better nature, reminding us that love and joy are more powerful than hatred and violence. During times of upheaval, it appeals to our hearts, replaces fear with hope and determination, encouraging us to seek out new visionary ways to organize society.

In this 350 EARTH installation, 3,000 people in New Delhi formed an enormous elephant threatened by rising seas — a plea to world leaders not to ignore the “elephant in the room.” Credit: Daniel DancerBut our activist culture has largely forgotten how to fight political battles with cultural tools. At protest after protest, we haul out the same exhausted puppets, chants, and songs. Our slogans and imagery are flat, prescriptive, and literal rather than poetic and inspirational. Compare the “Green Jobs Now!” placards at climate rallies to the iconic “I Am a Man” signs of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. One demands policy action; the other beautifully evokes hundreds of years of struggle for racial equality and justice.

Sectors of the climate movement are trying to cure our cultural amnesia. 350.org has begun actively promoting and supporting climate change art, even retaining an official artist-in-residence on staff to coordinate climate art projects. Land artists around the world — who in the ’60s and ’70s sculpted landscapes to protest the artificiality and commercialization of art — have become prominent “messengers” of the climate movement, organizing massive land art projects in dozens of counties to communicate 350.org’s goals in Copenhagen and Cancun.

Other artists have begun to respond. There are now songs like “Melting Ice” by 10-year-old Lil Peppi, the “King of Eco-Rap”; or Jill Sobule’s satirical “Happy Song About Global Warming.” Using live collaborative online tools, art students in Colombia and Canada have produced a powerful stop-action video based on their personal reflections about the climate crisis:

At the same time, there is a new generation of artists who represent a revival of the arts and crafts movement of the early 20th century, but with a modern twist. In the face of the great upheavals of globalization and climate change, as well as the hyper-commercialization of the conceptual “high arts,” this “green arts movement” dedicates itself to creating art that is sustainable, handcrafted, and produced locally.

Rejected by much of the commercial art world, these artists sell their work at farmers’ markets, in abandoned city lots, and increasingly on DIY online venues like Etsy.com. They are less interested in the traditional art forms of painting, sculpture, and the like, and instead are creating a new form of political art that embeds the ethic of sustainability into every object they create. Obsessed with function, these artists are hell-bent on proving that building a localized, sustainable economy and culture is not just necessary, but possible. While others use imagery, metaphor, and rhyme to raise awareness about the climate crisis, these new green artists are living proof that we can build a more just and beautiful world.

This new generation includes artists like the Haitian designer Catherine Charlot, who handmakes dresses sewn from recycled umbrellas; Canadian designer Nolan Herbut, who uses discarded computer keyboards for his lighting designs; and New York artist Stephen Shaheen, who recently constructed a park bench out of 5,000 discarded MetroCards. Mike Thompson’s “Blood Lamp,” which is powered by a single drop of human blood, represents the dynamic outer fringes of the eco-friendly avant-garde:

Green artists are even setting up their studios in kitchens around the country. Our organization, the CultureWorks Collective, recently nominated sushi chef Bun Lai as our “Artist of the Month” because he embodies this new zeitgeist of sustainability. Lai’s dishes swirl with environmental awareness, economic justice, and mouth-watering sensation. He describes one dish, called Kiribati Sashimi, this way:

Kiribati Sashimi incorporates Kiribati sea salt. I use Szechuan pepper corns in my recipe, which creates an alternately hot and cold mouth sensation. I created it to raise awareness about global warming. At only eight to twelve feet above sea level, Kiribati may become the first nation to be engulfed by the ocean due to climate change. It is also one of the world’s poorest countries and is barely an afterthought in most people’s minds. I know my sea salt purchase is hardly an economic stimulus package for Kiribati but I am hoping that the awareness that my menu creates may be worth something in some unforeseen tangential way.

Bun Lai’s “Kiribati Sashimi.”Photo: Jean Paul VellottiThis new, dynamic generation of green artists see themselves as much more than a community of artists. They envision themselves as members of a growing public sphere and cultural economy supporting those who grow or make what they sell. They represent a generation of organic farmers, green designers, activist musicians, and others who have fully merged their lives, their activism, and their art into one identity.

If the climate movement is serious about crafting new organizing strategies around passion and creativity, we need to provide artists with resources and weave their work into our organizing strategies — rather than simply assigning them bit parts at political rallies. We need artists as movement strategists and tacticians. We need to seek out the new generation of green artisans and merge their culture of sustainability with the climate movement’s energy and militant activism.

At the same time, much of the arts industry remains oblivious to the climate crisis, let alone its civic duty to act. Humanity faces an existential threat while music and film producers dump billions into projects of little or no social value. Gallery and museum owners continue to view art through the narrow lens of conceptualism, marked by its rejection of craftmanship, aesthetics, and social use. In the face of mounting threats — ranging from worsening droughts and the northward march of climate-linked diseases to climbing food prices and rising seas — it’s time for the arts industry to do some serious soul-searching about whether it wants to sit this crisis out.

Let’s face it: As the world burns, the climate movement struggles to make its case. Climate legislation is dead in the Congress; global agreements seem less likely with each passing day. In 2008, 66 percent of Americans viewed climate change as a major threat; by March 2011, only 51 percent of the public was concerned. Millions of promised climate-reducing green jobs have not materialized.

We are mired in dark and cynical times, and left yearning for a ray of hope and vision. Artists see the world in a different light, a light we need now more than ever.

So we call on our fellow artists to join the climate movement and our fellow climate activists to embrace activist art. For, as the Bible says (Proverbs 29:18), “Where there is no vision, the people perish” — and so does the planet.

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To learn more about the green arts movement, read the “Green Art Minifesto.”

Also check out “Art in a changing climate,” a Grist special series.