Because half of the Adirondack Park belongs to all the people of New York State and is constitutionally protected to remain a “forever wild” forest preserve and the remaining half of the park is private land, it is an ideal place to deconstruct environmental conflict and to explore, though the art of storytelling, how people in the park are experiencing climate change. The goal of this project is to connect climate change to personal narrative though a mobile audio recording studio that travels through the Adirondack Park. Research has shown that personal stories help reduce the idea that climate change will only impact people in the future. To make meaningful climate resilient communities, it’s more effective to hear and think about how climate change is impacting our local community than read scientific data. Participants will be invited into this traveling recording studio to record their personal stories related to changes to the climate in their own environment.
Our intention is to use these stories to inspire student activist/artists to reflect on ways to make art in an around the topic of climate change in our course. This art may take the form of film, dance, visual art, music and will be captured in a digital archive. This archive will hold these creative reflections, along with the original stories, and climate data allowing for multiple ways of understanding climate change.
