Art as Climate Action with Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris

Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

Adapting Kolbert’s investigative strategy, Ed and Susannah initially set out to photograph places around the world being impacted by climate change - in order to call out a warning, as the name Canary Project suggests.  (Though the photographs themselves or the installations that ensued were subsequently renamed History of the Future.) 

Since then, Susannah and Ed have worked on numerous projects, from Green Patriot Posters to the more recent Toolshed, and helped coordinate works of fellow artists tackling climate change. They also both teach in the Dept. of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.

As a former student of the arts (more the literary kind than the visual kind, but who’s quibbling), I was curious about the ability of art to engage in climate activism. What can the artist achieve that the scientist and the journalist cannot, I wondered? And, conversely, what are art’s limitations?

To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.net

To check out Susannah and Ed’s latests project go to https://tool-shed.org