Can the smell of fog help fight climate change? UCSC professor thinks we need art to get serious about climate change

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Jennifer Parker doesn’t believe science can solve climate change. At least, not alone. 

To stir people to action, the UC Santa Cruz professor of digital art and new media believes we also need a sensory push. 

“We know about the science,” she says. “But we don’t know what we can do about climate change. The arts really have this opportunity to close that climate-action knowledge gap.” 

Parker believes scientists and artists need to work together to research and create enticing, compelling and accurate ways to make the human impact on the planet – and ways to heal it – tangible to average observers. She believes we need interdisciplinary collaboration and to work with what people know, including new media.

“Modern culture is visual,” she says. “Most people are going to look at an Instagram picture before they’re going to read a science paper.” 

That’s why, in 2010, Parker built OpenLab, a collaborative research center and gathering place for creative scientists and data-driven artists. Some of the current projects include an exploration of humans’ relationship with algae, artistic ways to address climate change awareness and visual depictions of species loss. 

For Parker, OpenLab’s collaborative concept is nothing new. Even as a child, nature was her classroom. She thrived at a Waldorf-style high school, where she and her classmates learned about trees by drawing them and writing their own textbooks.

But when she enrolled at UC Santa Barbara, she found herself in monotonous lectures with no chance for interdisciplinary collaboration. She considered dropping out and moving to Paris to pursue her art, but then she stumbled upon the College of Creative Studies, a small college within UCSB that allows students to mix disciplines and choose their focuses. It became her academic home and the model she used to create OpenLab.

OpenLab’s focus is on integration, collaboration and creative research – not on siloing research by discipline. Parker wants people to engage with climate change viscerally – to see fog and ask questions about how air provides us with water, how water provides us with air, and to wonder what might change if we don’t confront climate change. 

She also has a new collaboration with the Seymour Marine Discovery Center called Climate Lab. The project is still coalescing, but the plan is to work in tandem on an art and science collaboration that will have events, workshops and exhibits. Lookout caught up with Parker to learn about it and about how we can combine skills and senses to engage with and protect the planet. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Lookout: Why is it important to conduct research with art and science?

Jennifer Parker: Well, because they’re not separate. We need each other. You plant a flower, you draw the flower, and you understand the seed and the biological processes. Those are all ways of learning about the world. 

We as a society have done some deep siloing of how we put the world together. When I was in school 30 years ago, we had just one biology major. Now, even that’s broken down into these micro-isms. It’s not all bad siloing — I want good engineers, strong bridges, good medicine. I appreciate that hyperfocus, but we need to consider who gets the medicine and how those bridges affect the environment. 

Rather than holistic, symbiotic thinking, we aren’t talking to each other, we aren’t solving problems, and we aren’t seeing how things are connected. 

Lookout: Tell me about OpenLab.

Parker: Here at UC Santa Cruz, around half of our art students have an additional major. They were already coming into our classes thinking about their other focuses, so the department was already interdisciplinary. These students wanted to tell stories about geology and talk about cool new studies and bring that knowledge into their artwork, but when I got here, there wasn’t much opportunity for that critical, creative practice. 

We started OpenLab to use art as an initial point of inquiry. If you ask, “Why are trees green? What’s happening here?”, we can understand it from a data perspective — what happens when they turn brown? OK, they’re dying, we can get that data. But what does it mean to be a human observer of that phenomenon? What does it mean to attach our senses, feelings and emotions to their observations? We need to try different ways of researching, including people observing the natural world, so we can learn even more. 

Lookout: What is an example of an OpenLab project you’re working on?

Parker: One of our collaborative groups is “Art and Fog.” Fog catchers are typically these big, mesh walls, with strings tied really close together so that when the fog goes through, water catches on the strings and glides down. We have one of those on the UCSC farm, but it’s just a giant wall. We decided to build one in the shape of a tree, so that people walk by and it catches their eye and they can learn what a fog catcher is and wonder what it means to pull water from the air. 

Lookout: Then what? What do you do with it? 

Parker: From a data standpoint, we can try to figure out when the fog will come, and we can measure how much water drips into a counter. But when you’re in a foggy place as a human observer, you look around. You notice that it’s not as foggy as it was yesterday. Maybe it smells like your mother’s house. Only we can bring in human sensing, this bridge where we contribute our human capacities within the environment and within culture, a kind of connective tissue between us and the environment. That’s creative research.

Lookout: How did your own interdisciplinary education affect your learning?

Parker: I went from being in a high school classroom with 15 people, one of whom was my twin sister, to a zoology lecture of 400 at UC Santa Barbara. I was frustrated with the way things were taught. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t memorize things, and hated flashcards. I didn’t see the point of it all. I knew I wanted to be an artist. It’s so cliché, but I decided I was going to drop out and move to Paris.

But then I found the College of Creative Studies, a smaller college within UCSB that functions sort of like a graduate school. I could finally sit through a biology class because I could draw, discuss with other students, and learn like I wanted. I was able to be a whole person again. 

Lookout: After graduating from UCSB, what came next?

Parker: After I got my master’s at Rutgers University, I worked for a few different artists, and then I moved to the Bay Area to work in art shipping and handling. Have you ever seen a Picasso exhibit with, like, 40 paintings? Well, you can’t put a Picasso in the mail. It’s a complicated process with millions of dollars involved. I did that for a while, and then a friend of mine who was teaching a class suggested I come lecture at UC Santa Cruz. 

Eventually, a tenure-track job opened, and I thought, OK, cool, I’m at the hippie school. It’s pass, no pass. Things are different here. I was able to have this unique engagement with students, but it still felt like there wasn’t enough collaboration between students and disciplines. Especially to answer these questions about climate change, I felt like I needed to work with biologists, chemists, and computer scientists, so I started OpenLab. And now I wouldn’t work any other way.

Lookout: How can art contribute to climate change solutions? 

Parker: We can’t change anything if we don’t change the culture. We can plant as many mangroves as we want, but it’s not going to make a difference if people continue to use the amount of carbon that they’re using, or if they continue to pollute, or if we don’t change our consumer habits. We have a lot of work to do. It’s not unfixable, but we definitely need all hands from all perspectives, and I think the arts are really good at bringing the emotional part to the table. 

Lookout: How can we as a society support this collaboration? 

Parker: Right now, science is having this really intense identity crisis for the first time. Before the pandemic, there were already climate deniers, but now there are everything deniers. Suddenly everyone is questioning whether science is even valid. 

And, unfortunately, I’m sort of like, welcome to our world! People have always been saying art isn’t valuable. Now, you have all these individuals who no longer want to believe scientists and reinforce that fabric. Some of the questions being raised are really good, and others are really scary. 

The world is changing rapidly, and for universities and research, it’s hard for us to keep up. But with these seed grants, creative collaborations, and interdisciplinary centers like the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, we can have a different kind of flexibility and agility. 

Within academia, we need to support each other and build off of each other, not compete or fear what it means for arts and humanities to have a piece of the pie. It’s time to let us lead to some degree because scientists have had the reins for the last 100 years, and it’s not working. 

Lookout What are you excited about right now?

Parker: We are currently working on another interdisciplinary space — the Climate Action Lab. It will be a collaboration with the Seymour Center to share climate action information, artworks, and science of adaptation and resilience modeling projects. 

Every campus should have a Climate Action Lab, just like we have a robotics lab and a stem cell research lab. It’s a place where people can go and learn about climate issues, but also strategies for action. We can use the arts to create a culture that protects natural resources. Stewardship is one word for it, but I think it’s really protecting as kin. How do you protect the things that you really love and care for? For example, you can talk about water policy and water rights, and all these things that are about consumption and extraction, but what does water want? 

Lookout: What other kinds of questions do you want to ask with creative research?

Parker: The future doesn’t exist yet. Nowadays, we dream up all these gadgets, and we make them. We want to be on the moon, so we work toward that vision. But what if we dreamt up a sustainable planet with wonderful, natural, integrated spaces to share? For example, what would it look like if there was enough housing? What would it look like if there were abundant rooftop gardens and plenty of food? How can we visualize a culture that we want to be part of instead of the sci-fi gloom and doom where we are all fighting for a cup of water? 

Creative research is speculative. It’s telling the stories of the places we want to exist in and also recontextualizing the past, where the voices of those on the margins have been lost and excluded. Now, we can rewrite these histories to be more inclusive and broader. As artists, creators and writers, we can imagine something that everybody wants to live in and work toward. It’s words and pictures. It’s all just words and pictures.

Molly Herring is a science writer trained in marine biology. When she’s not writing about science, she’s out chasing whales with scientists. She wrote this Q&A as part of UC Santa Cruz professor and Lookout Community Voices editor Jody K. Biehl’s class in the Science Communication master’s degree program.