A series of paintings, sculptures and quotes that form a single work on the environment.

By Duncan Edwards

The Piercing Eye

Influence

We now hear words everyday like Sustainability, Carbon Quotas, Global Warming, Deforestation, Environmental Disaster, and Green Issues. They have become prominent topical words stimulating a range of emotions from panic through to concern, anger, disinterest, denial, and lethargy.

Watercolour – Iguana

And yet we can’t or should I say we dare not ignore them.  So what is it that causes us to see our world like this and can we do anything to help.

We stagger on to the treadmill of life every day ushering our children to school, rushing to work, trying to maintain mortgage repayments and rents, frantically trying to stay in a job, purchasing the vital necessities of life.  We snatch at happiness in the few weeks we have off each year and glimpse what life could be like in those couple of hours we have as we relax each weekend.

On top of all this we are now expected to save the planet as well!

We know this is probably the most important thing we can do for the future, but the problems we have created are so huge can we really do anything?  We are constantly plagued by doubts.

Despite these doubts most of us do our bit and manage to fit saving the planet into the rest of our lives; recycling, reducing plastic bag usage, maybe getting a bus to work or even a bike or checking where our food comes from, and yet our efforts seem so small and futile when we look at what happens around us in the world.  There is a tendency to think ‘well why bother what effect can we really have?

Tiger Salamander - recycled office waste