We really believe that
artists are a necessary part of facing what humanity is dealing with.
I'm Ama Rogan, and I am the managing director
here at a studio in the woods.
A Studio in the Woods is a very special place.
It's eight acres of wooded property in what's called Lower Coast Algiers.
So, across the river and down the river from the city proper.
But we are still in New Orleans.
We are located on the river in a bottomland hardwood forest.
And we're a preserve.
We both protect and care for the forest here,
in service of creating a space for artists of any discipline
to make work that has a public engagement component around our particular theme.
We've done three-year series.
Three years on water,
Three years on landscape.
But frankly, it's getting pretty hot in here
in terms of the climate, and we wanted to amplify that.
And so this current theme that we have going now is called
Rising: Climate in Crisis.
With climate change,
we, as humans are contributing to warming our planet.
I'm Julie Whitbeck.
I am the ecologist for Jean Lafitte, National Historical Park and Preserve.
Today, we're at the Barataria Preserve.
The habitat is super similar to the Habitat at A Studio in the Woods.
We're less than 15 miles away, so we face the same kinds of challenges
and we're experiencing the same kinds of changes over time.
So 20 years ago, this was forest.
Now it's marsh.
We see a shrinking of the footprint of forest on our landscape of swamp,
and an expansion of both, this marsh kind of landscape
and also of open water.
It's a real short time span for that degree of change.
So we're very concerned about the pace of this change here.
So, right now we are monitoring the change in flooding
at an array of sites across the preserve.
Increasing flooding leads to sort of suffocation of tree breathing,
and they can't take in as much CO2, and deliver
as much oxygen to the atmosphere.
So, we are trying to understand
the specific outcomes of changing climate for this place,
and then share those with our public, our visitors, our neighbors here.
Artists express their experience of this change through their own languages.
And I think that shares this experience
with a broader range of people, certainly, than I can reach with my “science lingo”