#nataliejeremijenko

[ninacm]

Upside down plants. #plantlady #natural #nature #MassMoca #treelogic #NatalieJeremijenko #SundayFunday #love #art #artiseverywhere #openyoureyes #museum #latergram #latergramfordays

[ellenpbritton]

Natalie Jeremijenko

“wise, witty and bracingly fierce” ~ New York Times

Natalie Jeremijenko is highly qualified in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and engineering. Using art, she studies the influence of the environment on our health, and employs technology as an opportunity for social transformation. Jeremijenko explores the interface between biology and design, employing the best of nature to tackle our problems, veering into biomimicry. In her practice, she designs playful and unorthodox social experiments which may seem novel but actually address very real and critical issues associated with Environmental Health. 

Jeremijenko runs xClinic, a pioneering Environmental Health Clinic at NYU. The X Clinic rather than looking at the internal biology and genetics of an individual, it looks at the surrounding environment and our dependences on it and it prepares the patient for awareness and action. In this clinic, the visitors are not patients but impatients, citizens who are dissatisfied with the local environment and refuse to wait for legislative change, "you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organisations and local government or civil society groups: organisations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change." She uses a uniquely creative approach to start a conversation on environmental health, and to prescribe action. For example, pet tadpoles to monitor water quality, as they are the most accurate biosensors we have. They react to the same hormone emulators from industry that we do, and their growth is easily observed. She used the results to link water contaminants with the breast cancer and obesity epidemics, and other hormonal health issues. Jeremijenko’s work is bold, artful and makes a serious statement. She has gone beyond merely monitoring, and also devised public interventions to interrupt harmful contaminants in our environment. For example, her solar chimneys employ black plastic tubing to passively draw air through a standard HVAC filter which removes 95% of the carbon black of passing air before it can reach our pretty pink lungs. This carbon black, with ozone, is responsible for about half of global warming's effects, and results from inefficient combustion not combustion itself. The solar chimneys are installed at primary schools across New York, and the carbon black can actually be harvested from the filters and used to make pencils for the students, the length of which measures the grime that has been pulled out of the air. Supreme circularity, while making a mostly invisible pollutant tangible so it can no longer be ignored.  Her noPark bio-filtration gardens increase greenery on New York streets while utilising foliage to capture the oily run-off from the road before it enters the river. What she does is takes a "no parking" space associated with a fire hydrant, and prescribes the removal of the asphalt to create an engineered micro landscape, to create an infiltration opportunity. It’s also increasing fixing CO2s and sequestering some of the airborne pollutants. Aggregated, these smaller interceptions could actually infiltrate all the road-borne pollution that now runs into the estuary system.  Beyond practicality, experiments like this bring awareness to the invisible environmental crisis which is happening. They also address the crisis of agency associated with environmental matters, “what to do?”. Jeremijenko is pioneering a radical redesign of socioecological systems, creating and exploiting opportunities that require participation and engage the imagination. Instead of the idea that environmentalism is all about doing less, reducing carbon footprint etc, she strives to use the massive force of people as a social good. Action over inaction. 

The work of Natalie Jeremijenko creates change and cannot be ignored, my favourite type of art.

[ellenpbritton]

mini-project : Forest Pockets

“The rapid increase in urban population worldwide is among the most important global health issues of the 21st century. According to the projections of the United Nations Population Division, by 2030, more people in the developing world will live in urban than rural areas; by 2050, two-thirds of its population is likely to be urban. Among other problems, urbanisation is found to have a significant impact on well-being and mental health. The term ‘Nature-deficit disorder’ describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. Explore this issue to obtain a point of view, and define a solution.”

This was the brief proposed to us by Native for a twenty-four hour design challenge. The reality of urbanisation, and the implications for design, are both intriguing and terrifying. I hadn’t realised how quantified the research in this area had become, with Japanese scientists leading the way, distinct reductions in blood pressure and cortisol (stress hormone) levels have been measured as a result of the practice of escaping the city and ‘forest bathing’. The fact that these studies are producing evidential data is brilliant because cynics can no longer dismiss the benefits.

Nonetheless, I was horrified with some of the facts I came upon during my rapid research. I obtained the point of view that any development in this area should start with improving Environmental Health, guided by the thinking of Natalie Jeremijenko.  We need to consider our collective sources of disease and health, where the benefits of improvements can be shared by all, not just privileged participants. 

Air quality is fundamental; we have no choice, we must breathe, but do we have any control over the air quality? The reality is, going for a run in a city at the wrong time of day may do us more harm than good, lining our pretty pink lungs with carbon black. Traffic pollution causes two and a half thousand early deaths in Scotland a year. This is unacceptable. The World Health Organisation has now placed air pollution in the same category as tobacco smoke, UV radiation and plutonium contamination. It kills more people than AIDS and Malaria combined, and causes Cancer. 

Another negative aspect of urbanisation is derelict land, an issue that will resonate with any Glaswegian; 61% of us live within 500m of derelict land. A figure which has increased in the last ten years, despite economic improvements. More than half of the sites are in public ownership, and a third has been vacant or derelict since 1990 or earlier. Proximity to these ragged or empty lots has been linked to negative mental health effects and feelings of hopelessness, not to mention possible chemical contaminations from industry. 

So what can be done? Could an affordable, sustainable, low maintenance air filtration system be implemented? To alleviate some of the other negative effects of industrialisation and nature deprivation, too? How about trees? 

Trees remove gaseous air pollution, primarily by uptake via leaf stomata, though some gases are removed by the plant surface. A micro-engineered green space, a Forest Pocket, could be designed using the optimal trees to create a bio-filter garden. Small leaved conifers such as the Scots Pine and Junipers are especially good at capturing pollutant particles.

These could be dotted around Glasgow in some of the long-abandoned derelict sites, with choice locations prioritised appropriately. Other cities need to plant vertically to enjoy the benefits of more greenery, but we have more space here, ready to be used. The principal function of these Forest Pockets would be to scrub our air by removing particulate matter and carbon dioxide, with a secondary function as usable green spaces. 

The aggregative effect could be huge; in a 2014 report, following what was described as the "largest city tree survey of its kind", it was calculated that London's trees provided "at least £133 million of benefits every year in terms of air pollution removal, carbon sequestration and reducing the amount of water going into drains". With expert development, a network of greenery like this could be a feasible, logical, easily implementable solution to our air pollution problems while we strive for the transition to electric, emission-free vehicles. Or a part of the solution at the very least, which would benefit citizens by providing access to greenery too.

Is this concept naive? Certainly. Without a doubt. But I still think it could be impactful, and more importantly I passionately believe that something must be done about our Environmental Health, and our deprivation from nature. Forward thinking conversations need to happen between urban planning, architecture, design, horticulture, medicine and neuroscience to address the crises associated with urbanisation. Let Glasgow flourish, it deserves better.