Click on the image and it’ll enlarge in your browser for better viewing – and this one deserves it!
A new project is in the works – funded by the Crater Lake Institute. Here’s the sketch awaiting comments and maybe a few changes, but I can already see it’ll be a grand painting. And this is one of two large murals I’m working on at once. I’ll have the second sketch for you next week (I hope, if my fingers don’t give out). They’re both about Climate Change and the Yellowstone area.
This is a ecosystem in great peril, thanks to us: Climate Change is causing mountain pine beetles to over-live usually colder winters. Then there’s an introduced fungus called white pine blister rust that is believed to be native to Asia or Europe and was subsequently introduced to North America by us – and put the three together and you have the recipe for real disaster. Thousands upon thousands of these important trees are either dying or are already standing stark and ghostly against the Yellowstone sky, ghost forests – and most of the critters represented in the sketch rely on this tree for survival, for food, shelter and their way of life.
YES: those are dead trees! Photo from University of Utah researcher Wally Macfarlane.
So, the sketch: The big background peak was patterned after Electric Peak along the northern border of Yellowstone, and will show fresh fall snow – but snow is a factor in this story too. Warmer winters mean less summer ground water, and the elk birth rates are already declining there because of the lack of proper summer grass to produce milk for their young. Below the peak, the whitebark pine forests show as dying or dead with brown-red needles by the millions. A back-country hot springs to the right of the grizzly places it over the Yellowstone Caldera. Aspen are in full fall yellow on the far right side, another species in danger. Aspen are important because they are one of the few hardwoods growing here, but they need summer water to survive – oops, that too is declining. I could go on, but you get the ‘picture’.
Art should stimulate discussion, and that’s what this is all about. I’m excited to be a part of it. Global Climate Change is the single most important threat to our well-being – as well as the health of all the creatures and plants we are now responsible for. It wasn’t this way before humans learned to alter the planet they live on, but now it’s up to us to make sure they have a place to live. Onward – I say to my painting arm. What else could matter more?
Thanks for reading this week. Stay tuned for the painting!
Larry Eifert
Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.
Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.
Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs
And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.
