by Jo Ann Rangel

Created on: December 08, 2008   Last Updated: January 15, 2009

Eco-Art (Known as Environmental or Ecological Art) evolved from the quiet calm of a dead lake and the lackluster dance of crumpled waste lining the gutters of our urban landscapes through the lens of a human eye. To define Eco-Art is like trying to catch a shadow and hold it in your hand-for every try of saying what it is, there comes along someone who finds a new way to show you what it can be.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries you had artists who painted natural scenes of the outdoors which became very popular ; one could argue it was to capture beauty, to capture perfection in what the universe created. Fast forward to the present. These days if you want to see how a mountainside appeared before smog settled into a valley or look at an ocean view through a lens that today is distorted because of land erosion, you more than likely head to the Huntington or the Getty to have a glimpse of what used to be, that becomes our point of historical reference between then and now. That is the material point.

Eco-Artists are in the business of creating that reference point with the goal of understanding you are not a casual observer, you are an active participant if you choose to recognize it. Eco-Artists have really been Earth's messengers fanned out across the decades to bring attention to what is happening in the immediate natural world and also to bring our attention of what may happen if nobody gets the message in time. The art's lure is to make you think and find the message on your own; Eco-Art's design is to make you think of consequences, to think of beauty with a purpose, to appreciate life in all its forms and to take a hard look at what destroys the natural cycle of our immediate universe.

An example of finding the message in the chaos of consequences is work from the likes of T. Allan Comp, Ph.D., founder of AMD & ART. This organization forms its message to you in the transitioning of abandoned Appalachian company towns from their orange streaked damaged roads and chemical polluted waterways into usable stretches of visual bike trails and live regeneration. The message is if enough people have the same mindset, they can take what was once contaminated and spoiled into a place that given enough attention and care, can become a locale that is able to heal its own ecosystem from the inside out. To implement a system of change city planners, anthropologists and engineers got involved to figure out how to implement a process to make the land and the

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