2020-03-01_Cosmos_Magazine

LUCAS DAWSON,/ GETTY IMAGES

since performed this artistic intervention

a half-dozen times, in rivers in cities

throughout Norway, Iceland, Germany

and the US – always unannounced. In Los

Angeles, “nobody cared, nobody stopped,

nobody looked”, he has reported, while in

other cities people reacted “with fear and

distress”.

All these cataclysmic transformations,

these great changes we can wreak. It’s a

time the world’s greens should feel so much

more rare and precious, whatever names

they go by, as chlorophyll continues to

transform sunlight into life.

ASHLEY HAYis a novelist and editor of

The Griffith Review. Her most recent book is

A Hundred Small Lessons.

THREE QUARTERS OF AUSTRALIA’S

threatened species are plants, often with

restricted range; a single fire could spell the

end for species’ entire populations.

After previous fire seasons, the first

sprouts of new growth – clusters of grass,

new shoots on trees – have shimmered

like dot points of hope. In the first weeks

of 2020, scientists write that with the

frequency and ferocity of these last fires,

entire ecosystems can be pushed “beyond

their limits of resilience”. They write,

instead, of ecosystem collapse.

In the 1990s, the Danish-Icelandic

artist Olafur Eliasson discovered he

could dye rivers a safe but startling and

incandescent green using uranin, the

disodium salt form of fluorescein. He’s

could be dismissed as “one cold olive”,

monotonous and harsh.

It’s hard to think of anything less

monotonous than the greens in my front

yard, particularly after the relief of much

needed rain – including 130 millimetres on a

singleday. The plants perk up; enriched. It’s

an almost instantaneous reaction in this one

tiny plot of a continent’s space. It makes me

wonder about the different greens of plants

that might be absent – or present – across

more than 18 million hectares of the rest of

the continent that’s burned out in recent

weeks. Photographs document tiny bursts

of colour in the blackened space – always so

sudden; always so relieving – while scientists

begin to estimate the number of extinctions

that may be under way.

Photographs

document bursts

of colour in this or

that blackened space

while scientists begin to

estimate the number of

extinctions that may

be underway.

98 – COSMOS Issue 86

ZEITGEIST GREEN