Graduation Year

Spring 2013

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Art

Second Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Susan Rankaitis

Reader 2

Ken Gonzales-Day

Reader 3

Char Miller

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2013 Camille Robins

Abstract

The Stories of Environmental Ethicists in Word and Image captures the spirit of three local people: John B. Cobb, Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Dean Freudenberger. As teachers, writers, activists, and members of the progressive retirement community Pilgrim Place, they’ve had a significant influence on the global environmental movement. The photographs and small essays in this project highlight who they are and what they’ve done, and how they continue to shape contemporary intellectual discourse. An analysis of how portrait photographers use images to tell stories and how they incorporate text in their photographic collections to create fuller, more robust pictures of their subjects provides context.

An epilogue explains a mixed-media artwork I created that evolved out of my conversations with Cobb, Ruether, and Freudenberger. A three-dimensional rendering of transformations currently happening in California’s landscape, it visualizes rural and urban spheres converging within the state. It shows how boundaries separating what we’ve traditionally categorized as “country” and “city” are eroding, and how the landscape is becoming simultaneously rural and urban. New spatial forms are springing up and integrating in ways we’ve never seen before. As green areas get grayer, gray areas get greener.

The mixed-media installation attempts to bring people’s attention to various environmental shifts happening now in California and all over the world, and to ask us to question the implications of such changes.

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