Artists promote environmental awareness
by Anna McCormally
The Earlham Environmental Action Coalition (EEAC) had its first big event Monday night, hosting four Bees of the Beehive Collective, who came to Earlham to talk about staying politically active through art. The event, which was held in the Orchard Room at 7 p.m., attracted a group of about 60 people to participate in a two-hour discussion with the Bees about their most recent project: a mural about the realities of mountaintop removal.
EEAC’s co-convenors, junior Carmen Black and sophomore Madeline Peck, were pleased with the turnout.
“I was really excited that everybody came,” Peck said. “It was really good to have so many people there. We hope people will continue to be excited about these issues and keep coming.”
The Beehive Collective, based in eastern Maine, first came together as a group about 10 years ago. Self-described as artists, activists and educators, the collective tells stories about current social and political issues through art. They maintain a collective mindset through a certain degree of anonymity.
“Our mission is to cross-pollinate the grassroots,” said Kenben, one of the Bees that visited Earlham. (Not using last names is part of maintaining individual Bees’ anonymity within the collective.) “We are more an organism than an organization,” she added.
The Bees attribute their artwork, including the two ceiling-high murals displayed in the Orchard Room, to the collective and not to any individual artist.
Kenben described the painstaking process of checking back over and over again with the people whose story they are telling, whether they are as far away as Columbia or as close as Appalachia.
“We talk to the people whose story it is,” Kenben said, describing “getting the story straight” as one of the biggest parts of Bees’s work.
Black and Peck had the idea of inviting the Beehive Collective to present at Earlham last year.
“I saw them at Common Ground Fair [in Unity, Maine] and then I saw them at Power Shift and I saw that they were saying they could come to colleges,” Peck said. “We talked to Bonner, PAGS, environmental programs and ourselves [EEAC]. We all funded it together and it was really awesome because everyone was excited to be doing it.”
Black and Peck thought that the Beehive Collective was addressing issues that are relevant to Earlham and its students.
“I think that in a general sense the work they do is really important for the world right now, and especially for students to know about, because we are the people who can do a lot,” said Black. “I think it’s really important that people know about them because people could work with them.”
The fact that the collective’s most recent project focuses on climate change and mountaintop removal, a method of coal mining that has destroyed miles of mountain range in Appalachia, made their discussion even more relevant to Earlham students.
“Ninety-eight percent of energy in Indiana is made from coal from removing mountains, so that’s really pertinent,” Black said. “Knowing the cost of your energy is really important.”
The collective’s climate-change project, a work in progress titled “The True Cost of Coal,” shows not only the environmental destruction caused by mountaintop removal, but also the social effects. The collective conveys all of its messages through metaphors, with animals representing the people who are affected. Bees from the collective visited the mining site in 2008, and the mural has been in progress ever since.
When asked how topics for the murals are chosen, Kenben told the audience that they make choices based on what they hear people asking for. “This was the most requested topic,” she said of mountaintop removal.
One section of the mural showed a frog serving water to a tadpole. The frog had a scar on its belly from a gallbladder surgery, and the water the tadpole was drinking was black to represent the toxins that are poisoning Appalachian communities’ water sources, an effect of mountaintop removal. Another showed an elementary school that was in constant danger of destruction if a “sludge dam,” where dirty water from the mountaintop removal process is dumped, happened to break.
The Bees spoke at the event about the issues they see with the regularly proposed solutions to the energy crisis, such as solar and wind energy. While some believe these sources are sustainable, the Bees are less certain.
Black agreed, and appreciated that the Bees brought up this controversial point. “I agreed with them,” she said. “I think that sometimes when people have radical opinions like that it really turns people off.”
She went on to express her opinion that in the long run, consuming energy at the present rate is not acceptable, no matter what the source is. “That’s a point that’s hard to hear. You don’t want to make drastic changes; you want to say, maybe we can switch from burning oil to just using the sun,” she said, and added: “Supporting alternative energy doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing good things.”
According to the Bees, their Earlham stop was one of the best turnouts of their college tour, which the Earlham audience received well.
“They [the Bees] said it was really energizing and that they felt people were already awake to the world and asking hard questions,” Black said.
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