|Scientists have given us their verdict: the situation is urgent. Climate change is happening. The C02 and other greenhouse gases we release into the atmosphere pose a deadly threat. Experts tell us that we have less than one decade to make a major shift in our consumptions patterns.
Illustration can, and already is, fulfilling an important role in spreading awareness of global warming issues. Thanks to its ability to make ideas visible, illustration can play a part in making change happen. Furthermore illustration provides a means of communicating the complex emotional reactions that are naturally part of dealing with such loaded information as climate change. Illustration can work to communicate an immediate and a holistic representation. We need this ability of visual languages to help spread an awareness of not only the science behind global warming, but the measures that need to be taken to cut our energy consumption.
|Jody Barton for Greenpeace 2007|
Even when people start to acknowledge the problem, the systems in place are insufficient to make the changes necessary. We are all heavily embedded in a system that is unsustainable, and it is perpetrated by enormous advertising budgets. Within advertising, illustration can be used as an effective greenwashing tool by companies more eager to appear to be working towards a green agenda rather than actually doing anything about it. When advertising works to make unsustainable consumer choices aspirational, illustrators and designers become implicated in perpetuating systemic problems.