Climate Garden 2085: Handbook for a Public Experiment

Description

Global climate change is a frequently and controversially discussed topic. Yet apart from natural disasters that tend to be interpreted in any number of ways to serve vastly differing interests, it has so far hardly been a tangible phenomenon in our day-to-day life. The Climate Garden experiment enables the experience of climate change's consequences firsthand: it shows how the vegetation of a place might change in the future, what we may be eating, and what our gardens might look like. The experiment is conducted based on detailed climate scenarios that can be translated to different locations around the globe. This new book serves as a manual for the implementation of such a public experiment on a local or regional level anywhere in the world. Contributions by human geographers, art historians, and ecologists are complemented by a practical step-by-step guide to creating a climate garden. It provides a tool for private and public institutions to tell their own story and in particular to add a personal and emotional dimension to the largely abstract climate scenarios we usually learn about in the media.

Juanita Schlapfer-Miller is a science communicator and artist and has been working as a science communications specialist at Zurich-Basel Plant Science Centre since 2012. Manuela Dahinden holds a PhD in molecular biology. She works as a science communications specialist and as managing director of Zurich-Basel Plant Science Centre, a joint research initiative of the Universities of Zurich and Basel and ETH Zurich.