Last year, Hannah Rothstein was sitting in a lobby when she noticed a wall decorated with '60s psychedelic rock posters. Naturally, the display immediately brought climate change to mind.
It's not as big a leap as it might seem. Rothstein is an artist who in recent years has focused on climate-change-themed visual art. Those rock posters ended up serving as a muse for her latest project, a series of posters that use the groovy, swirly vibe of those iconic '60s images that once graced the covers of Jefferson Airplane or Cream LPs to glamorize solutions to the climate conundrum.
Rothstein has riffed on pop themes before—she's done coloring books and illustrations of food that have gone viral. In 2017, she decided to turn her method to attracting attention to climate change. "Any big change in how people think needs art, whether it's theater, music or visual," she says. "I wanted to use visuals to drive the climate-change movement forward."
She took a cue for her first project from another iconic set of posters: Those illustrating the U.S. National Parks, created in the 1930s under the federal government's Works Progress Administration, or WPA. Rothstein's versions recreated the original ones, with a major twist: She depicted the parks as having been devastated by three decades of extreme weather. Her series, "National Parks 2050," include posters of a fizzled-out version of Yellowstone's Old Faithful, a lake-less Crater Lake, a Great Smoky Mountains consumed by fire, a lifeless Everglades and more.
The goal was to force people to confront a disaster in the making that, to many people, has so far been too easy to ignore. "Humans tend to not worry about even big problems until they're right in front of them," says Rothstein. "To change that you have to make something that's distant and abstract feel more concrete and immediate. It's about bringing the future to the now."
The posters are intended to do that by delivering climate-change messages to a different part of the brain, she says. "When you describe the science behind climate change with words and numbers, people's eyes tend to glaze over," she says. "By making it visual, you can grab immediate attention."
Rothstein followed the Parks project up with "50 States of Change," a series of prints that depict postcards resembling the classic tourist cards of each of the U.S. states—except standard scenes are replaced by ones ravaged by climate change. Alaska's card shows a house sinking into mud, the Arizona desert is a burned-out wasteland, Texas is underwater and so forth.
Both projects went viral and have become their own kind of iconic. Having done a superb job of hitting viewers with disturbing images of a terrible future to come, Rothstein recently took a different tack with the rock-poster-themed project. "I had started by focusing on what's in store for us if we don't fix things," she says. "Now I wanted to focus on positive change that can combat climate change."
The result was "Goodstock"—a play on Woodstock, in keeping with the '60s-rock theme. The distorted, swooping typography espouses various slogans that exhort climate-friendly behaviors, including "Protect our forests," "Eliminate food waste" and "Invest in public transit." While Rothstein is not under the illusion that reading her advisory phrases will move everyone who sees them into action, she thinks the simplicity of the messages is a virtue. "There's a lot of information out there about how to solve the problem, and it can feel overwhelming," she says. "I think it's better to distill them down into manageable packets that people can understand at a glance."
Rothstein is already thinking about her next project, which might engage viewers with unusual aspects of living creatures. Two possibilities she's playing with for characters: the nudibranch, a bizarrely colorful sea-slug; and the Redwood tree. "The Redwood actually has salmon DNA in it," she says. "I'd like to show how amazing these sorts of details from nature are."
While the means of engaging viewers changes through the different projects, the goal remains sparking interest in climate change. "I'm trying to make art that helps," she says.
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