Vlogger discusses Living Green

Margaret Fabrizio, the land artist featured in our book, Living Green, has posted a Vlog on YouTube and Vlogger Heads. In it, she says, "I don't know how I got into this book." It's the sub-title, 'Communities that Sustain' that most puzzles her. Why include an artist living lightly on the land? Why use the term "community"?



Community is a concept that is quite undertheorized in North American cultures and scholarship: It is largely taken-for-granted. It can be used to signal kinship, affinity, proximity, inclusion, and to erect borders and boundaries. We use it in our book to demonstrate that "community" is many things to many people. It can emerge from the concrete or the ephemeral; it can be shared through virtual or "real" place and time, or through ideas and dialogue. There is no single or correct use of this term or ways to be a community.

As soon as Margaret posted this Vlog, many people left comments. This technologically-mediated set of contacts is another way in which Margaret participates in bringing people together whether or not she intends to. And it is not only sharing that signifies community: Margaret communes with the trees, the animals, the meadows, and all things that pass through, plant seeds, or spend time on the land. Her Nature and Art Conservancy is a form of living on and with the land that inspires human emotion, creativity, and action. Treating the earth with respect and love is not new, but it is something that often goes unrecognized as a significant and important way of acting that is a form of "living green," providing a lesson for how to stop some of the destruction done to the climate and the earth. Thank you Margaret for making this comment and, for creating another work of shared art.