What does art have to do with environmentalism? Doesn't art sit in a fancy gallery in downtown Manhattan, far from the "real world" problems of ecological devastation?

We might wonder to what degree destructive attitudes to the earth are socially produced by mainstream images. If people endlessly see sunshine and big trees in every picture of “nature,” perhaps that’s why they aren’t particularly concerned with ecological sustainability. “I don’t know what those hippies are talking, everything looks okay to me!”

If this is the case, we may wish to examine alternative images, such as those produced by artists. Can their images draw attention to "hidden" aspects of post-industrial society, the derelict spaces that tend to remain "invisible" in mainstream media? Can artists suggest possible alternative, sustainable relationships with the non-human world in visually compelling ways that can compete in the image-saturated world of corporate mass media?

A recent series of photographs called Ruins of California by Trevor Paglen presents just such an "alternative" to the human-oriented (read: consumer-oriented) sense of space and time so much a part of modern society. In such works as "Untitled #3 (Delta Ruins)," Paglen inserts hauntingly familiar industrial architecture into a washed-out gradient of water and sky. The man-made structures seem overwhelmed in the space, as if they've been eroded away by some superior, almost incomprehensible force.

Clearly, this suggestion of sublime force conveys both the relative smallness of recent industrial "achievements" within the geologic sense of time and space. In this work, there's a feeling that not only the water is rising over the delta, leaving the fragments of industrialism to be some latter-day "lost city" beneath the sea, but that the commonly-toned water and sky are actually melding. The earth emerges not as the socially-produced "everyday," but an alien space in which human temporality, indeed human vision is lost in a fog of the ultimately non-human earth.

In this way, Paglen's image manages to alienate us from the everyday, the blasé feeling of staring at the commonplace. This is an old avant-garde strategy, and one of deep importance for environmentalists who also strive to "shock" the viewer out of his or her everyday routine (Al Gore, of course, did this admirably with his Inconvenient Truth). This strategy of “alienation from the everyday” (rooted in revolutionary Soviet literary theory) is one common ground between socially-conscious artists and environmentalists, and is a useful “weapon” at the “cultural” front of the broader environmental struggle.

Check out more of Trevor Paglen's work at his website: http://www.paglen.com

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Mark Watson lives in the Big Apple and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is from Ohio and someday hopes to write a book that will be banned there.