Looking for Tomorrow: Lessons from Art for the Time of Climate Change

How can looking at art help us solve the global crisis of climate change?

Looking for Tomorrow argues that spending time with art-looking slowly, with climate in mind-offers lessons indispensable to achieving a sustainable global civilization. Solving the climate crisis will require technical and political solutions, certainly. But it will also demand the remaking of some of our most basic beliefs. We cannot build a twenty-first-century society on unsustainable ideas inherited from industrial modernity.

Turning to modern art, Joshua Shannon shows how its creativity and innovation can ignite necessary transformations in our thinking. Across seven lessons, each grounded in deep engagement with a single artist, this book explores how art can help us unlearn the philosophies, myths, and fantasies that brought on our current crisis. It shows how art can now guide us toward new (and sometimes very old) ideas capable of supporting a sustainable and just civilization.

Art, Shannon argues, can be a guide toward connection, well-being, action, and balance. It can help us reconceive our world.