Conservation Programs Director
The Center for the Force Majeure
Project Management & Research Lead | Kelly Skye
Creative Direction | Kelly Skye & Newton Harrison
Principle Designers | Kelly Skye & Andres Pacheco
The Center for the Force Majeure is a non-profit organization that brings together artists and scientists to design ecosystem adaptation projects in critical regions worldwide in response to climate change.
Initially founded by the pioneering ecological artists Helen and Newton Harrison, the ethos of “the center” is to take bold action on the climate crisis.
I was the Conservation Programs Director for several years, helping shape several international research and communications projects. These initiatives are presented in a booklet I designed to share our work.
“Like an oncoming storm front, the Force Majeure is a fluid frontier; a frontier of heat moving across the planet; a frontier of water advancing on lands; a frontier of extinctions touching all lives. It is a frontier from which we retreat, yet within which we must also adapt.”
— Newton Harrison
Worldscapes
Worldscapes are a series of public advocacy exhibits that take on large-scale landscape planning in response to problems that are global in scale. This series of projects asked questions such as:
What can we do about a 1 million square kilometer drought in Europe?
What can we do to respond to the crisis of fire and water, now consuming hundreds of millions of acres in the American West?
What would be required for the Tibetan plateau to become a water retention landscape as temperatures rise and glaciers melt?
Future Gardens
Future Gardens are scientific experiments, works of art, and public gardens that ask: what groups of locally adapted species can move into a heat-stressed landscape?
The concept of a Future Garden is that every place on the planet has been warmer, cooler, wetter, and drier than the present. So there exist indigenous species that can survive in a heat-stressed future. Local botanists can collect such species, propagate them, and generate a diverse scaffolding for a more rapid regeneration of local ecosystems as warming occurs.
During my time at the center, we envisioned a global network of gardens and successfully initiated three of them located in Tibet, Scotland, and California.
“Future Gardens generate biodiversity fields, which can self-replicate in virtuous cycles, expanding and improving the ecoregion as they develop.”
— Center for the Study of the Force Majeure
Art + Science exhibitions, a space for dialogue
These initiatives also manifested exhibitions at various art, science, and policy venues. This created a dynamic space for policymakers, philanthropists, and community members to come together and engage in dialogue. I helped with concept development, messaging, mapping, imagery generation, and exhibition design for these unique community events.
