If art has the power to encourage the public to act, to move them emotionally, or at the very least take notice, then this surely must mean art is a vital element in creating impact regarding climate change. And who know artists may yet save the planet from a total ecotastrophe!

Do you know the artist, Oiticica? She is known for using an exotic neoconcretist technique that reminds one of both land art and the eco art – a technique that allows nature’s elements to act upon her works. Oiticica is a “daughter” of the experimental art movement of the 1970s formed in Rio de Janeiro, where she was born.

To some it looks like a landing strip for extraterrestrial spacecraft. To others the portal to a parallel universe or an ancient monument to a benevolent deity who had a keen eye for design and symmetry. But the swirling arms of this design, spotted in the desolate reaches of the Egyptian desert, just a short distance from the shores of the Red Sea, is in fact an environmental art installation.

The giant structure has been baffling tourists and those scouring Google Earth from the comfort of their homes, since it first appeared in March 1997. It is the work of Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides. The team designed and built the one million square foot piece of artwork to celebrate ‘the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind,’, their website reveals. Entitled Desert Breath, the installation features two interlocking spirals, one with vertical cones and the other with conical depressions in the desert floor.

See the eco art priject here.

Eco artists turning trash into treasure… They are the Rumpelstiltskins (straw into gold) of our times!

Here is an eco statement… Created by designers and self-styled water crisis campaigners “Bloo Nation,” the vast undulating wave is made up of 1,200 19-liter water bottles. This, they say, is the amount of water needed to produce just two pairs of jeans. You can view it here.

In 1972, I coined the word ecotastrophe to describe such ecological catastrophes as the BP oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. Or the earthquakes caused by fracking in Texas. Or the poisoning of drinking water in West Virginia, etc. Which makes me an eco wordsmith, I guess – the publisher of pin-up-artists.com.