Though perhaps a tiny percentage of the science has yet to declare whether or not it’s our fault, there’s no denying that planet Earth is warming, and rather more quickly of late. If there are still doubters out there, a photographic exhibit and accompanying lecture by visiting scholar Tyrone Martinsson will likely challenge their disbelief. Martinsson, a senior lecturer in photography at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, displays a series of his polar landscape images from a recent trip to the Arctic, juxtaposed with archival images of the same areas from the 1860s. As you observe the rather dramatic comparisons, it’s nearly impossible to not see that climate change is having a real and substantial effect on our world, and Martinsson’s delivery of first-hand photographic proof—from a place we never usually see—brings a visceral and hence more urgent comprehensibility to an issue that’s often debated and understood in abstract terms.
Public lecture: Feb. 25, 7 p.m., Franklin Patterson Hall; Large-scale Polar Landscape Exhibit: Feb. 25-March 1, Liebling Center Gallery, Hampshire College, 893 West St., Amherst, (413) 549-4600, www.hampshire.edu.
