Dear Reader,

Happy Birthday to Artillery for turning 15 this year! And to celebrate this milestone we are covering how the world is going to hell! 

The climate crisis is our September theme and it wasn’t an impromptu decision or stop-the-presses situation because of the recent U.N. announcement stating our planet is in dire straits. A climate issue had been lined up for quite some time; we just didn’t realize it would be at critical mass when we got around to doing it.

It seemed like every artist we knew was doing something about the environment. Why hasn’t the rest of the world caught on? Even I, at the tender age of 16 in my high school biology class, made a pledge to never litter—and I really don’t care to mention how long ago that was!

Point being, artists have been doing their job. Does it help, does it matter, does anyone really care? Reading the articles in this issue, I would say that it does—and perhaps some reconciliation between art and politics can bring forth some change by exposing this work to our readership; or at the very least some much-needed immediate action.

Artists in general are very sensitive types, or at least in the beginning, before they become art stars. So it wasn’t hard to come up with an incredible roster of (youngish) artists who are putting forth their efforts into saving our planet. Let’s start with our cover artist, Brooklyn-based Zaria Forman, covered by New York contributor Annabel Keenan. Upon Forman’s first trip to Greenland, she discovered how the changes in the ice fjords were affecting the locals, and made a commitment to tracking the adverse changes in our climate. She traveled to Antarctica and Arctic Canada to record the transformation in ice. Her drawings of icebergs and glaciers are formidable in size and detail. She uses soft pastels to achieve the amazing realism with these images. Please take a look at her breathtaking drawings inside these pages.

Regular contributor Leanna Robinson addresses the issue of water with her coverage of Los Angeles artists that call attention to our misuse and exploitation of water, to the point of contamination and causing our fresh-water creatures to die off due to the unnecessary damming of rivers that pump water into places that just don’t have water, and probably shouldn’t.

Is all this starting to sound like a futuristic horror movie? Look no further than the pages of Lauren Guilford and Geena Brown, where they turned to artists Max Hooper Schneider, Hugh Hayden and Kiyan Williams for their takes on the impending apocalypse. Nothing scary about that.

Finally, we get a very realistically dismal picture that articulates the state of the world and how we reached this point: the big C—Capitalism. British writer Eli Ståhl interviews renowned climate expert T.J. Demos whose new book Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing further explains the connections between capitalism and our planet’s impending demise, and how art can be used as a tool against it.

After all that, it’s hard to think about Artillery’s 15th anniversary, and that all my efforts to not litter didn’t really seem to pay off. I will persevere though and hope you will too. We all have to take it up a notch and do our part. I hope this issue at least gets that message across.