Grappling With Nature Series - No 9 (No Planet B) | Mixed Media Project

During the 2025 Summer season, I began a new mixed media alien series titled "Grappling With Nature". The inspiration for the series is my affinity for nature. With this series of projects, I hoped to reveal my view and love of nature with humans' relationship with it through art. Interactions with nature can produce two results: positive or negative, with another, ambivalent, for those on the sidelines.

With my current analysis of the state of our natural resources in the form of the natural environment, only a memory of what used to be will remain once we deplete those resources.

You might wonder what does that have to do with humans?

Whether we want to acknowledge it, there exists a nature crisis. This means that every single human depends upon nature. The loss of nature either directly or indirectly affects every human being. The reason is that nature sustains all human life.

If humans place nature under threat, we lose because our health and livelihoods will be under threat also. To lose nature is equivalent to losing future food supplies. As nature dwindles, crops will fail due to pests and disease, extermination of insects that pollinate crops, or soils that have fallen lifeless.

Another aspect is the loss of available, precious clean water. Can you imagine not having access to clean water to sustain us? So many examples of human destruction when ecosystems are no longer able to absorb man-produced carbon emissions or protect us against extreme weather.

Several countries are currently feeling the effects of this. In India, for example, millions of people in the city of Chennai have undergone the effects of the nearby coastal wetlands destruction. Wetland ecosystems help prevent flooding by absorbing water and recharging the city’s water supplies. But in the last few years, the city has been twice hit by severe flooding, and faced a prolonged drought where water was required to be delivered to meet people’s basic needs. ¹

Another example can be found in California. The salmon industry, which supports thousands of jobs and contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to the state's economy, struggles to survive. Since the 1970s, Chinook salmon populations fell eighty percent in the Sacramento River as dams have cut the migratory fish off from their traditional spawning grounds. Falling water levels and rising temperatures exacerbate the problem.

In early 2024, the federal government allocated US$20.6 million in fishery disaster relief funding for affected communities. I'm certain numerous other examples exist of nature depletion in which humans rely upon.¹

Generally, nature provides several contributions to humans. Appropriate terms scientists use include “ecosystem services” and “nature’s contributions to people” to describe the numerous benefits received from the natural world.

• Forests regulate the climate, generate the rainfall that benefit agriculture, replenish water supplies, and provide wood, food and medicinal plants;
• Wetlands reduce the risk of both droughts and floods by soaking up and slowly releasing water;
• Mangroves protect coastal settlements against storms and erosion and store vast amounts of carbon;
• Marine ecosystems provide nearly 100 million tonnes of seafood yearly;
• Three-quarters of crops and more than a third of global crop production depend on pollinators, including bees; and finally,
• Nature-based tourism supports millions of jobs and generates huge amounts of revenue. ¹

While it’s impossible to put a price on nature, its contributions to various societies' economy is priceless. According to the World Conservation Union, the monetary value of goods and services provided by ecosystems amounts to an estimated US$33 trillion yearly. Another estimate says that over half of global GDP (55%) – or an estimated US$58 trillion – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services. ¹

I can understand now when the mention of loss of nature occurs, this loss and other environmental risks, including climate change and water scarcity, are consistently ranked among the largest threats to our global economy.

The honest truth is that humans could never purchase the services that we take from nature even if we desperately desired to do so.

All this given to humans at no cost to us. Free of charge. Isn't that awesome. The only payment asked by Mother Nature is that humans that we look after her well being in return and not damage her any more than is absolutely necessary in order to survive.

After research, I discovered that humans are using the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to maintain our current way of life. and the ecosystems can't keep pace with our demands. ²

Is that asking too much? I don't think so because there won't be an escape to reside off world. In fact, there is no PlanetB.

So what will we ultimately decide to do?

^{Source 1: How Nature Affect You
Source 2: Facts About the Nature Crisis}

For my current mixed media project, I utilized the stable diffusion program, StarryAI to retrieve the image of a female with a skull on the side of her face. The skull represents the decay in nature which affects humans as well.

The staircase signifies our desire to escape the dire situation we've created. However, desperately searching for a solution from inside the trapped room. We see a possible escape, but can't figure out how to accomplish it.

I utilized Canva to blend the different type images for my still version. I began with a blank, white canvas, adding layers of elements.

The images used consist of:

StarryAI
Female with alabaster skin	Staircase to sky	Brown Butterfly

I knew I wanted to focus on the loss of a clean water supply, so I wanted an animation that depicted this. I called upon again Deep Dream Generator. The design below is awesome in terms of reflecting the loss of water.