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In 2015, artist and activist Gustav Metzger embarked on one of his final major projects. Famed for introducing auto-destructive art, Metzger had devoted his career to responding to societal issues from anti-nuclear advocacy to ethical eating. Through a short video message, he issued a call for a international event to honor the environment.

“I call upon you for your participation in this international summons for a day of action to remember nature on 4 November 2015,” he declared, urging artists and creatives to resist the steady eradication of living beings. “Our task is to make audiences aware of the abundance and sophistication in nature … and by doing so the arts will venture into realms that are fundamentally innovative.”

The Birth of Nature Remembrance

Thus Remember Nature was born, a day when creatives nationwide created responses to the escalating planetary emergency. Jo Joelson, who cared for Metzger in his final years, recalls his sense of urgency. “There was a strong sense of urgency for him at the end of his life,” she says. “I just said – don’t delay. Let’s not wait for sponsorship or for anyone to green light this. Let’s just do it.”

After Ten Years

After ten years, the initiative hasn’t quite sparked the widespread change across the arts that Metzger had envisioned, but organizers feel its legacy can still be seen in movements like Culture Declares and Extinction Rebellion, as well as in how artists approach the environmental impact of their methods. That’s why she is reviving it to commemorate its ten-year mark. Included in the key participants taking part currently are A Man Called Adam and other notable figures. They have all created visual art, made video appeals, and created artworks set to be presented on the fourth of November next year.

Planting Hope

When speaking to Anya Gallaccio, she is on site in Kent, assisting with planting apple trees that will develop into a spiral-shaped orchard. Engaging schoolchildren, her project is part creative piece and somewhat instructive. According to her, the planning and planting sessions have already incorporated learning about maths (spacing the planting intervals), genetics (discussing the apple’s DNA), and history (mapping the backgrounds of how different apples arrived in Britain).

Many of the apples were selected because they’ve got amusing labels such as the Bloody Butcher. We have one apple that releases scarcolored sap

“A lot of the apples were chosen because they’ve got funny names such as the Bloody Butcher,” she explains. “We have one apple that ‘bleeds’ crimson liquid. Each has stories behind them. The historical cultivar was brought over by the Romans. The Flower of Kent is the apple that fell from a tree and struck the physicist’s head.”

The artist aimed the children to be more thoughtfully connected of the environment and the control we have over it. “To many of them, apples were just things you get at a supermarket, so I was prompting them, on their next shopping trip, to read the label and see their names and their origin. Ideally it reads Kent!”

Creative Initiatives Across the Country

At the capital, Youngsook Choi’s Book of Loss will engage visitors searching a major gallery on a journey to find the seven major glaciers that have been vanished in modern times. Every ice sheet will be drawn on the gallery’s windows and walls using invisible ink. Each discovery, a bell will ring and a recitation will be performed to remember that specific ice mass.

At the same time, up in Barrow-in-Furness, Maddi Nicholson will be putting on a open display about our disconnection from the land, as well as holding a shared meal, cooked from regional food. Further north, an artist is streaming her Some Kind of Love / Forest Choir, in which regional performers undertake a task to sing plants back to health in a local park.

Young Insights

Following this approach, Cornelia Parker will be engaging schoolchildren – on the scheduled date she is aiming to cover Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard in kids’ letters and drawings that capture their dreams and worries for the tomorrow. “Youthful expressions are powerful because they’re not as restricted as adults’,” she says in her call to action video. “Young people’s input to the world is something quite unique and perhaps it can provoke a awareness of obligation from us all. Youth is pure. They have fears about the future. But it isn’t meant to be about fear – it should be about optimism and making sure that they get a future.”

Tributes and Thoughts

A participant’s work also connects with children. Drawing on past experience, his Birds Can Fly involves illustrating avians and then embodying them – and for the initiative he is aiming to represent a local symbol. He is also staging a itinerant journey of the city, exploring locations that have been part of his long-term work over the past twenty years. That ongoing series commenced following he experienced multiple occurrences of prejudice on a one occasion. In response, Harfleet decided to place a bloom at the location of every incident and document it – the project has since grown to incorporate experiences shared by other people across the world. “I leave the pansies there but they are temporary,” says Harfleet. “It seems wildlife enjoys them, so they’re a very temporary memorial.”

Harfleet chose the bloom not just for the clear connection – it has long been a term of homophobic abuse – but also because its etymology comes from the French verb, penser, to think. “It was linked to a man who is thoughtful, and that, of course, is a terrible thing,” he says.

The plan on 4 November is to sow flowers at new locations and also refresh the memorials in places he has marked earlier, all the while talking to those on the itinerant journey about the occurrences and his memories of them. “I’ve recorded quite a few after my previous work,” he says mournfully.

Moving Forward with Hope

Harfleet hopes his work – and