The event took place at Confluence Park and included family-oriented activities, educational booths and artistic elements to encourage community dialogue about the impacts of global warming.
Binghamton 2 Degrees — a planned campus initiative to raise awareness of the impacts of climate change on Binghamton and the rest of the Southern Tier — hosted its community arts and music festival at Confluence Park for the second consecutive year on Saturday.
The festival, which ran from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., featured local organizations such as the Sierra Club, Ross Park Zoo, VINES, the Red Cross and the Broome County Food Council. Organizers promoted ways Binghamton can adapt to a two-degree warmer climate. Artists – painters, poets and musicians – showcased their creativity in media such as a non-slam slam poetry contest on the theme of climate change.
The students performed an excerpt from a play about tree sitters – protesters who sit in trees to prevent them from being cut down – created by Elizabeth Mozer, an associate professor of theater at Binghamton University. Alyssa Crosby, a local singer who competed on the 25th season of “The Voice,” also performed. Event organizers partnered with the Roberson Museum and Science Center, BU and the Broome County Arts Council, among others.
Andreas Pape, director of Binghamton 2 Degrees, associate professor of economics, and assistant dean of the Graduate School, explained how the initiative raises awareness of the severity of climate change and how the community can prepare for the future through art.
“We’re trying to imagine that future,” Pape said. “And how do we imagine it? We use art to imagine the future, we tell stories to imagine the future. All of that together makes art so central. It’s not enough to just give people facts and figures.”
Binghamton 2 Degrees plans to hold the festival annually while also organizing other events to educate the community about what life might look like after two degrees of warming. Future events will teach participants practical skills, such as making emergency kits for natural disasters, and encourage them to come up with ideas for climate education and advocacy.
Other pieces on display included the work of artist Muren Lum, a sales and marketing associate at the Broome County Arts Council, whose paintings are based on research on climate change. Leslie Heywood, professor of English and creative writing, has been involved with Binghamton 2 Degrees since its inception and shares Pape’s view on the power of art to get statistics and academic studies off the page.
“Scientists are boring,” Heywood said. “They communicate in facts and figures, and that doesn’t touch most people emotionally. Most people who want to be moved to do something need to be touched emotionally, and that’s where the arts come in.”
Another important aspect of the event was participatory art, which reinforced the organization’s mission to bring the community together. Internationally recognized installation artist Steven Siegel encouraged all festival-goers to contribute to a community piece using the repurposed materials he provided. The piece aimed to prepare Binghamton residents for the possibility of Broome County becoming a haven for people fleeing climate-related emergencies.
“This could be a place where climate refugees want to come,” Pape said. “So we need to think about how we can integrate people who come here for climate reasons into the community for mutual benefit.”
