A British artist is constructing a sculpture at the University of Wyoming that implicates coal in the region’s mountain pine beetle epidemic, and the state’s powerful mining industry—which has been generous to the institution—is not happy about it.
Titled “Carbon Sink,” the outdoor sculpture “will consist of a flat whirlpool of beetle-killed logs spiraling into a vortex of charred, black wood and studded with large lumps of Wyoming coal,” the Billings Gazette reports. The sculptor, Chris Drury, said students and faculty members had told him that the beetles had destroyed more than 100 million acres of forest in Wyoming and other mountain states and that there was no effective way to stop them.
Most scientists agree that humans are contributing to climate change by burning fossil fuels, and that the resulting drought and rising temperatures are creating conditions favorable to the destructive beetle, the article notes. But linking the two in a piece of art and then displaying it on a campus that gets major support from the industry being criticized is “really disappointing,” Marion Loomis, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told the newspaper.
“They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonizing the industry,” Mr. Loomis said. “I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing.”
The Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund and a private donor are financing the university art museum’s continuing exhibition of large-scale sculptures.
“I just wanted to make that connection between the burning of coal and the dying of trees,” Mr. Drury told the newspaper. “But I also wanted to make a very beautiful object that pulls you in, as it were.”
Mr. Loomis would not say whether the mining industry would limit its donations to the university as a result of the sculpture.
“I’ll have to see what it looks like, I guess,” he said. “And maybe they’ll put up a sculpture commending the affordable, reliable electricity that comes from coal on the other end of Prexy’s Pasture,” the campus’s central mall area.
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