Why does the World need Art?

When I first read the title of Bill McKibben’s article, “What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art”, I was a bit skeptical on the necessity of art in preventing climate change. However, as I read on, I was astonished at how much art plays a role in such a crucial issue of climate change right under our noses! For example, one of the reasons why people do not believe in the issue of climate change is because of the exaggeration of it’s consequences as depicted in multimedia, especially doomsday movies such, as The Day After Tomorrow and State of Fear (McKibben 2). The depiction of disastrous storms shredding the streets of Manhattan and extreme temperatures turning the city into a tundra (as seen in the image below) seems so unreal and over-dramatized that we, as viewers, refuse to believe that both the cause of all this is actually an ongoing reality. So why does the “warming world” need art?

 

This made me realize that art helps one remember the issue at hand rather than watching fatal casualties, like the tsunamis and hurricane you read in the newspaper. I immediately thought to myself, what is it about art that makes us more aware of an issue and remember it longer as opposed to reading a newspaper? The most plausible answer seems to be the fact that art actually attempts to seize the viewers’ emotions and not just solely inform them. McKibben uses this title because he hopes that these emotions, which derive from art, may one day hopefully motivate and sway the viewers to actually stand up for the prevention of climate change and actually do something about it.