Barbara Sellers-Young’s Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story marks a significant enlargement of concerns that have animated her work for decades. The book is about Oregon, certainly, and about artists working there in relation to wildfire, land use, community memory, and ecological precarity. But more deeply it is about a question that has become increasingly urgent in the arts humanities: by what means do people come to perceive environment not as inert backdrop or resource stockpile, but as a lived field of interdependence in which memory, livelihood, conflict, and imagination are inseparable? Sellers-Young’s answer is characteristically embodied. Sustainability, in this account, cannot be reduced to regulation, science communication, or technological remediation. It depends upon transformed habits of sensing, remembering, and valuing. Artists matter because they help produce those transformations.
The book begins from a striking conjunction of historical immediacy and personal recollection. On one side stand the Timber Unity protests of February 2020 and the catastrophic Oregon wildfires later that year, events that condensed the state’s recurrent struggle between “the land as an economic resource and sustainability.” On the other stands the author’s childhood in rural southern Oregon: gardening, canning, milking cows, butchering, following deer trails through oak and manzanita hillsides. These are not contrasting registers—public crisis and private memoir—but parts of a single argument. Oregon’s environmental conflicts cannot be understood solely as policy disputes. They are also conflicts among embodied relationships to land: between those for whom land is livelihood, those for whom it is amenity or heritage, those whose claims derive from Indigenous continuity, and those whose environmental commitments emerge from planning, conservation, or climate science. The book’s distinctive achievement lies in showing that art enters this conflict not by standing outside it as commentary, but by reorganizing the terms in which people inhabit place.
This reorganization is not treated metaphorically alone. Sellers-Young’s introduction offers one of the clearest statements in her later work of a position long implicit across her writing on dance, somatics, and culture: perception is historical, bodily, and patterned. Drawing on embodied cognition and sensory anthropology, she describes memories as consequences of organism-environment relation, sedimented into recurrent ways of attending. The deer trails of childhood become not nostalgic ornament but a paradigmatic “concrete image” of “an intimate and ongoing metaphoric relationship with the land.” In a passage central to the book’s method, she writes of the “quiet intensity of the listening, seeing and feeling of wandering the deer trails,” of the “flow of the light, touch of the wind and the sound that is sometimes absolutely still and other times filled with the rustling of leaves or the cry of a bird.” These experiences persist as “somatic modes of attention,” shaping not only memory but artistic disposition and intellectual preference.
That phrase, “somatic modes of attention,” matters here because it links this book to Sellers-Young’s broader intellectual project. Earlier she had used bodily participation to illuminate ritual, performance, actor training, diasporic dance transmission, and the politics of intercultural borrowing. In this monograph, the same fundamental insight is applied to environmental humanities and sustainability studies. People do not merely hold opinions about landscapes; they are trained into particular ways of sensing and conceptualizing them. Metaphors are not decorative overlays imposed on an otherwise neutral world. They are, as the book insists, structures arising from repeated bodily encounters with terrain, labor, weather, animals, and daily practice. This is why the question of sustainability cannot be solved by information alone. One may know abstractly that climate crisis is real and still remain affectively unaltered, politically polarized, or sensorially detached. Art becomes necessary at precisely this threshold between knowledge and incorporation.
Sellers-Young is careful not to romanticize either body or place. One of the strongest undercurrents in the book is its refusal of pristine environmental fantasy. Oregon has long been imagined as a “land of promise,” even a kind of secular “Eden,” and Sellers-Young traces the power of that image with due seriousness. It informed nineteenth-century promotion, settler desire, landscape painting, tourism, and a durable state mythology of scenic exceptionalism. Yet the book persistently subjects this myth to pressure. Oregon’s beauty is real; so too are dispossession, extraction, labor, infrastructural transformation, and ecological damage. The argument does not simply invert paradise into catastrophe. Rather, it shows how art can inhabit the tension between attachment and critique. Artists inherit the emotional charge of Eden while exposing the violences and exclusions hidden inside it.
That double movement is established in the early historical chapters. Indigenous practices of land relation and artistic making are presented not as prelude to the “real” story of modern Oregon but as evidence that the state’s landscapes were never untouched wilderness. Cultural burning, basketry, carving, and other forms of making belonged to a world of reciprocal relation among humans, animals, and place. Set against this, settler transformations reframed land as property, transport corridor, and source of private wealth. Sellers-Young’s treatment of Oregon environmental politics—public beaches, land-use planning, the McCall and Straub reforms, and the continuing backlash from property-rights and extractive sectors—makes clear that the present is not an abrupt ecological awakening but the latest phase in a long contest over what land is for. This historical depth is essential to the book’s method. Sustainability is not posed as a technical future problem; it is a conflict-ridden cultural history that artists both inherit and reshape.
The organization of the book by landscape rather than by medium is especially revealing. The six regions—high desert, Columbia plateau and Blue Mountains, Cascades, Willamette Valley, Rogue Valley, coast—are not neutral containers into which artists are placed. Geology, hydrology, settlement patterns, labor forms, and local memory become conditions of artistic emergence. This regional structure extends Sellers-Young’s longstanding insistence on event-context into a more ecological register. Just as a dance cannot be abstracted from its social setting without losing its force, neither can art concerned with sustainability be detached from the specific matrix of land, climate, history, and community in which it arises. Landscape here is not scenery; it is a collaborator, pressure, archive, and teacher.
The case studies of the opening half of the book clarify how broad and nonreductive Sellers-Young’s definition of sustainability is. In Vale, the mural project exemplifies cultural sustainability. The murals do not merely beautify a small town or market it to tourists, though those functions are part of the story. They create a distributed civic archive. Installed on banks, hotels, churches, and senior centers, they bring history into everyday movement through town. People encounter them while conducting ordinary errands; memory is thus folded into lived space rather than quarantined in a museum. Sellers-Young is attentive to what they depict: Paiute presence, trail migration, trapping, mining, railroad labor, cattle, schools, domestic life, Basques, Chinese workers, Japanese Americans, Mexican vaqueros. The result is not a perfectly decolonized historical account, and the book does not claim that. But it does show a local public art practice trying to hold together a more layered collective story than pioneer triumphalism alone.
What interests Sellers-Young is less representation in the abstract than activation. The murals “preserve and activate community history” because they habituate residents to seeing themselves as part of a temporally extended and ethnically multiple place-world. This matters for sustainability because communities rarely protect what they do not recognize as theirs in complex, shared ways. Cultural memory, in this view, is not ancillary to environmental concern. It is one of the preconditions for durable public attachment. The book’s recurring claim that sustainability includes “cultural memory, social relations, economic survival, and community identity” receives in Vale a concrete civic form.
The Ontario chapter on Kanriye Fujima carries this argument further by turning from visual public art to embodied transmission. Here the continuity with Sellers-Young’s earlier scholarship on Nihon buyo is unmistakable, but the emphasis is newly place-based. Fujima’s dance school in eastern Oregon shows that sustainability can mean the survival and transformation of diasporic cultural practice within a specific local environment marked by agriculture, wartime displacement, and intercultural adaptation. Ontario’s unusual welcome to Japanese Americans during the war and after incarceration created conditions under which classical Japanese dance could take root and continue. Sellers-Young’s interest lies in the pedagogy itself: learning through imitation, repetition, concentration, etiquette, posture, gesture. Such training transmits culture not as proposition but as bodily organization.
This chapter is important because it counters any tendency to equate sustainability only with explicitly ecological art. Fujima’s school is not about forests or climate legislation, yet it activates sustainability by sustaining forms of memory, discipline, and communal identity that resist erasure. Sellers-Young has long argued that technique forms consciousness; here that proposition becomes part of an environmental humanities framework. A community capable of living sustainably must be able to sustain ways of knowing, moving, and belonging that exceed the immediate logics of extraction or assimilation. The example of dancer Diana Hinatsu, who internalized dance as sensory imagery and carried that process into modern dance, also allows Sellers-Young to underscore that transmission is not inert preservation. Sustainability is not stasis. It involves adaptation, hybridity, and new embodied syntheses.
The chapter on James Lavadour and Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts offers a still more ambitious version of the book’s central claim. Lavadour’s paintings are not treated as landscapes in the conventional sense, still less as illustrations of environmental themes. Sellers-Young presents them as processual events, layered, scraped, and built in ways that evoke geological force, temporal depth, weather, and transformation. Lavadour’s own relation to the Blue Mountains—walking, drinking water, lying on slopes, learning the land through his father’s teachings—matters because it grounds abstraction in embodied place relation. The paintings do not picture land from outside; they enact an encounter with its vitality and mutability. This distinction is crucial to Sellers-Young’s aesthetics of sustainability. Ecological art is not simply art with environmental content. It is art that helps audiences perceive interdependence, duration, and change in forms adequate to lived and damaged worlds.
Crow’s Shadow extends this principle institutionally. As Sellers-Young describes it, the institute joins artistic excellence, Indigenous self-determination, youth education, and public visibility. Art is thus not isolated as elite commodity or museum object; it is embedded in community infrastructure. The political implications are considerable. Throughout her career Sellers-Young has been wary of abstract universalism that dissolves cultural specificity into generalized embodiment. Here that caution takes the form of showing that ecological consciousness can emerge from Indigenous-centered artistic institutions whose authority derives from place, tribal history, and collective continuity. Sustainability is activated not by asking everyone to feel the same way about nature, but by creating conditions in which historically grounded communities can generate their own aesthetic and civic practices of relation.
If these early chapters establish the book’s range, later examples broaden its method without abandoning its core assumptions. Hunter Noack’s In a Landscape concerts turn musical listening into environmental participation; Elizabeth Jones Art Center and Signal Fire create residencies and artist-environment collaborations; Sanctuary Stage builds public dialogue from community storytelling; Gaiety Hollow becomes a site of reflection on women, settlement, and landscape memory; the Oregon Country Fair models improvisational collective culture; Washed Ashore transforms marine debris into ecological pedagogy; FisherPoets preserve labor histories and coastal identity. The diversity of media—painting, dance, music, theatre, landscape architecture, public muralism, community festival, sculpture, poetry—could have produced a diffuse survey. What unifies them is Sellers-Young’s insistence that the arts organize attention. Each case asks, in effect: what capacities of feeling, memory, reflection, and collective imagination does this practice cultivate, and how might those capacities matter for sustainability?
The answer, by the book’s final chapter, is deliberately modest and nevertheless forceful. Sellers-Young does not claim a direct causal line from art project to policy reform or ecological repair. She explicitly notes that “there is no direct correlation between their artistic contribution and resolving Anthropocene-based issues.” This restraint gives the argument its credibility. The arts are not credited with magical efficacy. Instead, they “promote and activate processes” that can be taken up within broader community initiatives. The wording is significant: activation implies energizing latent capacities rather than imposing solutions from above. Among the processes the book identifies are localism, perceptual expansion, the complementarity of science and art, reflection, sanctuary, playful improvisation, and the recognition that “words create landscapes.” Such phrases distill the book’s practical philosophy. Sustainability begins where communities can sense more, remember more, and imagine otherwise.
Several of these terms carry special weight within Sellers-Young’s intellectual development. “Reflection” is not mere contemplation in the abstract; it recalls her longstanding pedagogical emphasis on embodied attention. “Sanctuary” extends her theatre work into environmental discourse, naming a social form in which nonjudgmental dialogue makes new collective articulations possible. “Playful improvisatory flexibility” brings to sustainability studies an idea developed elsewhere through dance and performance: improvisation as disciplined responsiveness to changing conditions, neither rigid control nor formless spontaneity. Even the claim that science and art are “complementary modes of knowledge” is best read against her larger oeuvre, which consistently resists the reduction of knowing to verbal-analytic cognition. The ecological crisis, in this sense, is also a crisis of epistemology. It reveals the inadequacy of a culture that knows abstractly yet fails to perceive relationally.
The book’s concluding movement is especially strong when it turns against binary thinking. Oregon’s environmental conflicts are often cast as preservation versus development, government versus individual, urban environmentalism versus rural labor, pristine nature versus human use. Sellers-Young acknowledges the force of these oppositions while showing their conceptual poverty. Her use of F. Stuart Chapin III’s spectrum of “views of nature” is apt because it allows stewardship to emerge across different meanings of nature rather than from one purified definition. In the same spirit, the book proposes that artists are valuable not because they stand above conflict with transcendent moral clarity, but because they can create forms in which people encounter complexity without immediate foreclosure. The arts become a medium for dwelling in contradiction long enough for more supple responses to arise.
This resistance to simplification also keeps the book from lapsing into regional boosterism. Oregon appears as both exemplary and damaged, aesthetically powerful and politically fractured. It is a compelling site for thinking because its myths are so strong and its material crises so visible. Wildfire, drought, fisheries decline, land-use battles, and struggles over forestry policy make the state a concentrated case of Anthropocene conflict. Yet Sellers-Young never treats Oregon as a sealed provincial world. The subtitle, “The Oregon Story,” is not parochial but heuristic. Oregon is a story about how landscape, art, and community become entangled under climate pressure, and therefore about how other places might think with, rather than merely about, their own artistic ecologies.
Within Sellers-Young’s career, the book is consequential precisely because it is not a departure from her earlier work but a re-scaling of it. The anti-Cartesian premise remains: thought is bodily, culture is incorporated, technique forms consciousness. The methodological reflexivity remains as well: the author’s own deer trails are not private confession but disclosure of the embodied grounds from which inquiry proceeds. What changes is the scope of application. Performance and dance had long served as privileged sites for showing how bodies know and transmit culture. Here the insight expands to a broad arts-humanities argument: ecological survival requires cultural practices that reshape perception and relation. The body remains the ground of meaning, but now the problem is no longer only how dancers, actors, or ritual participants come to know. It is how communities might come to inhabit damaged landscapes differently.
In this respect, the book belongs to a late phase of Sellers-Young’s work in which place, civic practice, and sustainability become increasingly central. Yet it also preserves the tensions that give her scholarship its seriousness. Embodied knowledge is affirmed without being universalized. Community memory is valued without being idealized. Tradition is shown to sustain identity while remaining open to transformation. Art is granted civic and ecological consequence without being burdened with impossible redemptive claims. And sustainability itself is redefined against narrow managerial or technocratic usage. It is ecological, yes, but also social, cultural, affective, and imaginative.
The final force of Artists Activating Sustainability lies in this redefinition. The book asks what kind of world can be sustained if the arts are treated as marginal, if public life neglects the aesthetic dimension, and if environmental action remains severed from memory, metaphor, and embodiment. Its answer is sober: under those conditions, cognition itself is impoverished. “If the way forward for any society is knowledge,” Sellers-Young writes, “when we fail to encourage the aesthetic dimension, we are limiting the depth and potential of our cognitive abilities.” That sentence condenses the work’s larger intervention. Art is not supplemental to sustainability because sustainability is not merely a problem of management. It is a problem of perception, of what histories can be borne, of what attachments can be widened, of what futures can be imagined without denial or despair. Oregon’s artists matter because they make those capacities palpable. Through them, sustainability becomes less a slogan than a practiced reorientation of body, memory, and place.
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