anna jopp

For many people living in a capital of a land-locked country in Central Europe, melting glaciers, ocean pollution, wildfires or dying forests are distant problems, something they hear about on the news from the safety of their homes, something they might trust their government and specialists will deal with.

For many, the observable signs of climate change are warmer winters and hotter summers, so they jump on a plane to go skiing somewhere farther or escape the heat in the city going to the lake or the seaside. “Odd weather is one of the growing ways human beings experience climate change phenomenologically or beyond abstract science. Even those who do not ‘believe’ in climate change experience it.” (Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World”, Stanford Briefs, 2022, p.10).

In the safety of their homes and gardens, people might feel they can hide from the ‘weather' and that as long as the big environmental issues stay distant, their private worlds won’t be affected.  Having trust in institutions, many people believe their government together with environmental organisations and scientists will take care of the issues they see in in the news, while their immediate surroundings stay unaffected. Until they see they are impacted in ways they didn’t even imagine.

My aim is to illustrate how personal experience of climate change shakes our sense of safety and what perceivable effects of climate change might encompass.

The questions the project asks is: How much of a distant news climate change is? What are the observable effects of climate change in our immediate surroundings, apart from strange weather? Will personal loss caused by climate change affect our trust in organisations and push us to demand action as a collective? Will (pine) tree cease to be a plant and become a commodity only instead?

This ongoing project started in September 2023 in Budapest and in the Mátra mountains (Hungary) as a photographic documentation of dying pine trees (Hungarian ‘lucfenyő’, picea abies), as well as scientific research and consultation of this issue - the trees are weakened during extensive heat periods due to insufficient amount of water in the soil and they stop producing resin that normally protects them from insects. That’s when the bark beetle attacks them, there’s no way to reverse this process. The trees die.

I want to continue researching similar cases, gather family archival photos, document the decay and its impact both on individuals as well as communities. This project is documenting the mass extinction of piece abies amidst the widespread belief that climate change is something that belongs somewhere else. These trees are irreversibly going to die and disappear in front of our eyes, affecting their respective ecosystems (this impact is being as well).