CENTER FOR THE FORCE MAJEURE FOUNDATION
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Mission Statement
Based at the University of California at Santa Cruz, The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure brings together artists and scientists to design ecosystem-adaptation projects in critical regions around the world to respond to climate change.
About This Cause
The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure was founded by Newton and Helen Harrison in 2007. It is a freestanding education and research center based at the University of California at Santa Cruz that brings together artists and scientists to design and catalyze the development of ecosystem-adaptation projects in critical regions around the world to respond to climate change. We work at the scale at which issues present, using a focus on “pre-emptive planning”, i.e. strategies that forestall, adapt to or mitigate the challenges emerging over the next 50–100 years. Force Majeure, the legal term embedded in the name, when framed ecologically refers to the uncontrolled impact of human-accelerated global warming and whole-systems stress produced by the vast industrial processes of extraction, production, and CO2 generation. For the past 200 years ‘free’ fossil carbon has allowed us as a species to separate ourselves from nature and the global web that supports all life on the planet. That same fossil carbon has given rise to a series of systems, in agriculture, forestry, urban development, transportation, technology and overall social organization that rely on that energy along with an enormous intellectual apparatus designed to rationalize our reckless behavior. The sheer scale of this transformation has impoverished all other global processes. We are on the edge of system collapse across almost every measurable axis. As artists, our response to the crisis we face is to honor the web and find ways to bring humans back into the natural systems of which we are a part. We address this imminent collapse by intentionally reintroducing complexity to systems impoverished by the inexorable simplifications demanded by modern industrial practice. We seek to provoke action and engagement that counters business as usual, to catalyze new thinking and reshape the inevitable social, political and economic responses towards bringing balance back into the web of life.