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Ginkgo biloba, a hardy tree commonly found along city streets, is considered a “living fossil.” It is closely related to prehistoric ancestors, but has no relatives today. Dr. Scott Wing, a Smithsonian paleontologist featured in the conference, has been studying fossils of gingko leaves from a time of sudden greenhouse warming 55 million years ago. By counting microscopic pores on the leaves, he and other scientists have estimated the amount of carbon dioxide in the prehistoric atmosphere. By comparing the pores to those on living ginkgo leaves, they have been able to compare the prehistoric atmosphere to our own.
The ginkgo, native to China, figures prominently in Asian art as well as the Art Nouveau movement of the late nineteenth century, two fields of interest for the Smithsonian’s Sackler and Freer galleries. Ancient Chinese artists often depicted the Buddha’s Dragon Tree as a ginkgo. Chinese monks brought the ginkgo to Japan, where it was widely planted in temple gardens. In Japanese decorative art, the ginkgo’s distinctive fan-shaped leaf has carried symbolism along with its singular beauty: the ginkgo has been a symbol of longevity (the tree can live for a thousand years) and of a more profound endurance (four ginkgos survived the blast at Hiroshima and are still growing today).
In the mid-nineteenth century, the opening of Japan to western trade set off a craze for “all one sees that’s Japanese,” as a rhyme by W. S. Gilbert puts it—a craze both spoofed and exemplified in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. Japanese decorative ideas, including ginkgo-leaf patterns, were later adopted by artists and architects working in the Art Nouveau style, a forerunner of Art Deco.
Art historian Paul Johnson defined Art Nouveau as an attempt “to soften the implacable advance of machinery by giving it, whenever possible, organic forms which expressed the eternal growth-cycle of nature.” The concern of those artists is recognizable to us today: the balance between nature and progress, between the world we’ve inherited and the world we make for ourselves.
It is a concern that overarches this conference on climate change, in which the issues are seen through the Smithsonian lenses of science, history, and art.
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