Institute of the Arts and Sciences undergradaute interns Kathleen Deems and Jocelyn Lopez-Anleu will introduce participants to this and other IAS art projects currently at the Arboretum.

Alumni Weekend Art+Science Exhibition Tour
Arboretum and Botanic Garden
11 am-12 pm
Assemble outside Arboretum administrative offices.

Internationally renowned for decades as eco-artists, the Harrisons and their Center for the Study of the Force Majeure worked for over two years on Future Garden for the Central Coast of California, a site-specific environmental art installation in the three geodesic domes and the surrounding garden at the Arboretum.​ 

The Harrisons worked with scientists at UC Santa Cruz and botanists at the Arboretum, along with other artists, scientists, and visionaries, to create trial gardens within the domes in which native plant species are subjected to the temperatures and water conditions that scientists see for the region in the near future. The aim is to determine which plants are best able to thrive as the region warms and to propagate these species to create the scaffolding for more rapid regeneration of the local ecosystem as climates shift. As Newton Harrison explains, the future for the rapidly warming planet lies in finding durable plant species that together create ecosystems that can continue to live and flourish as temperature increases. 

The geodesic domes of the Arboretum provide the perfect setting for imagining a future in the face of climate change. With new, gleaming white coverings, the Arboretum’s geodesic dome greenhouses reach back in time to Buckminster Fuller’s utopian designs for a better world and warn of the perils of inaction as the earth warms. Not just bearers of bad tidings, the futuristic domes are models for how, as Newton Harrison says, “people can take responsibility for a deeply stressed planet.”

Future Garden is sponsored by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust of the San Francisco Community Foundation, the Metabolic Studio, Kathleen Rose, Rowland and Pat Rebele, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.