In Manhattan, across the street from the Flatiron building in Madison Square Park, public artist, landscape designer, and architect Maya Lin has created the stark and beautiful memorial Ghost Forest, a set of 49 cut Atlantic white cedar trees that will slowly turn grayer over the course of six months. According to the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which commissioned the project, it represents «a memory of germination, vegetation, and abundance, and a harsh symbol of the devastation of climate change.» The trees, set upon a grid with the lawn of the park, are approximately 40 feet tall and were selected to «overwhelm the human scale» and provide a bracing symbol of what the future may hold.
Ghost Forest by Maya Lin / Andy Romer
Ghost Forest by Maya Lin / Andy Romer
Ghost forests are dead woodland, remnants of past vibrant ecosystems, and are sadly becoming more common. They are found where salt water has intruded into fresh water, where hurricanes and storms have stripped trees bare, where wildfires have left charred trunks. According to Lin and the conservancy, Atlantic white cedar forests on the East Coast are «endangered by past logging practices and threats from climate change.» The trees used in this public art installation were harvested from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, an area slated to be cleared as part of ecological restoration efforts. Lin explains that it’s an «extremely vulnerable site of the Atlantic coastal pine barrens ecosystem that encompasses more than one million acres.»
Accompanying the visual experience of Ghost Forest is a soundscape Lin created that uses snippets of sound gathered from the Macaulay Library sound archive at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. She highlights the sounds of native species of animals once common to Manhattan. (see link on lower left side of this page).
Ghost Forest by Maya Lin / Andy Romer
While raising awareness of climate change’s great toll on ecosystems through the stark, bleached-out trunks, the Conservancy will also also host a series of public programs focused on positive nature-based solutions: how to leverage natural processes to restore ecosystems. To create a sense of hope as well, 1,000 trees and shrubs will be planted in five public parks in New York City. The Conservancy states that over ten years, the trees will also store 60.5 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, more than ten times the amount produced by shipping and assembling the public art work. The installation will become carbon positive over time.
Lin became famous for winning the commission to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. at the age of 21. In recent years, Lin’s art and earthwork sculptures has deeply engaged with environmental and climate issues. In 2014, she created the powerful interactive art piece, What Is Missing?, a virtual memorial designed to raise awareness about the biodiversity crisis, which is worth exploring in detail.
What Is Missing? / Maya Lin
Lin told Artforum, that «one could argue that none of my memorials have been monuments. Rather, they have been anti-monuments—even the Vietnam memorial. I like to reinvent things.»
Ghost Forest will be free and accessible to the public in Madison Square Park until November 14, 2021.
