Meet Susan Israel, Founder and President of Climate Creatives (written for The Boston Globe, not published)
Newton resident Susan Israel switched careers from an architect to an “agent of change” due to her relentless passion for fighting climate change. She founded and serves as president of Climate Creatives, an organization in Newton aiming to inspire community members to get involved in climate change through art and sculptures.
“I just have to work on climate change,” she said. “There is nothing else that is ever going to be more important in my lifetime.”
Israel has included many others in her organization that are, like her, passionate about climate change and making a difference. Team member and arts intern Rose Scherlis discussed her experiences working with the organization to spark change in the community.
“I had a great experience working as an art intern for climate creatives,” Scherlis said.” I am passionate about helping the environment and felt that my time was well spent.”
Climate Creatives has eight interns, including Scherlis, who described her responsibilities as “facilitating public workshops, putting together kits, writing, and making and installing artwork for public art installations.”
Israel began her career as an architect with dreams of having a green practice. She previously worked for the National Toxics Campaign, which she said sparked her passion for changing the culture around environmental issues. She said climate change is a culture change problem.
“This is a behavior change problem,” she said. “The people don’t know about it, or don’t care about it, or don’t feel a sense of urgency. There’s no emotional connection.”
Israel said the initiatives need to exist in the building blocks of the community, and that’s one reason why Climate Creatives was integrated as a co-curriculum into the coursework of educator Carol Ober’s Media Lab class at Newton South High School.
“I started working on these tabletop exercises to design sculptures that generated renewable energy,” Israel described. “I called it STEM plus art.”
Ober said that Israel’s effort at Newton South was the first climate change unit added to her curriculum and the highlight of her career. It focused on wind energy and the design of wind turbines.
“The way she demonstrates climate change through art is not something I’ve ever heard of before,” she said about Israel. “It’s so effective.”
Israel thinks it is important for students to create an emotional connection around climate issues.
“It helps people get out of their comfort zone, it helps them communicate in a different language, and therefore gets them out of their silos,” Israel said.” It’s very interdisciplinary.”
Climate Creatives also brought its program to Harvard Business School, where more than 900 first-year students completed a leadership exercise, called the FIELD Rapid Leadership Development Exercise, about climate change.
Israel also created an exhibit where local artists displayed outdoor sculptures with themes and representations of sustainability in the artistic sphere.
She is founder and curator of the Energy Necklace at the Jackson Homestead Museum Project in Newton, a sustainability-focused initiative that took place in 2014 aiming to “curtail exploitation of the earth.”
“It reminds you what an influence public art has,” Israel said. “Space can totally transform the way you look at it.”
Israel said she has many hopes and plans for the future of Climate Creatives, including positioning number sculptures representing the upcoming decades in bodies of water to demonstrate the rapidly rising tides and partnering with more university organizations.
Climate Creatives has two ongoing projects, Rising Waters and Quarantine Quilts. Both projects seek to gain community engagement in order to demonstrate the environmental issues that they uncover.
Rising Tides “is a conceptual art project begun by Susan Israel in 2013 in Boston that marks future flood levels due to sea-level rise and storms from climate change,” the Climate Creatives website displays.
Quarantine Quilts was a project created during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to bring the community together without physical engagement. Contributors created a compilation of images, a virtual quilt, to fit a theme among the topic of climate change. Scherlis helped to construct the project, and designed quilts of her own.
“I created a couple quilts using images I took from my own life,” Scherlis said. “I created others using images from an online databank.”
Denice Koljonen, Associate Director of Strategic Services of Institutional Research and Planning at Boston College, also participated in the Quarantine Quilts project.
“I was astonished at how quickly each team was able to develop an idea, find suitable pictures, and create a nine block ‘quilt piece,’” Koljonen said. “We held two rounds of group critiques to improve on the initial ideas and the final products were unique and visually appealing.”
Israel, along with others involved with the organization, know that passion and determination lay at the heart of inspiring change.
“Once people make an emotional commitment to the issue, they start to put pressure on institutions, then they’ll vote the right way, and then they’re going to shop the right way,” Israel said. “You start to get that culture change that creates institutional change.”