When Berkeley 15-year-old Diya Patel took out her phone during a family trip to Joshua Tree National Park in April 2022 and snapped a photo of a golden sunrise, she didn’t expect anything to come of it.
For one, she was half asleep. “It was really early in the morning, and I remember because my mom made us all get up,” Patel said.
She had also never received any formal training in photography. “I was looking at how the sun came through the plants, lined up between the cactus, and was glinting off the sides,” she said.
Imagine her disbelief when she discovered her picture, titled Sunrise Over Cholla, would be included in a digital art gallery as a part of the U.S. government’s comprehensive report on climate change, issued once every four years.
“I was like, ‘There’s no way, they must have gotten the wrong person!’” Patel said.
This was the first year that the fifth National Climate Assessment, released Nov. 14, included a section devoted to art.
The call, intended to spur the public into action and show the impacts of climate change across the country, received more than 800 submissions, of which 92 artists were chosen.
“Art has the power to make abundantly clear how climate change is threatening the people and places we love, our livelihoods and our economy,” said Allison Crimmins, director of the report, in a White House press release.
For Patel, a sophomore who lives in North Berkeley and attends the Branson School in Marin County, bringing attention to climate change matters because she wants to keep the Earth clean for future generations. “We’re going to inherit the Earth,” she said. “I think it’s crazy that something I might have seen in my lifetime won’t be here in maybe 20, 30 years.”
In her artist’s statement, she wrote that the photograph was “inspired by the fleeting nature of time and the tenacity of mother nature as illustrated by the cholla cactus, which nourishes desert creatures in the harshest conditions.”
“Watching the sun rise over the Pinto Basin and light the humble cholla cactus on fire, I remembered that as families pass on through the generations, nature is here to sustain us. We all have a duty to protect her.”
