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San Francisco composer Cheryl Leonard was recording sounds of the Antarctic in the austral summer of 2008 when she stuck her hydrophone into a wall of melting glacial ice and heard something sublime. “It was the most amazing sound, like a gamelan trapped in the ice,” recalls Leonard, whose music in recent years has mixed…

A review of David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement, by Tom Turner; published by the University of California Press (5 out of 5) At the corner of Allston Way and Oxford Street in downtown Berkeley, directly across from the campus of the University of California, sits the David Brower Center. Opened in 2009,…

BERKELEY — Micah White, one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, will participate in a forum on the past and future of environmental protest at the David Brower Center at 7 p.m. April 22 — Earth Day. White is the author of “The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution,”…

The earth’s polar regions are the site of some of the greatest moral, political, and economic conflicts of our time. Though the scale of human activity in these areas is not enormous, the impact of scandalously shortsighted growth is realized most destructively in these remote places. Images of these areas have become increasingly common as…

After wowing us with the ecologically charged aerial landscapes of Edward Burtynsky, the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California is back with another evocative exhibit that challenges people to think critically about the state of the planet. In “Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art 1775-2012,” viewers are invited to the see the “frozen…

Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2002, a new exhibition at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, explores the way artists since the late 18th century have depicted the frozen parts of our planet. It’s a show that forces people to stop seeing the polar ice caps as bleak, alien landscapes, and instead…

BERKELEY — It’s a yin yang cyber world. As consumers, we want to have our cake and know its source, but we don’t want anyone to watch us eat it. While a considerable portion of the U.S. population exercised their credit cards on Cyber Monday and settled in to track their purchases, a “Mapping the…

Growing up in an industrial town in southern Ontario, where his father worked at a local General Motors plant, photographer Edward Burtynsky witnessed a side of manufacturing and consumer culture that many don’t experience. His appreciation and understanding of industrial scenery, cultivated at a young age, has led to a career of award-winning large-scale landscape…

Some of the musicians featured at the recently launched Bands at Brower series approached the performance like any other gig, presenting their usual material. But for Rob Reich the David Brower Center’s ecological mission is a feature not a bug, and he’s designed an immersive multimedia event that explores the way music and natural settings…

BERKELEY — A coalition of environmentalists warned against the ravages of the “oil economy” Tuesday, noting that Americans, reversing a years-long trend, have begun to drive more again now that gasoline is relatively cheap, putting more pollutants and greenhouse gases in the air, with ominous implications for public health and climate change. “The world is…