Not long after he joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2006, the curator Karl Kusserow wore a bracelet bearing the phrase “Stop global warming” to a staff meeting. His colleagues noticed (“It was,” he conceded, “kind of ugly and noticeable”), but only a few of them knew it referred to a cause. The term was just getting mainstream traction — this was the year Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Truth” and Vanity Fair launched its first Green issue. But the science suggesting that industrial societies have thrown climatic rhythms wildly out of whack had been around for decades. Just a year earlier, the environmentalist Bill McKibben had railed against the culture’s perceived indifference. “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” he wrote in an op-ed for Grist. “Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS ... which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect.” For future generations looking back on the present, “the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.”⁠ ⁠ As the environmental crisis accelerates, a growing number of contemporary artists have taken up the mantle of addressing the precarious present. At the link in bio, writer Zoë Lescaze (@zlescaze) asks: How should art reckon with climate change? ⁠ ⁠ Image: “Swale” (2017), by Mary Mattingly, a floating garden on a barge, with Lower Manhattan in the background. Photography courtesy of the artist and Cloudfactory.