With some downtime between work projects and a lineup of fun activities falling into place on the east coast, my sister and I both came to spend a month with our parents in North Carolina for the first time in our adulthood. I went to the Chesapeake Bay with friends for the 4th, attended Adult Beginners Sailing Camp with my dad and sister, harvested surprise squash from my mother’s garden, revisited the beach club we grew up going to on the coast. Things were lining up for what felt like a real, classic Southern Summer.

That trip took an unexpected turn, however, when my dad was in a bad motorcycle accident while on a ride in rural Pennsylvania, ending up in a Level 1 Trauma hospital undergoing two major surgeries and several weeks of recovery. While it’s a long road ahead, he is, luckily, okay. As he constantly repeated when he taught me to ride years ago: All the Gear, All the Time. This time, it’s certain that refrain saved his life.

Another refrain soon became a sort of running family joke. While my dad’s broken body spasmed in pain in the ER bed, sending his body into excruciating contortions every few minutes, his doctor somehow learned that he was a retired dermatologist who had some insight into her son’s chronic eczema. Looking to us when we arrived, she shared her gratitude for his advice. “See, everything happens for a reas…,” she began, before cutting herself off realizing the disproportional absurdity of the claim in the current context. Within a few days our family was finding reasons for my dad’s accident in everything. Discovering a mediocre roadside ice cream stand. Learning the importance of a ferro rod after watching an entire season of Outlast together. Befriending a very cuddly donkey at our Airbnb.

That said, perhaps one of the reasons this all happened was to introduce me to the fascinating, and fascinatingly relevant, history of Johnstown, PA.

If you’ve heard of Johnstown, a flailing rust belt town built from the steel industry and surrounded by coal country, it’s almost certainly about a tragedy. Most likely the devastating flood(s). Perhaps its recent wave of unsolved, weapons involved violent crime. Maybe in passing when discussing Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 that crashed in the PA countryside near Johnstown. That first tragedy, the one that gave it the moniker “Flood City,” was certainly the worst. In fact, it was objectively the worst flood in American history. After learning more about it, it’s also one of the most American stories in history, with themes that feel ever more relevant today.

Johnstown is situated in a steep chasm at the intersection where two rivers meet on their way to Pittsburg, the Little Conemaugh and the Stony Creek Rivers merging into the Conemaugh. Through land acquired in violated treaties with the Shawnee tribe, each river meanders through a valley, nestled tightly between low mountains of the Laurel Highlands, until they converge in a flat, low lying triangular-ish base between the hills. If you go to the top of the town’s infamous Inclined Plane (one of the oldest funiculars in America) and look down into the valley below, you may think to yourself, “Wow, that looks like a floodplain.” Not Joseph Johns. Our good man Joseph stood at the top of that hill in 1800 and thought, “Wow, that looks like a place to build a town.”

(Side note: one of the many American things about this story is that Joseph’s real name was Josef Schantz, but he anglicized it to Joseph Johns to be more palatable.)

Johnstown sat along one of the primary canal routes to Pittsburgh at a time when canal transport was critical to the American economy and industry as the primary method of long distance travel. To support the canal system, about 14 miles upriver on the Little Conemaugh, a dam was built starting in the mid 1830s. This 72 foot high, 900 ft wide earthen dam was one of the largest earthen dams ever built, and even during construction it was starting to collapse. Due to many reasons familiar to any infrastructure story in the US, construction started and stopped several times until it was finally completed in 1853, just in time to be operational for approximately one single year before the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal went bankrupt. A few short years later, the route was bought and replaced by railroad tracks - a newer, better technology that rendered the canal system, including the massive dam, obsolete.

Already springing leaks and requiring significant maintenance, the dam fell into further disrepair with no one paying much attention to it’s management. Within a decade, it partially collapsed again, causing a 2-3 foot flood downriver in the town of Johnstown. It becomes clear the dam is a liability. And yet, like true Americans, instead of dealing with that liability with foresight and integrity, the dam is sold to US Congressman John Reilly, who opts to fully remove the sluice pipes necessary to perform any future maintenance and sell them for a measly profit of scrap metal. Without the pipes in place, the top of the dam begins to sag almost immediately, increasing the risk of overflow. Instead of fixing it, Reilly sells the large reservoir and dam to an enterprising Benjamin Ruff who founds a bright new venture: the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club of Pittsburgh.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was a highly exclusive, invitation-only boys club intended as a retreat for the most promising Pittsburg industry tycoons. Its 61 members had last names you will certainly recognize at an art world aficionado such as yourself: Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, Phipps. They built gorgeous Victorian mansions they called “cottages” around the reservoir and spent their weekends frolicking with lady friends brought over from Pittsburgh. When they wanted to be able to ride their carriages in a full circle around the reservoir, they decided it made sense to remove the top three feet of the dam to make a wide, level path. When they noticed that the fish in the reservoir kept sliding over the spillway, escaping their fishing club territory, they installed screen grates at the spillways to prevent fish from toppling over the edge. Nevermind that these screens also trapped increasing amounts of debris that were rarely cleared away, clogging the spillway and forcing excess water flow over the lip of the dam instead. When they noticed leaks springing, they did their best to patch it over with some extra dirt and horse manure, never approving the costs of actually replacing the sluice pipes or fully repairing the years of damage threatening collapse at any moment.

Everyone knew this was a growing liability, but no one wanted to spend the money to deal with it. For that matter, the amount of money to properly deal with it at this point likely went well beyond what could be spent. And while there were signs, perhaps increasing signs, that the dam was a risk, those with the actual money and responsibility for that maintenance were upstream of that risk, not likely to face the life and death consequences of a potential future catastrophe.

That catastrophe went from potential to actual on Memorial Day weekend in 1889, then known as Decoration Day. Rain settled over the region, coming down continuously overnight and into the next day. Members of the club awoke to rapidly rising water levels, visibly watching it rise as much as 18 inches an hour. New rivulets began forming over the top of the dam, indicating an imminent overflow. The spillway screens were fully clogged from debris and completely ineffectual for the scale of the storm. Things happen quickly that day: The men still there after the weekend’s festivities come together and use the opportunity to finally start frantically dumping dirt and manure on the top of the dam, trying to actively build it up as the rain continues and the water level races higher. It becomes clear it’s a futile mission. Someone tries to send a telegram down river to Johnstown to warn that the dam might go. Because of the storm, the telegram lines are down and the message only makes it to a town half way down, nestled higher on the hillside, somewhat protected from what’s to come. They dispatch a man on horseback, who intercepts a track man inspecting the train tracks, which have also been washed out by the storm, leaving a train stranded between the dam and the town.

The dam breaches at 3:10pm. They do their best to send word. A stone viaduct part of the way down helps briefly delay the 20 million tons of water, before the sheer force collapses that as well. The stranded train conductor realizes what’s happening and puts his train in reverse, barreling down the mountain in a doomed mission to warn the townspeople below, blaring his horn as he goes. Water surges through the river valley in a tsunami reaching 89 feet high. By the time it hits Johnstown at 4:07pm, less than an hour after the breech, it arrives as a tidal wave 37 feet high flowing 40 miles per hour. The wave crashes through the town, slamming into the side of the mountain on the far side of the valley, ricocheting back and forth like a nightmarish wave pool at least three times before finally moving through the town and on down the Conemaugh. An entire four square miles of the town’s center is flattened, entire homes, businesses, buildings, families swept away by the force of the water.

But the tragedy doesn’t end there. Just past the point where the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek rivers meet there’s a stone arch bridge, one that still stands today. With the force of the water picking up most anything in it’s path, including entire trees, houses, livestock, animals, and townspeople, the stone arch bridge creates an impromptu dam of its own, trapping a massive pile of debris. Johnstown, you’ll remember, is a steel town, full of industrial equipment and chemicals. Mixed up in the debris pile is ample fuel and flammable material. Shortly after the tidal wave passes, it ignites. For three days, the fire burns. Those that were swept away in the flood and didn’t drown immediately but were instead caught in the debris pile had no way out. The remaining townspeople could do little to help dig their neighbors out as they burned.

Between 2,200-3,200 people died in that flood and the following fire, remaining the most lethal flood in US history. Ninety-nine entire families died, including 396 children. 1600 homes were destroyed. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, and as late as 1911. 750 of them were never identified and lay to rest in the Plot of the Unknown. In a town of only 30,000 people, almost 1 in 10 were gone.

However, this story is a story about Americans. Which means that by the next day, the men of the town came together and committed to rebuilding. We are nothing if not resilient, us Americans (and bygoneit we are certainly not susceptible to the whims of nature making demands on us). The country couldn’t get enough of the sensationalized news story, with major papers swarming the town with journalists, publishing reports inflating the death toll to 10,000, staging graphic fake photos of flood victims, and running out of paper printing excess copies to keep up with the insatiable demand. Full books were published within weeks based on highly unverified accounts. People came from all around to witness the tragedy themselves - certainly not the first or last example of disaster tourism.

There were, of course, inspiring outcomes. Money was raised from all parts of the globe, totaling over $3.7 million. The newly formed Red Cross arrived, led by Clara Barton, establishing its legacy as the leading emergency response agency it’s known as today. (Badass side note: Clara Barton was 67 years old already when she showed up in Johnstown, proving that legacies can be left at any time!) Despite valiant attempts at lawsuits, not a single man of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club was ever held liable for any of the damages, but Andrew Carnegie still generously donated $55k to rebuild the public library out of the kindness of his own heart, ever a consummate cultural patron. (Okay, so that last one is a bit tongue in cheek…)

Johnstown was rebuilt, settling deeper roots into its home on the floodplain, roots lasting through today. They built a new luxurious Victorian home neighborhood for the CEOs and steel industry businessmen to raise their families at the top of the nearby hills, safe from the risks below. The Inclined Plane was introduced to transport people from the valley floor to the hilltop above. Instead of considering the natural life of the river and the purpose of the floodplain’s landscape, they concretized and reinforced the river, building strong walls and high banks to wrestle it into their preferred channels. For years, they called it un-floodable. It’s flooded many times since then. At least twice it was deadly, killing 25 people in 17 feet of water in 1937 and another 76 people under 8’6” in 1977. The day I went to the flood museum, situated inside Carnegie’s public library, it started raining as we walked out, a flash flood warning ominously appearing on our phones.

And yet, what’s more American than our resilience. Our ability to stand at the top of a stolen mountain overlooking a floodplain and say, I can build a town there. To have that town flood, over and over again, and to say, if we just add more concrete, if we just make sure no rich people live there, if we just postpone the risk a little bit longer, past my congress term, past my children’s lives, past my profit forecast, then we can finally, certainly, force nature into doing what we want it to, despite knowing all along that it never will.

I can’t stop thinking about Johnstown. The way it points to so many themes underlying the currents of the US today. Where are we still watching obvious warning signs and choosing to ignore them, delaying our action until it’s inevitably going to be too late? Almost 140 years later,in the face of repeated disasters, we still choose, over and over, to rebuild rather than repair and relearn.

I’m thinking about our concretized LA river redirecting a century’s worth of water out to the Pacific instead of supporting the Los Angeles basin’s water table.

I’m thinking about Lake Mead and Lake Powell both reaching record lows as we negotiate new agreements for the overuse of water from the Colorado River.

I’m thinking about driving down the PCH looking at For Sale signs in front of burned lots in Malibu, the ocean already lapping gently over the ruins of their old foundations.

I’m thinking about the houses collapsing in the Outer Banks built on shifting barrier islands and the massive amounts of sand we dredge up and dump on repeat to “replenish” our beaches.

And of course, arriving back in LA to a dangerous heatwave, I’m thinking about heat. About the never ending firehose of emissions we are stuffing into our atmosphere, making us hotter and hotter and hotter each year, and all the catastrophic knock on effects that’s having.

Even now, as I prepare to send this note, new reports are arriving of the rising death toll after devastating floods swept away entire villages in Nepal and Tibet. I’m thinking about how rather than learning lessons from history to help keep us safer, its quite the opposite. Our warming climate, combined with poor infrastructure and planning decisions, has made events like these even more likely to occur, and more likely to be more deadly, not less.

In closing, I’ll say: Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps everything does happen for a reason.

The question is: are we going to listen to that reason? Interpret it as natural consequences for our past actions? As a critical warning to inform and guide what we do next?

Or are we going to continue to interpret that reason as cause for building our American character - a character built strong with a resilience reminiscent to that of the goats I spent my time in Johnstown living amongst, headbutting a wall over and over.

While history tells me, again and again, that it’s the latter, I want to do what I can to imagine into reality a world where it’s the former.

These are some of the things I’ll be thinking about going into this fall. If you are too and want to chat, or if you want to know absolutely anything else about Johnstown, PA - I’m your girl. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

xxL

Some references that helped inform my writing:

https://www.heritagejohnstown.org/attractions/heritage-discovery-center/johnstown-history/johnstowns-immigration-history/

https://www.heritagejohnstown.org/attractions/johnstown-flood-museum/flood-history/facts-about-the-1889-flood/

https://www.nps.gov/jofl/learn/historyculture/the-south-fork-dam.htm

https://www.nps.gov/jofl/learn/historyculture/johnstown-flood-timeline.htm

LHL Consulting is now Field Forms! Learn more here.

It’s here. After much anticipation (I know you all have been eagerly awaiting this news), Field Forms is born.

Field Forms will begin to take the place of LHL Consulting as the primary name of record for the work that I do as a climate and cultural strategist.

Why Field Forms?

Field (noun)
: an open land area (optional: containing a natural resource)
: an area or division of an activity, subject, or profession
: a space on which something is drawn or projected (such as a color field)
: a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in physics and/or human behavior

Forms (noun)
: the shape and structure of something
: the structural element, plan, or design of a work of art
: orderly method of arrangement
: a printed or typed document with blank spaces for insertion of required or requested information

(verb)
: to give a form or shape to; to bring into existence
: to be an essential or basic element of

An alliterative name, just like my own, that calls to mind both creative, logistical, and action oriented elements of the work that I do, Field Forms is a name that I hope will carry my work into the future with strength and grace, wherever it goes next.

You can now find us at:

www.fieldforms.co
lhl@fieldforms.co
support@fieldforms.co

And don’t worry, for the time being, all the old LHL Consulting / climateconsulting.art links should work fine too while we switch over.

For more about why I’m making this change , be sure to read last week’s update here.

xx Laura Lupton
Founder and CEO, Field Forms

Aka Laura; aka La; aka Ra; aka the Founder / CEO of LHL Consulting.

And soon, the Founder / CEO of something else….

Or, to be clear, not something else in form, but something else in name!

When I registered LHL Consulting, it was in response to an immediate need: to get a Tax Identification Number for my first big contract as the head of my newly launched climate and sustainability strategy consultancy for the cultural sector. Perhaps some of you were around at that point. There were extended conversations about what to name it, Instagram polls that went out, a vast range of convincing opinions, and then an even vaster range of opinions contradicting those convictions. In the end, I opted to register the LLC under what I considered “essentially a non-name.” Something anonymous, simple, without much identity of its own, just for the sake of getting the paperwork done for the TIN and bank account. Instead of rushing into a decision that didn’t quite feel right, I decided that I would wait to “name” the company with a DBA filing once I felt like the right name came around.

Fast forward three years later, and it turns out that once you start to use a name, that name sticks around. We've worked with a number of respected clients under LHL Consulting, gotten press in outlets like The Art Newspaper, The LA Times, and The New York Times, spoken at conferences and events, and met scores of people under the auspices of LHL Consulting.

For those of you who don’t know, the letters LHL are my initials - Laura Hope Lupton. A good Southern name that my grandparents would regularly say in full - Laura Hope. Fun fact, I once ran for student body class president under the campaign slogan, “Hope Is My Middle Name.” (Spoiler alert, I lost.) And not to imply anything, but this was a few years PRIOR to Obama’s campaign.

I love my initials. I like the alliteration and the symmetry, and if you’ve ever seen my creative work you’ll recognize the LHL Consulting logo as the makers mark in my clay and paintings. But, it’s never felt quite right as the primary name of record for the work of my company. I often work in collaboration with others beyond myself, I consider our work mission directed collaborative projects more than traditional consulting, and the name itself doesn’t convey much of a story of what we do. So for years, I’ve thought about what a more formal and creative name for the company could be.

After some productive conversations with my friend Jon Santos of Common Space Studio, I finally have that name. And after some unproductive paperwork filing, New York State now agrees. As my beloved insider followers on Substack you’re getting the heads up that a new name is coming. And if you’re a paid subscriber, you’re actually getting an even bigger heads up on what the new name is, just below the paywall jump. :)

For the rest of you, keep an eye out for the next newsletter, where I’ll share it with you all too! Or, if you can’t wait, go ahead and sign up right now to be first in the know. You’ll also have a head start gaining access to some of the new content that will be rolling out, now that I have a name to roll it out under!

Til then—

xxLHL

Read more

It’s overwhelming

how stunning this oasis

we get to call home

🌎

Some suggested reading for today:

Perrin Ireland is not only a wealth of weird animal facts and hula hoop skills, but she always serves the best calls to action:

Thirsty Science

EARTH DAY ACTION FOR ANIMALS

the first earth day was a mass protest. resistance on behalf of planet is our earth day PRIVILEGE…

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4 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Perrin Ireland

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson with the hot take of all hot takes:

WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT?

We already have the climate solutions we need. We just need to f*cking implement them.

Happy Earth Day, Earthlings. 🌎✨…

Read more

4 months ago · 28 likes · 3 comments · Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Sammy Roth left the LA Times to do the kind of climate investigative journalism Southern California desperately needs:

Climate-Colored Goggles

Why I'm writing about climate and culture

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” — Semisonic, “Closing Time…

Read more

10 months ago · 105 likes · 10 comments · Sammy Roth

And most importantly, at some point today (and every day really) go sit outside, take a breath, and revel in the marvelous wonder of the planet we so luckily find ourselves on.

‘til next time,

xxL

If you’ve had a conversation with me this past year about what I’m most inspired by, you’ve probably heard me talk about the Lincoln Heights California Native Plants Corridor. This was formerly a no-man’s strip of city owned, neglected, trash filled land on Avenue 20 next to 1-5 in Los Angeles that a local neighbor, Marie Massa, transformed into a thriving, native plant ecosystem.

I first read about her project in the LA Times, and resonated with her words:

“You see all these horrible things happening in the world,” she said, “the loss of rainforests, of plants and animals and insects. ... It’s so much and sometimes I can’t handle all this bad news,” Massa said. “That’s why I feel compelled, because I can make a difference here.”

So much of what needs to happen in the face of our contemporary permacrisis is macro-scaled. We desperately need emissions and waste reductions on a geopolitical and multinational corporate scale, and instead we are at the whim of an administration gutting environmental protections, ushering in environmental and humanitarian catastrophes worldwide, and doing it’s damndest to ensure that we’re too innundated with chaos, uncertainty, and crisis in our own day-to-day to have the capacity to even process it all, much less organize and fight. This can make everything feel overwhelming and pointless.

But Massa’s work on this small corridor fueled hope for me. It reminded me of the power of our individual care, our daily time. It demonstrated how we actually aren’t entirely powerless to make change, how we can choose to contribute to our local communities and ecosystems and create something wonderful that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. We can roll up our sleeves, put on some gloves, and give our time, day after day, week after week, to cultivate one small part of the world we want to see.

This little corridor isn’t going to solve everything, of course. But instead of waiting for someone else - whether it’s the government, nonprofits, companies - to do everything, it reminds me that there are ways we can each show up daily to help nurture the world that we want to live in. And if Massa can give her time, her care, her hands to this corridor, it gives me hope that others can too. That if enough of us do, those small actions start to weave a tapestry of the micro that can grow into something verging on the macro. It also helps me believe that the micro parts of this problem I work on matter. It makes me energized to think about what else I do have the power to pay attention to, to give my time to, to nurture, and, as a result, to help build the world I want to live in.

All that to say, now that I’ve perhaps warmed your heart and inspired you about the beautiful possibility to be stewards of the small, I’m actually writing now with a bit of heartbreak that the garden is dealing with.

Someone has been vandalizing the corridor, ripping up and attacking plants overnight the past few weeks. Amongst a devastating news cycle on the macro level (that I surely don’t need to remind you of here), getting updates on this micro tragedy is hitting me hard. Perhaps because I know how it feels to give so much to an already seemingly thankless project, and having such a senseless attack would perhaps be so disheartening to me that I worry I’d lose my ability to keep it up.

But I have a lot riding on this little garden. It’s come to represent the possibility of us all to act, to make a difference, to contribute. And perhaps this is a reminder that heartbreak is always a part of it. Whether a result of fire, storms, political change, funding loss, or the systems that fail our community members and leave them vulnerable to violent impulses, part of caretaking is a relentless endurance to keep rolling up your sleeves and showing up, day after day. Which means that part of what’s needed to weather these crises is emotional fortitude, good community support, and moments to tend to our recovery.

Massa is dealing with this in real time. When I reached out to her, she said replanting for native plants can’t happen until the fall no matter what. I hope dearly that she takes time to grieve, that she feels buoyed by community support, and that when it comes time, she has the energy to start over. I hope she also knows that she has the support of many in our community to show up for some garden workdays!

In the meantime, she has been organizing a campaign to promote thriving native plants and pollinators by making Los Angeles into a Bee City USA Affiliate.

A few notes about the importance of California native bees from Massa:

California is home to over 1,600 species of native bees. California’s native bees have evolved with its highly diverse flora and are more efficient pollinators of California’s native plants. Native bees do not produce honey like the European honey bee, as 90% of native bees are solitary-nesting making their nests in the ground or in hollow stems. But humans rely on pollinators, like native bees, to ensure that food crops produce the food we eat. Without the native bees we might lose native plant species that depend on these specific pollinators. Over 40% of native pollinators species are in decline worldwide, with some at risk of extinction. If Los Angeles can become a more hospitable place for pollinators, then maybe we can have healthier neighborhoods and environment as well as a stronger community which connects people to nature.

I’m happily signing onto her petition to get the City Council to adopt this, and hope you will too!

Til next time. xxL

(p.s. Thank you to those of you who have signed up as paying subscribers or have reached out with a quick note to say you're enjoying the newsletter! It’s a real help to make me want to keep it up!)

I recently attended a presentation of MIT’s life cycle analysis research for their on campus glove recycling program (they used Terracycle, FYI). The research isn’t publicly published anywhere yet, but spoiler alert: the overall Global Warming Potential (GWP) of a recycled nitrile glove is higher than one that goes to landfill. Further, there’s very little transparency from the companies that offer glove recycling services about whether the gloves are recycled in a safe, meaningful way, especially important when the bulk of these gloves are used in scientific labs and medical settings where they may be contaminated with hazardous waste.

It’s also clear that the impact of disposal - whether it’s recycled or sent to landfill - is barely a fraction of the impact of the materials, manufacturing, and transportation to the site of use. This is demonstrated in the Life Cycle Analysis that STiCH did comparing nitrile, latex, and reusable cotton gloves, where the dark grey “disposal” column is barely a sliver of overall GWP (GWP is a helpful numeric score summarizing the impact of an action or material on contributing to climate change).

Sidenote: While the above graph shows cotton gloves as having the highest GWP, this is based on an average of 4 uses of cotton gloves between washing in hot water and a total of 40 lifetime uses vs single use disposable gloves. A key takeaway if you read the full STiCH study is that using cotton gloves more than 7 times between washes, washing in cold water, and getting more than 40 overall lifetime uses can quickly reduce the GWP for cotton gloves to be preferable to disposable options when they are appropriate for the material being handled.

So what do we do?

The real answer (as always) is reducing use of gloves, not finding creative and complicated ways to manage their waste stream afterwards. That got me thinking of how often I defaulted to putting on gloves at the gallery when I was never even really trained on when to use them, and how often sales staff and clients expected art handlers to be wearing gloves regardless of really knowing whether they were needed.

So, I did some research. According to The Care and Handling of Art Objects: Practices in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there’s actually a lot of situations where a clean, lotion and jewelry free, dry hand is an acceptable and sometimes preferable way of handling artworks over gloves.

So you don’t have to read a full 220 page guidance document, I made a quick visual guide with the key points, opting for a default of clean, dry hands whenever the Met’s guidance includes that as one of the acceptable options for handling.

For paying subscribers, after the jump there’s a link to a printable flyer version of this so you can post it in your prep room to help your team make thoughtful decisions on when to Glove with Love.

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In 2025, I had perhaps the most successful year of my career to date, while simultaneously feeling the constant weight of it's precarity.

My work had been featured in the New York Times, the LA Times, and repeatedly in The Art Newspaper and other trade journals. Debra and I basically wrote a PHD dissertation on the climate impact of the country’s largest art event, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, which was then adapted to a Getty publication. I was invited to collaborate, to consult, to speak, and to contribute in myriad ways, not just by museums like the New Museum, ICA Boston, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, but also by cross sector venues like an international consulate, an architectural firm, and an innovation conference. And yet, starting January 7th, the day the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, the fragility of it all never stopped feeling palpable.

It’s a different flavor of cognitive dissonance than when I used to work at the gallery, but a familiar taste nonetheless: an uneasiness working on projects I believe in, with artists that inspire me, while knowing it can’t all last this way. As the Director of Special Projects at a blue chip gallery working on blockbuster museum shows, it was the dissonance of doing whatever it took to realize an artist’s vision, even when certain decisions were wasteful and inefficient, when they perpetuated practices that were killing my planet and community. Now, my time is (luckily, joyfully, amazingly!) dedicated to reimagining the models that ask us to make those compromises, and the dissonance stems from the ever tenuous question of whether it’s going to actually work or not, whether it’s going to work quickly enough or not - and the scary uncertainty of what happens when it doesn’t.

In 2025, I’ve seen not just myself but my friends, colleagues, and clients deal directly with the converging crises of our contemporary times.

The year of course started with the Palisades and Eaton fire in Los Angeles, not only surrounding Getty in flames, but impacting each of the more than 50 exhibiting partners and 400 Southern Californian cultural workers that we worked with through the PST ART Climate Impact Program in some way. In May, as I worked with Counterpublic to create a climate strategy for the 2026 triennial in St. Louis, an intense and destructive tornado ripped through the city, tearing straight through one of their partner sites. Throughout the year, another site partner lost funding. Another burned. Another was determined to be too toxic from years of environmental abuse. Counterpublic’s director, James McAnally, wrote about this quite powerfully in his own Substack New Institutions:

New Institutions

An Exhibition is a Discipline of Hope

I woke up on Black Friday to the news that the Crunden-Martin complex just south of the Gateway Arch in Downtown St. Louis was burning. The historic warehouses were slated to be at the heart of Counterpublic 2026 - just six days earlier, our curators had created a constellation of over a dozen site-responsive projects that would animate the soaring buil…

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9 months ago · 7 likes · James McAnally

Other projects I worked on weren’t able to secure what they thought was certain funding after priorities shifted in response to the government’s dismantling of the IMLS, NEA, and NEH grants. Projects stalled after staff burn out led to pauses and turnover. Plans to expand into the US were reconsidered in light of the political situation. While presenting at the AAM conference on Recovery & Resilience in May, when asked who among the attendees had lost funding due to the government budget cuts, almost every hand in the room went up.

I list this out not to contribute to the omnipresent doom spiral we already feel, but to note in concrete examples something that can sometimes feel nebulous and abstract: we are already experiencing the daily impacts of crisis.

So what do we do? How do we continue to do the work when everything seems to be crashing in?

That’s a question I want to continue to explore this year. What does it mean to curate for crisis? To continue what I believe is crucial work - to create culture, to contribute to our collective humanity and imagination, to reflect, document, and shape our times - in an era where we can’t predict what crisis will come, but we can predict that one will almost certainly come.

In Curating for Crisis, I hope to share strategies and reflections on that important question. I hope you’ll follow along, and perhaps even contribute in some way. Let me know what you’re thinking about and how you’re approaching these questions, and please send along any examples that inspire you!

For now, perhaps one answer I can offer is this: Here are a few examples of what I found most powerfully successful last year. A hint, they are all rooted in strengthening community before crisis to keep us resilient during crisis.

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I heard this experience echoed by my friends working at galleries the past few weeks while in New York - that in the midst of headlines about galleries closing, fairs cancelling, budgets shrinking, some that made it through actually had one of their best sales years yet. Which leads me to think about what it means to continue our work, one step after the other, even in times of deeply felt uncertainty.

While we all face more uncertainty to come, I’m a strong believer that we, as artists and arts workers, will continue to work on projects that reflect and define our humanity even, and especially, during unsettling times. As we start 2026, I’m thinking about what this means: to create with uncertainty as a collaborator, to make plans for the unplannable, to curate for crisis, not denying it. Subscribe to follow along as I explore that here.

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In the meantime, here are a few 2025 highlights from LHL Consulting:

Last year, LHL Consulting wrapped up a multiyear project leading the PST ART Climate Impact Program, a groundbreaking integration of climate action, community building, and data reporting as part of Getty’s landmark recurring arts event, PST ART.

Supported by Getty grants to dozens of cultural organizations across Southern California, PST ART is the nation’s largest art event and occurs every five years.

Each edition strives to create new research and engage audiences. The latest edition called Art & Science Collide (October 2024 through February 2025) added a new goal to increase climate literacy within the PST ART community and help the museum field move towards more sustainable practices.

We developed and led this first of its kind Climate Impact Program (CIP) for PST ART: Art & Science Collide to harness the cultural sector’s growing engagement in climate action and address the carbon footprint of making art exhibitions. With my co-director Debra Scacco, we offered grantees training and resources, built strategic community ties, and developed a reporting protocol to get data-driven insights for the sector, resulting in the largest dataset to date on grant funded exhibition making.

Getty recently published the Impact Report from the program, but there are SO many more inspiring case studies, successful solutions, and behind the scenes insights and updates to share. We’ll be dropping some of those here and over on socials, so stay tuned.

Counterpublic is a triennial exhibition reimagining the possibilities of art in public life. Located in St. Louis, Counterpublic connects art with lasting impact by bringing together bold ideas with the region’s most pressing challenges. As one of the largest public art exhibitions in the nation, Counterpublic celebrates and spotlights the St. Louis region as an epicenter of art and culture through new artist commissions, inventive programs, publishing, and civic initiatives.

LHL Consulting is working with Counterpublic to develop a climate action and strategy plan for the 2026 edition, thanks to a grant from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. This funding will support an energy and greenhouse gas assessment, a full organizational climate impact assessment, emissions tracking and monitoring tools, and training for artists, curators, and partners. This work marks the first step in a multi-year effort to align curatorial vision with environmental responsibility—establishing a replicable model for climate-conscious exhibition-making. Counterpublic 2026 runs September 12 - December 12, 2026, so I’ll share updates as it rolls out this year.

I’ve long said that museums can be a climate solution. They are community pillars, one of the most trusted sources in America, and manage buildings and operations with direct opportunities for improving the health, safety, and resiliency of their communities. Last year, LHL Consulting worked with museums like the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Craft Contemporary, and ICA LA on greenhouse gas accounting and reduction strategies - a service I’m now happy to be able to officially offer with the backing of my certification in Corporate Sustainability and Innovation from Harvard.

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Annabel Keenan has been covering the art/climate beat for all the best art trade journals for years now. In 2025, she authored Climate Action in the Art World, a timely and urgent book reviewing the work that has been undertaken to date to create a more sustainable art world and proposes the next steps in system-wide change. It identifies the main sustainability issues for the art industry, arguing that artists and art activists have led the way in creating awareness of climate change, and evaluates progress to date on climate-action commitments by the various sectors of the art world, offering examples of best practice.

I’m proud to be featured among many friends throughout the book as a co-founder of Galleries Commit, Artists Commit, and Barder, as well as for some of LHL Consulting’s client projects with the Art Dealers Alliance of America and Getty.

The year featured a range of speaking events and opportunities to talk about my work with old friends and collaborators as well as new audiences. These conversations are always great - I’m constantly inspired by my co-panelists, get to meet new people, and continuously hone the way I talk about this work. Storytelling is everything, and I’m always working on refining the Ted Talk/elevator pitch to not only do this work, but share it.

That’s part of what I hope to practice here too - writing about and talking about this work in the hopes of both telling and shaping the story of art and culture moving through crisis. I’m launching this newsletter series, Curating for Crisis, to explore what it means to plan for projects, programming, and possibilities in a time when we can’t predict what crises we’ll face along the way, but we can undoubtedly predict that we will face them.

I hope you’ll consider forwarding this along to someone else that might be interested, signing up to be a free or paid subscriber, or just dropping me a line or comment to say it’s worth continuing if you think it is!

Will it also be my last? Maybe! Time will tell.

But for now, I have a few things I want you to know about, so here we are.

Debra and I are sharing highlights from our climate action work in the Southern California cultural sector at an event hosted by the Los Angeles Arts Climate Coalition. This will be your best chance to hear in depth findings and success stories from the PST ART Climate Impact Program we developed for Getty over the past two years before the Impact Report gets published later this year. Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, October 7, 6-8pm (remarks begin 6:30ish)
SPEEDBOAT | 715 N Cherokee Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038

RSVP.

Want a FREE carbon audit and reduction plan for your institution?

I’m (almost done!) completing a Graduate Certificate in Corporate Sustainability and Innovation at Harvard. My final project is to complete a Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Reduction Strategy for a real world entity this fall, which means I am looking for a museum, gallery, or other institution to partner with on an audit. If you’re interested in getting a FREE carbon report and reduction strategy fully aligned with international accounting and reporting best practices, learn more and apply here.

Apply for a FREE Carbon Audit Here

p.s. That also means that operational and institutional GHG accounting and reporting will soon be a service offered by LHL Consulting. :)

Inspo & Tips

We just wrapped up a final edit of the Getty PST ART Climate Impact Program Impact Report. Keep an eye out for this to be published by Getty soon, but in the meantime here are three ways teams got rid of wall vinyl for their PST ART exhibitions:

• The Huntington used existing gatorboard for section-text panels and covered these with eco-cloth instead of vinyl. They printed small labels in-house on colored paper.

• UC San Diego’s Birch Aquarium opted for non-PVC wall coverings (DreamScape Printable Non-PVC Wall Covering), which were applied using cornstarch-based wallpaper paste. Other exhibition graphics were hand-painted directly onto surfaces or projected digitally, reducing the reliance on printed materials.

• Craft Contemporary saved $10,000 by switching to paper didactics adhered by double sided tape along the perimeter of the paper. After the show, the double-sided tape areas were discarded, and the remaining images and didactics were rolled up and saved for school visits to use as collage material.

You can find these ideas, and add your own, via the LHL Portal Exchange Network.

On a personal note, I’m back in Los Angeles for the fall after a summer going to eight different National Parks and let me just say, nature is AMAZING! The rumors are true: I full on cried in a grove of Sequoia trees. We are so lucky to get to exist on this planet and my goodness, I want to do whatever I can to make sure it stays that way.

Til next time,

LHL