The Cape Cod Blue Economy Foundation held its Big Blue Conference at Falmouth High School this week. Executive Director Katy Acheson said the two-day event focused on the intersection between a water-based economy and a changing climate.
"It’s really about sparking conversations, collaboration, bringing people together in one room to talk about what they’re doing and what they’re working on so they can sort of cross-reference, use each other’s resources, or start new projects together, like we’ve done in the past," Acheson said of the annual conference.
Attendees and presenters included business people, students, artists, and community and climate organizations. Day two of the event focused on the intersection between a blue, water-based economy and green climate solutions. Acheson said the host town played a key role.
She said Wednesday's agenda was "more about local climate action, with a lot of focus on Falmouth." Acheson added, "Because the Town of Falmouth, as a municipal group, and as a group of volunteers, have really done a lot to pave the way for other municipalities across the region.”
The event also shined a light on artists whose work focuses on climate change, including architect and artist Rajji Desai.
For her day job Desai is a climate change researcher for an architectural firm in Boston. On the weekends she creates whimsical illustrations that portray ocean creatures with urban infrastructure, in an imagined future of climate change and sea level rise.
"A lot of this is informed by the data that I work with every day in my day job, which looks at, you know, how our seas are going to change,” she said.
The project, called Dispatches from the Deep, is presented as a series of postage stamp images.
"In a way this is not prescribing or saying that this is the future, but it’s asking us to radically re-imagine with curiosity what the future could look like," Desai said.
She said the images – like climate change – can evoke a range of emotions.
