The Ephemeralization Project—launched in Broad Cove, Nova Scotia with “Labyrinth,” August 29, 2023—is an effort to restore a sense of poetry’s role both in transforming human perspective and conveying that experience across space and time.

We borrow the title and some of the driving concerns for this project from Buckminster Fuller, who, in 1969, argued that, even as exponential population growth guaranteed increased consumption of the world’s resources, advances in technology would lead just as quickly to increased “ephemeralization”; in other words, “the doing of ever more with ever less, per given resource units of pounds, time, and living in ever- increasing numbers” (Fuller 1969/2008 26).   As a result, a future of rapid industrial development that was, at the same time, “truly sustainable” was—Fuller maintained—well within our grasp.

Today, our aim is to promote an ephemeral form of earth accountability fundamentally resistant to the rhetoric of control and mechanizations of capitalism. At the same time, we seek to draw attention to the material structures, and both the human and non-human bodies, that undergird even the most apparently “ephemeral” developments in the history of industrialization.

Through collective engagement with specific environments, a range of both natural resources and human-produced waste materials, Buckminster Fuller’s project: “the doing of ever more with ever less, per given resource units of pounds, time, and living in ever-increasing numbers” will be activated in a poetic mode that underscores collective art practice as a way of recognizing and celebrating these site-specific and time-bound—fleeting—but also endlessly renewable resources: perspective, community, and the human imagination.