http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Portraits/mad_scientist

Have you recently experienced a heightened awareness of environmental concerns? Common symptoms may include: nausea, depression, feelings of helplessness, and increased fear of the words “polar,” “ice,” and “caps.” While there is as yet no cure for this condition, specialist Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, of NYU’s Environmental Health Clinic, might be able to help. Since the clinic’s launch in February, Dr. Jeremijenko, along with her trained assistants, has been addressing the environmental anxieties of its visitors.

To be clear, Jeremijenko, 40, has a Ph.D., not an M.D. And the project is run under the auspices of NYU’s Art Department, not the School of Public Health. Her credentials as an artist and environ-mental activist, however, are solid. Since arriving in America in 1994, the Australian-born artist and engineer has been producing work that harnesses technology to make people’s interactions with the natural world more, well, interactive.

When visitors come to the clinic with an environmental health concern—like children’s exposure to lead—the clinic’s specialists don’t simply trot out advice about limiting exposure to paint chips (it’s a conceptual art project, not a health provider). “What differs,” says Jeremijenko, “is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals, but for actions and … referrals to interesting art, design, and participatory projects.” Concern about lead in the neighborhood might call for a prescription for planting sunflowers to detoxify the soil in the park where children play. The clinic then might ask for samples of the flowers to determine how many chemicals the plants had absorbed, while keeping detailed records that are available to the public. “The data is precisely not private—it has to do with the shared space, air, water, and environmental systems we inhabit.”

Jeremijenko’s body of work exists somewhere in the ideological netherworld between the dystopian vision of people glued to computers while the world rots around them and the utopian vision of technology as a panacea. It has included robotic toy dogs whose noses were modified to detect toxins in supposedly-clean former industrial spaces, genetically-identical trees planted around the Bay Area in a statement on biodiversity, electronic buoys anchored near the shore of the Hudson River that glowed when fish pass between them (so bystanders could feed the fish special food that flushed out harmful PCBs), and weight-activated perches that delivered prerecorded soliloquies on avian flu when birds landed upon them.

As with all these projects, the goal of the Environmental Action Clinic is not just to help people make better choices for the world around them—it’s to show people that environmental problems have immediate effects on their health. “Have you ever noticed the flaccidness of the ‘what you can do’ screen at the end of rousing documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth? Translating environmental issues into health concerns makes them more tangible, manageable, and measurable,” says Jeremijenko. “How many petitions is a person really willing to sign?”

June 22, 2006 | It’s an icy spring morning and Natalie Jeremijenko skates into the Soy Luck Club on Rollerblades. The boutique cafe in New York’s West Village has polished concrete floors, brick red walls and burnished wood counters. It feels like it was designed to be featured in one of those big modernist architecture magazines. But Jeremijenko’s chaotic energy seems to melt the frosty interior into thin air.

Wearing a parka with a fake fur collar over a tight dress, she rolls around the glossy Knoll furniture, talking nonstop about her latest art project. She has all kinds of science degrees and drops terms in biology and mechanical engineering the way most people do the names of film stars. With her animated eyes and sly smile, her blond hair pulled loosely behind her head, she has the magnetism of a natural actor. Yet her enthusiasm often overtakes her logic and her sentences dart around like children. Born and raised in Australia, she retains her Aussie accent and seems to live so comfortably on abstract planes that at times you don’t know where she’s coming from. And that, her husband, Dalton Conley, a New York University sociology professor and writer, later says, goes for him too.

Alighting at a table, Jeremijenko, 39, explains that her work is “all about creating interfaces that draw people into the environment and get them to reimagine collective action.” She cracks open her laptop and displays an image of 100 polycarbonate tubes or “buoys” that she’s engineered to glow when fish swim through them in the Hudson River. Yes, she really has government approval to position the buoys in the river. Given her day job as a professor, she convinced state environmental officials her project was all about science. But never mind that. Did you know the fish were on Zoloft? All the antidepressants that New Yorkers take are flushed through their urine into sewage treatment plants, which overflow into the river. You doubt her? Go to the Whitney Museum and see one of her drawings hanging on a wall by a bathroom. It features a woman’s bottom, her pants below her knees, on a toilet seat. It asks, “Why are the Hudson River fish and frogs on antidepressants?” Printed on it in tiny letters are actual studies that attest to the chemical drug compounds in the waterway consumed by the unsuspecting bass, sturgeon and crabs.

Anyway, when the buoys light up, you can feed the fish food treated with chelating agents to help cleanse the PCBs from their blood, planted there from decades of General Electric dumping waste into the river. The fish food, in fact, will not be much different from the energy bars we’re always eating on hiking trails. “The idea that we eat the same stuff is a visceral demonstration that we live in the same system,” Jeremijenko says. “Eating together is the most intimate form of kinship. By scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I’m scripting our interrelationship with them.”

Oh, and one more thing. Do you know about the American doctrine that says a corporation has the status of a person and enjoys all the legal protections afforded by the Constitution, including the right to own property? Well, beginning this week, Jeremijenko is selling the buoys to collectors. With the money, she plans to form a corporation called Ooz Inc. – zoo spelled backward — and put the fish on the board. That way the fish, as shareholders, will acquire personhood, and have a say in the preservation of their grungy habitat.

Is she kidding? No, she’s not. She wants us to feel as connected to wildlife in New York City as we do in the Adirondack Mountains. And reflect on the ways we impact nature and the ways it affects us. She’s a maverick environmentalist whose field notes are public artworks. But she is being playful, a hallmark of her art and personality, and the trait that allows her work to stand out in the vital cultural arena where art and science collide.