Imagine a vacuum the size of a football field.

If you're a salmon in Oregon, you may get acquainted soon.

It looks like a giant floating industrial building with fish tanks and plumbing.

It's Wednesday, November 8th, but of course, today is Science Friday.

I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. Oregon's Willamette River Valley has a whole bunch of dams,

which have had a huge negative impact on the population of wild salmon. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to use a

giant vacuum to suck up salmon and transport them down river. We will talk about that wild plan,

but first, D. Peter Schmidt speaks with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist

who curated an exhibit about our possible

climate futures.

I talked to Ayanna along with artist Erica Deemant, one of the exhibits three artists,

about reconnecting with nature, food justice, and why the exhibit is called climate futurism.

Ianna started by answering that question.

The question that I've been asking myself for a few years now is, what if we get it right?

There's so much like apocalypse, doom in filmmaking, in social media, that I feel like we've lost the ability to imagine the future that we want.

And so when I think of climate futurism, I think about,

okay, we have basically all the climate solutions we need. What if we actually implemented them?

And so with this show, I was glad to have the opportunity to engage with artists around these

questions of what is the climate future we want to create?

What should we take with us and what should we leave behind?

My name is Erica Deeman. I'm a visual artist and I am sharing work as part of this installation.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

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