I grew up pretty much surrounded by the woods, and that meant surrounded by all the animals, from the raccoons to the possums to the chipmunks, to the rabbits, to the birds.

My parents always said the red cardinals had me tamed because they'd come to the door and start singing, and I would go to feed them.

And I think I've always loved nature, animals because of that.

My art is always trying to ground you in what might be right outside your front door that is invisible to you.

For instance, I will take a river that is flowing right underneath the city, but then I'll look at it in terms of an ecological history and also look at it in terms of a holistic approach, because we tend to understand a river with where we live on that river.

We rarely think about what's downstream from us, but we might possibly worry about what's upstream from us if someone's polluted.

So I will always try to make in my artworks visible what we take for granted.

My choice of materials is always natural, whether it's stone, wood, glass and then, of course, my big earthworks are all made out of the earth itself, and a lot of times my works try to reclaim a degraded or neglected landscape.

The Wave Fields.

I tend to work in series, as an artist.

And the first one was for the University of Michigan.

I am very site specific, but a site isn't just a physical site.

So I started doing all this research because the building that artwork was going into was an aerospace engineering building, and one of the faculty members had handed me this book on...

It was called Van Dijk's Album of Fluid Motion.

And I came across this Stokes water wave, which is a naturally occurring, completely symmetrical, repetitive water wave.

I went, that's going to be the piece.

So in the first one you could curl up in a wave.

They were five feet tall.

By the time I get to Storm King Wave Field, I wanted you to get lost in almost an ocean waves.

So those waves go 18 to 20ft above your head.

So I do tend to play with scale and just how one relates to the landscape, to the natural world through these, what I would call interventions.

In my life, I've done the art and the architecture.

I sort of see my career as a bit of a tripod.

And the third would be the memorials.

So first with Vietnam, then Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, the Women's Table at Yale, and then the Confluence Project, which is a six part series throughout the state of Washington.

I've always thought of my works as being anti-monuments.

They're actually very private, very personal, very intimate.

So they're memorials.

I call them memory works actually.

And so for me, well, what if a memorial could jump form?

What if it could flow like water?

It could go to multiple sites and multiple media forms.

About 20 years ago, I started making clippings of the sixth extinction.

We're in an extinction event, and we're causing it to happen.

Since I've cared deeply about the environment, and in a way I wanted to really give back something, I decided that my fifth and final of the Memorial series would be focused on the environment.

What is Missing is sort of a guerrilla art project.

One of its major aspects is an online website, but it's also an NGO.

It's a not-for-profit foundation that I donate to.

It tries to make us aware of what we're losing and said, you come away with your own conclusions.

We give you very concrete actions of what you can do in your own lives.

What we eat, what we drink, what we buy, what we throw away, what we recycle, as well as what can an artist do?

Maybe I can pose the issues we face in a different light, so that maybe you think that's all it would take.

I think a lot of people think there's nothing they can individually do that can make a difference with climate change because it is all of us doing a little bit here and a little bit there.

So we'll show you like an image of the world at night and go, if the entire world population, if we lived at the density of Manhattan, how much space do we take up?

And the answer is the state of New Mexico.

So by framing it differently, all maybe I can do as an artist is to get you to go, That's it?

That's the only... that's the amount of space?

But our impact affects 99% of the planet.

If it stays abstract, how do you get people to connect to nature?

So I always believe nature is incredibly wondrous.

So we've gone around the world and we've found anecdotal accounts.

Let's take New York City, for example.

You know, when the early explorers first came through, they encountered 40 pound turkeys.

They encountered six foot long lobsters.

Just these stories of wonder.

So we chose to live where there was very great biodiversity.

First comes sewage, then comes industrial pollution.

And then that awareness leads to legislation which leads to recovery.

So there is an arc throughout all these timelines.

We must have like 500 timelines of cities, species, waterways where you see this amazing wonder and then literally on the Thames hasn't been this clean in 400 years.

New York City, the seals are back.

Oysters are beginning to be coming back.

So if we protect nature, nature's resilient, it will come back.

And we like to emphasize that.

The bookending between Vietnam and What is Missing is in a funny way, when I started out with the Vietnam Memorial, if you think about the form itself, I didn't add a heavy wall into the earth.

I cut the earth, opened it up, and polished it.

The object of this monument, or what I call an anti monument, are the names themselves.

And that pure surface and that dematerialization of what a monument could be follows through to What is Missing, that continues to grow and continues to ask people to share a memory with us.

Something they've personally witnessed, or something their parents or grandparents told them has either diminished or disappeared, or better yet, come back.

How is nature personally connecting to you?

And I think to be able to connect into that and make it close to home again pulls away from the abstractness of protecting the world, protecting the planet.

It brings it right back to your own backyard.

That's all I can do as an artist.

Frame a new way of looking at the problems we face.

Art at times has been a predictor.

It's like science fiction.

I think we wrote about an escalator.

We wrote about an elevator.

We wrote about a rocket to the moon.

And I think we're very resourceful as a species.

And so if we show you plausible future scenarios, we can aim for it.