Based at Utah State, the Crossroads Project is a collaboration of the Fry Street Quartet and physicist Robert Davies that marries science and art to answer what amounts to the central paradox of modern life: "where the scientific ability to identify unprecedented risk to the natural systems that support us, intersects a societal inability to respond," as a document describing the project expresses it.

The inspiration for the collaboration is Davies's desire to get people to feel the issues threatening the natural world — which includes humans, of course — as well as they perceive them intellectually. Or, in the case of some humans, better than they perceive them.

I learned of this group from Dennis Carlberg, director of sustainability at Boston University, and I'm delighted he shared it with me.