by Stacia Friedman

Designer Peter Handler, 68, who has lived in Germantown for 34 years, isn’t afraid to mix art and politics. After over 30 years of making custom designed furniture for homes, churches and synagogues, Handler is now creating sculptural pieces about climate change which he calls “the moral issue of our age.”

“These are the canaries in the coal mine,” said Handler of the five pieces he has designed so far: The Golden Toad Reliquary, Maldive Table, Coral Reef Table, Arctic Ice Reliquary and Forest Fires. While his subject matter is environmental disaster, “My starting point for each piece is that they need to be beautiful.”

“The ‘Golden Toad Reliquary’ is representative of the Sixth Great Extinction, of which we are now in the midst. There have been five other great extinctions, the last one leading to the death of the dinosaurs, about 55 million years ago,” said Handler. “The Golden Toad of Costa Rica has become a poster child for climate induced extinction. In the late 1980s there were 22,000. When the ponds dried up, they were gone.” The Golden Toad Reliquary is built of Spanish cedar, an abundant Central American wood, anodized aluminum, glass and imagery by ceramist Karen Singer. It stands about 4 1/2 feet high.

Handler’s Coral Reef Table serves as a warning. Coral reefs are being threatened by rising ocean temperatures and the increasing acidity of the ocean waters, due to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide absorbed and dissolved in the water. (The oceans are the largest "sink" for carbon dioxide.) Similarly, all shellfish will be similarly affected, as will phytoplankton, which are the bottom of the oceanic food chain, affecting everything above them.

The Arctic Ice Reliquary displays a polar bear stranded on a tiny ice float. “The Arctic is the region of the world where temperatures have increased the most,” said Handler. “We are also seeing melting of the permafrost in the High Arctic, releasing vast stores of previously sequestered carbon to decomposition. If this happens under water, the byproduct of decomposition released is methane, a greenhouse gas 10 to 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.”

Handler grew up in Brooklyn, across the street from Ebbets Field. He graduated from Bates College in 1969 with a degree in political science and in 1978 received his MFA in Jewelry, Metal Smithing and Woodworking at the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

Acclaimed designer Peter Handler is not afraid to mix art and politics.

His Forest Fires piece is stark in composition, representing a burned forest at the base of a mountain. “In the U.S., the season for forest fires used to be in the late summer and fall. Today, we are seeing forest fires year round, particularly in the Southwest and the West. This has been due to the historic drought that has gripped much of the country since the 1990s and shows no signs of abating,” said Handler. “We are seeing more and larger fires, such as the one that killed 19 firefighters  in Arizona.”

Handler is not content to just express his concerns about global warming in his art. After participating in a 2011 protest march against the Keystone Pipeline in Washington, DC, Handler launched the Philadelphia Chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL). “We lobby Congress to pass national legislation to limit the use of fossil fuels. We want a Carbon Fee and Dividend of $15 per ton of CO2 emissions paid by energy companies,” he said. “We’re very pragmatic. If you want people to use less fossil fuel, you have to raise the price. But none of these fees will go to the government. The money will be returned to every household.”

Getting a national Carbon Fee isn’t enough. Handler says Citizens Climate Lobby wants to make sure that foreign countries with excessive carbon emission, such as China, have to pay a Border Adjustment Fee for all items made with fossil fuels they export to the U.S. “China won’t like it, but this will level the playing the field and clean up the air,” said Handler.

Handler’s involvement with politics dates back to the 1970s, but his interest in climate change didn’t start until 1988 when he read Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, then saw Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. “Before that, every book on my shelf was fiction,” said Handler, “Now I read widely on everything relating to climate change, including science, history, political, social economics.”

When Handler started the local chapter, there were 45 chapters in the U.S. and Canada. Now there are over 300. The third Annual Mid-East Regional Citizens Climate Lobby Conference will be held at Arcadia University in Glenside, March 4-6.

“We’ve doubled in size every year,” said Handler. “Doing climate work is very difficult. We can only succeed in community.”

More information at www.HandlerStudio.com.