Focus on Arts and Ecology

BY MELISSA GODIN, JUL 25, 2023 

When Mike Rosmann, an Iowa farmer and psychologist, heard his phone ring on a spring morning in 2019, he knew he had to answer. In the previous four months, his state had experienced the wettest period in its recorded history; farmers in the region were in crisis. A week earlier, one of Rosmann’s patients had lost his entire stock of corn when floodwaters breached a storage barrier, threatening to bankrupt him. Rosmann knew the man was in a dark place.

When he picked up the phone, his patient’s wife was on the other end: “He said he’s going to kill himself.”

The climate crisis is wreaking havoc on farms across the United States. Wildfires in California are burning avocado and citrus trees to a crisp, drought in the Midwest has eroded corn and soybean production, and unseasonal Arctic fronts are killing maple blossoms across the Northeast.

These impacts are only getting worse. A 2022 survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition found that more than half of young farmers said they experienced climate impacts either very or extremely often. For farmers, wildfires, drought, floods, and pests are not just an inconvenience—they are an existential threat. A 2022 study published by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California found that extreme heat is “positively associated” with farmer suicide. A 2021 study by a Colorado-based suicide prevention group found that when drought conditions increased in the state so did the suicide rate among farmers.

It’s a phenomenon occurring around the world, from India to Australia.

“This is what climate change is doing,” says Rosmann. “It’s putting people in a place of extreme apprehension, where they feel there is no way out.”

Experts say they have witnessed a rise in farmers struggling with anxiety and depression as climate impacts have worsened in recent years. The farmer crisis hotline run by Farm Aid, for instance, has seen a significant increase of calls from farmers during natural disasters linked to climate change. 

“When climate disaster strikes, or an ongoing disaster such as drought is occurring, the toll on farmer mental health is high,” says Caitlin Arnold-Stephano, a farmer and program manager at Farm Aid. “Often a disaster can push a farmer over the already-thin margin or edge that existed.” 

In recent years, the federal government has woken up to the mental health crisis affecting farmers. The 2018 Farm Bill was the first to direct funding toward farmers’ mental health, by providing grants for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN), which connects farmers, ranchers, and agricultural workers with mental health assistance programs and resources.

Advocates hope that the 2023 Farm Bill will offer even more support. Bipartisan legislation, led by Senators Joni Ernst (R–Iowa) and Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisc.), would reauthorize the FRSAN to establish helplines, provide suicide prevention training for farm advocates, and create support groups for farmers and farmworkers. The bill would increase funding for the program, authorizing $15 million per year for the program for the next five years, up from $10 million allocated in the last Farm Bill.

“We need to push for the network to be expanded,” says Rosmann, who helped write the 2018 legislation. “The bill is the major way we can bring about change on this issue.”

Even before climate change began taking its toll, farmers already faced severe mental health issues. The rate of suicide among farmers has historically been three-and-a-half times higher compared to the general population, according to the National Rural Health Association. Farmers often work under precarious and psychologically taxing conditions due to weather variations, changing policies, and economic tariffs, as well as fluctuating food prices. In the 1980s, American farmers faced an economic crisis that saw a quarter million families lose their farms, destroying businesses and decimating rural communities. Yet despite these challenges, farmers are less likely than the general public to have access to mental health services. 

Rosmann, who grew up in Iowa but spent several years studying and practicing psychology out of state, observed this firsthand when he moved back to his home state in the early 1980s. When word got out that he was both a farmer and a psychologist, his phone did not stop ringing. 

“People started calling me at all hours of the day and night,” he says. “There was clearly a need for someone who understands the culture of farming and gets what they are going through.”

Over the past five decades, Rosmann has come to intimately understand the toll farming takes. He has stayed on the phone with a woman who tried to kill herself by swallowing too many pills. He has climbed up a 60-foot ladder in a corncrib to stop a friend from jumping. 

Now, Rosmann says, climate change is exacerbating this crisis. “Practically every farmer is concerned about it,” he says. Some of his patients have lost an entire season’s crop to floods, heat, or other climate-related disasters. In other cases, subtly worsening weather conditions simply means more work without an increase in pay, resulting in physical and mental exhaustion among farmworkers.

Another stressor is that farmers often feel they are blamed for climate change. 

“Livestock and dairy farmers in particular are often singled out as ‘destroying the planet,’ with their cows being blamed for their methane emissions,” says Greg Mruk, executive director of New York FarmNet, an organization affiliated with Cornell University that offers financial and emotional counseling to farmers. “Yet farmers feel that they are stewards of water, land, and air.” 

Many farmers, however, struggle to access mental health services, which are often not readily accessible in rural areas. And when services are available, they are not always tailored to farmers’ needs. Traditional mental health services can be alienating to farmers, who sometimes come from communities where mental health is highly stigmatized. 

“To effectively reach farmers, you have to have culturally appropriate care,” Rosmann says. 

Experts say that for mental health interventions to be effective, therapists need to either come from farming communities or be aware of the farming culture. 

“Farming and agricultural culture comes with a lot of ‘boot-strap individualism’ and ‘blue-collar worldview,’ which often includes feelings of power, control, self-reliance, and dominion over the land,” says Krista Bajgier, a therapist in Maryland working on mental health and nature. “When you’re talking about climate change, you’re talking about forces seemingly beyond their control.” Bajgier says that if therapists want to support farmers, understanding this worldview is critical. It helps explain why climate change is not only an economic stress—it’s an existential threat to farmers’ very identities. 

For farmers and workers from marginalized groups, such as Hispanic migrant farmworkers, experts say it is also critical that therapists be from the same cultural background. Organizations running mental health hotlines have found that Hispanic farmers and farmworkers are more likely to call back if their counselor shares the same culture and language. 

Another strategy is to organize group meetings in local community centers, such as churches, where farmers—who often work in isolation—can share their experiences together. Rosmann, who organized these workshops in his hometown, says they are an effective way of teaching people how to ask for help. “These workshops are touching,” he says. “A lot of tears are shed.”

Mental health interventions have increased significantly thanks to the 2018 Farm Bill. Since the legislation was passed, four regional centers established through FRSAN have increased training to recognize signs of depression or anxiety, created support groups, and expanded access to hotlines. 

If passed, the 2023 bill would increase funding available to the program to hire more behavioral health specialists, particularly those trained to work with different farming populations, including veteran farmers and farmers of color. 

But unless the federal government takes action to address the root causes of farmers’ distress—the economic precarity, the lack of support, the increasingly unpredictable weather—many experts are concerned farmers will continue to struggle. 

“The stage is set for another major troublesome era,” says Rosmann. “Farmers are worried about that.”

Farmers say that what they need is not only greater support from the government but more agency and autonomy in developing adaptation strategies to climate change. 

“More than anything, farmers want to be given a chance to be part of the solution, a chance to figure it out,” says Mruk. “Let’s not be of the ‘sky is falling’ mindset. We need to take a proactive approach.”

If you or a loved one are struggling, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

This article was originally copublished by Nexus Media News with Ambrook Research as part of a series that looks at ways the 2023 Farm Bill can help address the climate crisis. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow @NexusMediaNews.

Signs of the drastic—and in some cases irreversible—changes that humans have made to the climate are now impossible to ignore. 

SABRINA WEISS MATT REYNOLDS MARIA PAULA ESCOBAR-TELLOAUG 17, 2023

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL on Climate Change (IPCC) does not mince its words when describing the disastrous effect that humans are having on the planet. “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land,” reads its latest report.

From heat waves and wildfires to downpours and flooding, 2023 has given us a taste of the impacts we can expect over the coming decades and centuries. In short, it’s not good news. Without very significant reductions in greenhouse gases—beginning immediately—it is very likely that global surface temperatures will exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Even if we do curtail emissions, sea levels will almost certainly continue to rise throughout this century and may continue to rise for centuries or millennia beyond that. Extreme weather events have become more frequent since 1950 and will become more frequent and more severe as global temperatures increase.

The message could not be clearer: We need to do everything we can to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions right now. Unless we take major action to stop emissions, we’re facing an Earth that is hotter, plagued by more extreme weather, and less hospitable than the already-warmed planet we have today. Here’s everything you need to know about where we are with the climate crisis.

1. There’s more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at any time in human history

The Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii has been tracking Earth’s atmospheric concentration of CO2 since the late 1950s. In 2022, the global average concentration it recorded was 417.06 parts per million (ppm). Preindustrial levels were 278 ppm, which means that humans are halfway to doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to the period between 1750 and 1800.

CO2 concentrations fluctuate with the seasons, while the speed at which they increase yearly is affected by human behavior. For example, the rising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere slowed during the early stages of the pandemic when emissions fell, but then rose steeply in 2021 as the world reopened. The annual rise in emissions and atmospheric concentration of CO2 has since slowed down again.

The global average CO2 concentration for 2023 is predicted to be 419.2 ppm. The last time Earth’s atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than 3 million years ago, when sea levels were several meters higher and trees grew at the south pole.

2. We’re accelerating down the path to exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming

In 2015, the nations behind the Paris Agreement set an ambitious target for keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latest IPCC report spells out just how difficult it will be for the world to stay under that limit unless we drastically slash emissions now. The report models five different future emission scenarios—from very high emissions to very low emissions—and in each scenario global surfaces are expected to hit at least 1.5 degrees.

Of the emissions scenarios modeled, only the very low emission scenario estimates that the world would see less than 1.5 degrees of warming by the end of the 21st century. In that scenario, temperatures are likely to overshoot 1.5 degrees of warming between 2041 and 2060 before returning back down to 1.4 degrees of warming by the end of the century. This scenario would require the world to dramatically reduce its emissions with almost immediate effect.

But the point at which the world first steps over the 1.5 degree threshold could be much sooner. According to the World Meteorological Association, there’s a 66 percent chance that the annual average temperature will overshoot 1.5 degrees of warming for at least one year between 2023 and 2027. Indeed, the 1.5 degree limit has already been breached for shorter periods of weeks and months—in 2015, 2016, 2020, and 2023. July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded, with temperatures breaking records on four consecutive days.

Based on current emissions and policies, the world is likely to experience 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.

3. Our remaining carbon budget is tiny

At its core, climate change is really simple to grasp. The more carbon dioxide—and other warming gases—that we put into the atmosphere, the higher global temperatures will rise. Between 1850 and 2021, humans released around 2,500 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (1 gigatonne equals 1 billion metric tons). So far, these emissions have led to 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming when compared to preindustrial levels.

To have a 50-50 chance of staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, we can release only 250 extra gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere—and that includes emissions from the beginning of 2023. To put that in perspective, in 2022 we emitted 36.8 gigatonnes of CO2, and global annual emissions are still yet to peak. In other words, we’ve blown our 1.5 degree budget—it’s just a matter of when, not if, we pass the threshold.

By the same logic, other temperature thresholds have budgets, too. To have a 50-50 chance of keeping temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, we must emit fewer than 1,350 gigatonnes of CO2 from 2020 onwards. As of mid-2023, roughly only 1,000 gigatonnes of that budget remains.

4. Extreme heat events have become more frequent and severe

You only need to think of recent devastating wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, the scorching temperatures in the southwestern United States, or the evacuation of tourists from Greece to see that climate change is leading to more frequent and more severe hot weather events.

The kind of extreme heat event that had a likelihood of happening once every 10 years between 1850 and 1900 is now likely to occur 2.8 times every 10 years. In a world that hits 1.5 degrees of warming, such events are likely to occur 4.1 times every 10 years. The same is true of once-in-every-50-years events. They’re now likely to occur 4.8 times in 50 years, and in a world that exceeds 1.5 degrees of warming, 8.6 times every 50 years.

Heavy rain is also more common because of climate change. The kind of heavy one-day rain that 150 years ago would have only happened once every 10 years is now happening 1.3 times every 10 years. In a world warmed by 1.5 degrees Celsius, that will go up to 1.5 times. And as frequency increases, so does severity—we can expect these extreme weather events to be hotter and wetter than those that went before them.

5. Humans have already caused 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming

The latest IPCC report estimates that global surface temperatures are now 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than they were between 1850 and 1900. Global surface temperatures have risen faster since 1970 than in any 50-year period over the past 2,000 years, and this has been particularly pronounced in recent years.

From 2023 to 2027, the annual average temperature is predicted to range between 1.1 and 1.8 degrees Celsius higher than the 1850–1900 average. There is a 98 percent estimated likelihood that one of the years in this period will surpass 2016 as the hottest year on record.

Global weather systems will be a factor in this. 2023 saw the beginning of an El Niño period, when sea temperatures get warmer in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean with the effect of raising temperatures worldwide and increasing the risk of extreme weather. But just in case there was any doubt, the IPCC’s latest report makes it clear that the principal drivers of rising global temperatures are human-released greenhouse gases.

6. Two-thirds of extreme weather events in the past 20 years were influenced by humans

The number of floods and instances of heavy rain have quadrupled since 1980 and doubled since 2004. Extreme temperatures, droughts, and wildfires have also more than doubled in the past 40 years. While no extreme weather event ever comes down to a single cause, climate scientists are increasingly exploring the human fingerprints on floods, heat waves, droughts, and storms.

Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering climate science, has gathered data from 400 studies on “extreme event attribution” and has found that 71 percent of all extreme weather events studied in the past 20 years were made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change—including 93 percent of extreme heat events.

7. Sea levels are rising faster today than ever before

Melting ice sheets and glaciers and warming oceans lead to higher sea levels. Since 1900, sea levels have risen faster than in any preceding century in at least the past 3,000 years, and this is set to continue for a very long time.

The process is also speeding up. Over the past 140 years, sea levels have risen worldwide by 21 to 24 centimeters. But roughly 10 centimeters of that rise has taken place since 1992.

Because oceans take a long time to warm, a lot of sea level rise is already baked in. If warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, then the global mean sea level will rise between 2 and 3 meters over the next 2,000 years. If warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius, global mean sea level will rise to between 2 and 6 meters above current levels.

8. Arctic sea ice is rapidly diminishing

Temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. Between 2011 and 2020, annual Arctic sea ice reached its lowest level since at least 1850, and late summer Arctic sea ice was smaller than at any time in at least the past 1,000 years. As of 2022, Arctic sea ice cover is decreasing at a rate of 12.6 percent per decade, compared to its average extent during the period from 1981 to 2010.

Under all the future emissions scenarios in the latest IPCC report, the minimum amount of Arctic sea ice will fall below 1 million square kilometers at least once before 2050—making the area practically free of sea ice altogether.

9. The world is getting hungrier and thirstier

For the first time in decades, world hunger is increasing—and climate change is a big driver of this. Extreme weather events from droughts to heat waves affect crop yields and their nutritional value, and some crops will become unviable in certain areas. Under heat stress, animals will become less productive and more liable to pests and disease, which might become more frequent and spread.

Across Africa, where many countries struggle with food insecurity, agricultural productivity has decreased 34 percent because of climate change. By 2050, the risk of hunger and malnutrition could rise by 20 percent worldwide because of the effects of climate change.

Crops, animals, ecosystems, and humans also depend on water—and already the UN estimates that roughly half the world’s population experiences water scarcity for part of the year. Over the past 20 years, climate change has intensified this shortage by lowering the water stored on land.

Water quality is also worsened by climate change, which accelerates urban migration, making water sources more polluted. It also causes flooding, droughts, and higher water temperatures, which can increase the amounts of sediments, pathogens, and pesticides in water.

10. Average wildlife populations have dropped by 60 percent in just over 40 years

The average size of vertebrate populations (mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles) declined by 69 percent between 1970 and 2018, according to the biennial Living Planet Report published by the Zoological Society of London and the WWF. That doesn't mean total animal populations have declined by 69 percent, however, as the report compares the relative decline of different animal populations. Imagine a population of 10 rhinos where nine of them died—a 90 percent population drop. Add that to a population of 1,000 sparrows where 100 of them died—a 10 percent decrease. The average population decrease across these two groups would be 50 percent even though the loss of individuals would be just 10.08 percent. And between 1 and 2.5 percent of animal species have already gone extinct.

Whatever way you stack the numbers, climate change is a factor. An international panel of scientists backed by the UN argues that climate change is playing an increasing role in driving species to extinction. It is thought to be the third biggest driver of biodiversity loss after changes in land and sea use and overexploitation of resources. Even under a 2 degrees Celsius warming scenario, 5 percent of animal and plant species will be at risk of extinction. Coral reefs are particularly vulnerable to extreme warming events; their cover could be reduced to just 1 percent of current levels at 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

(Sources: Wired)

August 29, 2023 

Zach Harris
Spiral Bound

Opening
Friday Sep 1, 2023
6 - 9pm

Dates
Sept 1 - Oct 7
Wed - Sat
12 - 6pm




"Zach Harris is a master of tromp l’oeil and its opposite, for which there is no word that I’m aware of; that is, the ability to make a three-dimensional surface appear flat. This sleight of paint triggers our imagination to come on in because the coast looks clear. Not so fast! These charming, insouciant paintings will take you on a jostling psycho-visual escapade, from fractious Baroque quadratura to jolly Magrittean surrealism, while twisting through ribbons of Bridget Riley-ish warped space-time and stopping on the way to sample Dante’s circles of hell; puzzle over Zodiacal-Masonic arcana; witness astrophysical spectacle; be spied upon by mystical oculi; sample hallucinogenic mushrooms; lounge in Lynchian mise en scènes; and gaze at hypnotically curling Pacific Ocean waves by which time it’s too late to undo the realization that you have become unnervingly enmeshed in the spooky clusterfuck of the artist’s mind."  -Lawrence Rinder

Spiral Bound, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based-artist Zach Harris comprised of the artist’s iconic sculptural paintings and a wide ranging installation of 9 x 12” drawings. Entering the gallery viewers are met with an expansive wall of more than 70 drawings, a practice that is part of the artist’s daily ritual. The drawings taken from the artist’s notebooks cover an expansive swath of topics, from bitcoin letters to functional object design and artist palettes; a cross made from dice to flagpoles with space junk; AI vs. human intelligence, Ukraine, neural nets and a game of Twister with masks; covid, DNA double helix, a machine smelling a flower, biospheres and strawberries in the sky. Harris’ drawings beautifully unpack some of the magical and mystical imagery that are layered into the artist’s complex sculptural paintings, while providing a diaristic window into the inner workings of the artist’s mind.

Directly across from the drawings is one of the larger works within the show, an opulently psychedelic painting featuring a series of unique smaller paintings in bespoke sculptural frames all hovering over a vibrating wallpaper of wavy pink and turquoise stripes. Echoing the drawings which are hung in vertical rows of three, Harris’ “wall of paintings” within the larger composition are hung in a similar manner, with imagery and themes that resonate throughout the exhibition, whether it be a compendium of zodiac calendars, a painting palette adorned with a pipe emanating swirling smoke in the shape of a question mark, or the sculptural nature of each frame and how it interacts with the artpiece that it holds. On a thin wall adjacent from the drawings is a beautiful meditation on landscape, with a plein air painting painted in 2014 in the Catskills placed on top of a backdrop of a digitized grass pattern painted in contrasting deep reds and greens. Upon closer inspection, each painting within the show is in some negotiation of its own objecthood, whether it be multiple works that hold paintings hung on intricately patterned wallpaper, or others that show the illumination of a spotlight, or even a painting inlaid with a bubble level or another with an illusionistic bubble level painted in. Harris’ paintings and drawings together forge their own bold path, pushing against time, boundaries and easy categorization while encompassing vast universes of information; generative and generous in the time and care that Harris imbues within each work, instantly enveloping and transporting the viewer.



For inquiries feel free to email us at guerrero@guerrerogallery.com

You have enlightened nature, says Pema Khandro Rinpoche. If you truly know that, you’ll always be kind to yourself.

BY PEMA KHANDRO RINPOCHE, AUGUST 28, 2023 

When people talk about daily practice, they usually mean doing silent meditation, a ritual, or mantra recitation. These are important parts of our daily practice, but there is another crucial dimension: it is being kind to our own body-mind. This is a method for connecting with our buddhanature during our daily activities.

There is a beautiful practice in Mahayana Buddhism, described in the Flower Ornament Sutra and Longchenpa’s Guide to Meditation, that says we should use whatever we do as an opportunity to cultivate altruistic, enlightened intent. When we eat food, we wish, “May sentient beings attain the food of meditative stability.” When sitting on a seat, we wish, “May sentient beings attain the Vajra Seat.” When walking, we think, “I am walking to serve all sentient beings.” And even when fastening a belt, we think, “May all sentient beings be fastened to the root of virtue.” In reciting lines like these to ourselves, our kindness and care is expanded and directed outward to others. Buddhist practice, however, also calls us to care for ourselves.

If we visualize in meditation that our body-mind is a landscape of buddhas, we are motivated to attend to it compassionately.

The Tibetan Buddhist yogi Choying Tobden Dorje (1785-–1848) taught a deity yoga practice somewhat similar to the one described above. However, the kindness that is generated, in this case, is directed at the self. In this practice, when we are eating, we visualize ourselves presenting food and offerings to the buddhas that live in our body. Likewise, when we are sitting on a seat, we visualize that we are sitting in the celestial palace of a buddha, wherein every sense perception leads us to vivid presence. When we are walking, we visualize that we are circumambulating the three jewels, and—my favorite—when we are bathing ourselves, we visualize that all the deities, buddhas, bodhisattvas, and dakinis are bathing us with nectar.

Such contemplations express an attitude of gentleness, love, and kindness toward ourselves and our body-mind. They are practices of receiving and giving. They are instructions, as buddhanature training, for caring for our body, including its clothing, nourishment, and bathing. This is what it means to bring our everyday life onto the path.

Beyond practices like these, which could be regarded as practices of view, there are two practical daily actions necessary as the basic foundation of our spiritual lives—eating and sleeping well. They may seem prosaic, but these are acts of care and gentleness that tune us into our buddhanature. One teaching that I recite to myself frequently is the Zen saying “When hungry—eat; when tired—sleep.” It sounds simple, but it can be incredibly difficult to honor our body-mind in this way. The Tibetan Buddhist yogi Shabkar gave similar practical advice to his disciple, saying, “Don’t eat food you can’t digest.” After all, whether we realize it or not, what we eat affects our meditation, our mood, and our perception. And our sleep does too. This is why, when a student asked Shabkar how he could please his teacher, Shabkar said, “Do your practice as much as you can and sleep peacefully.” In Dzogchen we are told that we should rest in the nature of mind and we are told that calm abiding is achieved by knowing how to rest body, speech, and mind. But how many of us remember how to rest well? Being calm and at ease will not result from neglecting our dire need to rejuvenate. Whenever we rest well and sleep well, we are training in gentle kindness as our way of life.

These activities for developing self-kindness take time and they rely on our willingness to prioritize. Shabkar says, “Don’t overestimate your capacities!” The cold hard fact is that we must sacrifice ten other things we will not do today to make the time to care properly for our body-mind. It is precisely for this reason that the practices of view described above are so important. If we visualize in meditation that our body-mind is a landscape of buddhas, we are motivated to attend to it compassionately. We could bear in mind what Saraha, one of the great masters of Indian Buddhism, said: “Here in this body are the sacred rivers, here are the sun and the moon, as well as all the pilgrimage places.” By contemplating the body as sacred, we remember our kindness to our body and mind as an indispensable facet of daily practice.

(Sources: Lion's Roar)

The closest, brightest full moon of 2023 is also the second full moon in August. Here's how to see it. 

By Jamie Carter, August 24, 2023

The biggest and brightest full moon of 2023 will rise on Aug. 30, and its strange name deserves an explanation. Called a "blue supermoon," it is the result of three lunar phenomena happening at once.

The "blue" supermoon's name has nothing to do with the moon's color. In fact, it will actually be orange. The blue supermoon gets the first part of its name for a different reason: It's the second full moon in August.

There are two types of blue moon. The August blue supermoon falls into the first category: two full moons occurring in the same month. That's occasionally inevitable; a new full moon rises every  29.5 days. Given that the Sturgeon Moon occurred on Aug. 1, 2023, the Aug. 30 full moon will be a blue moon. Blue moons of this type, called "calendar blue moons," occur roughly every two or three years, with the next one occurring on May 31, 2026, according to timeanddate.

The second type of blue moon, called a "seasonal blue moon," describes the third full moon of four during one astronomical season. This occurs when a calendar year has 13 full moons instead of the typical 12. (A lunar year — 12 orbits of Earth by the moon — takes 354 days, while Earth's solar year is 365 days.) The next seasonal blue moon, which also happens every two or three years, will occur on Aug. 19, 2024, according to timeanddate.

So, where does the second part of the name come from? A supermoon occurs when the full moon is close to its nearest point to Earth in its orbit. The moon's orbit of Earth is elliptical, so every month, it reaches a closest point (perigee) and farthest point (apogee). Moons that come within 90% of perigee in a given month qualify as supermoons, according to Fred Espenak, an astronomer and former eclipse calculator for NASA.

August's second full moon is the third and closest of four supermoons in 2023. At 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) from Earth, it will be the biggest and brightest supermoon of 2023, though it will be only 115 miles (186 kilometers) closer than Aug. 1's full moon, which was 222,158 miles (357,530 km) away.

The next full moon will be the Harvest Moon, on Sept. 29. In addition to being one of the best-known full moons of the year, it's the last supermoon in 2023.

Find out the exact time of moonrise for your location, and prepare for the spectacular sight of the blue supermoon on the eastern horizon next week.

And if you're looking to get into skywatching and astronomy, we have plenty of guides to help you get started. If you want to view the night sky, check out our best binoculars for stargazing and best telescopes guides. Or, see our picks for the best astrophotography cameras for capturing snaps of the spectacular views.

(Sources: Live Science)