Consuming beauty while extracting resources

“Melas Chasms Sunrise,’’ by Isabel Beavers, in the show “Golden Spike,’’ at Brookline (Mass.) Arts Center, through Jan. 31.

This is a three-person exhibition about the environment and climate change. A "golden spike" is presented as a signifier of the extreme man-made change in recent geologic record. Artists Beavers, Allison Gray and William Van Beckum explore the concept of "anthropocence," or the landscape as evidence of humanity's mark in time through models and other representations of landscapes from across history. "We simultaneously consume aesthetic beauty from landscapes, while treating them as sites of extraction and destruction," the artists say.

Overlooking Leverett Pond in Olmsted Park in Brookline

Here’s an edited version of a Wikipedia list of historic buildings in Brookline (Massachusetts’s largest town) that are open to the public:

• The birthplace of John F. Kennedy stands in Brookline and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It is maintained by the National Park Service and is open to the public from May through September.

• "Fairsted", the 100-year-old business headquarters and design office for renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and the Olmsted Brothers firm, has been carefully preserved as the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, on 7 acres of landscaped grounds at 99 Warren St.

• John Goddard House, an historic house at 235 Goddard Ave., was built in 1767 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

• Larz Anderson Park is in Brookline on the 64-acre estate once owned by Larz Anderson and Isabel Weld Perkins. The park contains the Larz Anderson Auto Museum, the oldest automobile collection in the country, as well as Putterham School, a one-room schoolhouse from colonial times.