In recent decades, a number of contemporary artists have posed aesthetic solutions to environmental problems. Their work - which has included rebuilding woodlands and wetlands - often crosses over into the realm of ecological and biological science. Arts administrator Hilary Anne Frost-Kumpf has provided a useful catalogue of many of these artists' land reclamation projects, created or proposed for sites in the US, Finland, and the Netherlands.

One of the more successful of these, both aesthetically and scientifically, is artist Mel Chin's Revival Fields. In this work, a polluted plot of ground is planted with "hyperaccumulatorss" - plants that pull heavy metal toxins form the soil, purifying it through a kind of scientific alchemy. Chin collaborated with Dr. Rufus L. Chaney, a Senior Research Scientist at the US Department of Agriculture. Revival Field elaborated on Chaney's research into the detoxifying properties of various hybrids of corn, bladder campion, and alpine pennythrift on soil laced with heavy metals such as cadmium and zinc. The Field was to be regularly harvested and the plants processed to reclaim and recycle the metals. For the artist, well-known for his conceptual work, this is sculpture in which "the material being approached is unseen and the tools [are] biochemistry and agriculture."