This article looks at possible artistic responses to the environmental crisis, using the theory of anti-mimesis as a means to rethink and reconfigure the ways that the crisis is understood. Initially using the nineteenth-century idea of anti-mimesis, or life imitating art, where art brings nature into existence in people's minds, the article looks at the work of contemporary artists and writers who are challenging existing assumptions about human interventions into the natural world and the ways in which thinking may be reconfigured by these responses. In particular the sluggish response of governments towards tree preservation and planting is used as an example of the potential for artist educators to revivify the thinking around this issue through their creative insights, hence the metaphor of planting critical ideas, with the aim of creating a momentum of consciousness about the preciousness and fragility of our natural environment.