Fish + Hope = the future

After a year of work, the Fish Story team, part of the Gulf to Gulf project, is launching a ground-breaking new website. It goes live today and is ground-breaking because it will become a platform to connect an educational forum, the webcasts that have been coming out of Gulf to Gulf since 2009, ecological art, hard restoration science and actual restoration projects. Check it out as an Earth Day present!

Our launch date is auspicious. The launch procedes the 44th Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, 2014. The 44th Earth Day is bookended by two critically tragic anniversaries: the March 24, 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and the April 20, 2010 BP Macondo oil spill.  Both events have made it clear that significant progress towards protecting the earth from human opportunism must come from ordinary citizens, not institutions. The 44th Earth Day is going to be auspicious because it represents the persistence of hope. That persistence is a testament to the determination people have to protect the earth from untrammeled greed.

Another reason for auspiciousness is that last week, April 14, 2014, the IPCC press release announced it's new report on climate change. The IPCC report is auspicious because it is the loudest call for action we have heard so far. In a nutshell, the IPCC report says 2 simple things:

1. We must act radically NOW.
2. Rich countries must give poor countries money to rescue them from bearing the consequences of climate change caused by rich countries.

Personally, I would be pleasantly surprised if geopolitics will give way to intelligence on this crisis. There are too many governments too beholden to extractive fossil fuel industries and the short term profits of destroying water, habitat and species. However, I do believe ordinary citizens, especially those of us "enlightened" by education can effect dramatic change. This is a time for hope, not despair.

The 44th Earth Day is going to be a time to celebrate a realistic strategy to save the  planet from human behavior.

Almost one year ago, the Fish Story team was in Memphis, TN., as part of the Memphis Social city-wide exhibition curated by Tom McGlynn. Our mission for Fish Story was to draw attention to how fish habitat mirrors human environmental challenges. The inspiration to focus on Memphis came from Dr. Gene Turner, whom in response to my question about how to catalyze healing dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, before the BP spill, had replied "Iowa," referring to the effluent from factory farms up river. Our premise was that Memphis is sited at a habitat and impact nexus critical to the Mississippi Water Basin. In 1982, it was estimated that water from the Basin serves at least 18 million people. Over thirty years later, presumably that number is higher. At the close of the Fish Story series of events, Dr. Jim White and I calculated what it might take to mitigate climate change (36 % re-greening of the earth).

The Fish Story plan is a bit more specific than planting a tree and much less abstract that a number. If you study any system of tributaries, rivers and watersheds, it is easy to see how systems link up and are interdependent with each other. Those systems can be conceived metaphorically, as all the elements that make a beautiful vocal sound from a human voice. Restoring habitat as a bioregional strategy for conserving habitat. It is about connecting dots between specific locations (trigger points) in a mapped system. Focusing on fish as the indicator taxa for that system ties our goals to specific externalized results.

The Mississippi Water Basin can be conceived of as a physiological system comparable to how the human voice produces beautiful sound.

Our new website, www.gulftogulf is just the new leg of a long journey but it will be a significant leg.

Hope 3 of 3 FIsh Story Afterlife!

Fish Story Afterlife! 

When the Gulf to Gulf team completed Fish Story Memphis last Spring, I knew we had to do more. The team had calculated that 36% re-greening the earth could mitigate global warming. How to do that? We decided to create a website that could link restoration work, education, the Gulf to Gulf work on line, ecological art and invite our friends to be part of that 36%! Please join us and consider giving feedback on this beta version of the site before it goes public:

dev.gulftogulf.org

Screen shot from the new website

What is the universe telling me about the New Year?

Fish are still the key.
They are the canaries in the waters of the world and the trigger point species to re-organize our life on earth. As fish go, so will our waters and ultimately life on earth for humans.

USDA map of where contaminants are killing fish in the continental USA

Friday, December 20, 2013, I decided to run away from my home in New York City, to Vinalhaven Island, Maine, also my home. What prompted my flight were two events:

1. I was imminently completing the final draft of my PhD dissertation, subsequently sent to my supervisors December 22. It is about how attention to fish must be the trigger point guiding restoration work.

My PhD dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism," uses Ghost Nets and Fish Story as the micro and macro case studies to apply an original methodology to identify why, where and how to focus restoration work. 
Ghost Nets site analysis pencil and pastel on white ash 10"x7"

2. My cat died Monday, December 16. As a person deeply grounded in my relationships with animal Others, this was a small but devastating loss of a companion of twenty years. Cats. Fish. Same story of loss.

Lilith December 15, 2013

Lilith in the Summer Garden August 2013

I left on the bus up the coast Monday December 23, for a 14 hour trek North, anticipating ten-days of a blank mind punctuated by white snow and some ice. My goal was to empty my mind of all content. My only social anticipation was the possible opportunity to sing with the local church choir, where I usually sing every Sunday when I'm home on the island.

The bus was late leaving Boston and late by thirty minutes arriving in Rockland, the mainland town where we catch the ferry to the island. The thirty minute delay meant we missed the last (4:30 PM) ferry of the day, had to take another ferry to a neighbor island and then a skiff back to Vinalhaven in icy rain, before catching a ride and driving another 45 min. home. As I type today, we have come to the end of another icy rain storm here, the end of which was a scant dusting of snow.

Ice

That icy traverse wasn't the biggest surprise of my escape. The biggest surprise was conversational. Conversation has always been a big part of my practice, in many forms, so that wasn't the real surprise. It was the serious environmental content of those conversations and that I was having them at all. After all, I was on vacation. On the leg out of Manhattan, I sat next to a young woman from Duke University who is just starting her forestry career and looking forward to working on community resistance in the Amazon. On the leg up from Boston, I sat next to an acquaintance from the island who has a home in the midst of the worst fracking in Pennsylvania. Since I've gotten to the island, i've had two separate serious conversations with fishermen about the impact of C. maenus (European green crabs) on the fisheries industry.

And then, this past Friday, I was invited to contribute work to an exhibition that is a conversation with the past and the future of women in art.

Portfolio of images for Nina Yankowitz' video for "Widening the Frame," an exhibition commemorating the first museum show of women artists in New York City. The 1973 original was, "WOMEN CHOOSE WOMEN," at the New York Cultural Center. These were selections from 7 works in the seventies, all of which dealt with observation and conversation over time. In each case, a narrative description that accompanied the images explained the conceptual structure and intention behind each work. These projects can be seen in greater detail at www.avivarahmani.com. 

So what is the universe telling me about this vacation? If I parse the word vacation, it implies a vacating. I did physically vacate New York City but apparently, vacating my passionate commitments wasn't what was meant to be. I did expect to be replenished by rest and have been but I am also being replenished by learning how many others are willing to commit their lives to resisting what is happening to the earth at the hands of oligarchical, extractive and ecologically heedless industries- from oil and natural gas to shipping concerns who dump invasive ballast inshore out of laziness, resulting in the impacts of invasive species.

Meanwhile, other artist friends are keeping me posted about the on-going effects of the Fukushima disaster on the earth's oceans:

http://www.educateinspirechange.org/2013/12/the-fukushima-video-everybody-needs-to-watch.html
This video was then contested by my colleague, the artist Erica Feilder with another series of links:

Complexity of Ocean Currents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current

Wind Map of the US

http://hint.fm/wind/

Animated map of nuclear explosions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo

Article Addressing 28 fallacies about the Fukushima

http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=15903

Air Currents Around the Globe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHrapzHPCSA

But then I did my own research and found an article contradicting those arguments for hope: 

http://www.collapsingintoconsciousness.com/at-the-very-least-your-days-of-eating-pacific-ocean-fish-are-over/

Eve Andree Laramee, also an artist, to whom I defer on matters of radioactivity suggested the following report: http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Report-2013.html

Instead of vacating what concerns me, I am being replenished and reinforced, shoring myself up for the next phase of my work. There are important connections between the ideas I fleshed out in the decade of the seventies and what I'm working on now: ideas about how we include others in our awareness and how we perceive the natural world. Going forward, I think I will put some clothing on that flesh, albeit that clothing may be tattered and torn with grief for what has been lost.

This past year gave me lots to think about concerning how the pieces of our planetary life fit together. Work on my PhD dissertation has been an opportunity to reflect in depth on ideas and research on what is affecting life on earth today. The story of fish from Gulf to Gulf, Fish Story, was the story of our relationship to the world's waters. How we depend upon the sea and inland waters where fish live, even as we poison and destroy life there, is about our disassociation from the consequences of short-sightedness. This vacation has reminded me that none of us can turn away much longer, even on vacation. My take away is that the universe is telling me that there's no turning away from knowledge, even on vacation. There's only going forward together, with the fish. And perhaps that's the hopeful part for the New Year: there are more of us now. There is a fragile basis for hope for the fish ... and us.

Fish Story update

Yesterday, Gene Turner, Jim White and myself assessed what we learned from Fish Story in a "Gulf to Gulf" webcast. I will load that in the next week, along with responses to our questionnaire to our audience.

Meanwhile, I am putting finishing touches on an article about the project. On FB, I wrote:

I took time from my diss revisions to rewrite the conclusion of an article coming out in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (ESAS) on Fish Story: 

"In conclusion, we observed that the tributaries are indeed a critical part of the Mississippi water basin puzzle but so are people. Trigger points for change in the Mississippi watershed will require not only the sustained efforts of ecological restoration scientists working on the Wolf River but far more extensive plans for public education about and engagement in restoration. That engagement must include the regional participation of young people who will inherit the mistakes of their elders, particularly from the inner city areas of Memphis. Fish Story was a modest initiative towards accomplishing the long term goal of devising strategic responses to environmental damage in the Anthropocene era. This project provided a beginning to effect the 36% greening White calculated might be imminently required of all human kind. Our experience was that art may play a significant role in changing necessary public paradigms for thinking and behavior. It was an incentive for further research and experimentation to build on lessons learned."

Pocketbooks and Fish

Yesterday, my assistant, Daisy Morton found this slightly battered black and white print from 1969:

The score and another shot of this work are on my avivarahmani.com website.

On my FB page I wrote, "In 1969, I was the director & founder of the American Ritual Theatre in So. Calif. and this was a shot by Fred Lonidier of my performance work, "The Pocketpiece Piece," with Claudia Bader, Barbara Zakarian and myself in Claus Von Wendel's studio, Del Mar, CA. Unearthed by assiduous archival excavation thanks to Daisy Morton." 

That discovery wasn't the whole story.

• After studying this image, I realized this performance version (one of many in Universities & colleges thruout Calif I performed then) was performed in the UCSD Art Gallery that same year. It was in that same period, that Pauline Oliveros & other faculty from the Music & Art Dept.'s asked me to start a Dance Dept there and John Stuart, the then provost, secretly threatened me with arrest if I was ever on campus again, because of my anti-war and pro-feminist speeches at rallies. I also created "Synapse Reality" and "Meat Piece" at this time. When Stuart threatened me, Newton Harrison urged me to go Angela Davis's route publicizing what happened and I did try by going to Stanley Grinstein in LA but I couldn't rally the support or my own conviction (I was 24 and somewhat naive). It was shortly afterwards that I met Allan Kaprow and started at Cal Arts, following another path in the woods.

• I may have taken a different path forward after Stuart's threat, but this image and that performance bear on Fish Story and my current PhD writing because both are about layering unexpected data to discover new knowledge. In the case of the fish, what we need to pat attention to in our layering is not just the loss of the taxa, but all the small decisions globally and personally that result in this loss. What I layered in "The Pocketbook Piece," was the data on rape, divorce and trivia associated with a lipstick, an official paper in the unedited contents of a woman's secret recesses of her pocketbook. What I sought to layer in Fish Story, was the bioregional and international context and relationship to water of built infrastructure, radioactivity and fracking in the world. What I am attempting to layer in my dissertation, are all the ways we can address those systemic horrors.

Stockholm syndrome- dodging the connections between sexism, ageism and speciesism

The 90 previous posts on this blog were about fish in Memphis, TN.   As my time has been consumed with completing my PhD dissertation recently, I'm focused on the larger systemic problems that contextualize our relationships to other taxa and species, like fish.

Apparently, the world just dodged a bullet over Syria. The most interesting part of the last week about that dodge was that perhaps the world doesn't want "strong men" anymore. We all just want peace. And yet, most of us haven't quite let go of our fantasies that we can have it all- or be connected to someone who does. That is what I want to write about in tis post. Not the having but the fate of the have nots and the glimmer of hope I have tonight that all is not lost.

Other people have a human partner. I have my dissertation and my cat.

The following are some notes that won't go into my dissertation on the relationships between Stockholm Syndrome, sexism, ageism and speciesism. Stockholm Syndrome, refers to the empathy evoked for bank robbers in 1973 when they captured employees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

As the dominant species, it's interesting to consider all the ways, as a culture, we have come to identify with the captors of this culture, whom are more powerful than the dying cultures and species that are collateral damage of the Anthropocene.

I would say the "bank robbers" these days are the large corporatized banks bank rolling extractive industries at the expense of Indigenous Peoples, people of color, women and other animals, many of whom are just fodder for a greedy few humans. That may be critiqued as classist, even, socialist. I don't intend it that way. The robbers I have in mind have simply taken greed and selfishness to an extreme. I accept that a measure of dominance and hierarchy is natural to most human species. Just not to the extent we see it operating today.

Yesterday, I wrote on FB in response to a recent article on Feminism and advancing the careers of young Western academic women:

"Ageism is a very serious problem for men and women and terrible for the economy because so much skill & wisdom is tied up with older people. This article is excellent for women up to the age of 35. It ignores the darkest side of the feminist mystique, which is how both men and women deal with ageism in relation to women. The competition not only with sexist standards from men but the often poisonous competition from other women who discount anyone, for example from the baby boomer generation is devastating. This is too complex a problem to address in a comment but it is not only totally ignored in this article but implicitly, women over child-bearing age have been utterly erased by the content because they are irrelevant and inimical to it. However, I promise you, every woman struggling today with the implications of being young, and attractive while ignoring how sexism is tied up with ageism will struggle twice as much tomorrow with the professional implications of being old and unattractive. Thank goodness for Diana Nyad."

The article I referenced, from the Chronicle for Higher Education, was: http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Feminism-Went-Wrong/141293/

This morning in the ecodialog, artist- educator Beverly Naidus posted links to two recent articles on racism:

http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/452/keep_off_the_grasslands   

http://www.policymic.com/articles/56733/are-mainstream-environmental-groups-keeping-racism-alive

My response was:

"Thank you for bringing these articles to our attention. I almost wrote a post yesterday on racism, sexism, ageism and the environment that might have over-lapped some of these points. It was on my mind because of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I linked on my FB page. I've also been writing about racism in my dissertation and refer to some of the same information about Yellowstone referenced in the Sun article. It's difficult for me to take time to write at length here about this now because of my disseration but I do think it's a critical issue.

In Memphis, for Fish Story, I worked very hard to engage the inner city and found it very challenging. Memphis is interesting about racism because the demographic is so blatantly physicalized. However, I think it is very hard for most people to see the connections, no matter how blatant, between environmental ethics and environmental damage because the connection between social data & hard science is often subtle and complex. These articles do a good job of making those connections. 

I've tried to reference these points in my diss. writing, without making it the main focus, only because there are so many related ideas I reference. One of the points I do try to make clearly, however, is over assumed patterns of dominance that are very intractable. As I referenced on my FB page, the painful dynamics of competition (generally) are rarely honestly confronted. I think that plays powerfully into a discourse on racism/ sexism/ ageism. I believe there is a privileging in our society of a very narrow, narcissistic view of the acceptable messenger for critical ideas: white, thin, youngish, preferably male or male identified. I reference that as Stockholm Syndrome."

It is almost 4:AM now in Maine, where I'm writing the end of my final draft for my dissertation. Earlier,  I was corresponding with one of my diss advisors, about the context for my thinking. I wrote about my thinking:

" (I argue that) ... the Anthropocene is a closed system model in which "nature" doesn't stand a chance. ... If it's true that the Anthropocene is a closed system, we need to erase one set of information and do the work of introducing another set of information to change the entropic nature of the system we've created."

The erasure I'd like to see, is the notion that humans, and top dog humans at that, are entitled to the center of the world. Only because in the end, that doesn't even work for the top dogs. With the suggestion that the world may not have to go to WW III to control Assad, that none of us can stomach one more strong man, there is hope for all the other dysfunctions in life.

And with that, I'll return to my diss writing and then to sleep. I am now writing my conclusion, the discussion of what makes a complex adaptive model to effect trigger point theory as aesthetic activism in the Anthropocene.

Another's Fish Story

Alan Sekula's ""Fish Story" told the industrial, marine side of how humans treat the sea. R.I.P.

Another painfully sad Fish Story

Earlier today, I was  studying a promising report from Shelby Farms Park Conservancy on restoring the bottom lands forests of the Wolf River in Tennessee. Then I saw the following discouraging report, on the heels of another report, of a Polar Bear who had died of starvation because the melting ice flows are now too far away from their food sources. I hope there were at least some Alaskan bears around to feast on this die-off:

Extreme Heat Is Killing Off Thousands Of Fish In Alaska

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 08:22 AM PDT

CREDIT: KFSK.org

Unusually hot, dry weather in Alaska is wreaking havoc on fisheries, as thousands of fish perish in overheated waters. Last month, 1,100 king salmon died on their way up to the Crystal Lake hatchery due to water temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit and lack of oxygen. That’s the bulk of the 1,800 adult salmon that were expected to return to the hatchery this season.
Earlier in the summer, another hatchery lost hundreds of grayling and rainbow trout in a Fairbanks lake where water temperatures reached 76 degrees. Alaska’s heat wave broke records last week, with 14 days straight above 70 degrees in Anchorage and 31 days of 80 degrees in Fairbanks.
Officials cited a number of factors affecting the fish, but observed that the die-off coincided with the hottest weather of the season. While die-offs are not uncommon, Doug Fleming, a sportfish biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, suggested the magnitude of the die-off was surprising.
“And so, getting through till Wednesday which appeared to be the hottest day, then on Thursday I was conducting an aerial survey just to get a grip on how many fish may have been killed by the warm water, not expecting to see a large die-off but some, and I was shocked to see the numbers of fish that we lost,” he told the Associated Press.
Besides the sheer heat, lack of rainfall is also contributing to the die-off. Many streams are too low to accommodate the fish waiting at the mouths, which essentially suffocate as more fish get backed up. The enormous salmon die-off in July was partly because large numbers of fish were trapped at the shallow Blind Slough rapids.
Alaska’s commercial fisheries are among the largest in the world. Salmon is the state’s largest export product after oil and natural gas.
While Alaska’s heat wave is expected to subside soon, the state has warmed up twice as fast as the rest of the nation in the past 50 years, and climate change is worsening extreme weather. Wildfires raged through subarctic forests as late as Friday, consuming more than a million acres and prompting emergency evacuations across the state. Thawing permafrost is also sinking villages, threatening fish stocks and water supplies that the communities rely on to survive.
The post Extreme Heat Is Killing Off Thousands Of Fish In Alaska appeared first on ThinkProgress.

View from Ghost Nets

Back in Maine, I am meditating on how the waters I canoed in Memphis, on the Wolf River, are connected to the waters I study in the Gulf of Maine, where I live. I am thinking about how the Ghost Nets project, that restored a former town dump, is related to the goals of Fish Story, that is concerned with restoring the relationship between the uplands of the Mississippi River, the third largest watershed in the world, the Mississippi River Basin and the Gulf of Mexico, formerly,
one of the most productive estuarine systems in the world.
The story starts and ends with water. Fish are the narrators.

In Ghost Nets and Fish Story the bottom line and connecting element is always water, whether fresh or salt, particularly in the shoreline littoral zone.

I walk in the garden several times a day to take a break in my work and observe small changes. My favorite time is always twilight.

June 19, the first Agnes roses began to bloom in the East quadrant of the garden.

Throughout the process of monitoring the restoration of the Ghost Nets site, the most rewarding experiences have been about the volunteer surprises, like this Lady's Slipper in late May.

In the evening light details of the restored salt marsh seem more important than the functional results of restoration.

The uplands riparian zone is a complex pattern of paths created to study the microhabitats in various weather conditions. But they also need tending to view the relationships between plant communities.

By June 1, garden details could be followed for the interactions between varieties of life.

Body, soul and money after Fish Story

It is one month since the work for Fish Story Memphis was completed. The experience was exciting, fun, challenging and educative. It was intended as a bioregional scaling up from Ghost Nets.

As I anticipated, I came back from New York to Maine after Memphis and had a dramatic Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) collapse that has left me mostly bed ridden for the past two weeks. That hasn't prevented me from assembling a portfolio of what we produced but it has been occasionally depressing.

I went into Fish Story mindful of the challenges we face to maintain a habitable planet and the personal cost of meeting those challenges. This collapse has been the occasion for me to reconsider just how challenging and costly. It is both a logistical and spiritual challenge to consider how personal change might result in global systemic shifts. Nothing much new there, but it does make me feel better to think about the limitations of my body as a portal to world spiritual evolution.

We are just beginning to do our accounting for what was spent and what was raised to implement this phase- and it IS a phase. it is not the end product. The end product wold be bioregional ecosystem health. The fund raising was difficult and frustrating. Difficult because it took time from developing the work. Frustrating because it didn't achieve all the outcomes I'd hoped for- at least, so far. The result was that I operated at a loss during the year of implementation to get this far.

On the other hand, I gained far greater knowledge of and insight into what needs to happen next and came way with many artifacts. Those artifacts: paintings, installation elements, photographs, film, the public webcasts which I have been slowly sharing here, are like secret codes whose meaning is yet to be revealed. My first task going forward, however, is simply to accept the depth of personal difficulty and cost, which I've claimed as a model for what our future requires along with the idea of bioregionally scaling up from Ghost Nets. As I continue to recover, I will share my new knowledge here, whether wrested from the secret codes or not.

Connecting the RIver the Dots

I am pleased to share the public webcast from Fish Story Memphis from: May 11, 2013, “Connecting the River  Dots."Connecting the River Dots was performed with the artists Ruth Hardinger and Eve Andre Laramee, the curator Yvonne Senouf of MELD, Dr. Eugene Turner and myself from the Memphis College of Art, as part of Memphis Social.

Post - Fish Story Memphis

I am back in Maine now, organizing, assembling and making sense of the documentation of our experiences with Fish Story in Memphis, which I will begin posting here later in the week. As with everything in nature, including mental creativity, there has to be some fallow time for fertility to be restored.

Big Fish of Fish Story

The  NYC art world is responding to the bigness of two male artists making big & irrelevant artworks: Paul McCarthy and Jeff Koons dueling for attention. Of the 2, McCarthy is arguably a better artist. Both sell their works for many millions of dollars. The three galleries/ gallerists showing them, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and Larry Gagosian sell to very big collectors, some of whom are using art to launder money. The art often gets stored in a warehouse as one more commodities investment without further aesthetic discussion.

What is "big" art in today's world? What are big ideas? I humbly submit that the biggest idea may be to simply stop doing what we have been doing: making many babies and consuming many planets to support all those extra people. The second big idea might be to put things back where we found them- like missing fish. Apparently, easier said than done.

So, what else's big? Perhaps, the enthusiasm and commitment and success I witnessed among the people I encountered in Memphis for a better environment,

Participatory map from playing the Anthropocene Game at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN.,  May 6, 2013
as part of Fish Story, Memphis for Memphis Social

Fish Story Memphis generated 80 blog posts on this website since November 2012, with 9 911 views; 1 room size installation at the Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN.; 1 9.5'x 28' painting on paper, almost 100 paper cut-outs of individual fish from 16 freshwater North American species; 7 13"x19" encaustic paintings on google map prints of the tributaries; 3 video tapes- 1 from a Pecha Kucha at Crosstown Arts Gallery in Memphis, TN. December 2012, 1 of a participatory mapping exercize after playing the Anthropocene Game at Crosstown Arts Gallery in May 2013 and 1 of a webcast between NYC, Memphis and Greece connecting river dots to radioactivity and fracking May 11,2013 ; 1 participatory map of what causes and cures environemntal degration; about 50 photographs of fish habitat and ecosystems taken on site in Memphis and on the Wolf River; 15 assessment evaluations and 1 hand-out, all to establish a basis to say that our world needs to pay attention to the story fish tell and pull together to save our common environment MORE than we need to extract energy to keep on the way we've been keeping on. That basis for change is the big fish I'm trying to land. I came away from Memphis happy to know that so many others are fishing in this new way.

Connecting the river dots in Fish Story

Today at 2:PM CT from the Memphis College of Art, we will do a public webcast to compare river issues in Memphis, TN from Fish Story, to river issues in Greece with Yvonne Senouf of MELD and Amy Lipton from ecoartspace and relate those problems to the emerging impacts of radioactivity with Eve Andre Laramme and radon from fracking with Ruth Hardinger.

Installation detail from the Hyde Gallery, Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN

On a pedestal outside the installation room a hand-out says:

"Scientists have confirmed that carbon dioxide levels in the air have reached 400 parts per million.

(see article) Off-setting that rise would require people to green the earth by an additional 36% by 2030.  Without such drastic measures, most species, including humans will not survive. The easiest way to change that is to restore degraded ecosystems. Everyone on this earth can participate in that work. Memphis may be a critical place to begin.

    We emit globally about 10 BMT/yr of  carbon (billion metric tons per year) in Fossil Fuel burning       and deforestation. In 20 years, that would mean about 200 BMTs.There are about 550 BMT of carbon in all plants above ground, and 1,500 BMT below ground (in soil carbon), so you need to add   about 2% to the living global biosphere every year to offset the above. In 20 years that would mean you need to add 36% to the living biosphere to offset Fossil Fuels and deforestation, or you'd need 1/3rd more biosphere in 2030 to do the offset. Its less if you can figure out a way to speed up the transfer of carbon form the living bits to the soil carbon pool. 

–Dr. James White, member of the Fish Story team

Fish Story Memphis is about how the causes and effects of global warming are affecting fish as indicator species for habitat and water quality. Memphis is a critical ecoregion: in the third largest watershed in the world, along the sixth largest river, South of factory farms and North of dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. The Wolf River may be a bioregional opportunity to effect large landscape restoration. Reconnecting the Wolf River to the Mississippi may be the first step.

Canoeing the Wolf RIver, Dr. Eugene Turner, guest blogger for Fish Story

The Canoes of the Memphis Social(s)

            A woman emerges from the darkened room, turns around to cast back a whispered ‘I love you, Bye!’, closes the door softly, and scampers off barefoot -- lightly thumping the wood floor -- gathers sandals, and zips downstairs and away. An old man smiles at the youth, the opportunity to care, and good use of precious time. The morning’s first restorative light spears glide across the room. Time to nourish oneself and get in motion.

            We are here as part of the Fish Story team for ‘Memphis Social’ that opens in two days. We have been reconnoitering the area, beginning with a canoe trip on the Wolf River May 4, then installing artwork for 5 days, giving one workshop at Crosstown Arts Gallery, and plan to attend the opening Friday night, and organize an international webinar on Saturday, May 11.

Dr. Eugene Turner and Aviva Rahmani with 8 guides from the Wolf River Conservancy

            The Wolf River cradles the southeast of Memphis, Tennessee. It drains the high ground above the present day Mississippi River, opposite the low ground of the present-day State of Arkansas. Ninety-five million years ago it debouched directly into the salty Mississippi Embayment, then an extension of the Gulf of Mexico. This was 60 million years before the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentrations dropped below 350 ppm, after which it was cool enough for ice sheets to form, and long before our human ancestors could exist as forest dwellers, which was about 6 to 8 million years ago. When sea level dropped because this global cooling, the embayment filled in with sediments to form the Mississippi delta lowlands. 

            Whap!...our canoe bumps another cypress knee. We push off and it hits another on the opposite side; the current moves us sideways against a tree buttress, and I briefly consider abandoning ship, lest we capsize in six inches of water. The paddle can be useful at both ends of the canoe, but if we both pull strongly on the same side at the same time, then …we’re with in with whatever fish are there. Sometimes we back up because the various openings are not wide enough or spaced apart enough to allow passage. We drag on the bottom. The canoe behind bumps into us. Then we turn in front of them to avoid a log. And so it goes for 10 minutes until we find a wider channel; and then it starts again.

            The water is high, or we’d be aground in a 10 mile wide swath of recovering swamp.  I say ‘recovering, because it was cut over, farmed, channelized and burnt many times over the last 200 years. Birds, snakes, bear, fish, raccoon, deer and the occasional bison and elk were hunted down as the European-based eastern seaboard culture moved west like termites chewing their way through wood, forming channels and burrows in the eatable valleys. These are mostly cypress, tupelo, and gum trees, but there are also splotches of marsh with bull tongue, waterlily, grasses, and reeds. Life will not be denied, in one form or another – it’s just that the place may silt in, foreign plants take over, birds disappear, and game be sparse. The largest cypress trees now reach up about 80 to 100 ft, but are only 4 to 5 ft wide. The record cypress in Mississippi is 15 ft. in diameter and the largest in the US is 17.5 feet in diameter. The biggest might have been 2000 years old. Gone now, for sure.

            Two of the 8 guides from the Wolf River Conservancy are behind mothering us along like a duet of parenting ducks teaching their newly hatched. One of them explored this section og the river  earlier this week to mark a new trail. Henry comes up from behind to joke that he has picked up the orange markers so that we can use them to mark the way forward, but wants to know “which way is forward?”. And it is not always clear where the trail is in either direction, either. Last year a helicopter picked up a pair of lost bayou paddlers. More people signed up for today’s trip, but the weather forecast discouraged them and they weren’t at the launch site when we left. But the temperature turned out to be agreeable and there is no rain. It’s cool enough to sweat, but warm enough to hold a paddle, and even to dry out if we tip over. The canoe needs only 2-3 inches of water and we are mostly in less than 1 ft of water. Some of the guides are in kayaks that are even closer to the water. Some of us are in wool (good if you fall in) and others in cotton (not so good). One has the ‘Full Monty’ – a neoprene diving suit from ankles to neck. The view from an airplane must be like a cluster of 11 dots moving across the green and brown, shivering, vibrating and mixing like water striders. If you haven’t seen them, water striders ‘walk’ on water supported by surface tension, with ripples emanating from each of its four legs. The water is muddy from eroded silts and clays. The paddle sometimes digs into sand, which would be bright white streaks when water is low and the surrounding land is restored.

            “We”, the tourists, includes the artist, Aviva Rahmani, and me, her team-member scientist who has signed up for what we call ‘art camp’. Aviva has the moxie to set this in motion and we try to help out. Another team member, Jim White, a paleo-ecologist from Boulder who is intimately involved in climate change programs is not here. The guides are from the thriving local canoeing club of the Wolf River Conservancy and are all a half-century old, or more. By virtue of their enthusiasm alone, they are helping reclaim, rehabilitate, re-discover, restore, and just enjoy what this place is and might become again. Mary is a computer-savy health specialist. The SoJourner brothers are former policeman and fireman. The names and specialists of the others are lost in a swirl of shadows and puddles, and I regret not writing them down, but we were in the midst of greenery, balancing, hunger, lightness, bugs and laughter. A camera does not work; cell phones are useless (thank goodness!), and the twists and turns around a thousand missed and a hundred un-missed obstacles kept us occupied.

            We stop at some high ground to chew and converse, point and laugh, and smile and inquire about each other. They are proud to be friends and find joy being on the water with a light touch. Some beaver mounds are discussed, the red-berried Ohio Buckeye pointed out, and… is it an eagle or an osprey nest over there?  Two of them?  And abandoned duck decoys – the flotsam and jetsam of modern life, like a plastic bottle, some loose twine, and plastic bag are picked up, but there is little of it. By the time we pull out to clean up and return home, we are tired, glad to survive and say quite honestly how much fun the work was, and that maybe we’d be a little sore tomorrow. Say, could you send some of those pictures? 

            Restoration in the broad sense of people, place and other, may be something like this canoe trip: Exploration, capsizes, led by both experience and chance, exchanging the lead to follow, tutoring and yelling, and with some companionship against the stream of dysfunctional pressure to subdue random acts of love, kindness, fun and exertion. The way back will be opaque in our collective memory for lack of examples, extinct species, and common goals. Moving forward with the current, we may get back with stiff muscles, but also with appreciations for how we need to just a little amount of gear to travel well, that the arch of similitude between our ancestral sensual lightness with the world and today can be couched simultaneously in awe and practicality.  But more on that later.