Pushing waves, making waves

The goal of Blued Trees has been to make waves in the legal system, by painting sine waves on the trees in forests, making music out of our relationships with those trees, making each site a trigger point for possible change.

I called this blog "Pushing Rocks," because that's what it often feels like to practice ecological art in the Anthropocene. Pushing waves, of course, is impossible. You either go with the flow of the waters or you resist them. I believe there may be ways to go with a flow.

What we want is sustainable change. Change that moves towards a resilient future. That may be far easier said than done. In this webcast with my colleagues, Jim White of UBS, and Gene Turner of LSU, we discuss how we might adjust to a very imminent future, in which the principles behind Blued Trees may have a  role.  As Jim White references in this webcast, perhaps it is not impossible to find a way to be part of the waves. What we want is to make waves that could erode hopelessness in the face of despair. We may need to first wade through a good deal of that despair.

https://vimeo.com/154916508?utm_source=email&utm_medium=vimeo-cliptranscode-201504&utm_campaign=28749

Considering paradoxes

There is a new debate about having children, questioning the motives of those who choose not to have children and judging them as selfish. However, when we consider the scale of the human population explosion against the dwindling lives of other species and the impacts on weather and climate for all living beings, I have to question the logic of those judgements.

It is a paradox, however, that humans experience their own personal drive to have a child as somehow exempt from the planetary consequences of billions of humans with similar drives.

Recently, my attention has been focused on another paradox, that many who staunchly oppose fracking, are cheerleaders for natural gas. It is a similar disconnect between wishful thinking and logical consequences.

In the sketch below from my journals, I have contemplated the paradox of how North America plans to deliver energy to a burgeoning and demanding population, while, incidentally crisscrossing the continent with fracking wells, pipelines that could explode, right thru the third largest watershed in the world. Earth Day, Tuesday afternoon, April 22nd, in discussion with Jim White and Gene Turner, we will discuss those disconnects in a Gulf to Gulf webcast.

The yellow horizontal she across the United States indicates the swath of fracking and natural gas destroying watersheds and habitats in its wake.

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."

Fish Story update; one month after launch and more fish stories

Memphis airport website

After six months of planning, thinking and talking, it's exciting to announce that I have settled on a date to visit Memphis for the first time, to begin to move Fish Story forward. The dates have been pencilled in- December 12-14- and the first letters have been going out to specific people and institutions in the area. Susan Steinman and I talked earlier today to follow up some of our thinking. Gene Turner shared some ideas about engaging young people. I spoke at length with Tom McGlynn about what to schedule in that first window and with Eleanor Whitney, at NYFA about how to move forward with fund raising. Tom is writing the first letters of introduction for me to folks there. I'm beginning to break out a budget.

On my FB page, I wrote:

I have begun contacting people in Memphis for Fish Story. It feels big, scary, important & exciting. I got the intro down to an elevator pitch: "It is an ecological art project for Memphis Social, May 2013. Fish Story (see launch post on my

 blog @:http://pushingrocks.blogspot.com/2012/10/fish-story-launch-and-first-responders.html) is about how the impacts of climate change are reflected in the fate of fish in the Mississippi River."

And, I might add, how our attitudes about that reflect a lot more about our values and understanding. Now, going forward, I must state the caveat, that altho I feel anguish over animal suffering, in the interests of ruthless transparency, I do eat animals, including fish, so as long as that's true, I have no right to judge anyone else. I had salmon from Zabar's for lunch. That said, I would hope we consider fish seriously for two reasons.

1. Their fates reflect our careless disregard for the health of our own ecosystem- our home.
2.  They experience pain in death, as all animals we consume and out of respect for life, it seems to me we have an obligation to become mindful and responsible about those deaths.

Meanwhile, for a while, I wondered if anyone noticed the dead fish after Sandy.
There are dead carp in New Jersey now, fish that were washed into the wetlands with Sandy and when the waters receded, died. One biologist wasn't unhappy about that. He said they are invasive. But I can't help but think about evidence of sensitivity to pain and sentience in fish.
There are also dead fisheries: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/31/hurricanes_and_fisherydisasters/
But this isn't the first time.
In 2010, it happened in Cape May
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/08/hundreds_of_dead_fish_wash_ash.html.
and ominously, the seagulls wouldn't touch the dead Menhadin:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/12/jersey-shore-dead-fish-wa_n_680150.html
It also happened in 2007:
http://ind.gmnews.com/news/2007-09-19/front_page/001.html

The vegetarian aspect of our attitudes to animals as objects of consumption is horrifically engaged by Paul McCartney, sent by:

 Cristina Sedna Varuna, Seville, Spain

http://laverabestia.org/play.php?vid=1438

And more whimsically by Carissa Welton who wrote:

"I started swimming before I started walking. So it was only natural that I fantasized about being a mermaid as a child. I would always refuse to eat fish when it was served for dinner; I couldn't stomach eating my own kind."

In contrast, Susan Shulman http://www.susanshulman.com shared her artwork about fish, https://vimeo.com/45224958. In her statement, she writes, "My magic symbols of fish are a continuous theme running through my works, their scales have become my symbolic vocabulary, my musical notes, tones of fluid and soft movement, a visual syncopation between colour and imagery."

Fish, feathers and us: conversations from the edge

I am happy to pre-announce that December 11, 2012 we will record a 1 hour Fish Story "Gulf to Gulf" session with environmental animal ethicist Marc Bekoff marcbekoff.com who has written about animal consciousness and fish sentience in over 200 papers and 22 books:

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

Bekoff regularly blogs for Psychology Today.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201211/fish-are-sentient-proposed-memorial-is-justified

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201210/odd-couples-compassion-doesnt-know-species-lines

I am hoping that in addition to our regulars, Jim White of INSTAAR, Gene Turner of Louisiana State University and myself for our regular chat, Marc may be joined by ecological artist Aimee Morgana, who has trained a parrot, N'Kisi, to have intelligent, thoughtful conversations (N'Kisi wants Aimee to hurry up and write her book about him http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/). I think Aimee's work with just one animal, personalizes and dramatizes the horrific loss of biodiversity caused by climate change. It reflects our blind spots about other species which Marc addresses more abstractly.

When we have completed the recording, it will join the following works, some edited & some raw excerpted videos of my work and from  "Gulf to Gulf," on youtube:

Excerpt from Trigger Point Theory Applied to Fracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojn0C96lMz4&feature=plcp 

Tracking the Mississippi excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyFcPf_xhmQ&feature=plcp

Simplifying Complexity Excerpt:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHFjruWNMnI&feature=plcp

Oil and Water Excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ-rdLj925w&feature=plcp

Blue Sea Lavender: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJZ8x8LUYLg&feature=plcp

Fish Story in a wider context

Gene Turner is on the "Gulf to Gulf" team and one of our science collaborators for Fish Story. When the launch announcement for Fish Story went out this morning, he was moderating a RAE panel, "Why we restore- an exploration of values," with Robin Lewis, an international restorationist with the Coastal Resources Group, myself and Bill Shadel of the American Littoral Society. In the background, as he introduced the panel, Gene was running this beautiful PPT, which I'm temporarily inserting as a movie until I can get Gene's permission to upload it to vimeo:

As I was uploading this, the following fish story came in on facebook:

Roman Taher

i was 12 my goldfish died but when it happen i thought it was just sleeping at the top of the greeny tank. An ever lasting sleep 3 days later the tank was empty my mum flushed lil fishy down the toilet.

Twilight at week's end of the RAE conference in Tampa. It seemed
to me, before news of Hurricane Sandy, that perhaps a big storm was coming,
 in more ways than one.

I was at the Met, with politics on my mind, to talk with Susan Leibovitz Steinman about "Fish Story" for the "Memphis Social" project May 2013. Walking to the stairs, I was greeted by the Acapela Blues singers playing, "Do you love me?"


I'm pulling together an amazing team of thinkers for "Fish Story," including the 2 scientists I've worked with the most since I began "Gulf to Gulf," in 2008: Gene Turner and Jim White. respectively a couple of the top people in the world working on dead zones in Gulf regions and global warming. The big deal now, is scheduling my first visit to Memphis, meeting folks there to hear their concerns and what they've already been working on. What I hope might come of that visit would be to begin to flesh out a picture of how Memphis is already functioning as a trigger point at a critical geographical nexus.

Memphis is between the Midwestern factory farms to the immediate North and melting Arctic to the far North, dead zones to the South in the Gulf of Mexico, at the base of the Mississippi, increasing drought and wild fires to the West, increasing floods and storms to the East and is on a river that reached historic flooding levels in 2011 and has recently had to be dredged when it fell too low for barge traffic in 2012.

The politics on my mind, are the surge of approval for Mitt Romney, which seems entirely based on whether Obama is a "strong leader," and whether he can deliver jobs, regardless of what those jobs are or the consequences, for example, extractive industries that destroy water and air, causing death and destruction, not just to wildlife but people.

Fish are an indicator species. I chose them as the focus for this project because they tell a story that's much more basic than all the political rhetoric in the world.