Connecting dots between "Blued Trees," the Newton Creek superfund site and parts unknown

Last Friday evening I got two pieces of seemingly unrelated information. The good news was that I have been offered and accepted an ISCP/NEA residency, beginning on October 1st until December 31, 2015, to work on the Newton Creek problem. The Newton Creek problem is that it is a superfund site in New York.

Within hours of that news, I also learned that the Spectra natural gas pipeline corporations, in charge of the Algonquin expansion that would pass near the Indian Point facility, also in New York, the site of the Blued Trees overture launch has moved a month earlier than we expected to condemn the land and take it from private landowners by eminent domain. That news has accelerated pressure to expedite the legal process that would protect Blued Trees, the land it's on, and the community it's in with the fund raising through Rockethub that would support that process. The news came as I was also preparing to leave for the UK, for the Society for Ecological Conference, in Manchester, where I will be presenting about trigger point theory and launching the Blued Trees film in the Whitworth Gallery, at the University of Manchester.

Back in 1997, when I first daylighted the Ghost Nets site to restore the estuarine system, I took a shot of the moment when fresh water passed through the highest known storm surge line, indicated with granite chips left over from the granite industry that had buried the former wetland rocky intertidal patch, and met salt water for the first time in about 100 years. I called that shot, "Connecting the Dots."

"Connecting the Dots" 1997

Friday night, I began connecting a much larger set of dots, between the thinking that creates a superfund site, the site of a possible even greater ecological disaster, between natural gas and a nuclear facility with a history of problems, on the banks of the Hudson River, miles from several major East coast cities, and the people I look forward to meeting in Manchester. Each of these sites, are locations I would identify as trigger points: places where a small area could impact entire bioregions. Connecting these dots of trigger points will lead to parts unknown: parts where we will all rescue the earth from ourselves, or witness a great loss for all life.

Connecting dots

I first used the term, "connecting dots," in 1997. At that time, we'd just daylighted the salt marsh for the Ghost Nets site. For the first time in 100 years, fresh water was meeting salt water.

The line of rocks in this picture was the highest known storm surge line, noted from a 1994 flood. When the Ghost Nets estuary was daylighted, I marked the line to track the effects of sea level rise.

More recently, on the www,gulftogulf.org website, we've been creating a map that has entered some sites that have been restored and discussed on the website. These have been intermixed with some of the locations of our Gulf to Gulf guests. http://www.gulftogulf.org/map/ That is another kind of connecting the dots.

Screen shot from the www.gulftogulf.org website locating some of the webcast participants https://vimeo.com/111373730 and some of the restored sites.

Each restored site reconnects habitat. But when we start restoring more sites, we can reknit entire bioregions. The dots that I can see connecting include, restoration locations, people active in restoration issues, virtuality, which allows us to talk to each other and generate new ideas, without adding air travel to global pollutions. These purple dots are only a handful of those locations. If you go to the site and click on each dot, more information will come up. I hope for a day when this pale green map turns purple.

New Year coming, tasks to tie up

‘If we can re-green the earth by 36%, we can survive global warming,’ - 2013 James White, paleoecologist, Fellow and Director of INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, on the occasion of Fish Story, Memphis, part of Memphis Social, curated by Tom McGlynn

However. Is 36% of the earth available to re-green and how?

“The earth was lost by increments, it can be restored by increments,” - 1997 Wendi Goldsmith,  CEO and founder of the Bioengineering Group with Aviva Rahmani, ecological artist, Affiliate, INSTAAR and researcher at the University of Plymouth, UK, on the occasion of completing bioengineering to restore the Ghost Nets salt marsh.

(Rahmani 2013)

In 1997, after several years of collaborative preparation, Goldsmith daylighted the Ghost Nets site: a "pocket (rocky intertidal) marsh," typical of the upper half of the Gulf of Maine. At some point, one of us said, "the environment was lost by increments. It can be restored by increments." Years later, after I had attributed that quote for years, to Wendi, I thought she said, no, "you said it." Then she corrected me, that she HAD said it.

I think the confusion arose because her quote was synchronous with my developing trigger point theory. The two ideas converge. Wendi had the part about increments of restoration. I have contributed the part of where and how we choose to target and prioritize those increments.

White has calculated how much restoration is required of us. It is also correct that, so far, we don't have enough places to restore to mitigate climate change. However, with as many people as now inhabit the globe, if everyone adds an increment that could be a trigger point, the impossible may become possible. At least, that is my holiday wish for the earth.

On the performance of being cocooned on my bed for three months under the tray that supports my computer for 12 hrs at a stretch 7 days a week to complete my dissertation

My dissertation is a mediation event about relationships with the natural world. It is about a theoretical approach to environmental degradation and it is being written on a beautiful island in Maine from the Ghost Nets site.

Dawn July 6, 2013

The performance artist Marina Abramovic who sat across from strangers all day in 2010 has nothing on me. She sat. She just sat during museum hours @ MoMA. She had an audience, company across the table and lines of admirers. I am not sitting. I am doing my writing lying down. I have my cat, facebook, email, the phone and the TV with reruns of Law & Order & NCIS. When my cat's not by my side, she patrols the garden.

I am lying down on my bed to avert the low blood pressure that comes with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This is an endurance event. 6 weeks into this performance, my neck is a wreck. My hair is falling out. I have chronic, blinding eye strain and my hands, arms and shoulders are practically in spasm most of the day from the constant typing. I am mostly serene and stubborn about getting thru this.

Work station

I am on the 16th page of 50 of my third chapter of 5.

I am doing this to seriously ask if art can change the environmental world of the Anthropocene.

My routine is punctuated by meals and brief walks in my garden.

Each day when I walk in the garden, I watch the subtle changes as flowers bloom and then fade, shifting the palette, textures and trajectory of the eye.

I make an effort to interact with the world beyond my research strewn bed on the average of 2 hours a day. That means I get in my car and join friends to do something, like sing Sunday mornings in the local church with the choir. Yesterday, I accidentally killed my car battery, so today, I did not sing.

But in the early morning when I went downstairs, I startled a beautiful Doe having brekkers on my pansies.

The Doe is the beige smear in the middle as she ran away, but then pauaed to look back at me.

When I walked down to the garden, nothing seemed much the worse for wear.

Whatever pansies she'd eaten looked like they were only dead headed.

Walking back to my house, I stopped in my vegetable garden and I gathered some berries for my own breakfast and then went back to my cocoon.

Each day, I encounter a new group of ideas, the personalities behind them and the work that emerged. My task is to see past my opinions, to humbly & carefully examine the premises, context and results and connect links between the arguments I'm making, the research I've done and what remains to be presented. 

Then I consider how this relates to Ghost Nets and Fish Story. It makes my head hurt and my brow furrow. That is a performance.

I fully expect to spread my wings and fly like a butterfly when I'm done,

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.

The demographic infrastructures of Fish Story

This is what the mechanism of hope looks like to me. It is a diagram of how air is controlled in bel canto, the technique required for opera singing, by a combination of redundant anatomical engineering and the physics of sound waves.

Since I came back from Memphis about ten weeks ago, my attention has been on the finances and logistics of launching Fish Story. There is now a little less than ten weeks left before Fish Story will be completed, by which time I will have spent a year of my time conceptualizing and designing the work since Tom McGlynn first extended the invitation to me for Memphis Social. I've made progress with the help of my studio assistant, Daisy Morton. Along with Tom and Daisy, a number of wonderful folks in Memphis have guided my thinking, including Scott Banbury of the local Sierra Club, Matt Farr of Shelby Farms, Virginia McLean of Friends of Our Riverfront and Cathy Justis of the Wolf River Conservancy. They have each taught me an entire encyclopaedia about the political and biogeographic ecosystem they work in. This week, I had to accept that my goals for Memphis aren't going to be a trick I perform by May. May will have to be a salvo in a much longer process.

Memphis is not only the center of the world in a continental and paradigmatic sense, it is also the center of a world of complexity. Two elements seem at the heart of this complexity. One is the fish, whose life cycles reflect all the complexities I've been studying and considering this year about Memphis. The other element is "inner city youth," whom each of the people I've spoken to, whose mandate is the environment, have worked to engage with and bring into a relationship with the natural beauty of the region. Inner city youth are important because they represent a huge demographic of our collective future. Globally, they are now disenfranchised and vulnerable to manipulation. They are the raw material of unrest, gangs, terrorism, the target of fascistic enterprises and the fodder for dictatorships. They COULD be, the force that turns us all away from the disaster of the anthropocene. Right now, instead, funding for education, transportation, science research and other facilities that might bring them into a conversation with the rest of the world, are being cut even more than they already were. Memphis embodies the economic over-simplification the whole world is facing as the gap between rich and poor yawns ever wider, recapitulating the same gaps we see between humans as top predators and the other species we are predating.

It is not easy to engage impoverished young people and the percentage of them that my new friends have been able to reach, let alone their parents or grandparents is relatively small. The poor in Memphis, remain largely physically isolated from the more prosperous central city or the affluent suburbs of Germantown. The result is that a large sector of the population is not part of the solution to their own problems. That is the fascination of Memphis for me, how to draw all of "us" into a conversation about the anthropocene and empower everyone towards hope.

As I've worked on Fish Story, I've also been completing my dissertation, on Ghost Nets as a case study model for my theory of environmental restoration (trigger point theory). In the research for that writing, I've focused on studying issues in the littoral zone, the fragile area between marine life and land we call: "the beach." The littoral zone is important, not only for the life it supports, but because it is complex in the ways we need to make sense of for every other system on earth. Like Memphis, the very complexity of the challenge is the very paradigm we need to resolve for the survival of our species, along with every other species, as, fish.  In the littoral zone I've used fish as the fulcrum and harbinger of what that trigger point model needs to consider because they are among the most indicative taxa for ecosystem collapse. Since I began my PhD work in 2009, news of trophic cascades, species loss and other environmental disasters has only escalated. The challenge of finding solutions has proportionately dramatically increased, even as conservative forces have resisted necessary steps to alleviate problems and supported behavior that could only make things worse, as, fracking. This, in the face of calamities such as the BP spill and Sandy.

On Thursday, I spent the day traveling back and forth to Ramapo College, where I participated on a panel organized by Amy Lipton for the show she organized, "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)." The exhibition includes my work, "Oil and Water." I commented in my opening remarks that any engineer can tell you a good system requires redundancies to be resilient to stress and that is what biodiversity permits in food webs. The danger of the anthropocene is that our predation and contamination of the environment has not only impacted but over-simplified every system on earth. The result is that we are eliminating those protective food web redundancies. In my writing and research trying to reconcile the problem of supporting resilient complexity in the face of the anthropocene, I have been inspired by two systemic models. One comes from the logistics of physics. The other is bel canto singing. Both are represented in my little diagram at the beginning of this post. I've studied bel canto since 1999, mostly with the coloratura Debra Vanderlinde, formerly with the New York City Opera.

What is relevant about bel canto, is how in the midst of the over-simplication of ecosystems we have precipitated, we contain a solution in our own bodies that conflates the complexity of physics and biological redundancy. The vocal system that produces music from the manipulation of air in a very small space in the human body: the space between the diaphragm and the mouth from which sound emerges, may be a viable model for future solutions to littoral zone problems, whether demographic or hydraulic. In effect, our body contains the very model for redundant complex engineering we need to study as a template for how a healthy infrastructure functions. The peripheral apparatus that produces an operatic aria is as complex as a healthy littoral zone that permits tidal flow for the health of water and biota (fish).

The trick I need to pull off, is to translate my diagram above into chipping away at solving the problems I see in Memphis, in a way that enhances the life of fish and by implication the lives of folks who eat them now. If I find a way to leverage those logistics, including a means to engage the many poor people to whom my diagram might seem irrelevant, the incrementally improved well-being of fish will be a measure of my success.

Anthropocene Game for Gasser Grunert Gallery, a preview for Fish Story

Anthropocene Game for Gasser Grunert Gallery

Fish Story, Memphis is the center of the world: a trigger point for change

I'm interested in redefining public art as personal accountability to bioregions and environmental justice. That work includes creating strategies that catalyze overlapping constituencies to effect ecosystem resilience in the anthropocene.

The idea for trigger points emerged from my decade long project restoring a coastal town dump in Maine, Ghost Nets. Early in the project, I was diagnosed with a severe case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and found that acupuncture was the only way to support my resilience. It inspired me develop a theory of ecoregional nucleation for environmental restoration: trigger point theory.

The Anthropocene Game, on Martin Luther King Day, was designed for Alyce Santoro’s Dialectic Revival series, part of her installation at Gasser Grunert Gallery, 524 W. 19^th St. in Chelsea, NYC. It was the gallery's first event after the devastating impact of Sandy, which left 21’ of water in their building. The game was intended as an experiment, a test for trigger point theory and the second phase of what will be done for Fish Story at Crosstown Arts, May 6, 2013.

Monday night, I began by reading a brief statement, which was also distributed in hand-outs:

Photograph of me delivering game instructions to the audience by Julian Mock. Work by Alyce Santoro behind me.

Trigger Points after the storm;

 finding where bioregionalism and environmental justice meet

We are in the Anthropocene, the era when humans have come to dominate every aspect of life on earth. But no living species evolved to cope with this level of rapid change. We are experiencing what I call, a collapse of time. In 2010, we entered the fast phase of climate change. Sandy was a symptom of that change. Many respond to change with fight or flight. What we need is connection.

Talk alone doesn’t solve these challenges. Some knowledge comes from embodied experiences. Some comes from meditation. Some comes from our senses. And some comes from talking. Tonight I want to seek new knowledge.

I invite you to join me in a sequence of experiences before we talk. It will be a game, an experiment in finding the “unknown unknowns,” Trigger Points, where bioregionalism and environmental justice might converge.

The print-out also Quoted from Rumsfield about unknown unknowns:

Slate has compiled … the exact words of the defense secretary (Donald Rumsfield), as taken from the official transcripts on the Defense Department Web site:

The Unknown/
As we know/ There are known knowns./ There are things we know we know./ We also know/ There are known unknowns./ That is to say/ We know there are some things/ We do not know./ But there are also unknown unknowns,/ The ones we don't know/ We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

In parenthetical statements, I conflated racism, speciesism as forms of lack of compassion or ecosystemic prudency. I spoke to why we would experiment with the role of play in discovering imaginative solutions, as a means of uncovering unexpected solutions to intractable problems. The discussion focused on the imminent problem of fracking in New York State. At the end of the evening, I concluded that people have a tendency to allow their passionate commitments to specific solutions to become competitive rather than co-operative (which may be overcome by connections between constituencies). We went thru the sequences I had planned: an initial intro, a game exercize, a meditation with music. The game directed people to create teams, such as “money” or “poverty” and then physically (albeit gently), struggle with each other to dominate the center of the space. The game continued until people formed a composite team of "connectivity." When I called “stop,” people sat down, closed their eyes and listened as I sang Faure’s Au Bord de L’Eau with Alyce accompanying me on her flute. Then we had our discussion. My notes below, fleshed out with some literal quotes, are from the ensuing discussion but not in any particular order, nor intended to be complete:

Ruth Hardinger: info on fracking, write letters. “Fracking would pollute drinking water for New York State and New York City's upstate watershed with poisonous, naturally occurring and induced chemicals and those toxins could migrate to aquifers and surface water. If hydraulic fracturing for gas is approved in NYS a result could be that when Marcellus Shale gas is piped to NYC, carcinogenic radon would be emitted from kitchen and commercial gas stoves. In drinking water, it could bring radon levels 80% higher than EPA standards for end users. Write letters to and call politicians now!”

O'Kang Ruddock: what is fracking?  (I answered by explaining that it is the nickname for hydraulic fraturing of rock, to retrieve natural gas. It requires massive amounts of water, the injection of toxic chemicals that migrate horizontally for miles thru rock fissures into the watershed and despite marketing publicity generate even more carbon than other fossil fuels)

Ghana: didn't speak, will call her later

Klemens Gasser: use strategy for activism

Tanya Grunnert: art can't use strategy (except Haacke), education & getting info out, apathy of young people -(my comment: what do we mean by strategy? Strategy is a plan but also a military term which relates to my experience after COP15, of large fossil fuel corporations pouring $ into disinformation. Artists have prerogative of appropriating terminology)

Kevin: (we) went from play, fun to fear, anger, conflict (Note -my interpretation-: because going from Kumbaya platitudes to becoming specific is where people can disagree)

Tom MyGlynn- strategy/ no strategy no diff for artists, “artists exist in the actual, between the ideal and the real, and that an agonistic tactics, strategy, is less effective in the social communication of such fraught issues as fracking than a willed suspension of judgment between the either /or of political struggle. A" beyond good and evil" approach may seem immoral on the surface but might actually go deeper than circular political arguments allow. Humans dwell in the "actual". More often than not it is artists that enact this with their practice, which isn't necessarily pragmatic, but nevertheless exists (or is an invitation to exist) in an actualized present.”

Ellen Levy: desperation of poor rural landowners over fracking makes them vulnerable (my comment: weakness & dependency of humans on water & other species = strength of arguments against denial). 

Abigail Doan: from farming family- her area in turmoil. Spoke of need for trust. “(there)is an underlying sentiment of distrust based on the differences perhaps between local activism and concerns and efforts by so-called city dweller, i.e. New Yorkers. Many in the upstate communities feel that NYers are in an outrage over fracking as it will effect their water supply and urban lifestyle, rather than being outraged that this wave will also destroy farm communities in areas that have been experiencing economic hardship for years now. There is already a built in tension that often leads to mistrust, and makes it difficult at times to brings these groups together. If fracking did not directly effect New Yorkers in some manner (and only impacted the rural communities to date) the NY activists might not be as outraged by this issue. Obviously, this is not just a regional concern, but this is the sort of frayed discussion that I hear around dinner tables when visiting folks four hours north of NYC.” - Abigail

Jay McDonald: answer is a new religion (of the earth)

Alexis: friends & family involve with fracking, discouraging (my comment: artists may not be able to have direct impact but perhaps indirect impact)

Aviva: play as part of answer, to Klemens & Tanya: rebuilding = spiritual resilience; each of us responsible to create constituencies, overlap constituencies

Alyce: recycling & using less (my comment: deprivation may not work unless people see potential for pleasure). " at the end of the action led by Aviva during which individuals named social or environmental challenges or themes that they would like to see addressed, representatives from the various "teams"  (water, fracking, joy, interdependence, poverty, etc) seemed to come quickly to the conclusion that, as we say in the OCCUPY movement, "all our grievances are connected"...many of us found ourselves in a twister-like configuration of hand-holding, not able to choose one particular "side", but realizing that no problem or solution exists in isolation. Personally, my chosen theme/team last night was "independence/interdependence"...reduction of consumption (by the greatest users: ie: we citizens of the "developed world") came up as an example, one of many ways we can become more engaged and conscious members of communities and society at large (i referenced joseph beuys' maxim that "everyone is an artist"...by engaging personal creativity we become empowered, engaged citizens)... "recycling" is a part of this."

Julian Mock: didn't speak but had contributed sound checking and Rumsfields quotes of unknown unknowns

Wendy Osserman: “I was struck by how cooperative we strangers to each other were even though we were somewhat reluctant & not sure what we were doing; it gave me hope that because people have this social side, perhaps together we can get things done that seem so difficult (fighting fracking etc)”

red-haired woman: did not speak

Roger Denson did not speak

Tom (non-artist): artists have onus of communication, even iconic images (Alyce's comment: not just one image, one artist)

Kate Temple: Joy initiated as a team "joy" in the trigger point (Anthropocene) game.

Later, Ellen Levy added, "An embodied approach to ecological issues makes sense, and it is the reason that artworks have the capacity to be moving emotionally.  In the case of your game, one advantage was that it required no props.  It seemed to me that the interpretation was, of necessity, ambiguous.  For some, the feelings provoked elicited interrelatedness. For me, it also illustrated that differing stances/ideologies could not occupy the same space.  I think that the game is certainly worthwhile to pursue as a way to open up discussion. Perhaps using 2 or more such games in encounters with audiences would lead to the ability to more easily compare the respective merits of such hands-on approaches. (another example that readily comes to mind is Lillian Ball's ecological game of competition vs collaboration, which does require props.).

And yet, this problem Ellen identifies, of containing different stances/ ideologies, is precisely what we need to solve in order to effect adaptive change.

The next night, the difficulties of achieving "joy" with the conflicting stances/ideologies problems we face was framed by the stark reality that for some people, whatever can be understood, created or designed may be too late for the kinds of discrepancies in justice we must reconcile with ecoregions. After the last of the 4 Dialectic Revival events last night, I wrote about what I later encountered on FB. When I falter in my own convictions or stamina to find solutions, I think of the kind of experiences I had last night:

Walking East in bitter cold & occasional snow flurries from Chelsea after the last Dialectic Revival event @ Gasser Grunert Gallery, the first beggar approached me on 9th Ave about 9:30PM. He was hunched over and said, "it's so cold out here. Can you spare some change? I want to get some food." His voice sounded desperate to me. As I fished in my purse for a dollar, thinking that wouldn't be enuf for a meal, he kept moving towards me as tho I embodied the hot dinner he needed. As soon as I could give him the dollar & wish him well, he was off asking the next person, still hunched against the cold. At 8th Ave I encountered the second beggar. He was seated on the pavement in front of a cardboard sign that said simply, "Homeless. Please help. God bless you." I can't imagine how cold he must have been tonight sitting motionless on that concrete, hunched like the first man, but his face hidden under a hood. He never looked up as I wished him good luck. Every Winter there are a few homeless people who die of hypothermia. I have a friend who thinks beggars shouldn't be indulged and never gives them change. I wonder what my friend would have thought of those two shivering people tonight?

If we can't have compassion for and connect to the most vulnerable of our own species, how can we have compassion for and connect to all the other species dying because of our negligence, let alone compassion for the consequence for ourselves? Perhaps we can't. What I hope, is that with Fish Story, we may at least care about our dinner plate and from there, realize that compassion connects us to our own dependency on the rest of the world.

Fish Story, Thanksgiving eve

Holiday decorations outside the Hotel Carlyle

At 10:AM this morning, my phone started ringing off the hook, as people called to tie up unfinished business before Thanksgiving. It is the start of the holiday season in the USA and many Americans will not be doing much serious work until January 15, 2013.

My assistant, Daisy Morton and I, however have made initial contact with 8 organizations in Memphis, with whom I hope to speak before arriving there to spend a few days from December 12.
Meanwhile, I will be working steadily on my dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism," which will lay out the theoretical basis for why I am looking at fish in the anthropocene and why Memphis in particular. Last night, I had a small panic about that work for my second chapter, when my files crashed both on my computer and a back up. Word help retrieved a relatively recent version. I have wrestled that tiger to a draw today and am moving along to wrk on Chapter 3. Chapter 3 has several GIS maps about predatory green crabs and fin fish and I just noticed one of the maps I created but have not yet published, is on the net. Not sure how I feel about that or what to do about it. I assume it got there because I had posted it a year ago on my FB page. I think the take away is that it's time for me to publish an article about biological context for healthy fish, including East coast rocky intertidal zones. But not tonight.
Tonight, I'm quitting early. I don't usually quit work till about 10: PM but tonight, it's not even 7: PM and I'm quitting work till Friday.
Tonight, I'm wishing all my friends, American or not, a happy day with much to be grateful for tomorrow, the American day of Thanksgiving. What are you grateful for this year?
This is what I'm grateful for tonight: 
1. Cease fire brokered by Egypt in Israel- Gaza
2. NYC is recovering from Sandy and talking about softscaping the margins of the island, which would be very good for everyone, including the fish.
3. Climate change is finally getting serious attention in the USA, which will make my task in Memphis a whole lot easier.

4. Romney and all those $100's of millions lost the presidential election in the USA, which means to me that you can buy some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of time but not all of the people all of the time. It also means there may be an alternative to making money by gutting and trashing the environment. There may be green jobs to be had.
5. Personal #1: I caught early stage cancer last Spring, got thru my treatments OK and found out how many friends I have.
6. Personal #2: The end is in sight for my dissertation. Word count today for Chapter 2 after yesterday's file recovery trauma: 11 851, down from over 18 000 in September, clearer and meaner. I can move along to Chapter 3. And, universe willing, will have my mind clear for Fish Story as I go into the spring.

7. Steady, modest progress for Fish Story.

When I did Ghost Nets, my most sobering lesson, was that nothing replaces environmental conservation. Fighting back from ecosystem degradation is enormously difficult and problematic. I have often been quoted as saying, the environment was destroyed by increments, it can be restored by increments. But when enormous swathes are destroyed, it's a lot harder. And for me, it seems a lot more exhausting. For now, I am grateful for the increments and the time off.