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.

IPCC 2009: Memories of times past and time lost

In 2009, I had the privilege of working with Donald Brown, who has a new book and also writes of Dr. Robert Brulle's new study documenting the immorality of climate deniers and their funding, Chris Cuomo and others on the press release of the Ethics Committee that was delivered at COP15 in Copenhagen for the IPCC, when I was a formal observer for the University of Colorado. The following iteration was one of the versions I worked on then. Shortly afterwards, as I blogged in the High Tide COP15 Project, the Danish government went into full panic mode. Police attacked peaceful demonstrators. They shut down the conference, and everyone went home.  The global fossil fuel industries went to work on smear and disinformation campaigns against activists and scientists alike. The world has squandered precious time and lives while climate change has accelerated. J'accuse the fossil fuel industry for their frantic, amoral scramble to amass ever greater profits at the expense of the entire world.

                                  Press Release

Press Conference on Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change

Friday, December 11, 2009 9:30 am, Press Conference Room

The Crucial Missing Element in the Climate Change Negotiations: Duties and Responsibilities, Not Just Narrow National Economic Interest.

Ethics is a practical issue. Tuvalo’s demand for a binding agreement illustrated the Ethical challenges of the negotiations. To make climate justice operational, ethics issue must be included in the text. Ethicists from around the world call on those nations opposing meaningful commitments. Do you deny duties and responsibilities to:

- Tens of millions of Africans whose food and water supply is threatened by increasing drought

- Small island states who see their very existence jeopardized by rising seas

- Much of central Asia faces losing their fresh water supply as the Himalayan glaciers melt

  

Many parties continue to justify their positions in climate change negotiations based on their economic interests alone. Climate change is a matter of justice and morality. COP15 commitments must take responsibility, to protect the poorest peoples and richest ecosystems, who will suffer the direst consequences of climate change.

The COP15 is struggling with the gap between commitments and implementation. Previous failures have created a lack of trust in the process. Parties need to agree on how to make climate justice operational in the text. This press conference examines how nations must negotiate if they acknowledge their duties and responsibilities

-   to prevent dangerous climate change

-   to pay for harms caused by high levels of greenhouse gas emissions

-   to prevent deforestation programs

-   to enable transfer of sustainable energy technologies to poor nations.

This press conference will assist the media in understanding how some parties are taking ethical responsibility while others employ naked self-interest to justify their negotiating positions.    

The press conference has been called by the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC. EDCC is a program comprised of 17 institutions around the world working on climate change ethics and whose secretariat is the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. Other members of the EDCC include the IUCN Ethics Working Group, the Bahai, etc, etc, and individual ethicists from around the world working on the ethical dimensions of climate change. Interested individuals can contact EDCC program coordinator Don Brown at dab57@psu.edu or Dr. Nancy Tuana, Director of the Rock Ethics Institute  at Penn State University at Ntuana@psu.edu

How do we negotiate the Anthropocene?

Changing Landscapes: Panel Discussion

Tomorrow, September 27, 2013 at 6:30pm

CENTRAL BOOKING in New York, New York

21 Ludlow, St.. NYC NY

I am very pleased to share the stage tomorrow night with esteemed colleagues:

Garry Golden, professional Futurist, moderates a panel that includes Aviva Rahmani, Peter Fend, Eve Mosher and Susan Goethel Campbell

The new IPCC http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/09/on-looking-forward-to-the-september-27-ipcc-ar5-initial-report/working group completed its first of three international meetings yesterday. The final report is due for publication on Halloween 2014. It is already being critiqued for soft-pedaling the danger and challenges of climate change. As with the Soviets beginning drilling in the Arctic, despite the Greenpeace resistance http://www.euronews.com/2013/09/24/greenpeace-insists-arrested-arctic-sunrise-activists-acted-peacefully-at-/, China is continuing to build coal plants & the US is fracking like crazy. It is going to be very hard to turn around this ship. The argument is that soft-pedaling alarms no one, so there is more chance of dialog. That looks like appeasement from here. I am back in NYC from Maine, trying to negotiate a terrain of deadlines to contribute what I can to the broader conversation. It is a bright shiny Fall day in NYC and this is exhausting but optimistic work. For a couple decades, I've taken the approach that as performance artists, endurance events that require artists to sustain difficulty, makes us into avatars of the earth as we know it: trying really really hard to survive with tools that are old.

This encaustic painting over a Google Earth view of the Wolf River for the Fish Story project, is about fish habitat in Memphis, TN. It interprets how periodic flooding from tributaries of the Mississippi River could affect suburban residences of the outskirts of Memphis but open new channels for fish passage. (Rahmani 2013)

Panel Discussion: Changing Environments Aviva Rahmani will join Peter Fend, Eve Mosher, Susan Goethals Campbell, and Moderator Gary Golden for the Artist and Scientist Panel Friday, September 27th at 6:30pm. CENTRAL BOOKING 21 Ludlow Street New York, NY 10002 (LES) 347-731-6559 www.centralbookingnyc.com info@centralbookingnyc.com Hours: Thursday-Sunday,12-6 PM Subway: F to East Broadway The CENTRAL BOOKING panel is going to be an awesome group. What I find most intriguing is that the moderator, Garry Golden, is a futurist. I hope that means our discussion will look forward realistically rather than more woe-is-me-ism or pollyannaism. I understand there's still a ton of education to be done. But I also think those of us in the field really need to hear about concrete, transdisciplinary tools at this point.  This is going to be a dry run for me, for the SER presentation. Both will synopsize the science behind Trigger Point Theory for the first time.- Aviva Rahmani SER2013 World Conference on Ecological Restoration:  Reflections on the Past, Directions for the Future Aviva Rahmani will present "Trigger Point Theory;  an idea model for large landscape restoration in the Anthropocene" Tuesday October 8th 10:30am-12:30pm   Session 1.02 Restoration Ecology at Large Scales II Chaired by Dawn R. Magness Hall of Ideas F Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center Madison Wisconsin "Triggering Change: A call to Action." published in Issue 48 Vol. 24, Spring/Summer 2013 of Public Art Review can be viewed online:http://avivarahmani.com/artistInfo/avivarah/biblio/12.pdf?1155  "Fish Story Memphis; Memphis is the center of the world" will be published   online for the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.

Here is more information on the event tomorrow night:

Panel Discussion: Changing Environments Admission: $5 As part of CENTRAL BOOKING’s ongoing panel series delving into the confluence of art and science, we are pleased to present the accompanying discussion to the exhibition Un/Natural Occurrences. Comprised of members from the arts and sciences communities, the panel will discuss issues regarding the changing state of both the global and local environment. Gary Golden, professional Futurist, moderates a panel that includes Aviva Rahmani, Peter Fend, Eve Mosher and Susan Goethel Campbell in our newly opened OffLINE event space of the gallery. Un/Natural Occurrences features the work of 25 artists and collaborators. These are artists who are searching for more than the obvious in either bringing to light past and current indiscretions, warning against a catastrophic future if unheeded, working with the scientific community on possible solutions and sometimes just telling it like it is. We view this exhibition as a bookend to Natural Histories, which launched CENTRAL BOOKING’s initial space in 2009.

The future is us

Tomorrow, I head to Memphis to begin on the site research and conversations for Fish Story. Meanwhile, I continue to edit my dissertation, with the expectation that I will be done in March. Each page edit is a drawing and another opportunity to consider how to model change in the face of uncertainty.

Page of edit notes from dissertation

In 2010 for the eartotheearth festival http://www.eartotheearth.org/ in NYC, I did one of a series of performance events on fracking, experimenting with how embodiment might be part of the solution. Now, I am coming to the end of my dissertation work and between working on my dissertation, am moving along on Fish Story. These have been experiments in how to model community solutions to climate change.

Memphis, TN., is my next trigger point research site. I am going to meet folks with whom I might work on Fish Story for May, to walk along the river banks there and think about how Memphis might be a trigger point at the center of the North American world: sited between the species loss, fires, droughts, floods, dead zones, factory farms and the Arctic opening of the grand anthropocene, where polar bears are going extinct. I will present a PPT about Fish Story in a Pecha Kucha @ Crosstown Arts http://crosstownarts.org/ in Memphis Thursday night and meet with people from Ducks Unlimited (DU) http://www.ducks.org/ Friday morning. I plan to sing in one of the local churches Sunday and get to Graceland before heading home. At DU, one of my interests will be to study their extensive GIS work.

Yesterday, Chandler Blackington, on Vinalhaven island, Me., where I'm a legal resident, posted in his town blog, that Governor LePage defunded climate change studies for the state. I wrote him, cc: to our town manager, "As far as the climate change issues you referenced and the Governor has abandoned, thank you! I think this is very serious stuff and foolish to ignore. A couple years ago (after COP15), I suggested we start a town committee to deal with how we might be affected, on the advice of NOAA, with whom I'd spoken in Copenhagen.  I offered to serve on that committee. In 1994, the town parking lot was flooded to the Post Office and waves broke under my studio. That scenario might be much worse next time. My proposal was voted down by the Town Selectmen as "not necessary." I sincerely hope this is taken up again and would still be happy to serve. I think it is VERY NECESSARY prudence, even more so than in 2010 because we are now in the cumulative "fast phase" of climate change. I appreciate you bringing it up publically. It was my observation during COP15, that future needed change would not come from policy makers. It will come from people like yourself."

The future is us.

Since Dec 18, 2010, there have been some dark times on this planet. Yesterday, I participated in a  panel, "Culture trashes nature," at Sideshow Gallery http://www.sideshowgallery.com/, with Ruth Hardinger and Jonathan Goodman. One of our threads was about how you fight this environmental war (with unscrupulous corporations and the policy makers that support them) from a sane position of generosity and with the power of art? Not easy, eh? But as I stated last night, as I believed in 2010, and believe even more firmly now, an answer is in social networking and linked platforms: us.

Dec 18, I will be home and it will be exactly three years since I left the IPCC http://www.ipcc.ch/climate change United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen. That was the day I wrote my last post for my blog at the time: High Tide COP15 project http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3532459556869820195#allposts. I posted after the Danish police attacked demonstrators, threatened participants at the Bella Center and closed the doors to official observers, including myself, leaving me shaken and angry.

Right after that, the fossil fuel corporate industries launched 2 devastating campaigns. One campaign was a blitz of disinformation to confuse the alerted public and lull them back to silence. The second campaign was to launch drilling for natural gas: fracking, which is endangering water supplies world wide. fracking would enrich those corporations at the future expense of all life on this planet. We need us to have a future ...  that's why I'm headed for Memphis.

Art, climate change and politics

Girls outside the UWS Whole Foods raising $ for the Red Cross by selling homemade cookies. It was nice to give them a dollar and let them keep the cookies instead of my usual dollar to hopeless homeless people.
The coming together of people to support the city they love has been very moving to me

http://www.vulture.com/2012/11/jerry-saltz-devastating-visit-to-chelsea-galleries.html

• This is an amazing, heart breaking account from Jerry Saltz, of loss and heroism to flank the stories of trying to help the elderly & infirm victims of the Hurricane Sandy disaster or my own posts about the impact on animals, as the fish and birds in the Tri-State region. All martyrs to climate change denial. 
• Art is like a beating heart that lives outside a body. And now it has become disconnected and trashed. a bunch of those hearts have been ripped from those bodies by the tidal surges and sea level rise of global warming driven by fossil fuel production. I am grateful to Jerry for being one of her caretakers.
• As he wrote, it's easy for us to knock the gallery system, dealers, etc, But these are our blood kin. I was esp upset about Printed Matter, an institution-cum-museum of alternate art and a real tragedy. 

I woke still haunted by the implications of Jerry's essay. What haunts me is the combination of the cultural impact of climate change and the personal implications of the rise of the right. They are inseparable.

In 2009, I was an official observer for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I am an affiliate, for the United Nations IPCC meetings at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. 
http://www.ipcc.ch/
I blogged about my experiences and observations:

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3532459556869820195#allposts

The most moving of all the presentations then was from the island nation of Tuvalu http://www.tuvaluislands.com/.

To standing room only, they held a session about the loss of their homeland to sea level rise, with flowers, dancing, song, giving us all necklaces and impassioned pleas to hold the island nations in mind as we discussed climate change.

There was a lot going on then, but one of the actions I was involved with was an ethical action group, led by Don Brown http://blogs.law.widener.edu/climate/ who had worked on toxic waste sites in the Clinton administration. We crafted the press releases for the press conference and one of the points I focused on was language in the IPCC documents to the effect that we must protect the cultural treasure of impacted nations, such as Tuvalu, as much as we concern ourselves with economic sustainability. I vividly recall crafting phrases for that press release, to the effect that culture is what holds a people together and allows them to be resilient.

I had been scheduled to give our own press conference, on the work Jim & I were doing as a precursor to Fish Story: "Gulf to Gulf," when the police cordoned off the Bella Center and began beating demonstrators in the City of Copenhagen. That was followed in swift reprisal, by a flood of corporate funding to seed global doubt over global warming, drown out the island nations and scientists and culminating with the present Citizens United decision which has allowed one party to, in effect, precipitate a corporate take over coup of the United States.

Previously, in work with Jim White, of INSTAAR who enabled my attendance at the iPCC, we had spoken about our horror over, and generated visuals from, studying the projected global impacts of climate change refugee migrations. Our horror was over the human cost.

Most of the attention to the impact of of Hurricane Sandy in NYC has gone to Wall St and transportation to get back to work and return to normal life. What people are missing is that this is the new normal. NYC is also an island "nation" in the same peril, with the same implications as the fate of Tuvalu. And NYC is the canary, singing for all she is worth about the peril we all face. Jerry is a good microphone for that song.

Courage, lies and the art of the horizontal conference in our brave new world

The brave new world of "Fish Story" in Memphis, TN

This evening, I'm heading to a reception for the weekend Creative Time (CT) conference instead of listening to the Ryan- Biden debate. I expect it will help me think about my new project, "Fish Story." 

There is a lot of talk in the circles I'm in about Romney as a liar. Sean Capone, for example, on Jerry Saltz' FB page, has taken on a Republican at great length for the past couple days, itemizing not just Romney's lies, but how even Newt Gingrich was confounded by how to debate with a bald-faced liar. Here's Clinton on Romney's performance: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7EyYhbLn98.

What is the evil power of a lie? I think the reason people lie is fear. Compare the trajectory that the radical right that Romney & Ryan represent, to the Taliban in Pakistan who tried to murder Malala Yousafzaia for being progressive, bright and wanting an education. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/world/asia/teen-school-activist-malala-yousafzai-survives-hit-by-pakistani-taliban.html?smid=fb-share

They are all afraid. And they are willing to lie to themselves as well as others rather than be courageous about scary realities. Every bully is someone who is scared inside, scared by their own fear. I think what these people are scared of is our present. I think any reasonable person is scared of our present, where nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of crazies, where corporations have taken over global governance, where new, essential expensive tech toys come out every week, our food is tainted, our waters are disappearing under the weight of over-population and fracking, and climate change, cross-dressing and uppity women are the new norm.

We are all scared by and initially inadequate to change. But when terrifying people who are so terrified of real life, that they act on their yearning for a delusionally unchanging world where they might feel safe, secure and in control, are willing to murder, debase, destroy whatever stands in their way to go back to that imagined Eden, that's when they endanger themselves and their own children as much as they threaten the rest of us.

My take on the people who would have murdered Malala is that they are like the Neo-Nazis around the world or the retro bullies in the USA, who egg on Romney and cheer for Ryan when they declare on the stump that they will cut access to good public education, social services for the poor and deport immigrants. 

The right, whether in the USA or Pakistan, seems to confuse economic prudence with depriving the future of the tools to think clearly. In the case of the USA and Europe scarcity as replaced planning. In too many places, gender freedom is threatened by those who can't accept difference. I have to label this cowardice about the dangerous present and the scary future. The cowards are those who want to return to an imagined past, running from what we all fear rather than facing the present and difficult options. 

Since 2009, the corporate right seems to have figured out that they need to fight back and have responded on the same horizontal globalized level, countering a grass roots movement with big oil money, seeding sufficient doubt, particularly in the USA, where leadership on climate change is so critical, to arrest critical change and dig in with ever-more aggressive extractive fossil fuel industries and repressive social policies.

Just saying no to the present isn't an option. We must parse real options to survive. Real options include understanding the history of the kinds of choices we need to make, socially, economically and environmentally. That is an interdisciplinary process.

I've been going to interdisciplinary conferences since the early nineties. Many artists, including myself, are used to the College Art Association conferences, where thousands of artists compete for attention to get jobs. But in the early nineties, I started attending and presenting at science conferences, starting with the Island Institute and the Society for Ecological Restoration. And then in 2009, I was at the IPCC conference on climate change in Copenhagen and realized that for that historical moment, the whole world became what I labeled a "horizontal conference," and wrote about for James Brady in the UK and the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA). 

http://www.sustainablepractice.org/

Difficult parsing is why I'm going to a CT art conference tonight. Art is where we think big, broad and courageously- albeit, not fearlessly. Being fearless in the face of real danger is stupid. The reason I'm going to a reception for a conference where I'll see my art colleagues instead of listening to tonight's Vice-presidental debate (which will no doubt will be rerun to my heat's content later), is my faith in the horizontal conference, which is not just about CT. It is in the conversations I read and engage on FB. It is on NPR and even on Rush Limbaugh because Limbaugh is countered on FB and NPR, as is the Taliban and the Republican right. The horizontal conference is something artists are really, really good at. It is, in fact, a discursive performance of democracy.

In this performance, there is no golden man at the center, no superstar, no perfect hero. Yes, of course some people stand out. But at it's best, the horizontal performance of democracy gathers collective intelligence. It is not a mob led by a bully. Artists, as many have pointed out, are as easy to corral and lead as a herd of wet cats. We are too iconoclastic, too broody, too egocentric and self-centered, too freedom loving and rebellious to conform to anything or anyone very easily. And we are very bad liars. These failures are, in fact, the very strengths I suspect we need right now to deal with our very complex, brave new world.

In the next weeks, as the election looms and my thoughts and plans take greater shape, I will write more about applying these skills to "Fish Story," for Memphis, TN and Social Memphis.

http://www.beautifulfields.org/memphis-social-curatorial-statement