Mierle Ukeles at the Brooklyn Museum on maintenance

In developing Fish Story, I am often reminded of the work of artists such as Mierle Ukeles, known for her work on Fresh Kills wetlands and as the artist in residence for the NYC maintenance department.

Mierle Ukeles is remarkable to me not just for her work but for her thoughtfulness, modesty and generosity to others. I think she lets the work speak for itself without languaging or keywording at all. In this case, the work was all about framing her questions about the meaning of maintenance and the implications of Sandy with peoples experiences, letting the context frame the content.

Mierle began the event with some opening remarks, most of which I missed. Mierle referenced an earlier performance, in the 60's and that now was a good time to revisit the meaning of maintenance. She was seated to the audience's right, on a raised platform podium, at a table and each person sat across from her, like Marina Abramovich at MOMA last year.  She was in a relaxed posture but didn't break till everyone was done, about 6:PM. 

She had sent us questions- how do you survive, how will NYC survive (after Sandy):

What keeps you alive?

What do you need to keep going?

What keeps NYC alive?

What does the city need to survive?

in the short run

in the long run

She also asked us each for an intro.

Each participant was weighed before they ascended & then after they descended the platform.

The entire event was taped and will be available on disk.

A questionnaire was distributed inviting people to list their maintenance activities.

The day interspersed artists, a few scientists with maintenance workers who each spoke precisely 15 minutes. I stayed till the end.

There were several of us present from the ecodialog. Jackie Brookner, Betsy Damon & myself spoke about our current work, respectively in Fargo, China and Memphis. Lillian Ball & Ruth Hardinger were also there. 

Betsy Damon talking with Mierle Ukeles

One account was from a museum window washer, who had had cancer, was a former model. She could be seen washing the windows behind Mierle earlier in the performance. 

The window washer

The maintenance people fascinated me. They were modest, humble & competent. Very smart people and as Mierle said, what keeps us going. They were the people  one Parks dept cleaner said & Mierle agreed, who could just as easily be CEOs.

One particularly riveting speaker was a maintenance man from the Rockaways, who described his experiences with Sandy. His time went double everyone else's. 

Describing the clean-up after Sandy

Mierle listening

These were some of the quotes I wrote down:

What are we going to sacrifice to survive?

I'm proud to be an American and a New Yorker ... there's worse out there

We cried the whole night about Stage 4 cancer and then we were OK

It was magnificent (about people helping with Sandy) ... I wanted to be helpful. I grew to hate the storm.' I'm reporting for duty.' They put me to work and I felt useful. People have to shred more. You could only operate while the sun is shining.

Methane harvesting (at Fresh Kills) for 100 000 homes and generating $1 million for the city

make people biological by connecting them to the land

"You don't know who you are until you know WHERE you are" (Wendell Berry)

How the story will end?  "You (Mierle)" remind us we are all stardust.

Emptying out art

Earlier in the day, I had passed a homeless person, asleep in a  church doorway and wondered what their maintenance was like.

On facing the anthropocene with resilient adaptive community evolution

We now know there isn't a corner of the earth that humans haven't impacted, not a force of nature our activities have left untouched. It is called the anthropocene. The anthropocene is our present geologic age dominated by humans. Speaking for myself, I don't think that dominance is a good thing. Speaking for myself, anthropocentrism, like racism, sexism and a few other isms, is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. It is a devastatingly short-sighted way to go thru life. The evidence is in the collapse of entire ecosystems we depend upon, the rise of what scientists call novel ecosystems, to replace those we've lost, often vastly over-simplified without enuf biodiverse redundancy to avoid even further collapse and even in their present state, often do not adequately service our own survival.

At the risk of sounding didactic, judgmental and exhortative, I think the answer, as Darwin pointed out a while back, may be moral evolution, a community affair. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it often gets pretty scary to face the present and future we've created with our meddling. Fish, the subject of much of this blog and my new project (Fish Story), are the tip of the iceberg, the underwater, invisible canaries in our mines and so on.

But those of us who care about these issues are less and less alone. We are building communities and those communities are talking to each other. I have been a founding member and participant in one of those groups, the ecoart dialog, which numbers over 100 members internationally. It is an invitational list but of course there are many other groups with open membership. Recently, we have been corresponding about how dire the global situation is, sharing articles and thinking and how to cope with the anxious feelings that arise. Those feelings include, but aren't limited to: anger, fear, despair, confusion and grief.

The following is an edited version of what I posted this morning about facing the environmental crisis clear-eyed, but not alone. I am posting it here, with the full names of some of our members, to continue to enlarge the community of ecological art practitioners and thinkers and those who are our support and audience:

Speaking for myself, I really appreciate what others, inc Amy Lipton and this from you, Jan van Boeckel, have shared to give us all strength to continue, while squarely facing the realities here. Speaking for myself, one of the great values of this dialog is the opportunity, reinforced when we can meet in person, as we did this past Tuesday, at Jackie Brookner's or at each other's events, at conferences, etc, so there's a continuity of relationship.

Speaking for myself, beyond abstract discussions, I need to know there's a caring, informed and experienced human heart on the other end of my dialogs with fear and anger. Not the same as therapy or even a partner.

Speaking for myself, it is all terrifying and enraging and yet, as Gene Turner quoted me as saying last year, human beings are very promising. We are smart creatures who can solve problems. And this is one h---- of a problem.

Recently, I inadvertently upset someone on the list, Linda Weintraub, when she realized I hadn't read her book before making comments about relativity and restoration. I do apologize for hurting anyone's feelings here on this list, inc Linda. I am passionate and some of that passion is fueled by intense frustration with the problems and the obstacles. 

Thankfully, over the years, we have shared our values but have also overcome our disagreements because of a shared common, deep ecology ethic.

One of the issues that came up at Beverly Naidus's talk at Parsons last week, was the perennial one of urgency vs trying to bring the timid into the activist fold. As Beverly said Monday night, some people come in with a teaspoon. Most of us on this dialog come in with at least a shovel and sometimes, literally, an excavator.

These are things that personally scare me: that I won't have the stamina to continue (I still have chronic fatigue syndrome, I fear a recurrence of cancer or heart issues and all the potential economic issues around those problems), that even if I were superhuman, it wouldn't be enuf to forestall any of the coming disasters, let alone, the ones already upon us. I don't, curiously, fear being driven mad by the sheer scale of the problems. Perhaps, I am already over the edge.

These are the things I'm grateful for: that so many of us are reaching so many others, that so many of us share things (exhibitions, articles, essays, books, calls for conferences, etc), as Jan, everyone, has, that let me know or remind me how hard others are working on these problems, that we have genuine interest here in each other's work, a willingness to self-critique and honestly judge without meanness and are generally so often willing to share resources, ideas, opportunities that make it easier for us all to keep going.

This dialog began in 1998. As each of our careers have developed, it is remarkable how much we have clarified about our shared values, our common and divergent strategies, how much the field has expanded. It would be very interesting for someone to calculate, in fact, how many people we have collectively reached- if you add up all the conferences, students, exhibitions, articles, books, parties. Not inconsiderable.

You are all my teachers, as is everyone in my internet audience.

I am humbly grateful and fiercely proud: resilient adaptive evolution in practice here, I think.

Drawing for all we're worth

On the ecoart art list serve http://www.ecoartnetwork.org/, my friend Lenore Malin asked recently whether people need to move from the coast? She asked who pays for all that? She and Jackie Brookner, both fellow artists, had gone to help in the Rockaways, devastated by Hurricane Sandy http://lenoremalenblog.com/in/utopia. The activist artist and educator Beverly Naidus said she has a student who replies, when people ask him what he does, that he draws to save the world.

Young men enjoying Hurricane Sandy, Photo credit, Chandler Blackington, November 4, 2012
 Vinalhaven Island, Maine

As far as what to do about the shoreline, I may have written this before, but when I asked the late wetlands ecologist Michele Dionne about that, years ago, she replied: insurance. The insurance companies would stop insuring structures too close to sea level rise and eventually people would stop building there. And that's what is happening.

Except that many companies got various kinds of federal back-up, not just in flood prone regions but also fire prone areas of the SoWest, leaving too many in the way of Sandy & ginormous forest fires.

Who's to blame and who's to pay?

Well, we can start with anyone who blew off a science class and every legislator who cut funding for the sciences, along with the arts. And we can ask why the insurance companies, like the financial institutions that brought us the on-going economic crisis, are still being artificially propped up.

Living on the coast is a calculated risk these days and will increasingly be. But so will living in fire/flood/drought/storm paths. In other words, this is the world we have wrought by ignoring how things work. By ignoring how things work, I mean biogeographic dynamics, imagining that small scale solutions can be disengaged from larger forces and privileging the grand designs instead of all the little parts of microhabitats that hold bioregions together.  And that echoes economically as much as biologically.

In short, we have made our own sci fi reality by ignoring garden variety reality.

Based on the scientific discussions I have been having since 2007 with Jim White and others, we have entered the accelerated fast phase of climate change. There are landscape level precedents for ecosystems to evolutionarily adapt resiliently to Large Impact Disasters (LID).

Maybe. If so, we aren't seeing most people either rushing to solutions or getting the education and support they need for a chance at a resilient transition.

Biologically, the solution is called evolutionary adaptation. But even evolutionary adaptation has a cost.

I am not sanguine about this situation nor am I cold about it. I think 100's of millions of people may die in our lifetime because we here in Rome fiddled and lost time in our opportunities to address global warming and establish transitions for evolutionary adaptation. The cause of these deaths would only tangentially be directly from natural disasters. Most would come from the geo-demographic change that will result from massive socio-economic and cultural disruptions as people find their own ways to adjust.  Meanwhile, the ones who might die won't be the Romney's of the world, who laughed at sea level rise and advocated drill baby drill. 

In 2007, when I realized what we were facing, I was shaking with hysteria over the implications for months. A year later, I decided to do a PhD that would tie together what I knew and present the research to back it up. The program, Z-Node, a division of the Planetary Collegium with the University of Plymouth in the UK, blends environmental sciences, studio art and technology.

So as some know, I have been writing a dissertation on an original theoretical approach that I believe might support resilience: "Trigger point theory as aesthetic activism," and have periodically posted to my friends about my progress, "Reports from PhD Land."

My current "Report from PhD Land," is that I'm about half thru the writing now, which takes forever and that is still not what I need to do to make it into a trade book. That's at least years to come to get the ideas in front of anyone who might pay attention and be able to act on whatever I put forth ....if in fact, it amounts to real new knowledge anyone doesn't already know by then.

Realistically, it's a grim landscape, a brave new world that is not for the faint-hearted.

Meanwhile.

I guess we keep drawing for all we're worth.

Still shot Aviva Rahmani November 8, 2012 from Bill Viola's 2005 "The Tempest" in Chelsea at James Cohan. Riveting tonight with the pungent smell of flood waters still intense in my nose from my walk North from the closed galleries on 22nd St.