Draft letter to a policymaker in New York State on the proliferation of natural gas pipelines

I have been advised that the legal process is both too expensive and takes too long for an artist to engage in to resist the proliferation of natural gas infrastructure at the expense of citizens. Some activists, such as the Montrose 9 + 2, have taken the route of risking (and being) arrested to prevail under the "necessity defense," that the necessity of opposing a disaster prevails over other considerations. Instead, I was advised to, and decided to find a policymaker who could spearhead the necessary changes. So I drafted the following letter for a policy maker in NYS:

I am writing as a citizen concerned with pubic good, and aware of your record of concern for the people of this state, with the hopes that we might meet to discuss your position on natural gas. I am a resident of NYC, and an ecological artist, with a transdisciplinary PhD in environmental sciences from the University of Plymouth, UK, and an Affiliate at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I was approached a year ago, by activists opposing the Algonquin natural gas pipeline (AIM), now being installed in Peekskill, NY close to the Indian Point nuclear facility. Since then, I have informed myself about the risks that concerned them. In June 2015, I launched a public art project, “Blued Trees,” at the invitation of private landowners resisting eminent domain condemnation of their lands. That work has now been installed within the corridors of miles of proposed natural gas infrastructure, throughout the United States, copyrighted, and in the case of the Algonquin, a cease and desist was issued, and subsequently ignored by Spectra Corporation. The grounds of this legal-art work, are that the public good is not being served, as we face a catastrophe of climate change, alarming data on fugitive methane emissions, the probability of a fracked gas explosion close to a nuclear facility thirty miles from NYC, and impacts on watersheds and the small farming communities of upper New York State. I would be very appreciative if we might meet to discuss the data about this situation.

Thank you for you time and attention,

Dr. Aviva Rahmani 

Collapsing time for fish ... and others

Today's post is a sketch for what I'm thinking about presenting PM 7: Monday evening at Gasser Grunert Gallery http://gassergrunert.net/test/. The event, "Trigger Points after the storm," is "contained" by another artist, Alyce Santoro http://www.alycesantoro.com/, who has an installation in the gallery and invited me to present as part of a series of talks and events intended to generate productive discussion. The invitation happened to have come in the midst of a series of other events claiming my attention.

When I was young and first lived full-time in NYC, it was the sixties. I went to the Art Students League and NYU during the day, Cooper Union night school in the evening, topped off the night at the jazz spot, Slug's or dancing at the Electric Circus, went to shows, worked with Joseph Pilates, performed with the Bread and Puppet Theatre, participated in demonstrations, joined E.A.T. and felt like being in that whirl at that time opened me to the whole universe, was good for my work and would lead me to "answers" to the burning questions of that time. And I suppose somewhat it was and did but it was also a very hectic way to live and I think there were invisible casualties.

Since 2007, James White and I have spoken about a different kind of whirl, what I call a collapse of time, the effects on the world of a confluence of climate change, species loss, over-human populations and so on. Biogeographical events are unfolding at a dizzying speed with both invisible and visible casualties. It's easy for most people, however, to ignore those collapses and casualties and simply stay focused on the known. Of course, for many, it is not possible to take that option. It is not possible for coastal communities, farmers in drought stricken or fire-prone areas, island nations, urban areas, such as Delhi, India, whose aquifer is dwindling... or fish.  Fish are particularly helpless to adapt to these rapidly changing conditions. They can't travel to safety where the water stops, when it stops. They are among the invisible and visible casualties of collapse. And that is why they are the focus of Fish Story.

My life still seems replete with multi-tasking on too many days, and that seems to be increasing, to my discomfort. Certainly, this week that is true. It doesn't seem as much fun as it was in the sixties. The stakes seem higher. I have less stamina to weather the shifts. I am getting a dose of time collapse. I wonder even for those of us privileged to live in prosperous areas, such as NYC, whether one unknown is how to cope with a world where many things are happening at the same time, all of which seem to be demanding our attention with equal urgency, a world where our time is collapsing with few obvious answers to the problems we glimpse in passing? Monday evening in the gallery, I intend to try to set up a situation which simulates some aspects of that time collapse simultaneity in rapid succession and see what insights might emerge from the discussion afterwards.


On FB last night I wrote:

Preparing for my Trigger Point event Monday, I've been thinking about how to define the "collapse of time," of the anthropocene, the phenomena of too many changes happening faster than any species can assimilate. I feel like I've been experiencing it all day. Today I did singing practice, wrote fundraising cover letters for Fish Story in Memphis, worked on GIS, my dissertation, an article, co-ordinated art pick up, organized my bills, did some filing, vacuumed, responded to a family issue, contacted or switched appointments with about 20 people and trimmed my eyebrows.

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.

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.

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.