Cease and Desist Served, First Movement Launch: Moving Forward with "Blued Trees"

October 1, 2015

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:

Margery Newman, Publicity & Communications, 212-475-0252, MargeryNewman@aol.com

Aviva Rahmani, Eco-Artist; GhostNets@ghostnets.com

Blued Trees Serves Cease-and-Desist on Fracked-Gas Corporation

As Next Phase of Eco-Art Project Debuts Oct. 4

Algonquin receives notice to halt forest destruction,

as Blued Trees Symphony’s First Movement is about to launch

Blued Trees is a symphonic art installation encompassing visual and musical art forms in concert with nature. The project was conceived by ecological artist Aviva Rahmani to move the function of art beyond witnessing or illustrating ecosystem devastation and into direct policy engagement. Rahmani was invited by New York residents-cum-activists faced with condemnation and seizure of properties and beloved places by fracked-gas pipeline corporations.

As corporations are leveraging the legal tool of “eminent domain,” Rahmani is contesting the justice of that leverage with the sword of copyright law. Blued Trees is being copyrighted by Rahmani in discrete movements, as it grows in scale.

Blued Trees consists of trees in the line of destruction on which a blue sine wave is painted. One such tree is one note in the symphonic score. One-third mile of these notes constitutes one full measure.

A Cease-and-Desist Demand has been served by Blued Trees on the Algonquin Gas Transmission LLC. That corporation seeks to condemn the private property in Peekskill in Westchester County, NY, on which the overture for the project was installed on June 21, and copyrighted.

The overture was created on land that has been owned by a small group of families for four generations. That property lies in the path of the Algonquin Incremental Markets (AIM) pipeline for “natural” gas, planned by Algonquin and its parent company, Spectra Energy Partners,  to span four states: New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The pipeline is also slated to pass just 105 feet from vital structures at the Indian Point nuclear facility, 30 miles from New York City.

Additional measures and “Greek choruses” have joined the Blued Trees orchestra from 11 other sites internationally since the summer solstice overture launch.

On Sunday, Oct. 4, a number of simultaneous events in the Blued Trees Symphony/Saga will unfold:

·      Blued Trees’ First Movement will formally commence with a full 1/3-mile measure of the score being painted and performed in the rural Town of Augusta and Town of Kirkland, NY, threatened by the Dominion New Market Pipeline and Niagara Expansion Project of TGP/Kinder Morgan. Additional measures are joining the orchestra from the New River Valley of Virginia and Nassau, NY.

These new sites will be included in the second copyright filing. Five movements in total, over the next year, complete this symphony, with the Coda planned for fall 2016.

The words of Pope Francis, delivered at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 25, resonate with Rahmani and other Blued Trees participants: “Any harm done to the environment…is harm done to humanity.”

Individuals and groups whose properties lie in the path of fossil-fuel infrastructure are invited to join the Blued Trees “Greek Chorus.” Detailed instructions are at: pushingrocks.blogspot.com/2015/09/painting-full-measure-of-first-movement.html.

NOTE TO EDITORS & PRODUCERS: To arrange an interview with Rahmani, participating landowners, attorneys or painters, please contact Margery Newman, MargeryNewman@aol.com, 917-608-6306.

View a short video about the project at https://vimeo.com/135290635 

See map with locations and photos of Blued Trees Symphony and Greek Chorus pieces http://www.gulftogulf.org/map/ .

View a graphic from the Spectra Corporation’s website of Spectra AIM project path at spectraenergy.com/Operations/New-Projects-and-Our-Process/New-Projects-in-US/Algonquin-Incremental-Market-AIM-Project/.

Blued Trees is an element of Gulf to Gulf, a fiscally sponsored NYFA project, which has since 2010 investigated how art might impact climate change policy, gulftogulf.org.

More information about Aviva Rahmani is at ghostnets.com.

What is the universe telling me about the New Year?

Fish are still the key.
They are the canaries in the waters of the world and the trigger point species to re-organize our life on earth. As fish go, so will our waters and ultimately life on earth for humans.

USDA map of where contaminants are killing fish in the continental USA

Friday, December 20, 2013, I decided to run away from my home in New York City, to Vinalhaven Island, Maine, also my home. What prompted my flight were two events:

1. I was imminently completing the final draft of my PhD dissertation, subsequently sent to my supervisors December 22. It is about how attention to fish must be the trigger point guiding restoration work.

My PhD dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism," uses Ghost Nets and Fish Story as the micro and macro case studies to apply an original methodology to identify why, where and how to focus restoration work. 
Ghost Nets site analysis pencil and pastel on white ash 10"x7"

2. My cat died Monday, December 16. As a person deeply grounded in my relationships with animal Others, this was a small but devastating loss of a companion of twenty years. Cats. Fish. Same story of loss.

Lilith December 15, 2013

Lilith in the Summer Garden August 2013

I left on the bus up the coast Monday December 23, for a 14 hour trek North, anticipating ten-days of a blank mind punctuated by white snow and some ice. My goal was to empty my mind of all content. My only social anticipation was the possible opportunity to sing with the local church choir, where I usually sing every Sunday when I'm home on the island.

The bus was late leaving Boston and late by thirty minutes arriving in Rockland, the mainland town where we catch the ferry to the island. The thirty minute delay meant we missed the last (4:30 PM) ferry of the day, had to take another ferry to a neighbor island and then a skiff back to Vinalhaven in icy rain, before catching a ride and driving another 45 min. home. As I type today, we have come to the end of another icy rain storm here, the end of which was a scant dusting of snow.

Ice

That icy traverse wasn't the biggest surprise of my escape. The biggest surprise was conversational. Conversation has always been a big part of my practice, in many forms, so that wasn't the real surprise. It was the serious environmental content of those conversations and that I was having them at all. After all, I was on vacation. On the leg out of Manhattan, I sat next to a young woman from Duke University who is just starting her forestry career and looking forward to working on community resistance in the Amazon. On the leg up from Boston, I sat next to an acquaintance from the island who has a home in the midst of the worst fracking in Pennsylvania. Since I've gotten to the island, i've had two separate serious conversations with fishermen about the impact of C. maenus (European green crabs) on the fisheries industry.

And then, this past Friday, I was invited to contribute work to an exhibition that is a conversation with the past and the future of women in art.

Portfolio of images for Nina Yankowitz' video for "Widening the Frame," an exhibition commemorating the first museum show of women artists in New York City. The 1973 original was, "WOMEN CHOOSE WOMEN," at the New York Cultural Center. These were selections from 7 works in the seventies, all of which dealt with observation and conversation over time. In each case, a narrative description that accompanied the images explained the conceptual structure and intention behind each work. These projects can be seen in greater detail at www.avivarahmani.com. 

So what is the universe telling me about this vacation? If I parse the word vacation, it implies a vacating. I did physically vacate New York City but apparently, vacating my passionate commitments wasn't what was meant to be. I did expect to be replenished by rest and have been but I am also being replenished by learning how many others are willing to commit their lives to resisting what is happening to the earth at the hands of oligarchical, extractive and ecologically heedless industries- from oil and natural gas to shipping concerns who dump invasive ballast inshore out of laziness, resulting in the impacts of invasive species.

Meanwhile, other artist friends are keeping me posted about the on-going effects of the Fukushima disaster on the earth's oceans:

http://www.educateinspirechange.org/2013/12/the-fukushima-video-everybody-needs-to-watch.html
This video was then contested by my colleague, the artist Erica Feilder with another series of links:

Complexity of Ocean Currents

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

Wind Map of the US

http://hint.fm/wind/

Animated map of nuclear explosions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo

Article Addressing 28 fallacies about the Fukushima

http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=15903

Air Currents Around the Globe

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

But then I did my own research and found an article contradicting those arguments for hope: 

http://www.collapsingintoconsciousness.com/at-the-very-least-your-days-of-eating-pacific-ocean-fish-are-over/

Eve Andree Laramee, also an artist, to whom I defer on matters of radioactivity suggested the following report: http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Report-2013.html

Instead of vacating what concerns me, I am being replenished and reinforced, shoring myself up for the next phase of my work. There are important connections between the ideas I fleshed out in the decade of the seventies and what I'm working on now: ideas about how we include others in our awareness and how we perceive the natural world. Going forward, I think I will put some clothing on that flesh, albeit that clothing may be tattered and torn with grief for what has been lost.

This past year gave me lots to think about concerning how the pieces of our planetary life fit together. Work on my PhD dissertation has been an opportunity to reflect in depth on ideas and research on what is affecting life on earth today. The story of fish from Gulf to Gulf, Fish Story, was the story of our relationship to the world's waters. How we depend upon the sea and inland waters where fish live, even as we poison and destroy life there, is about our disassociation from the consequences of short-sightedness. This vacation has reminded me that none of us can turn away much longer, even on vacation. My take away is that the universe is telling me that there's no turning away from knowledge, even on vacation. There's only going forward together, with the fish. And perhaps that's the hopeful part for the New Year: there are more of us now. There is a fragile basis for hope for the fish ... and us.

Thanksgiving labor

I think one way to look at our experience of climate change, is that it is a thriller. Will we survive? Very few people who are carefully tracking what we've done to our planet are still talking about sustainability. We speak of resilience. What we mean is that we have surrendered the idea that we can sustainably keep things we know. Now we just want to see what might survive the anthropocene with resilience.

It is early Sunday morning and I am thinking about different kinds of work on a weekend when most of us take some time off. As I complete my dissertation writing and move forward with Fish Story, I can't help wondering how things will play out for my own life and everyone else. What I mean by play out, is how will we manage our resources in a changing world? Will we succeed in saving fish from all the ways we are transforming their waters? What about other familiar ingredients of our lives, like cranberries grown in wetlands for Thanksgiving?

I have had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) since 1990, a mysterious immune system disorder which makes those of us who have it, very, very tired. Much more tired than most people can ever imagine. It seems to predispose us to cancer and among other symptoms, causes sleep disturbances, which is one reason I've been awake today since 3: AM thinking about work and sustainable systems. Lately, about that too, I find myself wondering how much resilience I can sustain. CFS has been an instructive illness because it means I have a built in template for how to live sustainably and accept the limits of my resilience. When I go past my limits, I collapse and whole swathes of my life fall apart. Applying the template is about what may happen to the earth as we go past our limits. For example, what may happen to the wetlands where we grow cranberries, if they become inundated with sea water from sea level rise with global warming? Speaking for myself and my built in template, my personal question is what part of the aspects of life I value, such as having all the right ingredients (cranberries, honey, etc) for making my cranberry sauce recipe for Thanksgiving will be resilient?

Simmering down Porto for cranberry sauce

Last Thursday, I went to my sister, Ilana's house in Armonk, to make cranberry sauce for a family dinner at my nephew's house in Thornwood. My recipe takes about two hours and starts with Ruby's Dow Porto, which gets cooked down (never boiled) from two bottles with the juice of about nine oranges and their zest, light honey, maple and brown rice syrups and spices to a thick enuf consistency to make the texture, fragrance and taste divine. This is old-fashioned cooking. Will the ingredients, such as light honey made by honeybees still be here through out my lifetime?

I put my colleague and friend, Juliette Yuan, the New Media curator to work helping and she cheerfully grated the zest off the nine oranges before squeezing the juice out for the sauce.

New Media curator Juliette Yuan grating zest with my brother-in-law as audience on Thanksgiving Day.

On the way home, I encountered a musician in the subway who had gathered a crowd and was exhorting them to get moving in response to his labor. Will we still have subways under Manhattan?

Times Square musician

I got home before midnight and woke the next day to complete most of the second chapter of my dissertation. My dissertation was inspired by the acupuncture treatments I take for CFS. I thought, if we can leverage small catalyst systems in the human body, can we do the same for the planet? I push myself now to complete writing up my research, because I want to think that some insight I may share will help the fish, the cranberries, myself find a measure of resilience.

Yesterday, I began writing my third chapter, about how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) science may take a point of landscape nucleation and extrapolate a useful analysis. I studied GIS at Lehman College for two years but I am not very good at it. GIS makes beautiful maps of complex relationships between systems, seductive blend of science and art. Perhaps, because it requires a high level of resilient physical stamina to sit at the computer and concentrate that is not very sustainable for me with CFS, I find it a very difficult media. So now I need to decide how far I will go to present my premises with this tool. Answering that question is a search for the right balance between personal resilience and understanding and communicating planetary resilience. In my last "Gulf to Gulf," webcast with Dr. Jim White, we spoke about sustaining the tension of that balance for climate change scientists: what are the personal limits for those who have been the messengers of global warming as they encounter a culture determined to silence truth?

I wrote on FB:

I have recovered most of the dissertation chapter I lost Tuesday night, reduced my word count from 18 009 to 10 695 and am almost done with my conclusion for this chapter, which begins with, "Scientists agree that problems of novel ecosystems, loss of water quality and quantity and trophic cascades are among the consequences of habitat degradation, encroachment and fragmentation, all caused by human agency serving anthropocentric attitudes. This chapter considered nucleation practices as part of a focus on how and when environmental restoration practice can shift a point of view, to conserve bioregional clean water and the role of animals in that process." And a good night to you all.

• And then yesterday, in reply to a link from Ann Rosenthal, I added that: 
One of my points, about nucleation, is about how critical animals are to the health of the entire ecosystem that protects water. Each species distributes seeds, etc in specific patterns. Ie, bats & birds have very diff patterns. I have to focus on marine (littoral zones) in my research but there's a ton of fascinating data about forests, most of which I had to cut down to stay in the word limit. Of course, it all works a bit differently in the ocean, where tiny organisms, like detritovores carry out functions large carnivores fulfill on land, with tidal patterns functioning as wind does. Some of my third chapter is about mapping those relationships.

Today, in the NYTimes, there was an article about how much of New York City may end up underwater, possibly within our lifetimes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/sunday/is-this-the-end.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121125