I'm Aviva. And I'm a recovering human.

The Obama administration has released their report on climate change and it is grim but nothing new. George Bush once said that we are addicted to oil. Evidently, we are also addicted to denial. Obama and the Pope recently met and perhaps planned the timing of this report with the Vatican pronouncement as reported in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

But human nature is a recalcitrant beast.

In 12 Step relationship programs, what is repeated in those rooms is that we must accept the alcoholic/ insane/ addicted person with love and detachment while working on our own welfare. What eventually changes the dynamic is not trying to change anyone else but focusing on changing ourselves. The critique of that approach, which evolved from Bill Wilson's wife's response to her husband's initiation of AA, is that it's essentially sexist. That is, put up & shut up while her husband cheated on her, underearned and filled their house with drunks.

On the other hand, there's a lot of wisdom in working on the solution, As far as the Dark Mountain project, recently described in the NY Times magazine section, I'm not sure. It certainly represents working on oneself. But on the other hand, the Jewish mandate to step forward when a crime is committed or you are equally guilty, is worth considering. Even in Al-Anon, passivity isn't recommended. People routinely organize "interventions" to confront a person with their effects on others. The trick, is to do that with true love and compassion, not rage, fear, self-righteousness, judgement, pity or contempt. A bit of a task that, sometimes.

As far as working on oneself, the "solution" is to be so deeply grounded in the spirituality, personal responsibility and spirit of being of service to those still suffering & fellowship with those in recovery, that it overwhelms awareness of horrors. A bit of a task that too. 

Which is why I'm sharing these thoughts with you, dear readers, rather than crying in my white wine. And, considering that we have the President of the United States and the Pope on our side, there may really BE some cause for hope.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt; paradigm changes

I am sure that Hurricane Sandy is a Democrat and a better politician than anyone else. Governor Cuomo, Democrat of New York, just said in his public address, that, "anyone who is denying the dramatic change in weather patterns' (that the impact of Hurricane Sandy is not about climate change), is denying reality." 

Here's a good run down of the relationships between Hurricane Sandy and climate change: 

http://grist.org/news/superstorm-sandys-climate-change-connection/

Is anyone out there listening? Thomas Kuhn, scientific historian and physicist, famously wrote in his seminal book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" pub. 1962, that what changes a paradigm of thinking is the preponderance of evidence that accumulates while the old style thinkers die off.

Meanwhile, needless to say, there is lots we can do once certain folks take their heads out of the sand. Fortunately, not everyone has their head in the sand. Even Gov. Christie, of New Jersey, a Republican, has praised Obama for his appropriate responses. Too bad there have to be so many casualties before we get to our new paradigm, from the ten people who died in this hurricane to all the fish in the local waterways, now threatened by oil and other pollutants from overwhelmed systems.

I read & appreciated Paul Greenberg's "4 Fish" on how we have come to farm and domesticate the world's wild fish for my dissertation research. His essay explains why oysters might be one of our best friends in future storm events. At the recent Restore Americas Estuaries conference (RAE) I attended, there were a lot of sessions on oysters. So maybe us humans can learn how to live in this world we've altered so dramatically, after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/opinion/an-oyster-in-the-storm.html?smid=fb-share

The paradigm change suggested by Greenberg and others working on oyster restoration, is that nature is not simply our combination larder and toilet, but our indispensable hospital and retirement plan. The big shift is in how we experience our power in relation to nature's power. If I were a betting woman, I might take a bet on who speaks more eloquently: the climate change deniers or nature, in the Halloween guise of Hurricane Sandy.

Wetlands, fish and RAE on the night of the last Presidential debate

I have spent the day in sessions for the Restore America's Estuaries (RAE) national conference here in Tampa, Fla., around the corner, figuratively speaking, from the Presidential debates and both have been on my mind all day. That is, I have been thinking about the health of and challenges to American estuaries as reflected in the conference and the implications for fish. Many, many innovative and important projects are being implemented around the country despite terrific obstacles. And many are in danger with the threat of a new round of cuts.

While admiring the successes, for example from Low Impact Development (LID- basically permaculture on urban steroids at the service of stormwater filtration), which I took an excellent all day workshop on yesterday, with Larry Coffman, I have also been thinking about the implications of the coming elections, should Obama lose or even if Obama wins again in this debate or ultimately, for the presidency. The reason my thinking has been pivoting around implications for fish between estuaries and the presidency during this conference, has been that I'm about to launch the formal announcement for a new project, Fish Story. Fish Story is a project about how the fate of fish speaks to the environment and people. I believe the team I have assembled for this project can address many of the gaps I've heard about so far at RAE. Those gaps are about what I think only art can supply: framing, connection and context to build a narrative for people that they can use to take ownership pf their own environment.

Fish, are, as I've written in earlier posts here, indicator species. And they are in trouble everywhere in our world. And they are in trouble because of how people think about our environment, a manner of thinking that is also relevant to how we make our decisions about leadership and why so many wonderful environmental restoration projects encounter resistance. I think a lot of that thinking brings people back to a sense of powerlessness rather than empowerment. I suspect many fish feel the same way.

This morning, Majora Carter, a MacArthur fellow, delivered our keynote address.

http://www.majoracartergroup.com/

Majora is a black woman from the South Bronx, NYC, who has been able to leverage her experience to help disadvantaged youth by engaging them in empowering environmental restoration work. Her accounts of her  enormous accomplishments were delivered with modesty, compassion and honesty, qualities I admire greatly. During the Q&A, I asked her about her interest in working with ecological artists. She made the point in response, that it spoke volumes, that ecological artists put the terms environment/ ecology in front of our description of ourselves. I think that's true and a generous observation. I was also further, personally delighted when she said she'd be happy to talk more with me about my new project, Fish Story.


Majora's is a model of leadership and ecological engagement for economically disadvantaged young people that I want to explore for Fish Story in Memphis. That aspect of the project, is something I am also hoping my collaborator, Susan Steinman Leibovitz will particularly pick up on because her expertise is in social practice ecological art. My own expertise is more on the science side. But I am at least as concerned about the young black & brown people in Memphis as the disadvantaged fish in the Mississippi. I'm also not sure there's a real distinction between them, not only as condemned to powerlessness but as systemic indicators of globalized distress.

Majora's position is clear: restoration is inevitable work which either political party must complete because it makes good economic as well as social sense. Because she sees that there is no alternative, she is convinced that both candidates must also see that that is true.

The rest of the day was about restored seagrass beds, the possibility of developing a certificate program for restoration work through the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) and raising money for restoration projects. In the evening, I studied the poster sessions on display for various projects.

The constant refrain in everything I heard & saw however, was how easy it is to destroy the littoral zone (between land and sea), how hard and expensive it is to repair that damage and how fragile even the modest push back achieved by ambitious restoration projects can be. The consistent subtext in every session was the question of what will happen to our environment, should the Republicans be in a position of power to cut the legs out from under even that modest success by defunding federal agencies such as NOAA. There are two more days to go with RAE for me to reflect on these ideas and what I learn. Those two days will also be the first two days after this last debate.

8:59 PM EST So, the last debate is about to begin. In the past two debates, I noticed that the outcome could be predicted from the body language in the first few minutes. They walked out on the stage very much as equals. How will they walk off and how will that walk be perceived?

11:PM EST
O: 48
R: 40
According to CNN.

I was at the Met, with politics on my mind, to talk with Susan Leibovitz Steinman about "Fish Story" for the "Memphis Social" project May 2013. Walking to the stairs, I was greeted by the Acapela Blues singers playing, "Do you love me?"


I'm pulling together an amazing team of thinkers for "Fish Story," including the 2 scientists I've worked with the most since I began "Gulf to Gulf," in 2008: Gene Turner and Jim White. respectively a couple of the top people in the world working on dead zones in Gulf regions and global warming. The big deal now, is scheduling my first visit to Memphis, meeting folks there to hear their concerns and what they've already been working on. What I hope might come of that visit would be to begin to flesh out a picture of how Memphis is already functioning as a trigger point at a critical geographical nexus.

Memphis is between the Midwestern factory farms to the immediate North and melting Arctic to the far North, dead zones to the South in the Gulf of Mexico, at the base of the Mississippi, increasing drought and wild fires to the West, increasing floods and storms to the East and is on a river that reached historic flooding levels in 2011 and has recently had to be dredged when it fell too low for barge traffic in 2012.

The politics on my mind, are the surge of approval for Mitt Romney, which seems entirely based on whether Obama is a "strong leader," and whether he can deliver jobs, regardless of what those jobs are or the consequences, for example, extractive industries that destroy water and air, causing death and destruction, not just to wildlife but people.

Fish are an indicator species. I chose them as the focus for this project because they tell a story that's much more basic than all the political rhetoric in the world.