Contextualizing Sunday's climate change march in NYC with COP15 2009 and my own dissertation work on trigger point theory

In 2010 I wrote about what might effect policy makers on climate change and COP15. At that time, like many, I had been hopeful that information and passion might affect policy makers to respond and "do the right thing." My observation after COP15 was that policy makers are so deeply in bed with and beholden to global fossil fuel industries, that their response to global concern was ruthless violence. That violence was expressed by the Danish police at the end of the 2009 conference. I was stunned and radicalized and blogged for High Tide and wrote about my experience for CSPA: https://www.academia.edu/8379829/The_Horizontal_Press_Conference.

I think Sunday's climate change march has the potential to be a significant event, perhaps a trigger point. That is because it may signal a new grass roots determination to see change, despite the memory of the violent backlash of corporatized policy makers in 2009 in the name of the Danes. 

The historical significance of this march goes back to COP15. That was when it became clear that change had to come from grass roots action. 2009 was the Flower Power phase of the movement. As I wrote yesterday however, climate change is too important to leave to policy makers. The crushing of the 2009 Flower Power phase of hope is what the internationalization of this march disproves. The difference between 2009 and 2014 is the determination and radicalization of demonstrators as the impacts of climate change have accelerated and policy makers have dithered. I blogged about my experience in Denmark in 2009 and 2010, when I tried to make the point that a persistent international movement is what must turn the tides. This could be the beginning of a resurgence of that movement and NYC might be the trigger point to triage our future.

2009 was also when I began my PhD dissertation work on trigger point theory as aesthetic activism with the University of Plymouth, UK. The same weekend as the march, I am now completing that writing and preparing it for my Examiners. Writing my dissertation on what may effect change was my answer to conflating activism and practice. 

More to be revealed; more to be revealed.

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

Fish story isn't just about fish

Many of you have sent us your wonderful fish stories. Thank you!  We want more of them. There are still more I will post. But Fish Story isn’t just about fish. It’s about global warming, knitting bioregions and connecting the dots to environmental justice, one critical location at a time. Homelessness and dying fish are linked by dysfunctional systems that have sacrificed many human and non-human lives.  Fish Story is working to increase awareness while restoring degraded ecosystems.

Tis the season to be giving, Sunday morning Greenwich Village before Christmas 2012. 

Photograph by Aviva Rahmani

Fish Story has been in development for six months. Our implementation plan in Memphis will include three stages of engagement and creation. I am not ready to release that plan here, but a prospectus will be available for our supporters early next month. Two weeks ago, I was in Memphis on reconaisance, lining up support from several of the premiere regional conservation institutions there, meeting each one of those wonderful folks in person.

I was very impressed by what modest Memphis has been accomplishing and look forward to writing more about the people I met and their conservation and engagement projects over the next months. Memphis is split by racial, political and other demographic divides. It bears the burdensome legacy of King Cotton and the history of slavery that reigned then. It still has charming, bubbling brooks but is shadowed by fracking state neighbors who may endanger their water systems. It is the belly of the beast of where America sits on the fence between a short term energy future status quo before inevitable water-less collapse and longer term, albeit rocky planning for the survival, not just of fish, but ourselves. And yet, there are people doing amazing things there.

The image of the NYC homeless person above (I think it was a woman) struck me, not just for how neatly her belongings seem to be arranged around her, but the evocativeness of the red door behind her figure. It reminded me of another image I have, from the series of works that have proceeded Fish Story for the last few years. This one (below) is from, "Oil & Water," a version of which will be in a couple shows next month, "It’s the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine)"at Ramapo College, Mahway, New Jersey, curated by Amy Lipton and "One of a Kind III" curated by Heide Hatry, University Gallery of Canada: at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, from January 11 - February 24, 2013.

Red Sky: Warming skies over the Louisiana bayous seen from train window during hurricane season 2010. Photograph by Aviva Rahmani

What is striking to me about comparing these two photographs and the function of the color red, is how in the Red Sky image above, there is no sign of human habitation but the sky is alive with ominously heated color. In the second, the figure is very present but huddled and anonymous. "She,"is front and center, while the red door behind "her" is dull and relatively small. 

The Red Sky, symbolizes the contrast to me, of how dramatically imminent and overwhelming global warming felt to me in 2010. I had taken the photograph in 2008. Katrina still felt raw and bloody. COP 15 in 2009 left me with over whelming feelings of urgency. I was totally energized by rage and hope. I knew we were entering the fast phase of global warming. I could not believe what was going to happen, did happen, that every powerful leader would be cowed by corporate interests and determinedly stick their heads in the sand, while sticking their hands out for, in effect bribes from fossil fuel industries, particularly natural gas, at the expense of the whole world as we know it.

Three years later, I think part of me feels like the woman in the doorway, self-protective and huddled against the truth of the red door into hell humans have opened for life on earth, which has become a dull back drop to misery. 

Another part, is hard at work on completing a dissertation to address the theoretical underpinnings to another approach, grounded in an admittedly limited understanding of physics. But... I think, viable and as scientists say, falsifiable. which means, it can be tested. And Memphis may be ground zero for the first test.

It was last Spring, that I began documenting my encounters with homeless people. It began while I was going for cancer radiation treatments at Mt. Sinai hospital. I felt stunned by the contrasts I saw between the lavish comeliness of Upper East side Fifth Avenue NYC window boxes and neat gardens and the homeless people I was encountering as I traversed the city each day. My cancer, their restricted lives, all seemed a piece with the reduced world we have made for our children. It was then, that the ideas for Fish Story began to take shape. Next week, I will go for my follow up tests. But so will the rest of the world.

All that drama having been stated, I am now completely committed to what Fish Story in Memphis could mean. Memphis is the center of the world, in the heart of the North American continent, with Canadian tar sands at one end and South American drug cartels at the other end. It is the most degraded and promising place in the third greatest watershed in the world. I think there are grim and daunting days ahead for many of us ... but it must start somewhere and Memphis is going to be a good place to do that from.

Dec 18, 2009, I blogged from Copenhagen:

"... as many pointed out to me ... thruout this process, from Kelly Blyne of 350.org and Jim White, my collaborator from INSTAAR, to the EU negotiator on the train up from Germany, it isn't the end of the story. It just makes for a more painful and complex narrative.

For the long term, I am actually vastly encouraged by the many wonderful projects I learned about around the world, mostly at the Side Events in the Bella Center, many of which I tried to share here. I wish the whole world knew about them. An enormous amount of networking occurred and I'm sure the grounds for further policy negotiations were laid.

In the short term, I think every sane person who was here and a lot of the rest of the world, is speechlessly bowed down by grief for every species, every nation which, every child who, will bear the consequences of COP15's failures. And in the end, nothing and no one will escape the scary consequences of failure to act on the causes of climate change in a timely manner."

O how I wish I had been wrong.  It is almost midnight in New York City and they predict snow again for Saturday: another opportunity for hope and innocence. 
Amen and happy new year.

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.