The demographic infrastructures of Fish Story

This is what the mechanism of hope looks like to me. It is a diagram of how air is controlled in bel canto, the technique required for opera singing, by a combination of redundant anatomical engineering and the physics of sound waves.

Since I came back from Memphis about ten weeks ago, my attention has been on the finances and logistics of launching Fish Story. There is now a little less than ten weeks left before Fish Story will be completed, by which time I will have spent a year of my time conceptualizing and designing the work since Tom McGlynn first extended the invitation to me for Memphis Social. I've made progress with the help of my studio assistant, Daisy Morton. Along with Tom and Daisy, a number of wonderful folks in Memphis have guided my thinking, including Scott Banbury of the local Sierra Club, Matt Farr of Shelby Farms, Virginia McLean of Friends of Our Riverfront and Cathy Justis of the Wolf River Conservancy. They have each taught me an entire encyclopaedia about the political and biogeographic ecosystem they work in. This week, I had to accept that my goals for Memphis aren't going to be a trick I perform by May. May will have to be a salvo in a much longer process.

Memphis is not only the center of the world in a continental and paradigmatic sense, it is also the center of a world of complexity. Two elements seem at the heart of this complexity. One is the fish, whose life cycles reflect all the complexities I've been studying and considering this year about Memphis. The other element is "inner city youth," whom each of the people I've spoken to, whose mandate is the environment, have worked to engage with and bring into a relationship with the natural beauty of the region. Inner city youth are important because they represent a huge demographic of our collective future. Globally, they are now disenfranchised and vulnerable to manipulation. They are the raw material of unrest, gangs, terrorism, the target of fascistic enterprises and the fodder for dictatorships. They COULD be, the force that turns us all away from the disaster of the anthropocene. Right now, instead, funding for education, transportation, science research and other facilities that might bring them into a conversation with the rest of the world, are being cut even more than they already were. Memphis embodies the economic over-simplification the whole world is facing as the gap between rich and poor yawns ever wider, recapitulating the same gaps we see between humans as top predators and the other species we are predating.

It is not easy to engage impoverished young people and the percentage of them that my new friends have been able to reach, let alone their parents or grandparents is relatively small. The poor in Memphis, remain largely physically isolated from the more prosperous central city or the affluent suburbs of Germantown. The result is that a large sector of the population is not part of the solution to their own problems. That is the fascination of Memphis for me, how to draw all of "us" into a conversation about the anthropocene and empower everyone towards hope.

As I've worked on Fish Story, I've also been completing my dissertation, on Ghost Nets as a case study model for my theory of environmental restoration (trigger point theory). In the research for that writing, I've focused on studying issues in the littoral zone, the fragile area between marine life and land we call: "the beach." The littoral zone is important, not only for the life it supports, but because it is complex in the ways we need to make sense of for every other system on earth. Like Memphis, the very complexity of the challenge is the very paradigm we need to resolve for the survival of our species, along with every other species, as, fish.  In the littoral zone I've used fish as the fulcrum and harbinger of what that trigger point model needs to consider because they are among the most indicative taxa for ecosystem collapse. Since I began my PhD work in 2009, news of trophic cascades, species loss and other environmental disasters has only escalated. The challenge of finding solutions has proportionately dramatically increased, even as conservative forces have resisted necessary steps to alleviate problems and supported behavior that could only make things worse, as, fracking. This, in the face of calamities such as the BP spill and Sandy.

On Thursday, I spent the day traveling back and forth to Ramapo College, where I participated on a panel organized by Amy Lipton for the show she organized, "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)." The exhibition includes my work, "Oil and Water." I commented in my opening remarks that any engineer can tell you a good system requires redundancies to be resilient to stress and that is what biodiversity permits in food webs. The danger of the anthropocene is that our predation and contamination of the environment has not only impacted but over-simplified every system on earth. The result is that we are eliminating those protective food web redundancies. In my writing and research trying to reconcile the problem of supporting resilient complexity in the face of the anthropocene, I have been inspired by two systemic models. One comes from the logistics of physics. The other is bel canto singing. Both are represented in my little diagram at the beginning of this post. I've studied bel canto since 1999, mostly with the coloratura Debra Vanderlinde, formerly with the New York City Opera.

What is relevant about bel canto, is how in the midst of the over-simplication of ecosystems we have precipitated, we contain a solution in our own bodies that conflates the complexity of physics and biological redundancy. The vocal system that produces music from the manipulation of air in a very small space in the human body: the space between the diaphragm and the mouth from which sound emerges, may be a viable model for future solutions to littoral zone problems, whether demographic or hydraulic. In effect, our body contains the very model for redundant complex engineering we need to study as a template for how a healthy infrastructure functions. The peripheral apparatus that produces an operatic aria is as complex as a healthy littoral zone that permits tidal flow for the health of water and biota (fish).

The trick I need to pull off, is to translate my diagram above into chipping away at solving the problems I see in Memphis, in a way that enhances the life of fish and by implication the lives of folks who eat them now. If I find a way to leverage those logistics, including a means to engage the many poor people to whom my diagram might seem irrelevant, the incrementally improved well-being of fish will be a measure of my success.

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.