Hope

Personally, I find it very hard to be hopeful when I'm exhausted. It has been an exhausting year. But as we approach the last hours of 2014, I happen to be rested today and can think more lucidly about hope. Jim White, one of the scientists I work with always points out to me, when I feel gloomy about our environmental prospects, that there is always hope. It just gets harder.

At dawn this mooring I looked out my window to my Manhattan viewscape
to see a workman flexing his muscles for my camera.

The image I snapped this morning of a man on the roof across the way, looks like a small King Kong on the skyline. He may or may not have seen me taking shots, so may or not have been posing. But at this early hour, this man represented to me how humans stand on top of all we have created and look out to one another, or the future. But perhaps, we might more profitably consider what is below all we create, for example, soil or water and how fish might reflect the health of either.

The future many of us want to see these days is just something hopeful. I have written often here, about how fish are indicators of aquatic habitat health. Soil is a material that stands at a confluence between animal life,  geology, and water. It reflects the health of all the relationships that make clean water possible. It is what the quality of our food depends upon.

As the year turns, we have a few days to rest up and regather our stamina to go forward, to consider the basics that support us and build our "hope" muscles. As rested as I am, at least today, I think it is just a question of work and not impossible.

In other posts, I have written about Maxwells Demon, the premise from thermodynamics that implies that the energy of work can change the most closed systems on earth, by presenting new data. So, rest means we can do the work of that data transmission.

The task we build our hope muscles for, may be to identify that critical data that can make that critical transformation.

In the new year, I wish us all enuf rest to feel hope, to exercise the work of environmental transformation, to see more fish, that we may enjoy clean water and fertile soil.

Fish-less

And beyond comment.

Guess how many were left in 2000?

Source; http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/06/plenty-more-fish-in-sea.html

And consider this, also from Pew:

Today's Fish Stories

I have been receiving a bucket full of fish stories, they seem to run a rorschach gamut of human relationships to "nature," esp childhood encounters with goldfish and the mostly heartless behavior of parents when the fish died.

Beth Carruthers sent me this link:

http://www.luluperformingarts.ca/Elementsfestival_Fish_on_Air.html

As I have been gathering these little gems, like sea shells on the beach, I have been involved in an ongoing exchange with colleagues about the definition of ecological art and what we valorize and teach others in our culture. I think these fish stories speak between their lines, to what we valorize.

Most of the contributions, so far, are awaiting permission for attribution. Some have been related in person with firm requests NOT to be attributed or repeated because the implications were so personal & painful. Who knew our relationships with fish could reveal so much? The following stories are about life, death and consumption. The first came in tonight with a proud name tag from a young friend I've known since her childhood in Vinalhaven, Me.:

"At camp, I didn't want to impale worms on hooks, but had no trouble catching fish, watching them die, and cleaning out their guts.  I suppose I felt that I'd eat the fish, taking it's life for mine, but I wouldn't be eating the worm.  I noticed that dandelion stems looked sort of like worms, and set about collecting some, to the scorn and/or amusement of bigger girls and counselors. A friend and I set out in a canoe (also "wrong" -- we were supposed to fish from rowboats, not canoes, but no rowboats were available).  We baited our hooks with dandelion stems -- and promptly caught two large catfish.  There was an ongoing fishing contest during the two weeks of the camp session, so we dutifully brought our catches to the weighing station to be checked in.  At the final campfire, when prizes were announced, my friend had won first prize for the largest fish, and I came in second.  Everybody wanted to know what we used for bait.  By the way, our vegetarian catfish were delicious, and fed our whole cabin.

OK?

Fun idea!

Fine to publish, just credit me.

Leila Daw, Artist"

And also from Cecilia Girz, Vinalhaven, Me.:

"My water sports have been limited to swimming, canoeing, and sailing, but my husband, who had fished in Alaska, took our children fishing at the small lake near our Colorado mountain home. The homeowners association would stock the lake with trout, and that afternoon, on the shore of Rock Lake, our kids couldn't contain their excitement at having caught their first fish. Even though it was a small fish (no more than six inches in length), I scaled, gutted, breaded, and fried it for supper.

Full of bones, flesh permeated with the taste of algae, we gagged trying to swallow that fish. To this day, I don't know why or how a fish could be so bad. And, it knocked any future inclination for fishing clear out of those poor little kids.

                    You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

  - Mark Twain"

We believe

I believe climate change is real. Dying fish believe climate change is real. The USA is beginning to believe. In fact, we believe these truths to be self-evident. We have the proof from the Yale- Georges Mason work emerging from the Center for Climate Change Communication directed by Ed Maibach:

Good news from CCCC: Americans' Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in September 2012.

Some key findings from the report include:
Americans' belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012.

http://climatechangecommunication.org/sites/default/files/reports/Climate-Beliefs-September-2012.pdf

http://climatechangecommunication.org/sites/default/files/reports/Climate-Beliefs-September-2012.pdf

climatechangecommunication.org

As I settle in to work on my GIS mapping of how invasive species are decimating fish and seaweed (like eelgrass), I'm listening to Bill McKibben and Bill Maher on climate change: "this is why we have scientists." Re: that used car salesman, Mitt Romney and his huckster movement.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/bill-mckibben-nails-it-on-bill-maher-show-plus-tuesday-afternoon-quarterbacking/

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.