Acts of God

Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge Probabilities, NOAA site
Chance of Storm Surge >= 2 feet (NGVD-1929) at individual locations
Sandy (2012) Advisory 31
For the 77 hours from 11 PM EDT Mon Oct 29 to 04 AM EDT Fri Nov 02

Unlike my academic writing for my dissertation, on this blog, I can own my opinions without too many citations. I have a few opinions about Hurricane Sandy.

Hurricane Sandy has turned many lives upside down in NYC, not to mention those lost but we have never so desperately needed to invert our ideas about our relationships to nature, from infinite expansionism and extraction to accepting our limits while exercizing infinite empathy. we used to say that major weather events were an Act of God. I charge that Hurricane Sandy was an act of stupid white men. Michael Moore's Stupid White Men were DC policy makers. I think we are all stupid white men when it comes to the environment. We have made a world where Cuomo and Bloomberg can talk about storms like Hurricane Sandy becoming routine. We have replaced god, with our own stupidity.

In considering my new project for Memphis, Fish Story, I am still thinking about fish: the fish that have now lived (if they still live) in a toxic soup of chemicals and sewage for almost two weeks (not to mention the birds that eat them or the small life the fish normally consume). In a "normal, healthy" estuarine system which historically surrounded Manhattan Island with fecund abundance, Sandy should be part of a cycle of high impact phenomena to bring even greater nourishment and support to this bioregion. Instead, we have made a charnel house of this region.

Humans, particularly white European colonists and their progeny since 1650, have ignored any attention to how things work in their own world, except as they serve short term interests of acquiring material wealth and power. New York City, is in fact the icon of exactly that acquisition. It has been enormously successful in proselytizing that ethos and exporting it globally out to the world. the consequence of all that "success" is this disaster. We expanded to the point of what Jared Diamond wrote of as Collapse, filling in the wetlands that might have protected us. What has collapsed is the fertile, protective natural system that protected us and the built infrastructure that replaced it. That collapse signals an opportunity to exchange and invert our priorities. To exchange expansionism for empathy for all life. If we live with empathy, we cannot countenance what we have done to this planet. If a god had any part in Hurricane Sandy, it was in the circumstantial conflation of a climate change event and the Apple, days before an election for president of the USA.

It has been incidental to the success of our great expansionist society, that NYC is also full of begging homeless people, extracted from a culture that has no place for them.

Drawing of homeless woman begging across the street from Bloomingdales, May (from Homeless in the Apple project) 2012 Aviva Rahmani

Now, we are talking about the impact of global warming. In my opinion, global warming is the symptom of a terrible spiritual disease that is literally killing the whole world. My opinion is that Hurricane Sandy, as part of global warming in the anthropocene, is a spiritual wake-up call. The spiritual part has little to do with gods in the world and everything to do with the moral power of empathy for what is not us. Hurricane Sandy was not an Act of God. It was the backdraft of many acts by many people who chose convenience, expedience and short term gain (including myself) over encompassing a view of the world which might include the suffering of others, whether fish or homeless women across the street from a luxury emporium. As I type, I am listening to Brian Lehrer on WNYC speaking to a caller from Coney Island, describing old people walking down 14 flights of stairs to deliver a bucket of their own waste to the street level. None of that misery is the consequence of an Act of God.

Tomorrow, I will record another Gulf to Gulf webcast to discuss the science behind this new normal reality in depth with Jim White, my collaborator from INSTAAR and will post the url after we are done. Friday evening, I will participate on a panel at LIU in Brooklyn about fracking and social media. I will also post further about that here before the event. They are connected: the fish, the homeless, the old people with a bucket of waste, fracking and the world crying for an ethos of empathy rather than expansionism. And it is here, on the net, where we can advance another point of view, one that might invert our present headlong trajectory towards destruction.

"Chasing Ice" aftereffects

Shot by Wendy Brawer of greenmaps http://www.greenmap.org/greenhouse/en/home of me with James Balog, photographer of arctic ice and subject of "Chasing Ice" showing this weekend in NYC @ Cinema Village http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/

"Chasing Ice" www.chasingice.com, is a film directed by Jeff Orlowski about the melting Arctic ice. The story of the ice is seen thru the filter of James Balog's work to capture the astounding images of vanishing glaciers. James, a fellow affiliate at INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, set up multiple cameras over a period of years, at great peril to his (and others) health and life to document the dramatic story of loss and destruction. They hope this film will finally break thru the wall of denial about global warming. It has garnered a lot of attention at Sundance and won many awards. Fellow artist Aimee Morgana shared her passes with me so I could attend this special screening, along with Ed Koch and many other opinion makers. This weekend is the time to see it. Next stop, Lincoln Center for a week.

The images are haunting & exquisite. The record of loss, heartbreaking. The story of James' harrowing adventures to capture footage is told in the tradition of  intrepid Arctic explorers. James & Jeff are convinced that beauty will draw people into the film's message of desperation. Louie Psihoyos, the executive producer of "The Cove" http://opsociety.org/projects/the-cove, did cinematography. Scarlett Johansson sings a raspy but lovely closing song about not dying before her time. It is certainly well-timed after Sandy.

After the screening I asked 2 questions:

1. My first question was about beauty. What about the Hudson River effect- how images of the Hudson River School brought people to the river to destroy it? James felt that was a negligible danger relative to our sources of carbon loading. Having recently done a Gulf to Gulf webcast with Jim White (director of INSTAAR) about the implications of opening the Arctic, I'm not so sure. James feels people just turn away from the gory details of real impacts. Beauty is his strategic choice and judging from the film, he puts his money and body where his mouth is, going to any lengths for those results.

2. My second question was about denial. People seem stuck in the denial stage of grief over climate change. Will this be enuf? James felt it would be the cumulative effect of many things.

I have some reservations. Not about this beautiful film but over what will bring people to put pressure on policy makers for change. I am uncertain about the limits of the power of beauty and the power of the unlimited stage of grief that has entrenched so many politicians, corporations and confused American in denial. Perhaps I am too cynical. I have been part of the resistance movement against fracking since 2010. The corporation pushing fossil fuels are in it for the long haul and we still don't know what will happen with the tar sands pipeline or natural gas in NYC. Our window of hope is that at least they didn't succeed in buying the recent USA election.

As I've written elsewhere, I see us in a protracted war with formidable opponents who will not give up. On the other hand, thinking about about COP15 http://www.ipcc.ch/, which James & I both attended, there were plenty of good folks there from business, as well as Govt agencies of all stripes. Our default is that we need "leaders." But "we" may be the leaders. This may be an equal opportunity revolution.

Over the years with my Gulf to Gulf webcasts with Jim White and many others, the topics of neuroscience, cognition, perception and behavior have come up many times. People don't always seem to behave realistically when confronted by reality, no matter how extreme. But they do eventually yield to cumulative evidence, as they eventually did with tobacco. At least, most of them.

James and I spoke a bit more after the film. In spite of my pessimism, I think he is right about cumulative effects. Sandy. Fires. floods. Storms. Plus this film. Plus the evidence of dying fish, polar bears, Inuits and Island Nations.

Plus other groups: 350.org http://350.org/, the Yale Mason group (CCCC) http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/, ACE http://www.acespace.org/ including my own small teams working on Fish Story and Gulf to Gulf and many other artists, thinkers and scientists, may be the steady drip drip we need.

Jeff & I spoke briefly about the stages of grief. It is something I give a lot of thought to these days. What brings people to acceptance and finally, realistic behavior? Certainly, what we see now in the face of global warming is NOT realistic. Until we succeed in weaning the world from fossil fuels, the jury is out.

Addendum: Frank Rich did a good analysis of modernist relativism run a muck in the USA political system http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/14458-gop-in-fantasyland. I wonder how much this may affect climate change policy? I wonder whether a gorgeous film like "Chasing Ice," can overcome this kind of delusionalism?

I have my doubts. I think people cling to the moral structure of fairy tales and weave all sorts of pretty gee gaws into that architecture. I guess that makes me a radical cynic, tho an optimistic one: I do believe art touches people's souls in ways nothing else can, and wish for us all, that "Chasing Life" will.

Drawing for all we're worth

On the ecoart art list serve http://www.ecoartnetwork.org/, my friend Lenore Malin asked recently whether people need to move from the coast? She asked who pays for all that? She and Jackie Brookner, both fellow artists, had gone to help in the Rockaways, devastated by Hurricane Sandy http://lenoremalenblog.com/in/utopia. The activist artist and educator Beverly Naidus said she has a student who replies, when people ask him what he does, that he draws to save the world.

Young men enjoying Hurricane Sandy, Photo credit, Chandler Blackington, November 4, 2012
 Vinalhaven Island, Maine

As far as what to do about the shoreline, I may have written this before, but when I asked the late wetlands ecologist Michele Dionne about that, years ago, she replied: insurance. The insurance companies would stop insuring structures too close to sea level rise and eventually people would stop building there. And that's what is happening.

Except that many companies got various kinds of federal back-up, not just in flood prone regions but also fire prone areas of the SoWest, leaving too many in the way of Sandy & ginormous forest fires.

Who's to blame and who's to pay?

Well, we can start with anyone who blew off a science class and every legislator who cut funding for the sciences, along with the arts. And we can ask why the insurance companies, like the financial institutions that brought us the on-going economic crisis, are still being artificially propped up.

Living on the coast is a calculated risk these days and will increasingly be. But so will living in fire/flood/drought/storm paths. In other words, this is the world we have wrought by ignoring how things work. By ignoring how things work, I mean biogeographic dynamics, imagining that small scale solutions can be disengaged from larger forces and privileging the grand designs instead of all the little parts of microhabitats that hold bioregions together.  And that echoes economically as much as biologically.

In short, we have made our own sci fi reality by ignoring garden variety reality.

Based on the scientific discussions I have been having since 2007 with Jim White and others, we have entered the accelerated fast phase of climate change. There are landscape level precedents for ecosystems to evolutionarily adapt resiliently to Large Impact Disasters (LID).

Maybe. If so, we aren't seeing most people either rushing to solutions or getting the education and support they need for a chance at a resilient transition.

Biologically, the solution is called evolutionary adaptation. But even evolutionary adaptation has a cost.

I am not sanguine about this situation nor am I cold about it. I think 100's of millions of people may die in our lifetime because we here in Rome fiddled and lost time in our opportunities to address global warming and establish transitions for evolutionary adaptation. The cause of these deaths would only tangentially be directly from natural disasters. Most would come from the geo-demographic change that will result from massive socio-economic and cultural disruptions as people find their own ways to adjust.  Meanwhile, the ones who might die won't be the Romney's of the world, who laughed at sea level rise and advocated drill baby drill. 

In 2007, when I realized what we were facing, I was shaking with hysteria over the implications for months. A year later, I decided to do a PhD that would tie together what I knew and present the research to back it up. The program, Z-Node, a division of the Planetary Collegium with the University of Plymouth in the UK, blends environmental sciences, studio art and technology.

So as some know, I have been writing a dissertation on an original theoretical approach that I believe might support resilience: "Trigger point theory as aesthetic activism," and have periodically posted to my friends about my progress, "Reports from PhD Land."

My current "Report from PhD Land," is that I'm about half thru the writing now, which takes forever and that is still not what I need to do to make it into a trade book. That's at least years to come to get the ideas in front of anyone who might pay attention and be able to act on whatever I put forth ....if in fact, it amounts to real new knowledge anyone doesn't already know by then.

Realistically, it's a grim landscape, a brave new world that is not for the faint-hearted.

Meanwhile.

I guess we keep drawing for all we're worth.

Still shot Aviva Rahmani November 8, 2012 from Bill Viola's 2005 "The Tempest" in Chelsea at James Cohan. Riveting tonight with the pungent smell of flood waters still intense in my nose from my walk North from the closed galleries on 22nd St.

Choices, homesteading, microhabitats, fish and trigger point theory as pragmatic ethics

Detail of 20'x40' chalk blackboard mural created for ecological novelty conference in Monte Veritas, Switerland, 2011

Like any addict on this election day, despite mental self-destruction, I can't turn off the WNYC voting reporting on the radio. Truth is, so much is at stake this time: civil rights for so many, global warming & the environment, democracy & economic sanity... I still hope to do the phone banks today. But the other part of me, wants to turn all the news off until this time next week.

I believe I understand the mentality of climate change deniers. I think they are in one of the early stages of grief: the first is denial. Then people in grief cycle thru anger, bargaining, sadness and finally acceptance. The same biological drivers that make deniers want to put their heads in the beach sand, are the same impulses that make me want to pull my mental covers over my head until next week. I've posted for years on FB & elsewhere about the dangers I see from bigotry and exclusionary practices, unrestrained corporate power, creeping fascism, deprivation solutions. I've argued with relatives, made art, launched webcasts and other projects to erect a seawall against what I see as ignorant blindness and today, when so much is in the balance, my vote was cast a month ago with an absentee ballot. I am struggling with a bad head cold and don't know if I have the stamina to do volunteer work on the phone banks. So it is out of my hands right now: all of it.

That's not all, of course that's out of my hands. But I, we, still have choices. Choices must come from informed values and a set of ethical premises that do no harm. I think we can all agree on that premise.

The values I want to address today are those that connect us in the world and conserve human welfare. I'm not talking about some Kumbaya Lala land. I mean linking ourselves to ecoregions and other species, because whomever is elected today in the USA, that is the thinking, I believe that may save us as a species and conserve our welfare. Water is the fount of life for all and water conservation is also about conserving other species: living bioregions.

An ecoregion is how geographic features, such as rivers and oceans, mountains and valleys create what landscape ecologists call a mosaic of habitat patches. On the macro level, the function of these mosaics in ecoregions, is to preserve clean water for all life on earth. On the micro level, what links the patches of these systems, are the communities of animals and plants that make up an ecosystem. That is why environmentalists battles so hard to save the wolves, bears, lions and other megafauna: they are the regulators in these large systems. There is no chance, anywhere in the world, that such large predators will overtake the earth. They are not the apex predator. Humans are. When the populations of an "apex" predator, such as humans run amuck without any resistance, as we are seeing today, all the smaller biological links become so disrupted and the matrix of what environmental economists call "natural resource services," frays and begins to collapse. That point of collapse results in what biologists call "novel" ecosystems. That means they get weird & unpredictable.

The summer of 2011, I was one of a handful of artists at an international conference on novel ecosystems, held in Monte Veritas, Switzerland, hosted by the prestigious ETH http://www.ethz.ch/about/index_EN. At one point, I drew a large temporary mural on a vast blackboard with colored chalk (see illustration), asking the audience to call out key words that were on their mind as a result of the presentations as I wrote them on the board. The terms that were called out, weren't taxonomic. The words called included, "complexity, fear, confusion." 

Scientists, like any other demographic that has gotten past the stages of grief over what we have done to our planet, are experiencing what Glenn Albrecht has called, "solastalgia," http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/solastalgia/. They are frightened by what we are coming to accept. The recent flood from Hurricane Sandy in NYC is an example of what that acceptance means, along with chronic fights against fossil fuel industries, as fracking and their representatives on the right decimate our waters and our air. We can't in fact, separate these ecosystemic consequences from our political and personal choices, personal choices such as are being exercized in the USA with the national election of our next president.

There are many more complex choices I believe we need to examine. An example is how we fail to connect large bioegional dots. On the bioregional level along the Mississippi River, the choices we make over what supports fossil fuels, also determines the fate of fish in those waters. When the use of fossil fuels warm temperatures, fish literally cook alive in the warmer waters which can reach over 98 degrees. When climate change causes droughts that require dredging the river to allow barge traffic, the habitat for fish is as utterly destroyed as when marine fish habitat is destroyed by trawlers that stripmine the ocean floor.

Another example is how we fail to connect small dots. Many people think the answer to fossil fuel industries is "get off the grid." and homestead. There are two problems with that choice. The first is that fragmenting ecoregions into small plots of less than 10 acres, usually transformed into agricultural plots without the fine shadings between microhabitats that support whole sytsems, it creates what the Wildlands Project  http://stewardsofthesequoia.org/Wildlands_Project.html has called a sink for biodiversity, because domestic cats and other medium size predators such as raccoons can decimate birds but large predators can't control the populations of those mesopredators. The second problem is that by conceiving of land as a series of self-contained patches, we lose sight of and most often diverge from and destroy ecoregional integrity when people divert waters and create farmland out of woodland. We simply have too many people and not enuf biogeographic literacy today to look to homesteading as a solution.

What I think we need instead, is a shift of conciousness to what former physicist & philosopher Edgar Morin has called an "ecology of action." Or, what I propose as the ethical mentality of "trigger point theory," in which each choice, each action, connects us to a larger whole, in which bioregions, water and other species are the complex matrix within which we must fit ourselves. The alternative is to fit the world to our needs. And we have seen how well that works. 

Czech Christmas carp

"There is a habit to eat fish on the Christmas eve in Prague, Czech Republic, where I was born. We, 3 children,had a wish to buy a living fish and to keep it in the bath stab in the meantime. The carp was lovely to watch, so living and fresh. Too beautiful to eat. We decided to give him the freedom, to bring him to the river. It was great feeling, we felt happy and generous when we saw the carp slipping in the water and disappear. It was the most beautiful Christmas gift not only for the fish, but also for us."
Dagmar Dost-Nolden
www.dost-nolden.de

We are so accustomed to imagining nature at our service, to be extracted for our consumption. it's refreshing when I encounter a different attitude. -AR

Art, climate change and politics

Girls outside the UWS Whole Foods raising $ for the Red Cross by selling homemade cookies. It was nice to give them a dollar and let them keep the cookies instead of my usual dollar to hopeless homeless people.
The coming together of people to support the city they love has been very moving to me

http://www.vulture.com/2012/11/jerry-saltz-devastating-visit-to-chelsea-galleries.html

• This is an amazing, heart breaking account from Jerry Saltz, of loss and heroism to flank the stories of trying to help the elderly & infirm victims of the Hurricane Sandy disaster or my own posts about the impact on animals, as the fish and birds in the Tri-State region. All martyrs to climate change denial. 
• Art is like a beating heart that lives outside a body. And now it has become disconnected and trashed. a bunch of those hearts have been ripped from those bodies by the tidal surges and sea level rise of global warming driven by fossil fuel production. I am grateful to Jerry for being one of her caretakers.
• As he wrote, it's easy for us to knock the gallery system, dealers, etc, But these are our blood kin. I was esp upset about Printed Matter, an institution-cum-museum of alternate art and a real tragedy. 

I woke still haunted by the implications of Jerry's essay. What haunts me is the combination of the cultural impact of climate change and the personal implications of the rise of the right. They are inseparable.

In 2009, I was an official observer for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I am an affiliate, for the United Nations IPCC meetings at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. 
http://www.ipcc.ch/
I blogged about my experiences and observations:

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3532459556869820195#allposts

The most moving of all the presentations then was from the island nation of Tuvalu http://www.tuvaluislands.com/.

To standing room only, they held a session about the loss of their homeland to sea level rise, with flowers, dancing, song, giving us all necklaces and impassioned pleas to hold the island nations in mind as we discussed climate change.

There was a lot going on then, but one of the actions I was involved with was an ethical action group, led by Don Brown http://blogs.law.widener.edu/climate/ who had worked on toxic waste sites in the Clinton administration. We crafted the press releases for the press conference and one of the points I focused on was language in the IPCC documents to the effect that we must protect the cultural treasure of impacted nations, such as Tuvalu, as much as we concern ourselves with economic sustainability. I vividly recall crafting phrases for that press release, to the effect that culture is what holds a people together and allows them to be resilient.

I had been scheduled to give our own press conference, on the work Jim & I were doing as a precursor to Fish Story: "Gulf to Gulf," when the police cordoned off the Bella Center and began beating demonstrators in the City of Copenhagen. That was followed in swift reprisal, by a flood of corporate funding to seed global doubt over global warming, drown out the island nations and scientists and culminating with the present Citizens United decision which has allowed one party to, in effect, precipitate a corporate take over coup of the United States.

Previously, in work with Jim White, of INSTAAR who enabled my attendance at the iPCC, we had spoken about our horror over, and generated visuals from, studying the projected global impacts of climate change refugee migrations. Our horror was over the human cost.

Most of the attention to the impact of of Hurricane Sandy in NYC has gone to Wall St and transportation to get back to work and return to normal life. What people are missing is that this is the new normal. NYC is also an island "nation" in the same peril, with the same implications as the fate of Tuvalu. And NYC is the canary, singing for all she is worth about the peril we all face. Jerry is a good microphone for that song.

Fish, feathers and us: conversations from the edge

I am happy to pre-announce that December 11, 2012 we will record a 1 hour Fish Story "Gulf to Gulf" session with environmental animal ethicist Marc Bekoff marcbekoff.com who has written about animal consciousness and fish sentience in over 200 papers and 22 books:

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

Bekoff regularly blogs for Psychology Today.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201211/fish-are-sentient-proposed-memorial-is-justified

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201210/odd-couples-compassion-doesnt-know-species-lines

I am hoping that in addition to our regulars, Jim White of INSTAAR, Gene Turner of Louisiana State University and myself for our regular chat, Marc may be joined by ecological artist Aimee Morgana, who has trained a parrot, N'Kisi, to have intelligent, thoughtful conversations (N'Kisi wants Aimee to hurry up and write her book about him http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/). I think Aimee's work with just one animal, personalizes and dramatizes the horrific loss of biodiversity caused by climate change. It reflects our blind spots about other species which Marc addresses more abstractly.

When we have completed the recording, it will join the following works, some edited & some raw excerpted videos of my work and from  "Gulf to Gulf," on youtube:

Excerpt from Trigger Point Theory Applied to Fracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojn0C96lMz4&feature=plcp 

Tracking the Mississippi excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyFcPf_xhmQ&feature=plcp

Simplifying Complexity Excerpt:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHFjruWNMnI&feature=plcp

Oil and Water Excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ-rdLj925w&feature=plcp

Blue Sea Lavender: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJZ8x8LUYLg&feature=plcp