Hope, 1 of 3

I am pleased to announce the release of 4 new "Gulf to Gulf" webcast events. These are not intended as polished films but rather raw conversations about how we can deal with climate change.

"The Search for Anthropocene Solutions" (https://vimeo.com/84840975)

"Assessing Predictions from 2007" (https://vimeo.com/84718229)

"Leverage 36% Green from Memphis?" (https://vimeo.com/85037535)

"Women and Global Warming" (https://vimeo.com/85042661)

Gulf to Gulf "The Search for Anthropocene Solutions"

A "Gulf to Gulf" performance "The Search for Anthropocene Solutions" January 20th, 2014. Ecological artist Aviva Rahmani: ghostnets.com, with Dr. Eugene Turner,…

"I periodically find myself over-whelmed by how difficult the struggle is, how grief-stricken I am by collateral damage, as climate change takes human life around the globe. At those times, like today in a Noreaster, listening to deaths interspersed with accounts of dissolving starfish and slaughtered elephants in a world inured to loss, I take heart in knowing I am one of many in an army of determined Hope for the earth's future. I am therefore more than pleased when we can contribute sober considerations to that future.- Aviva Rahmani 2-13-14

The following is more information on each of these webcasts:

These conversations are deliberately raw, except for recording corrections. They are opportunities to reflect with the participants, on the implications of each research session. We are proud that since they were initiated in 2009, they have been accessed from over 75 countries. We consider them to be an on-going public think tank to come to terms with the impacts of climate change from Gulf to Gulf, across the planet. Additional information on each webcast and participants:  "The Search for Anthropocene Solutions" January 20th, 2014 with investigative reporter  Dahr, Jamail, artists Erika Blumenthal and Aviva Rahmani, Fisherman Addison Ames, and Dr. Eugene Turner, Distinguished Research Master and Professor, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA:(http://www.oceanography.lsu.edu/index.php/people/faculty/eugene-turner/), Addison Ames a fisherman in the Gulf of Maine and joining from Qatar, ecological artist Erika Blumenfeld (erikablumenfeld.com), and her husband, investigative journalist Dahr Jamail, author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Will-Resist-Soldiers-Afghanistan/dp/1931859884/ref=pd_sim_b_1) and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1931859612/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) (dahrjamail.net/). Participants talk about problems in the Gulf of Mexico due to the Macondo oil spill. "Assessing Predictions from 2007" January 8th, 2014 with Dr. Jim White, Professor of Geological Sciences, Fellow and Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO: (instaar.colorado.edu/people/james-w-c-white/) and Addison Ames a fisherman in the Gulf of Maine. Aviva and Jim discuss their work together since 2007 and predictions they have made about the impacts of climate change. "Leverage 36% Green from Memphis?" November 12th, 2013 with Dr. James White, Professor of Geological Sciences and a Fellow and the Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO: (instaar.colorado.edu/people/james-w-c-white/), Dr. Eugene Turner, Distinguished Research Master and Professor, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA: (http://www.oceanography.lsu.edu/index.php/people/faculty/eugene-turner/) and Virginia McLean President of Friends for our Riverfront in Memphis TN: (friendsforourriverfront.org/). Participants discuss the places and ways in which re-greening the earth may be possible. "Women and Global Warming" October 2nd, 2013 with Dr. Jim White, Professor of Geological Sciences, Fellow and Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO: (instaar.colorado.edu/people/james-w-c-white/) and Chris Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Georgia and Curator at eco*art*lab (ecoartlab.wordpress.com/). Participants discuss ways to talk about climate change and how, if possible, to reach the people who can actually make an impact regarding climate change.

Meditation on the Artists' Mark

I think I might keep revising this over a few days because the ideas aren't simple to me. "Tache," is the painterly term for the mark of the brush on a surface. The origins are modernist, dating from impressionism but it is also associated with abstract expressionist brushwork. For a long time, it was out of fashion to leave any trace of the artists' presence so there were no marks. Then we went into an era of deskilling, where the artists sloppy marks were everywhere to prove it wasn't a rote effort, something machine made and all gloss.

As an ecological artist, I am ambivalent about my mark on the outcome of my work. If the desired outcome is a restored or at least healthy ecosystem, does it need the human touch in any form? That can segue into long theoretical discussions about the nature of any restoration and the implications and extent of human presence but my concern in this post, is just to begin to clarify my own thoughts about the artists' mark.

The artist Lucy Meskill posted something on her FB page today in response to news that populations of Monarch butterflies are crashing due to lost habitat. Her post was a plea to buy and plant asclepius, commonly know as milkweed, the only food monarchs eat (rather than lawns). That is, to me an ideal tache on the landscape. It would be the mark of a healing effort, not to mention that the flowers are beautiful, as are the doomed butterflies.

But my mulling about marks goes a little further because recently, as I wrote on my own page, I have been feeling consumed by paint-envy, as I've been reading Martin Gayford's, "Man with a Blue Scarf," about posing for the painter Lucien Freud. On the ecodialog, I started writing about that longing as almost like wanting to have a baby used to be, when I was younger: I just want to be mixing & applying paint, like I once just wanted to bear a child. There was an avalanche of eloquent response from my colleagues. Everyone confessed their longings and fulfillments.

My own questions are about how could I make a painterly mark, a tache that is evoked by trigger point theory, that evokes a trigger point effect?

I supposed in one way, the desire to leave a mark couldn't be much different than a dog that has to pee on the lamp post. So to think out what I was thinking, I went to an art opening for Shirin Neshat's new work on the political tragedy in Egypt, "My house is burning," a reference to a poem by Mehdi Akhanan Slaes, whose first line is, "My house is on fire, soul burning." Over her large, monochromatic, powerful portraits, Neshat had superimposed fine Islamic calligraphy. This is a trope I'd seen before in her work. Sometimes it worked in this show to convey the pathos of the population and sometimes not. I haven't decided. What was her impulse in these marks and did it distract or add another layer of meaning? I'm not sure.

Shirin Neshat 2013

I thought she was more successful when the images were less explicit, the tasche more mysterious.

Shirin Neshat 2013

In my own work, when I paint, I am being reflective about my content, which is always some aspect of reality that eludes me or that I want to somehow contain and digest. I am also trying to capture some moment, some world view that might convey some deep emotion and share it, for example, as I am thinking about now, trigger point theory. For many years, I thought it was impossible for me to express myself in any more truthful form than those marks I could make on a surface.

"beautiful View," selection of small paintings each 10"x10" oil on linen 2010

Now suppose, everyone who could, bought a packet of asclepius and the result was a resurgence of monarchs, then whose tasche is it? Lucy's for making the suggestion? What is the goal of the tache besides a service to the universe? Is it still an artists' tache? Is the tache, the flight of the butterflies? In chaos theory, we reference the impact of the flap of a butterfly's wing to indicate the delicacy of sensitivity to initial conditions that can change the earth. Could all those Asclepius seeds change the future? If such an effort were successful, I would call it DIY restoration and would hope for much more.

Trigger point options?

Today, after a few hours of work, I went to see Dr. Susan Levine, the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) doctor/ researcher who has been treating me since 1991, told her what I'd been up to and what my worries were while she took some blood. The conversation was grounding. I've stopped talking about CFS much except to people who have it or treat it, except about how it inspired trigger point theory. Often, when I'm in a relapse, as I was tonight, I'm reminded how that works: I have to choose where to put limited stamina. That's such a simple idea but the implications have been profound for me. Tonight, I had 4 events on my agenda plus follow-up on 6 more. They didn't happen. Instead, I just thought. I asked Susan what is happening to CFS patients as we all get older, with vanishing emotional and financial support for many and still no seriously promising answers? She said, "it's a very serious problem." And that is what I see with trigger point theory/ environmental war triage: serious problems, no obvious answers, limited options. Even my own theory, is just a promising theory. I discussed this with kitty. She stretched, yawned, studied me with her big green eyes and then purring, curled up closer for a moment before wandering off to her food bowl.

My new kitty has been in residence exactly one week and has become the resident philosopher and a FB star with her own album and fan mail.

This is an example of what will require some serious thinking about our limited options:

More Than We Thought
H. Jesse Smith
One of the most worrying impacts of climate warming is the sea-level rise caused by melting or collapse of the polar ice sheets. The Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough water to raise sea level by roughly 60 m were it to melt completely. Most of the work done to determine the influence of warming on the Antarctic Ice Sheet has focused on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is thought to be the most unstable portion with respect to warming. Fogwill et al. consider the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), which contains 90% of Antarctic ice, using a computer model to examine how much of that region may have melted or collapsed 135,000 to 116,000 years ago during the last interglacial, when the global average air temperature was about 2° C higher than it is now (a potential analog for the warmer climate of the next century). They focus particular attention on the effects of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds on Southern Ocean circulation and the dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet, concluding that the EAIS may have made a significantly greater contribution to sealevel rise over that period than currently is believed, with the implication that projected changes in the climate of the southern hemisphere may constitute a more serious threat to the future stability of the EAIS than has generally been appreciated until now.

Sometimes the trigger point is where and and with whom we consider our options. 

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

Stop having children

I'm very glad to hear this article on environmental apocalypse by Dahr Jamail has gone viral. As I wrote last Spring, in response to Ian Dunlop's presentation at the UN, without dramatic interventions, we may be facing a drop from 11 billion to 2 billion people by 2050, not just from sea level rise, climate change, diseases, starvation, invasive species infestations, food web collapse and loss of biodiversity, water contamination, etc but from the geopolitical disruptions we're already seeing spread world wide. A topic we've increasingly explored in the "Gulf to Gulf" series, is whether we need to consider all the factional tensions world wide as adaptive biological responses to over-population, etc., in which the rhetoric (ie., of the far right) is just symptomatic. 

These implications are extremely messy, albeit somewhat avoidable with more realistic policies about extractive industries and the income gap fueling climate change. The greater the gap between the power of First World countries and global corporations driving fossil fuel extraction, the less likely we are to forestall disaster.

In our last "Gulf to Gulf" with Jim White for a few months last week (which we'll get on line ASAP), we reviewed some of the maps we generated in 2007, to analyse data and biogeographic patterns. At the time, we came to conclusions, without GIS to verify our conclusions, that were far ahead of the curve of predictive conclusions we're seeing even now. Last week we discussed the personal implications of living with that knowledge. It's pretty alarming and that alarm has been for me since 2007.

"Trigger Points/ Tipping Points" variable sizes Rahmani with White 2007

What is relevant here & now, is how to best live and work with this knowledge, nicely presented here http://youtu.be/sRGVTK-AAvw. I have contended several points for several years:

1. Team work, of which attribution & generosity are keys, is critical. So is the mutual support we can give each other.

2. Despite our urgent realities, we must take time to think thru our options very carefully, which paradoxically takes time we don't have.

3. Despite our selfish & realistic terror for our own species, it is going to be focusing on other species that can best "save" us, such as fish.

4. We can analyse large systems for critical leverage points (trigger point theory). I learned this from living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

5. It is possible that we first need to accept the hopelessness and despair of what we have wraught before we can realitically figure out our next steps.

6. Stop having children. Nothing is contributing more to the planet's stress than over-population, especially from the First World.

An addendum based on that last statement & my title, which alarmed some folks as an injunction to the third world. I added, "particularly in the First World," because our impact is so disproportionate. If people think I'm talking about third world fertility, I think that just reflects their racism. Also, I think over-population IS the critical issue. I also agree with others, however that capitalist consumption is critical & actually think the two issues are mirror images of each other: we think we can have unlimited children. We think we can consume unlimited resources. We entitle people to be monster narcissistic consumers in every way, whether financial, attention or morally. Capitalism encourages all of the above but is also a symptom of the more is more mentality. A related issue on art making is the whole object issue of fetishism, critiqued by post-modernists- a whole other kettle of fish. Finally, having children is the third rail no one wants to come to grips with. In the FIRST WORLD WE SHOULD NOT BE ENTITLED TO PRODUCE MORE CONSUMERS no matter how much we love the little critters. Hate that message but heed it, please. If we don't, there will be nothing left for anyone or anything except the roaches.... in our lifetimes and certainly in the lifetime of any child born today.

What is the universe telling me about the New Year?

Fish are still the key.
They are the canaries in the waters of the world and the trigger point species to re-organize our life on earth. As fish go, so will our waters and ultimately life on earth for humans.

USDA map of where contaminants are killing fish in the continental USA

Friday, December 20, 2013, I decided to run away from my home in New York City, to Vinalhaven Island, Maine, also my home. What prompted my flight were two events:

1. I was imminently completing the final draft of my PhD dissertation, subsequently sent to my supervisors December 22. It is about how attention to fish must be the trigger point guiding restoration work.

My PhD dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism," uses Ghost Nets and Fish Story as the micro and macro case studies to apply an original methodology to identify why, where and how to focus restoration work. 
Ghost Nets site analysis pencil and pastel on white ash 10"x7"

2. My cat died Monday, December 16. As a person deeply grounded in my relationships with animal Others, this was a small but devastating loss of a companion of twenty years. Cats. Fish. Same story of loss.

Lilith December 15, 2013

Lilith in the Summer Garden August 2013

I left on the bus up the coast Monday December 23, for a 14 hour trek North, anticipating ten-days of a blank mind punctuated by white snow and some ice. My goal was to empty my mind of all content. My only social anticipation was the possible opportunity to sing with the local church choir, where I usually sing every Sunday when I'm home on the island.

The bus was late leaving Boston and late by thirty minutes arriving in Rockland, the mainland town where we catch the ferry to the island. The thirty minute delay meant we missed the last (4:30 PM) ferry of the day, had to take another ferry to a neighbor island and then a skiff back to Vinalhaven in icy rain, before catching a ride and driving another 45 min. home. As I type today, we have come to the end of another icy rain storm here, the end of which was a scant dusting of snow.

Ice

That icy traverse wasn't the biggest surprise of my escape. The biggest surprise was conversational. Conversation has always been a big part of my practice, in many forms, so that wasn't the real surprise. It was the serious environmental content of those conversations and that I was having them at all. After all, I was on vacation. On the leg out of Manhattan, I sat next to a young woman from Duke University who is just starting her forestry career and looking forward to working on community resistance in the Amazon. On the leg up from Boston, I sat next to an acquaintance from the island who has a home in the midst of the worst fracking in Pennsylvania. Since I've gotten to the island, i've had two separate serious conversations with fishermen about the impact of C. maenus (European green crabs) on the fisheries industry.

And then, this past Friday, I was invited to contribute work to an exhibition that is a conversation with the past and the future of women in art.

Portfolio of images for Nina Yankowitz' video for "Widening the Frame," an exhibition commemorating the first museum show of women artists in New York City. The 1973 original was, "WOMEN CHOOSE WOMEN," at the New York Cultural Center. These were selections from 7 works in the seventies, all of which dealt with observation and conversation over time. In each case, a narrative description that accompanied the images explained the conceptual structure and intention behind each work. These projects can be seen in greater detail at www.avivarahmani.com. 

So what is the universe telling me about this vacation? If I parse the word vacation, it implies a vacating. I did physically vacate New York City but apparently, vacating my passionate commitments wasn't what was meant to be. I did expect to be replenished by rest and have been but I am also being replenished by learning how many others are willing to commit their lives to resisting what is happening to the earth at the hands of oligarchical, extractive and ecologically heedless industries- from oil and natural gas to shipping concerns who dump invasive ballast inshore out of laziness, resulting in the impacts of invasive species.

Meanwhile, other artist friends are keeping me posted about the on-going effects of the Fukushima disaster on the earth's oceans:

http://www.educateinspirechange.org/2013/12/the-fukushima-video-everybody-needs-to-watch.html
This video was then contested by my colleague, the artist Erica Feilder with another series of links:

Complexity of Ocean Currents

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

Wind Map of the US

http://hint.fm/wind/

Animated map of nuclear explosions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo

Article Addressing 28 fallacies about the Fukushima

http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=15903

Air Currents Around the Globe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHrapzHPCSA

But then I did my own research and found an article contradicting those arguments for hope: 

http://www.collapsingintoconsciousness.com/at-the-very-least-your-days-of-eating-pacific-ocean-fish-are-over/

Eve Andree Laramee, also an artist, to whom I defer on matters of radioactivity suggested the following report: http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Report-2013.html

Instead of vacating what concerns me, I am being replenished and reinforced, shoring myself up for the next phase of my work. There are important connections between the ideas I fleshed out in the decade of the seventies and what I'm working on now: ideas about how we include others in our awareness and how we perceive the natural world. Going forward, I think I will put some clothing on that flesh, albeit that clothing may be tattered and torn with grief for what has been lost.

This past year gave me lots to think about concerning how the pieces of our planetary life fit together. Work on my PhD dissertation has been an opportunity to reflect in depth on ideas and research on what is affecting life on earth today. The story of fish from Gulf to Gulf, Fish Story, was the story of our relationship to the world's waters. How we depend upon the sea and inland waters where fish live, even as we poison and destroy life there, is about our disassociation from the consequences of short-sightedness. This vacation has reminded me that none of us can turn away much longer, even on vacation. My take away is that the universe is telling me that there's no turning away from knowledge, even on vacation. There's only going forward together, with the fish. And perhaps that's the hopeful part for the New Year: there are more of us now. There is a fragile basis for hope for the fish ... and us.

New Year coming, tasks to tie up

‘If we can re-green the earth by 36%, we can survive global warming,’ - 2013 James White, paleoecologist, Fellow and Director of INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, on the occasion of Fish Story, Memphis, part of Memphis Social, curated by Tom McGlynn

However. Is 36% of the earth available to re-green and how?

“The earth was lost by increments, it can be restored by increments,” - 1997 Wendi Goldsmith,  CEO and founder of the Bioengineering Group with Aviva Rahmani, ecological artist, Affiliate, INSTAAR and researcher at the University of Plymouth, UK, on the occasion of completing bioengineering to restore the Ghost Nets salt marsh.

(Rahmani 2013)

In 1997, after several years of collaborative preparation, Goldsmith daylighted the Ghost Nets site: a "pocket (rocky intertidal) marsh," typical of the upper half of the Gulf of Maine. At some point, one of us said, "the environment was lost by increments. It can be restored by increments." Years later, after I had attributed that quote for years, to Wendi, I thought she said, no, "you said it." Then she corrected me, that she HAD said it.

I think the confusion arose because her quote was synchronous with my developing trigger point theory. The two ideas converge. Wendi had the part about increments of restoration. I have contributed the part of where and how we choose to target and prioritize those increments.

White has calculated how much restoration is required of us. It is also correct that, so far, we don't have enough places to restore to mitigate climate change. However, with as many people as now inhabit the globe, if everyone adds an increment that could be a trigger point, the impossible may become possible. At least, that is my holiday wish for the earth.