Pushing Rocks
I woke from a dream today
Slowly but surely, a culture of impunity is being dismantled as though we might all be waking from a bad dream. This despite every effort on the part of the dominant culture of capitalism and extraction to continue to run rampant.
Notes in Advance of Blued Trees www.bluedtrees.com, an Opera About Ecocide
“The original ecocide proposal is almost 50 years old
The intent to make ecocide an international crime isn't new. The idea was brought up by then-Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme at the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. In his speech, he warned that rapid industrial progress could deplete natural resources at unsustainable levels. But even before that biologist and bioethicist Arthur Galston used the word "ecocide" at the 1970 Conference on War and National Responsibility in Washington, D.C.”
Ecocide, Genocide and Blued Trees
August 26, 2023, we will debut a premiere of the Blued Trees opera about ecocide at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
The consequences of ecocide have been discussed for decades, particularly in the work of the late Polly Higgins.
Why is this so difficult?
"Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience."
Consider these three words: pity, compassion, and empathy. Pity has its roots in a religious experience of withness as a communion with divine mercy. Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience. It is provocative to consider that obedience to the sacred coexisted so intimately with great class disparities, aggressive colonization, and subjugation of the nonwhite world.
On Heroes and Fatal Flaws
"At the end of the 1980s, after I had already created decades of work about violence between people—not only rape but child abuse and domestic violence, violence between men, and animals victimized by people, always trying to understand the link between human behavior and environmental disaster—I heard a sociologist on the radio say, “It is amazing how much pain you can inflict if you don’t feel your own.”
Lumumba in Chongqing
A great deal has been written about Earth rights, environmental rights and increasingly, ecocide, from the point of view of politics, law and sociology. I will write about it as a practicing artist and as someone struggling with personal implications.
Department of Random Insight
I have always thought transparency is a good thing and that it's impossible to be truly generous without openness. The opposite of generosity is withholding. withholding in personal relationships is cruel sport. In relationship to the rest of nature, it is just profoundly short-sighted, even, stupid. This is our present challenge: environmentalists are being outgunned and outspent and outpowered by people who have no problem being transparent.
Land
Art has historically been cultural glue for communities under stress. As an ecoartist, I have struggled with the realities of environment danger, seeking where I might position myself with integrity. I decided to risk my entire life's work in the most dramatic act of ecoartivism I could imagine.
On painting as the Algebraic Spatial Choreography of a Globalized World;
I first met Thomas Erben in 2021, when the curator and historian Monika Fabijanska brought me into the "Ecofeminisms" show in his gallery https://www.thomaserben.com/. We stayed friends and I visited with Thomas Erben in his gallery, now showing Dona Nelsen's paintings, on a sunny, fair day, too warm for mid-November in the midst of a very problematic COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.
Ecoart and the Environmental War
I have long believed that ecoart is on the frontlines of a battle for the planet as we know it. Well, alongside phalanxes of environmental scientists, whole battalions of Indigenous peoples practicing Traditional Environmental Knowledge, and platoons of guerilla lawyers defending Earth rights and teenage climate activists.