Peripitaticness & Global Warming
Can information trump hierarchy?
Many people are paying attention to the Elizabeth Kolbert article in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060320ta_talk_kolbert It states that based on Russian satellite information, global warming is arriving in all our lifetimes, imminently. And this administration is continuing to ignore the evidence. What she doesn't say but others do, is that the USA is also making it much worse by relying on fossil fuels, including coal.
Can information trump hierarchy?
The word hierarchy refers to sacred authority. A government that is vertically organized, as ours in these United States, is also heirarchal. It makes information sacrosanct and inaccessible. I recently went to nasa.gov to look at some GIS maps that would help with global warming.
They were inaccessible. How can we read the runes of data if we don't have access?? This is hierarchy making a religion of secrecy at everyone's expense.
A blog, like acting to deal with global warming, is another kind of religious experience. In both cases, there is no guarantee that the universe is listening. Consequently, I find myself acting in fits and starts, swinging as wildly as a bipolar personality at a party, from ebullient hope to flaccid melancholy.
Am I writing into a void? Can I do anything to effect change or is that simply grandiosity? There are days when I feel too glum about the over-heated earth to write or am too busy trying to do something about global warming, using my skills as an artist, to sit at the computer. So this is a peripatetic blog.
As I heard someone point out about global warming, on NPR recently, on my way out the door, we can't presume all is inevitably lost just because we have noticed reality. The globe is warming. That doesn't mean the collapse of civilization in fifty years is a foregone conclusion, altho it MAY be the case.
As usual with disasters, the most vulnerable are affected first by global warming: already imperiled species, from frogs to polar bears and Indigenous Peoples world wide. These are the lives most sensitively tied to geographical specificity and ecological fragility. And that changing specificity, under the pressure of global warming, is killing them.
Globalization and global warming are tied and both are unfriendly to fragile systems.
I have noticed that there are few if any comments to my blog. I forgive all of you who haven't commented publically. I suspect most of youa re writing or preparing to write your own blogs. I confess I rarely comment on the blogs I read.
I also forgive myself for being unable to elect a president of this country who cared a fig leaf for the environment. But every time the temperatures drop, my spirits rise.
Martin I. Hoffert, professor emeritus of physics and former chair of the department of applied science at New York University and Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a division of Goddard Space Flight Center's Science Directorate, on a recent panel chaired by reporter Andrew Rivkin for the New York Times, speculated that we are looking at geo-climate engineering for the future to address the effects of global warming.
As an artist, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is the Frankinsteinian spector of corporate controlled rainfall resulting in further hoarding scarce water resources for agribusiness with languishing rainforests and massive desertification.
On the other hand, I am charmed into imagining sky spectacles of designed tornados rimmed by rainbows and lashed by lightening for an evening's entertainment on the back porch and around the barbecue.
Neither will save the polar bears.
Meanwhile, the most sensible solution may be natural gas. Many say there are great reserves and it is the cleanest fuel we have. But India, the United States and China are planning to build many hundreds of coal burning facilities which will hasten global warming even more.
In another context entirely, speaking of church corruption in energizing hierarchal controls, Robert Blair Kaiser, author of, A Church in Spite of Itself, said that information will overwhelm hierarchy via the internet.
So here I am on my blog, acting to add my one drop of water to the fire we need to put out with a bit more information. It is my sabbath prayer.
Many people are paying attention to the Elizabeth Kolbert article in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060320ta_talk_kolbert It states that based on Russian satellite information, global warming is arriving in all our lifetimes, imminently. And this administration is continuing to ignore the evidence. What she doesn't say but others do, is that the USA is also making it much worse by relying on fossil fuels, including coal.
Can information trump hierarchy?
The word hierarchy refers to sacred authority. A government that is vertically organized, as ours in these United States, is also heirarchal. It makes information sacrosanct and inaccessible. I recently went to nasa.gov to look at some GIS maps that would help with global warming.
They were inaccessible. How can we read the runes of data if we don't have access?? This is hierarchy making a religion of secrecy at everyone's expense.
A blog, like acting to deal with global warming, is another kind of religious experience. In both cases, there is no guarantee that the universe is listening. Consequently, I find myself acting in fits and starts, swinging as wildly as a bipolar personality at a party, from ebullient hope to flaccid melancholy.
Am I writing into a void? Can I do anything to effect change or is that simply grandiosity? There are days when I feel too glum about the over-heated earth to write or am too busy trying to do something about global warming, using my skills as an artist, to sit at the computer. So this is a peripatetic blog.
As I heard someone point out about global warming, on NPR recently, on my way out the door, we can't presume all is inevitably lost just because we have noticed reality. The globe is warming. That doesn't mean the collapse of civilization in fifty years is a foregone conclusion, altho it MAY be the case.
As usual with disasters, the most vulnerable are affected first by global warming: already imperiled species, from frogs to polar bears and Indigenous Peoples world wide. These are the lives most sensitively tied to geographical specificity and ecological fragility. And that changing specificity, under the pressure of global warming, is killing them.
Globalization and global warming are tied and both are unfriendly to fragile systems.
I have noticed that there are few if any comments to my blog. I forgive all of you who haven't commented publically. I suspect most of youa re writing or preparing to write your own blogs. I confess I rarely comment on the blogs I read.
I also forgive myself for being unable to elect a president of this country who cared a fig leaf for the environment. But every time the temperatures drop, my spirits rise.
Martin I. Hoffert, professor emeritus of physics and former chair of the department of applied science at New York University and Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a division of Goddard Space Flight Center's Science Directorate, on a recent panel chaired by reporter Andrew Rivkin for the New York Times, speculated that we are looking at geo-climate engineering for the future to address the effects of global warming.
As an artist, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is the Frankinsteinian spector of corporate controlled rainfall resulting in further hoarding scarce water resources for agribusiness with languishing rainforests and massive desertification.
On the other hand, I am charmed into imagining sky spectacles of designed tornados rimmed by rainbows and lashed by lightening for an evening's entertainment on the back porch and around the barbecue.
Neither will save the polar bears.
Meanwhile, the most sensible solution may be natural gas. Many say there are great reserves and it is the cleanest fuel we have. But India, the United States and China are planning to build many hundreds of coal burning facilities which will hasten global warming even more.
In another context entirely, speaking of church corruption in energizing hierarchal controls, Robert Blair Kaiser, author of, A Church in Spite of Itself, said that information will overwhelm hierarchy via the internet.
So here I am on my blog, acting to add my one drop of water to the fire we need to put out with a bit more information. It is my sabbath prayer.
1 Comments:
The woman on an island in Maine is frustrated accessing satellite maps on-line.
I know it's hard sometimes, but we've come a bit of a ways since the bishops were destroying the printing presses.
Hierarchy and "sacred auhtority" like popular music just ain't what it used to be.
Keep trying, stay on course.
I don't know if the universe will listen but somebody probably will
...and information may trump away
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