Do We Learn?

I was speaking with someone today about global warming. In effect, they said the great intellectually unwashed of America do not care. They drive their SUVS from place to place in the exburbs (which incidentally represent a vast fragmentation of landscapes necessary to protect the atmosphere and other natural resources) while the cities languish and rot.

All this is bad for the environment. And it is true, that description of the Unites States is accurate to a much larger extent than I normally want to think, even if Newsweek did do an article about climate change and global warming this week.

I came home to a post from a friend http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500025.html
to the effect that we have been there, done that in the storms that hit South Florida in 1926 and 1928. And we are about to repeat sad history in the wake of Katrina in Louisiana. The same friend sent me and article by Bryan Walsh with Susan Jakes and Jodi Xu/ Beijing from Time magazine, in effect saying it can get much, much worse once the people of India and China decide to be as unwashed as we are. Unless of course, they can do us better, energy wise. Which they may.

I went to http://www. fightglobalwarming.com and calculated my own carbon footprint. Despite living in Maine in a tiny house, I DO travel for work. My carbon footprint, 18.6 metric tons of carbon is equivalent to cutting and burning all the trees in a section of the Amazon rainforest the size of 2.2 football fields. This is disheartening. So I can be as self-righteous as I like about global warming but all I need to do is look in the mirror to se a great unwashed.

Urgency and Opportunity

Many scientists believe we have all the technologies available today to avert the worst consequences of global warming. I have no trouble imagining how new materials used in new ways as well as ancient technologies re-tooled, could slow global warming by increasing the aldedo effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo

I intend to explore some of these options and opportunities in my next installation. That work, called, Pervious, Porous, Integrated, opens April 8 at the Exit Art Gallery. http://www.exitart.org/ is in New York City at 475 Tenth Ave on the corner of 36th St.

As I design that work, I am even more motivated by news, again, this time in the journal, Science, that the glaciers continue to melt faster than anyone anticipated.

This is happening because we did not know that warming waters are slipping under the glaciers now, even as melting waters slide down between fissures. All of that is contributing to a series of earth quakes in Greenland. The earth quakes accelerate the melt in another feedback of cumulative effect. Scientists have seen significant change since 1993. That has dramatically increased since 2002. The Law of Unanticipated Consequences is at work.

To apply something someone else said today, all changes and ends in life, including coastal zone life as we know it. Life has pain, which includes the loss of entitlements to natural resources. People are not always loving or kind, in relation to the earth we share or the people & species most effected by the selfish, greedy and unscrupulous. Life is not always fair. The reapers and sowers do not seem to be in communication with the seeds and weeds of disaster. Things do not go according to plan. See above.

We have the opportunity to effect this situation. The situation is urgent. What more can I say?

Information Trumps Fear & Hierarchy?

The Harvard Business School review published a fascinating study about the dynamics of why some people feel free to speak out and others remain silent. I see implications for any kind of activism and consequently, change, including how we address global warming. The qualities these researchers identify as effecting change, are those routine on the internet.

The great hope of the world of the internet and blogs is that people feel comfortable to share any information they have. This is like the French peasants before the French revolution. They began keeping cahiers when they learned to read and write. Just the act of recording thier thoughts began to free them to act on thier needs and desires despite hierarchal constraints.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5261&t=organizations

The study is by HBS professor Amy Edmondson and her colleague, Professor James Detert from Penn State"

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.

Rivers Run Dry

Rivers running dry globally are the concern of Fred Pierce, of The New Scientist magazine, amongst others. This is a global problem caused by agricultural irrigation and damming for hydroelectricity.

So what will catch up with us first? The poss of potable water or the loss of arable land or the coastal flooding and climatic disruptions that will come with global warming? Take your pick or worry about terrorism.

Lester Brown, who advocates a Department of Sustainability, will speak on web radio tonight http:// www.voiceofvashon.org, about a sustainable future. James Hansen will be part of a forum tomorrow in New York on Global Warming and our Future at The New School.

Today in Maine, it is unseasonably warm and people are happy to shed their Winter coats. My body can't help but rejoice at the signs of Spring. My mind still sees starving Polar Bears.

Relentlessness

It snowed all day here. My dogs played in it. In New York City it was almost seventy degrees.

On NPR, they announced that Maine lakes are thawing, eight to twenty one days earlier than they had in the twenties, a good point to calculate back from.

Global warming is relentless despite the small signs of hope I cling to. It is also something we can do something about. I think we must all be as relentless as this terrible situation we have brought upon ourselves. Perhaps not to see the effects in our lifetimes or even our children's, but the alternative is far worse.

I have been thinking a great deal about why we don't do more of that: act in spite of despair. I think it is simple but very difficult. It is soooooooooooo much easier to feel despair or deny it or rage or hide than simply do the next right thing. The things we can do are legion. Some are political, some are personal.

They are all essential. They all depend upon loving this earth and all its creatures and all our foibles and all our magnificent achievements, whether it's an international treaty or playing in the snow.

Small Happinesses

It is only eight PM here and I am happy because it was cold today. I am also happy because I have finally figured out how to enable "comments" posts to my blog. I needed to formally approve them. How unexpectedly polite.

But I am exhausted because I have been working since six AM on an instalaltion for a group show called The Drop that will open April 8 at Exit Art in New York City. In the show, I invite people to buy plants for center dividers in commercial areas, as tenth avenue, where the gallery is located, that would create ecotones. Ecotones are vegetative communities that replenish water and protect shorelines from flooding. If New York City is inundated by sea level rising those plants might hold a little ground.

Until then, I am content to see the ground is still frozen solid here.

Astonishing

I just received a clip from al Jazeera via a friend.

http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

In it a strong Muslim woman, who describes herself as a secularist, is confronting a Muslim cleric, saying that fighting civilization with terror is mideaval and fruitless. The cleric is shown smirking and mumbling into his papers about heretics. If that can be a live broadcast, might we one day see someone stand up for the Polar Bears and coastal cities with equal fierceness? We can not fight global warming with more carbon emissions and trade treaties that encourage environmental devatstaion apace.

Unintelligent Design

My elderly lab is walking on the small frozen marsh near my driveway. My heart stuck in my throat as I watched her. It has been a heart-stoppingly beautiful day of Maine Winter light here. The water is a clear Prussian blue and the sky is light cerulean. Now, at twilight, the branches and grasses are lavender browns and red ochres.

I could hardly begrudge the sweet warm air, despite global warming. But I am grateful that it is cold enuf that she will not fall thru the ice. I am even more grateful when she is inside and I have coaxed some dinner into her.

In the New York Times today, Nicholas D. Kristof has written an editorial, on global warming on page 14 of the Week in Review. He concludes with a quote from Jerry Mahlman, climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Dr. Mahlman wonders if our actions on global warming indicate we are an intelligent species or not and seems to conclude we are not.

As I type this, President Bush has announced a scheduled trip to visit New Orleans. What does he expect to find there that has changed in several months? Does he believe the image of his presence will offset the evidence of the collosal failure of this administration to address either global warming or the consequences of that failure for coastal cities? Just how unintelligent does he think we all are?

Kristof speculates about the future of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Kristof presumes the decisions Bush is determined to make will be a moot point. The refuge and all that wildlife will shortly be under water along with all coastal cities internationally. He does a very good job of explaining cumulative negative and positive feedback in climactic dynamics. Even someone not very intelligent can understand what Kristof writes.

So, it is not about intelligence.

Many authors and politicians have presumed that alternately, for this administration, it is rather about greed for oil profits or determination that the apocalypse should be hastened. Both seem likely to me. But what if there’s another explanation? What if this administration simply is incapable of caring?

That is, they simply do not care about dying Polar Bears or coastal cities. Perhaps it is just terminal self-centeredness.

Many people voted for this President because they could imagine him as a drinking buddy. So perhaps that is exactly what they have now: a drinking buddy who is too drunk to care about the repercussions, implications and consequences of choices? And the rest of us are in an emotionally drunken stupor of terror, deluged by survival issues as the economy tanks for the middle class.

I am often beset by self-doubt. Can any individual make a difference at this late stage of global warming with any act? Doing this blog is an act of resistance to that self-doubt. I see, each day from my counter, that I have visitors. Someone stopped me today to tell me their grandchild in New Jersey recommended my site. And my friends write me long, eloquent personal posts in response to various posts here. I have threatened to excerpt their writing and post it as a comment. Is that unethical if they won’t post themselves? I want to be ethical as well as intelligent.

My cat is on my lap as I type and has put her paw on my left hand as tho she is telling me something. Probably encouraging me to curb my self-righteousness; to have faith that we might still forestall the future.

A few weeks ago, I read of an algae that could eat carbon emissions. Might we all someday install algae devices in our gardens, on the rooftops of our cars, on our window sills, incorporate them into out fashions? And if we did, how many decades might it take to slow down the synergy of global warming?

Yearning

Temps have been seasonal lately, hovering around zero. My spirits lifted when we started what looked like a blizzard only to have my hopes dashed a couple hours later. The tip off, as usual, was how big & sloppy the flakes got.