Rain Forest Fuel North cont.

It i still raining here. It is burning in the West. So far this administration has done nothing to lead the way on global warming. I am reconsidering all the flying I do as an ecological artist. Seems a bit weird to use all that jet fuel to save the planet no matter how important the ideas or the beauty may be as a result.

Media, Politics and Global Warming

There is a link between what needs to be done to address global warming, current political realities and the impending threat to the internet. There are solutions folks are offering. One is still on the internet: information.

I would not have known about the efforts from Japan to re-establish whaling if it were not for the internet. That effort has been pushed back < ">http://tinyurl.com/hg5de> but it has not died.

That particular battle has illustrated to me that we are in a war. I am not referring to the Iraq war. I mean a global war to make "1984" the reality of this globe- at least until global warming swamps us. And how close we already are. I believe that each of us, as international citizens of the earth, has the duty to fight back with the legal means we still can control. It helps me, to name this situation: a war. That clarifies to me why I have have been feeling desperate urgency since 2000 and why I have been feeling depressed and exhausted by the constant efforts needed to protect what rights this precious planet deserves.

I already have chronic fatigue syndrome so when I say I am exhausted from all this, I really mean it.

Part of the resistance to this war is inherent in the practice of ecological art. Many who are not artists are also using the internet for that, as http://tinyurl.com/ezgsl.

But I think we can also consider doing more.

On Larry King last week, Al Gore, in response to a question from a caller about what can be done about global warming, replied that every listener should call every elected official, from the lowest on up and start hammering at them to address the issue immediately. He also, in another context, commented that he had always spoken of global warming but the media refused to cover it.

I have been watching link tv.

Reporter Amy Goodman was on exhorting people to be aware of the danger of the media push now to privatize the internet. The push is coming from the same consortium of Bush family relatives and friends, inc Rupert Murdoch, et al, who have brought us to the current state of affairs. Diebold and Bass how control 80% of the voting machines. They are owned by die hard Bush supporters who have already amply demonstrated their disregard for the rule of law.


Linktv is are offering "Orwell Rolls in His Grave", for sale. The price, $400. Includes support of the channel. It occurs to me that this might be purchased by individual teachers & libraries for students. The channel has been showing a series of documentaries about the use of media for political manipulation and commercial profit, the systematic destruction of democracy since the Reagan administration, for example by rescinding the fair use doctrine in the media and the Rupert Murdoch/Fox News tactics that parallel the work of Goebells at the service of totalitarianism Fascism.

Those tactics include persistent intimidation & ridicule of the opposition, deliberate censorship & disinformation (a la Exxon Mobil) and media self-censorship to sustain commercial support.
Another guest was Greg Palast.

Figures on the 2000 and 2004 elections in this country are analyzed in the new book by Greg Palast, investigative reporter for the BBC, in his new book, "Armed Madness". His conclusions include that Jeb Bush deliberately purged 57 000 black voters 6 mons before the 2000 elections and he has the paperwork to prove it. He asserts that the media refused to run the stories when he offered the proof. 12% of black district votes registered errors that disqualified them vs 2% in white districts in the Florida count. The reasons included were faulty machines and lack of air conditioning which caused malfunctions.

Palast concludes that the answer is to resist MORE and get out even more voters.

Frog

Two days ago I caught a frog in my house. Apparently, it had hopped thru the dog door, passed thru the mudroom, evading my cat and had no idea where it had landed. It took some doing to corner and catch it. I have often had to rescue birds from my cat or from blundering into my studio but this animal was harder to herd and catch than a bird.

When I had managed to secure it between my cupped hands, I was astonished at it's strength. It couldn't have weighed more than several ounces. I outweighed it astronomically. But I was no match for the power of it's efforts to leap to an illusion of safety, away from me, heedless of the resident, very predatory cat.

Yet once it was safely within my cupped hands, it had stopped struggling and was very still. I marveled at the strength and perfection, the texture and aliveness of what I held in my hands, so vulnerable to global warming.

I was fortuneate on this occasion that my cat was busy elsewhere. Very carefully I carried my captive outside, somehow managing the door knob without releasing the frog. I shooed my remaining and curious dog away and carefully set the frog alongside a small pond on the other side of my driveway.

For several minutes it remained still. Then in a flash it took a mighty leap off a the relative cliff that overhangs the water, two feet below and vanished.

I will restrain myself from philosophical comment about the implications to me of this encounter or parallels to what might be a prudent response to global warming except to pass along Al Gore's response to Larry King about whether he feels fear (about global warming). Gore responded to King by recounting how the Chinese symbol for danger and opportunity are identical, only reversed.

Climate Change & Polar Bears

Several people responded to my request about local observations and larger patterns.

This is what concerns me: at the Society for Ecological Restoration, in Zaragaoza, Spain last year, we heard many reports from indigenous groups whose traditional agricultural means are failing due to weather patterns. It forces them into dependency on globalization and disrupts values, as being forced to eat livestock that are like extensions of their family & spiritual world. Now I am thinking the serious disruptions are already universal rather than contained into extreme situations, as New Orleans.

Until now, I had seen serious disruptions particularly at the geographical planetary extremes, as island nations at the equator and Siberia. When I began Ghost Nets, one of my public statements was that I thought, based on statements from scientists, that we had 10 years to forestall serious damage. That was in 1990. Now Gore is saying we have ten years to avert major disasters. I wish I could see his film but we don't have movie theatres up here. I hope to get his book.

But it seems to me, based on this scant input I have & my own experience, that we are all making a mistake to think there is time left to lead normal lives, let alone think in normal ways, when we think of "ten years". When I did my installation at Exit Art, one of my statements was we must make dramatic changes "immediately", first of all in our thinking. I am wondering if even that is too tame a statement.

I am not sure where the line is here between alarmism and reality. I suspect it's pretty thin. Despite what I wrote above, I believe we still have to live in paradoxical double vision- half normal for the sake of our sanity, half in triage. I would appreciate hearing more thoughts from others about how far we must go right now, further on local observations and what measures people are taking in their practice to address the apparent urgency.


This morning I got this from a friend:

June 12, 2006
Polar Bears May Be Turning to Cannibalism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:16 p.m. ET
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) –

CLIMATE CHANGE

This past weekend we have had a Noreaster up here. Normally that only happens in the winter. In the past five weeks, we have gotten forty per cent of the total rainfall we normally get annually. It is raining hard again now and another storm is scheduled to come in Wednes. I have been joking about rain forest North up here.

Of course it affects a lot, inc the fishing. No one recalls comparable weather at this time of year. I have been studying the larger systemic patterns and can not precisely figure out the dynamics relative to global warming. I suspect it may have more to do with the axis of the earth shifting slightly.

My question to you all is what weather anomalies you are observing local to where you live and what analysis you may be putting on them?

This past week, I noticed one established tree in my garden keeled over from how liquid the soil has become. I had come up from NYC with the remaining trees from the Exit Art show. The rest of the work is coming down today. When we dug the holes to plant the trees from the installation, they filled up with water like a well. One of the holes we dug on the slope that is part of the Ghost Nets site riparian zone filled up and wouldn't drain down at all, so we abandoned it.

The next day, water was pouring thru that hole like a regular mountain stream from the uplands. Normally we get about one half our total volume of rainfall to replenish our sole source aquifer in April and the other half in November. The volume of flow in the uplands riparian zone maxes out at one third what I saw yesterday by April and it disappears by now.

I had to plant the trees, already stressed by girdling from their time in the gallery and windburn from the ride up, in pools of water. Almost everywhere I dug, there was standing water. And since then we've had two more storms with no end in sight ahead.

Looking at the weather maps, it seems the Pacific is pushing the storms this way (perhaps from the warming there?) and it's almost as tho the Arctic is sucking them North towards us.Then the Atlantic seems to be pushing them back West from the Gulf of Maine so rather than go out to sea, they just keep swirling aroung New England. The latter may be related to talk of Britain going back into a mini ice age?

Informed insight is welcome.

Allan Kaprow, sustainable artist

The Allan Kaprow memorial was documented by BIBIANA PADILLA MALTOS on her website, for those who may wish to visit. Click on the Allan Kaprow memorial. It was a very, very moving event for those of us who could attend.

One speaker referred to him as the last of the "heroic generation of artists", who truly believed art could change the world. His work and the formal delivery systems he designed may provide one of the most enduring and prescient formal templates for sustainable art we have because it lay so lightly on the world and yet touched so profoundly.

One of the most beautiful elements of the day was the tribute of his widow, Coryl Crane, an Aikido master, who performed an Aikido meditation for him with her sword. The pictures don't do the dignity and elegance of her performance justice, but they do convey a hint. I will eventually write more about the day.

http://www.padillamaltos.blogspot.com