Jet Emissions, Choices and Satisfactions

The conversation with Sam Bower on the 10: AM ET Virtual Concert today lays a little base for a discussion of why the virtual world is so important and yet so tricky in addressing global warming and other environmental issues.

The Virtual Concerts I am doing with TalkShoe.com emerged from the Virtual Residency I did last Summer from this site. They are my continuing effort to address jet fuel emissions, my own physiological limits and still practice internationally as an ecological artist. The genesis of that idea is in the essay I wrote for greenmuseum.org:

"Birthing A Virtual Residency" by Aviva Rahmani Artist
Aviva Rahmani provides an overview of how attending an ecological conference inspired a change in her work.
Birthing:
http://tinyurl.com/yzfxdy

A parody of why this is important is in the following article about “Spurt”, a group defending airlines right to spew carbon emissions over the world:
http://tinyurl.com/yjerkv

Nicholas Kristof has a more serious take on things in today’s NY Times:
http://tinyurl.com/yf9k3x

I am not satisfied with proposals to buy carbon credits as a solution for jet emissions. As with the tobacco industry, the solutions to bad situations and serious consequences have to be far more dramatic. The technology is there, it is just not being applied. That applies to both travelers and industry execs- as much as ecological artists.

That said, as Sam implies, and we all know, there are times when jet travel is the only solution. So the question comes back again to human factors: when to make the trade off, how to take responsibility for the consequences and how to develop the means to find alternatives.

Sam Bower vs Global Warming Head in Sands

Sam Bower of greenmuseum.org will be on tomorrow's Virtual Concert at 10: AM on TalkShoe.com. We will talk about virtual vs on the ground ecological art sites and the trade off in carbon emissions at stake.

Meanwhile, some others experience no conflict whatever these days, let alone pain.

Just as reports come out that global warming is going to impact the globe as much as the great depression or a world war, The New Yorker and others are publishing reports on water subsidence in India and China, as proceeding at alarming rates and British reports announce that carbon emissions have not appreciably declined in Europe, UPI reports that Michael Palmer, a TV Station manager in Bangor, Maine, has told WVII and WFVX to black out all reports on global warming.

I am speechless at the willful stupidity of some people and struggling to be generous, optimistic and ooooooooooooooooooo.............. let it go? No, just be grateful there are people like Sam Bower and I have forums like this and the Virtual Concerts

Lawsuits on Global Warming

I am always interested in enforcement. It is the part of me that appreciates good fences, appropriate boundaries, efficient solutions and control.

Business Week reports that a lot of other people think so too. 16 cases in state & federal courts holding companies liable. I relish it. It is SOooooooooooooooooooooooo frustrating to hear namby pamby pronouncements & delays as the world literally burns and polar bears drown.

http://tinyurl.com/y24afx

Meanwhile, back on the Virtual Concerts, I got to talk about Tom McCormack's work as a Native American performer and activist and Carl Safina on the shameful treatment of our oceans today. Next week, Sam Bower of the greenmuseum will speak about interfacing the showcasing of virtual and on the ground ecological art.

After a fair amount of labour, the link to the coming schedule of Virtual Concerts is now up and running on my site for your delectation. The link is: http://www.ghostnets.com/Global_Warming_Event_3.htm

Bill McKibben on Global Warming and Energy Alternatives

Bill McKibben has an article coming out in the Nov 16 New York Review of Books which is being previewed by Grist at the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/yemtp5

McKibben's closing statement, after reviewing recent books on topic, is, in effect, ' do not ever let anyone tell you we need fossil fuels. It is a lie.'

Meanwhile, he quotes James Lovelock to the effect that perhaps 200 million people will survive the coming global warming crisis, a nice stable number that will live near the Arctic. Travis Bradford, in "Solar Revolution"is the answer for McKibben but not the solution.

Add that to all the other lies this adminstration does better than anyone else. And as far as I can see, the one and only enduring legacy to inspire awe from Bush & Co.: how many people have been fooled for how long and at what cost? Astonishing. In any case, McKibben puts the kabosh on that.

The real solution, he implicitly concludes, is a sense of community around this crisis. And we all know how close we are to that....

A Trigger Point That Became the Virtual Residency of 2006: greenmuseum.org Writing

I am pleased to refer my gentle readers to a recently published virtual article I had written last Summer, now available on greenmuseum.org:

"Birthing A Virtual Residency" by Aviva Rahmani
"Artist Aviva Rahmani provides an overview of how attending an ecological conference inspired a change in her work."
http://www.greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=268

This article touches on some important theories I have about how to analyze "Trigger Points" in a landscape to catalyze large landscape restoration. It also addresses emerging scientific approaches to building healthy socio-political bases for restoration thru play at the New England Workshop for Science and Social Change.

Ear to the Earth

Last week, I attended the Ear to the Earth festival (www.eartotheearth.org) in NYC. Put together by Joel Chadabe, President of the Electronic Music Foundation, it included some transcendently beautiful work, as the ambitious symphonic composition by Pierre Marieton from the found sounds of Hanoi, to some rather slight work by young artists. Much was far too loud for me but all was instructive.

Fascinating panels were interspersed thruout events showcasing the work of artists with scientists, as Andrea Polli and Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig (Columbia) and David Dunn with Jim Tolisano of Kinship Fellows, who pointed out that it was an artist, Alfred Wallace, who provided the observations upon which Charles Darwin based his theories of evolution. Dunn has been recording pine bark beetles, discovering what attracts them to trees and collating information that may now address the devastating infestations out West.

What were most moving to me were a series of installations based on gathered sounds, as Annea Lockwood map and soundscaping of the Danube, Philip Dadson of New Zealand on the Antarctica and the crown jewel, Suspended Sounds, a collaborative work by Joan LaBarbara, Chadabe, Alvin Curran, David Monacchi and Mort Sobotnick, listed as an equal collaborator, my former mentor from graduate school, who protested that his only involvement was at a dinner. I appreciated the spirit of generous attribution of the organizers.

The, Suspended Sounds, project organized the sounds of extinct and endangered animals into a series of Scenes, opening with the delicate voices of the extinct Dusky Seaside Sparrow and Bachmans Warbler and closing with the plaintive sound of the endangered Hawaiian Kauai O o bird.

In the final panel, Saturday October 14th, it was referenced from the World Watch Institute that we are now losing 10-20 000 species a year, compared to 4 per year in the past. We will shortly have lost two-thirds of all species. I found it heart-breaking to listen to the complex and beautiful calls of animals we have destroyed without a thought.

One of the most charming events was a chance to compare the rain sounds of Hildegaard Westerkamp, co-founder of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology from British Columbia and Steven Miller, recording sounds from the Pecos River in New Mexico. The former was light and comforting, the latter was threatening and dramatic, reflecting the respective ecological functions of rain in those ecologies.

An opening installation and closing panel participation was from Laurie Speigel, on NYC pigeons. She has observed that rats and pigeons compete for food and where there is an abundance of pigeons, there are fewer rats. She presented her comparisons between dogs and pigeons, pointing out that pigeons, as dogs, were bred to be dependent upon humans and tho now feral, are neither truly wild nor domestic. In captivity, they typically live into their twenties and mate for life. In the wilds of the city, their average life span is only two years. The installation was a series of views of these beautiful, intelligent and much maligned animals.

A notable element of all these works was the cross-disciplinary nature, in which visual and acoustic practice, science and art blurred and for the most part, created powerful statements about what we must all embrace if we are still to save something of this fragile earth for all the inhabitants. We share this planet and like pigeons, in many cases, are neither fully wild nor fully domesticated. What we are all dependent upon, is the kindness of strangers with a conscience.

Jo Hanson; Reuters on global warming

Tomorrow, October 17, the Virtual Concert event will be a talk from pioneer ecological artist, Jo Hanson, in San Francisco, on the eve of the Bioneers conference in San Rafael, CA.: bioneers.org.
Please join me on TalkShoe.com tomorrow morning, Oct 17, at 10: AM ET.

Reuters reports that a few bill dollars now will save trillions down the line on global warming:

http://tinyurl.com/wy8sr

What do you suppose the percentages are that world governments will pony up? I will not hold my breathe.

Insuring Global Warming

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Firemans Fund will give credits to green architechture and steer customers to green materials.
http://tinyurl.com/y4vflo

My friend Grace Jeffers, however, who recently wrote a book, about to be released, about building materials tells me that ultimately there is no such thing as environmentally friendly building material.

This strikes me as related to the problem of jet flying. In preparing an abstract for a conferenceon Sustainability in Germany this coming Spring, I voiced my concern about using jet fuel to get there. I was kindly steered to: www.atmosfair.de. This airline gives carbon credits. But it still uses fuel.

What is the answer? Do we stand still? Stop building entirely? Stop having children to tip us back from any possible revocable sustainable living point on this planet?

The global warming we experience today is the result of what we did in the seventies. Scary, huh? That means we have thirty years of catch up & consequences ahead.

Also in the early seventies, I did a sound event, "Stay Wait Look Listen", that projected my very soft voice into a very large architechtural space with those four words, spoken slowly and with about 30 sec. between. I recycled that concept many times and it was already a recyling from an earlier version I'd designed years earlier.

Is it possible that that is what is required: "Stay Wait Look Listen"? Would that mean we sit down and wait, as in a story someone told me about rainforest guides or perhaps it was sherpas... until our souls catch up with our bodies?

Something tells me that may be exactly what is required right now.

Considering Today's Virtual Concert

Today I broadcast the Virtual Concert around water problems in India, reading the eloquent text in the new book soon to come out from Indian artist Ravi Agarwal and from a letter he wrote me in July. This is an example of a conversation that emerged from the Virtual Residency last Summer. It is a conversation I hope will be followed up with a further episode at another time, as Don Krug and I have also discussed pursueing a workshop with his students in this format.

I can see that one function of the Virtual Concerts may be to extend and develop conversations about common ecological issues over time.

The whole goal of the Virtual Residency was to find easier ways for those of us who are working ecologically to communicate with and help eachother. India’s problems are the problems of Vinalhaven island, where I live.

There are so many problems in the world to distract us all from this most crucial one: water links and how global warming will create a feedback of effects. The cumulative effect will make a coming crisis that much more serious and urgent. I am glad to have this new format to explore new ways to search for solutions.

Ravi Agarwal on Virtual Concert, Paul Challacombe on McLuhan

Since July of this past Summer, I have been corresponding with Indian artist & activist Ravi Agarwal about the water situation in India. He just sent me his first draft of a beautiful new book he is doing on the Yamuna River, which flows thru New Delhi. I am looking forward to reading portions from it on tomorrow's Virtual Concert, at 10AM ET at TalkShoe.com.

My indefatigable friend Paul Challacombe reminds me for my broadcast, that enunciation is important, as is feeling, so I shall go to sleep and be as rested as I can be to do that reading as clearly as I can.

Paul also writes, re: disembodiment: "One of my conversations with Professor McLuhan considered the telephone. He said once we started with that technology and in another way radio, we all became angels -- that is for first time in history we truly were weightless and spanned time and space in an instant.

I told him that was reassuring since I had previously been told these machines were the work of the devil.

You actually couldn't kid around too much about this kind of stuff with McLuhan because near the end of his life he became a rather serious Catholic. "

Experiments in Application for "Virtual Concerts"

As I continue down this brave new world of experimenting with using virtual analogs to save carbon emissions on traveling to physical sites for environmental interventions, I am encountering masses of small unforeseen problems.

For example, creating episodes of "Virtual Concerts", for TalkShoe.com. The fun part is lining up & designing the episodes to break down issues that arose in the Virtual Residencies. The other part has included that my normal speaking voice is so soft it requires special phones and tons of sophisticated adjustments. Who knew? I have been struggling to solve this problem since the first Virtual Concert in early August.

What I can't control at all, is whether I have insomnia the night before. Let alone a late night of creative revelry. Live at 10AM can challenge my aplomb and cheeriness on four hours sleep. Or alternately, my attention span.. and consequently the listener's. It makes me feel far more respectful of TV broadcasting people like Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric than I ever was before.

Incidentally, as a person with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, who uses my illness as a template for sustainability, these glitches require constant rethinking of my strategies.

It is weird, grounded as a visual and sometimes performance artist, to rely entirely on the ear, broadcasting from a silent room all by myself. I feel very and literally am, disembodied. Disembodied to address very material concerns. It sometimes makes me feel disoriented- not a good thing when you are broadcasting live. The old style radio shows always had sound engineers and others around.

This past week, the "Ear to the Earth" festival has begun in NYC and all sorts of wonderful people have gathered to present and talk about acoustic ecologies. But it is far away (for me) and requires (for me) exhausting travel. So the day after, I can't get any work done. It is wonderful to think of artists all over the world gathering found sound and sound that localizes itself. The great value of cities is the opportunity to convene in person on such occasions. But how to access everyone else?

Ah well, that brings me back to the earlier paragraphs today and my "Virtual Concerts". Once I solve all these technical glitches anyway. And get some sleep.

I told you so

Early last Summer, I initiated a 49 day virtual residency rather go to 4 international sites in person. I could no longer face spewing emissions in my jet travel in the serivice of my environmental, eco-art agenda. Apparently others are beginning to pay attention to this kind of disconnect:
http://tinyurl.com/rvg7u .

Monsoons and Global Warming; Standing at Courts

There have been articles lately about the effect of El Nino on Indian Monsoons and consequently watershed issues of having enuf water. These monsoons are affected by global warming that changes weather patterns of precipitation.

There have also been articles about loss of vegetation, plant species, due to the inability of plants to out run global warming. These would be the same plants that protect the watershed.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court in this country is scheduled to review a case brought by California against the EPA, to the effect that it is not doing the job it is mandated to do. The outcome will depend upon the legal question of "standing". That is, have those bringing the case been suffciently damaged.

The plants going extinct, the starving polar bears, the millions of thirsty Indians, presumably cannot bring suit.

What does this have to do with ecological art? It is the raw meat.