Warm

Despite the short-lived blizzard in Chicago this week, it was 70 degrees in New Jersey today. In Maine we've had light rain for two days that should have been snow.

The fishermen say the ocean temps last week were 48 degrees, unheard of warm for up here and the lobsters were gone to colder waters by October. The Supreme Court says the issue of enforcing EPA standards comes down to pinpointing where & when the cataclysm will happen to confirm "standing" to prove injury.

It reminds me of any garden variety case over rape or domestic violence a few years back. Where is the harm? The victim has not gotten any broken bones or isn't dead yet so where is the real harm or danger? Come in and complain when we have habeus corpus: the dead body. A little late by then isn't it? The harm is in the incidence of asthma and lost species.

People see what they want to see. As an artist, how to make them see the harm? By asking them to pay attention.

Connecting Dots, from Darfur to the New York Art World and Jodi Hanel

It was so warm in New York City when I went to see the Ecotopia show at the International Center for Photography yesterday, that I wore a light jacket, open over an open necked t-shirt. This is too warm for this climate at this time of year. Home in Maine, it is colder but not enuf colder. Why is that important? Because besides all the desperately dying human coastal cultures, animal species, forests and wetlands world-wide, there is a statistical relationship between drought and strife. Global warming redistributes rain and results in drought. It makes competition for resources all the more ruthless, including in Africa.

I compared Ectopia to The Drop, at Exit Art last spring, which will be represented by Jodi Hanel on the Virtual Concert this Tuesday. That show was arguably a bit more didactic than Ectopia. Artists implicitly said things like: "don't eat endangered fish. Don't drink bottled water. Take actions that will reduce global warming." The audience for "the Drop" was smaller than the 250 people a day average that came thru Ectopia but were they any more or less moved to necessary action?

The Ectopia show is painful. It presents some of the many ways humans destroy the earth with hardly a thought. My question is, does it and should it point the way to options?

Lauren O'Neill-Butler, writing for the November Art Forum, lauded Ectopia for eschewing idealism, didactism, moralism, judgementalism and utopianism. "Saved" was her term. In other words, it successfully stood back and did not interfere with our options to continue to self-destruct unless, by free choice, we felt compelled to do so?

Excuse me. Artists do not stop being citizens of the world. Or are we all supposed to pander to the collectors, trustees and so on that profit from Exxon Chevron & so on? Art has too long been emasculated. Arguably this goes back to the arguments over abstract expressionism as a safe way to make art.

When people and species are dying, art doesn't have that option any more than anything else on this earth. The notion of art divorced from morality is as ridiculous to me as the notion of .... oh well. I won't go off on more of a tirade. I just think art history has always been about content and has often straddled the divide with patrons with questionable moral credentials. The O'Neill- Butler review concludes with a relevant question: "the curators seem to question how far empathy really takes us, and how much longer it will be before the future is now."

Jeroen Van Westen

Jeroen Van Westen will be my guest today on the Virtual Concerts. He is an ecological artist working with engineers in the Netehrlands. I expect to discuss his work, the work of his colleagues and how the Netherlands is dealing with global warming. Better than us in the USA I would venture to guess.

A New Astonishing Experience, Psychological Subsidence

In the NY Times today, an article on the effects of over-using the Yellow River in China, http://tinyurl.com/yc7tcb, illustrates the limits imposed by over-extraction of natural resources (water). This is the same problem I have been writing about in New Delhi since early summer. The difficulty I see is that people are not sufficiently humble and flexible to adapt to those limitations. People resist defining a Vision and Actions that are realistic. Me too.

Early in my experiments with Virtual Concerts, thanks to input from Hans Tammen of Harvestworks & my own observations, I realized there were two problems that mirrored larger demographic divides over global warming. We need to create consensus across that divide to achieve sustainable Vision and realistic Actions.

I call this the need for pan-demographic consensus.

The first problem in this divide is that the youngest people are the most user friendly to the tech but the least intellectually developed to grasp the implications of complex problems around global warming. The other is that older generations, well-equipped to work thru the concepts, were either rigid in thier thinking (less true as the continuing dire info on global warming is doled out in the media) or resistant to learning the tech to access the process. The latter is slowly shifting. The former was a mystery. Both are questions of exposure to data and continuing education. Until last tonight.

Last night, I was the guest of someone else on TalkShoe. Joh Buehler hosts a show at 10:PM Saturdays on TalkShoe, called: Reinventing Eden. It was fascinating. John is a lovely, gracious, knowledgeable host and I will look forward to listening to some of his previous podcasts.

I prepared for the show by reviewing all my past blogs thru to Aug 1 on global warming.

What I couldn't prepare for was that I had to give up control in a new way and take responsibility in another way than I do when I moderate my own Tuesday shows to talk about global warming. Furthermore, I could tell John is a Republican. I could tell he was a Republican beacuse he said two nice things about them. He also took a deep breathe when I referred to the election. I am not often in the position of discussing global warming with Republicans.

And we are on the same side of what I call this little Jihad of Reason in response to global warming. The only thing we disagreed about was whether there are more fools than wise people out there to forestall the consequences of global warming. John thinks there are more fools than I do. You can listen to us reach that point of difference by logging on and clicking "Listen" at TalkShoe. What is more important, that we agree on, is the potential of this media to address global warming by creating a pan-demographic constituency.

But that wasn't the truly astonishing part.

The astonishing part was that one of the listeners, who has a talkshoe scheduled to follow John's at 11: PM ET Saturday is thirteen. He told us he was thirteen and I thought he meant he had an access code of #13. No. He meant he is thirteen eyars old and his show followed Eden and he wanted us to come to it. He had been doing his homework while listening to us. He was doing that while we talked about 40% carbon emissions from coal and how the education of women results in lower populations. He was doing that while we discussed politics and biological diversity and dying polar bears and ecological art and Jeroen Van Westen who will be my guest this Tuesday. Before we closed, he invited us to his talkcast.

John & I are older and were sleepier, possibly in another time zone and begged off. But a little later, I signed on out of curiousity and sure enuf, I saw John there and heard a thirteen year old voice. All I could say was: Goodness (as in goodness gracious, land sakes alive).

An inadequate response to an astonishing experience.

If this medium can be truly pan-demographic then it can realize everything I could hope for in terms of outreach and building consensus from shared data. If I can talk with a Republican about global warming to an audience of thirteen year olds, anything can happen.

The young man's name is Evan Ruede and apparently he has a talkcast, an audience in his age range and he is lined up right alongside us in the roster. I am astonished and rendered optimistic out of my mind.

On John's show, John asked me what would be my take away for the audience. I said, stay, wait, look listen. Stay where we are long enuf to learn how to cope with human intransigence & greed. Wait till we know what can be done before we build more coal factories. Look at the dying polar bears and missing monarchs. Listen to the data that is gathering over lost coastlines and land subsidence. Pay attention to it all. I said this media teaches us all the skills we we need to solve the problems: humility & flexibility. Humility before technoilogy, flexibility in how we respond to technology and the potential it offers. these are the same tools we need to address global warming now.

I just got tested on both counts tonight: in my own process of exposure to data and continuing education. I encountered a need for another measure of humility and was challenged to be flexible.

Land subsidence in response to resource extraction may be locking humankind into a death-spiral in denial of limits but an unlimited human resource is humility and flexibility. In fact, it may be the only resource that seems to expand in capacity the deeper it is mined.

Imagine: thirteen!!!

At Last Justice for Global Warming?

I was pleased to see what I've been waiting to see for years: that this administration is being sued over it's deliberate malfaesance over global warming.

http://tinyurl.com/yerp5w

I have been alternately enjoying a post-election afterglow and recovering from making 50 calls for moveon.org that night to help create the tipping point.

Kofi Annan is also impatient about Global Warming, exhorting the USA and China from Africa to hop on board before it's too late. Last night I listened to an account of the effects of using coal- 40% of the source of carbon emissions and no guarantee that carbon sequestration will work.

All these options need to be co-ordinated: population control, international law, habitat fragmentation, energy use, resource extraction and water subsidence. This is a design issue as much as an intellectual puzzle.

Moritz Wettstein, Janet Goldner, Richard Pombo and Ecological Art

I have cast a broad net on this blog and in the Virtual Concerts. Composer Moritz Wettstein was my guest yesterday on the Virtual Concerts. Wettstein, an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks, spoke about the NETPD project he is involved with. I introduced his work by saying I saw this kind of work as an "Aesthetic Math" of creating solutions for international acoustic infacing for ecological monitoring.

Next week, Janet Goldner will speak to how the culture of Mali has affected her sculpture. As with Wettstein, my interest is in how artists and ecologies cross-pollinate eachother and the tracking of that interactive effect.

Last night I made fifty calls, mostly to Missouri and Virginia. I was part of a phone crew for moveon.org of almost 700 000 people who made close to 1 million calls. I participated on an evening when I was exhausted and had other commitments. Today, I am even more exhausted but elated beyond words!

I am thrilled beyond words that Americans have rejected Bush policies, sent anti-wildlife Representative Richard Pombo, Chairman of the powerful House Resources Committee packing and squeezed a door open for us all to once again address global warming, along with so many other issues, more realistically.

At the International Society for Ecological Restoration in Zaragoza, Spain last year, one of the more sobering conversations I had with Europeans, was whether global warming can be addressed without American support. After reflection they said "No". Bush still has veto power but he is significantly weakened at a crucial historical point in addressing this most crucial issue internationally.

On my blog and in my Virtual Concerts, I do my best to make the connection between such horizontal efforts and the larger picture of our art practice. Activism and formalism cross-pollinate. It is one more applied lesson from Allan Kaprow: work horizontally, even in vertical systems.

Fish and Global Warming and Virtual Concerts

In 2048 the oceans will be dead. That's the worst case scenario if we don't change our wicked ways.

Almost twenty years ago, I began the Ghost Nets project in response to what I saw of depleted fisheries, global warming and other environmental issues. It was a metaphor as well as a reality. Now the reports are coming out about how direly our patterns drive us into self-destruction, taking the whole world with us, particularly those fisheries:

http://tinyurl.com/ymyoxw

My continuing goal with the Virtual Residencies and Virtual Concerts is to explore other optional behavior. Each episode of Virtual Concerts on TalkShoe.com is designed to explore an aspect of that potential, essentially the potential for change.

The next Virtual Concert episode with Moritz Wettstein is like paying attention to a mathematical model. The model, virtual musical experimentation, can be applied to creating a variety of global networks. The same thinking that can create fishery reserves to protect future stocks.

The biggest problem in over-fishing is bycatch. That is the same dysfunctional model that privileges a few at the expense of many. But the few won't do mucyh better than the rest of us if the planet as a whole is not treasured. So here is to treasure: may you all enjoy and protect it.

Recycling; Oil & Water

Lives Per Gallon; the True Cost of Our Oil Addiction is a new book by Terry Tamminen Island Press

The Last Drop; Confronting the Possibility of a Global Catastrophe, is a recent article on water by Michael Spector for The New Yorker Magazine 10-23-06

In a conversation with artist Christy Rupp, about the truly fabulous work by El Anatsui at David Krut Projects gallery (amazing constructions from bottle caps by this Ghana artist) last night, I mentioned an article and a book that addressed oil & water. She asked for the references and it occurred to me that others may want them also (see above).

The latter article, begins with a description of the same water conditions in New Delhi, India that mesmerized me last Summer in the first Virtual Concerts. The image detail, of water being delivered by truck, to be gathered in plastic pails by residents, is on my site under the Virtual Concerts Schedule of episodes, by Hemant Sreekumarfor from Khoj International there.

So what will it be folks on the almost eve of the elections? Your money or you life? The Jack Benny version is a pause to consider... which has been this administrations byword at all the wrong times: do not pause en route to war or money, echoed by the Chief Justices http://tinyurl.com/yaduag in recent rulings against the EPA's efforts to enforce sanctions of power companies, pause to consider the environment while we despoil our natural resources.