Global Thought Tsunamis? Antonio Cerveira Pinto on Change and Fear

I was struck Tuesday, in the "Virtual Concert," by some of Pinto's comments and Vision for museums in our age of global environmental crisises. He has curated the show opening May 5, "Bios4" for the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, in Seville, Spain. As a Portunguese artist-curator, who has been mainly working thru Spanish museums, he perceives museums globally, as places where communities can go in our coming age of "long-emergency," to get collaborative help to survive our times. He sees artists as having a "duty" to provide that help.

This is the most positive & provocative conceptualization & articulation of the new role for institutions I've heard. But he also cautioned that institutions are under-going a period of fear, in the face of the implications for change, much as ordinary people are facing in the face of global warming. At a time when experts are talking about the potential impacts of immigrations of possibly billions of peoples in response to desertifications, his ideas fascinated me in terms of envisioning & modeling a "bloodless" global immigration. Apparently he has hit a nerve, as since yesterday, there have already been 30 downloads, the most I've noticed in less than 24 hours.

Next week, Lucy McCarthy of the Vinalhaven Land Trust, will speak of the role of conserving relatively small areas in significant environmental change. Yesterday, there was a major NY Times article about Pulao, a small fishing village in the Philippines whose marine reserves have become an international model of hope for the fisheries.

Does this all mean there is hope that the great global tsunami of competitive greed, mindless consumption and isolationist lassitude has turned? Today, I am optimistic.

Virtual Thinking

Last night I attended one of the virtual telecasts of candidates from moveon.org. I had mixed feelings. First of all, the winner-take-all in my estimation was Gov. Bill Richardson, whose plans to get out of Iraq were grounded in an international vision for cultural inclusiveness and environmentally intelligent energy strategies. He was lucid, specific, modest and clear. Everyone else was vapid, posing and unoriginal at best. Halfway thru, I said outloud that, "he is going to get my money" and he did, this morning. Will he have a chance against the political machines? I don't know. It will be a test of sanity over familiarity I fear.

The good part was the chance to listen without the charisma factor. The bad part was not seeing a more complete webcam display and limited options for follow up input. The question to me, is how will the internet change the plausability factor? If it is no longer just about telegenics or delusions of having beer with a candidate, but humans still being the limted creatures we are, what common denominator will prevail as criteria for judgement?

At the gathering, I referred to the introduction of cahiers to the French peasants before the revolution. The French peasants were taught to read, write and fill in notebooks: cahiers, with thier political thoughts. Then they discussed those thoughts. Et voila, la revolution! Of course, that also trasnlated into the guilloutine. In our own times, the blog-olution has translated into permission to savage our neighbors with excoriating and often totally unmonitored textual assaults. Ann Coulter & Don Imus are the living embodiments. We rest uneasy, however, with these icons of negativity. Witness, Imus losing advertisers. But he still makes $10 000 000. a year and Coulter still sells books. How weary are we of the easy way out?

We will find out soon enuf. I believe it was Theodore Roscak who said that, " for every complex problem, there is a simple solution... and it is the wrong one. "

I have begun saying to people that I am beginning to question whether the very paradigm of framing conflict situations as problems that we can find solutions to, may be outdated. Outdated by what my new friend Dr Jim White of the Instaar Institute in Boulder calls, the (present) "oscillating base line (of global warming)."

Moveon wanted us to vote last night for whether we would keep the pressure on candidates to stay liberal. I am leery of this question because it presumes we are right and "they" are wrong (whomever doesn't agree with us).

What I want, is more attention to the ideas I heard from Richardson last night. It is not unrelated to me, that with constant application of acupuncture, my formerly dying dog continues to steadily improve and become more active. What I mean, is I'm less interested in how we can add another dimension of bullying to the world than how much pressure we can apply towards implementing workable strategies to achieve global health & healing.

Devastated

The new UN Report is out on climate change. I am overcome.

I have just read the new UN Climate Report. It is available at npr.org. It is devastating. And as many of you know, some countries, as China & Saudi Arabia, insisted on watered-down language for the effects on poor regions of the world. As I write, I am listening to some of the further specifics that aren't in the report.

It has been inescapable to me, for some time, to see the relationship between population increase, energy use that relies on tolerating carbon emissions & resource extraction. 100's of millions or even billions of people may die as a consequence.

Beyond the direct effects and consequences, the interdependent effects that are so devastating to me from this report, are the combination of weather pattern changes that will reduce arable land & precipitation into watersheds, sea level rise due to loss of ice that will endanger coastal regions with high populations and the loss of species that will have secondary ecosystem effects. We will see all this unfold in our lifetimes. By 2030, 70% of the water from the Ganges will be reduced and far more polluted, affecting 100's of millions of people in that region alone.

The continued & cumulative effects will persist and "evolve" for centuries, even if we all immediately adopt the most draconian means of adaptation. This has been generally known for some time but the cumulative psychological effects of the details is what has devastated me.

Until now, I've been able to maintain a fairly positive attitude about the opportunities for our species to meet this challenge. But today I am less optimistic. It is less about my general grief for what we have engendered than the incessant images of wasting polar bear cubs, dying of starvation because their parents have drowned, swimming endless out into seas bereft of seals, that leave me feeling so devastated.

It is staggering to me, to accept all this and my part as a human being, in these circumstances.

The Electronics and Dynamics of Change

Acupuncture presumes that we are electronic entities. On my dog, it has had miraculous results. She is walking unaided.

Last weekend, for the ESA conference on Sustainability http://www.new-arts-frontiers.eu in Lueneberg, Germany, I used an electronic collage of Unyte, webcam, pen tablet and audio signal to present from my island, on the topic of my theories about how we can heal degraded landscapes.

The healing I see in my dog gives me joy & hope. She seems very happy and pain free. But she will never be a puppy again. Still, I am grateful for these changes I see.

The presentation for ESA was astonishing because I did it from my little fishing island thirteen miles out to sea. The night before, I sang in a local concert. The presentation was the very next morning at 7:AM. I was tired and there were audio and recording glitches. It was still amazing.

Acupuncture and virtuality, both mystically connected to invisible (electronic) powers to effect change. Astonishing and hopeful.

The Fragrance of Hope

I wrote the following post a month ago but have had trouble posting since blogger.com improved themselves.

The fragrance of Spring is the smell of hope. I took my dog out for a walk two days ago. She has recovered from her near-death experience, thanks to acupuncture, and with the assistance of a sling and my support, is walking. On this occasion, she didn't have any goal for our walk except to inhale deeply and stand in the breeze letting all the perfumes of Spring pass her by. That was her goal on the same day I had Dr. Michele Dionne on the Virtual Concert.

Michele was talking about salt marshes and global warming. Altho they are the lungs of the earth's waters and being squeezed out by development on the one hand and rising sea levels on the other, she is optimistic that hurricanes will solve it all. Hurricanes will wipe away the coastal infrastructures and the grasses will return. Just wait.

It is like hoe the fires in Yellowstone gave rise to Disturbance Theory. That is, sometimes the slate needs to be wiped clean to all new growth. Of course, the caveat, is what or whom) gets destroyed in that process.So, ever since, as I inhale Spring along with my dog, I contemplate hope in the form of endless hurricanes. I suppose that is the significance of Shiva, the destroyer in Hindu thinking. Hard way to solve these problems