Following up the Work

I always imagined that one big blast of insight & vision would transform the world I know. I know better now. Before and after, there are endless phone calls, notes and paperwork to fill out. Offers come in to participate in events and appear at important places with important people, without much recompense and I have to thread my way diplomatically and prudently thru the priorities of what I believe in.

Meanwhile chunks of ice fall into the warming oceans, more polar bears die and penguins may be extinct in the wild soon. And here, back home I need to be sure my bills are still paid on time, my car gets fixed, my animals are happy and I have a chance to recuperate from exhaustion to have another day of work completed, one day at a time.

I have been keeping this blog, albeit intermittently, for almost two years and have gone from feeling like only a few of us are shreiking alarms in the wilderness of global warming, to knowing that millions are now concerned and confused. But the news keeps getting grimmer and more urgent every day.

Today, nation's leaders met at the UN in NYC. Bush was "too busy" to attend. Ahem, no comment. Except to say that any child born in the free world uses 25 times the resources of any child born in the third world.

Bush believes in "voluntary compliance" to address global warming. That only works when perpetrators actually feel the pain they inflict on others. As Bush dickers over the fine print on medically insuring children in this country, the same day he was "too busy" to show up to discuss global warming with his peers, I wonder, does he feel ANY pain, for anything or anyone? And if that indifference is his model for voluntary compliance, then the very words are meaningless. Half the work of following up global warming is in the heart and the spirit.

Backing off from the Tipping Point?

Today, in the Arts & Leisure section of the NY Times, on page 35, Claire Dederer wrote an article about the new show my work is in: "Looking for Inspiration in the Melting Ice." The show is at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (bmoca.org), and is terrific: 51 artists and a fabulous catalog.

For almost five months, I did little except work on preparing my collaborative project for this show: "Trigger Points/ Tipping Points," which was also shown at the Venice Beinnale. The work was with Dr. Jim White, for "Weather Report," curated by Lucy Lippard for the BMoCA and opened Sept 14.

I took the train there and back, did two "Virtual Concerts" the week I was there aboutt he show and now am reflecting on what was accomplished besides the work, which I'm proud of. Dr. White and I created a project comparing a series of conflict zones in river deltas: Darfur, Bangladesh and New Orleans, to understand the relationship to global warming. We posed various questions to eachother and studied research and mapping to analyze data.

There is one lingering question now, are there actions we might take, now that we are in the rock bottom baseline point that will tip us into disaster with in the next five years, to forestall utter calamity of hundreds of millions more people and species than are already devastated?