I recently discovered Facebook and find it easier to post there than on my own blog. I confess it's because there are other people around. It doesn't feel as lonely. I just posted 3 photo albums there: about going to New Orleans, my Maine studio and Push Pull at LACMA last spring. I'm still a bit confused about what goes where on the net.
Here I can post in more depth about my own concerns. Primary right now are the Bush efforts to hamstring our future with his political appointees, as NOAA and legislative roll backs on critical legislation, as endangered species. It's hard to fathom if the man has any understanding or integrity at all but that's not my concern. My concern is how the new administration can put things back together. This Tuesday, Hannah Pingree will be on the Virtual Concerts and I shall ask her exactly that. Pingree is the Majority Leader for the Maine House of Representatives and daughter of Chellie Pingree, newly elected to the US Senate.
The US Supreme Court just ruled that the Navy can conduct sonar tests despite clear evidence of damage to whales, dolphins and other sea creatures. I hope the international court takes us to court over this. California, whose coast this concerns has recently passed a farm animal protection bill and Spain has addressed specism. Isn't it time to put Manifest Destiny on trial?
The artist Bonita Ely has sent me a link to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Nov 11, 2008 program on lost drift nets, ghostnets in the Gulf of Carpinteria in Northern Australia. As is happening globally, the lost & discarded gear of foreign, mostly southeast Asian, particularly Thai, fishing fleets has wadded up in enormous balls. The largest found so far: 6 kilometres, weighing 6 tons and 6 metres deep.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2008/s2415642.htm
The ghostnets kill mostly turtles, but also lots of birds, endangered fish as well as being threats to local small fishing boats manned by indigenous people.
It's hard (painful, wearying) for me to comment on these nets. For twenty years, ghostnets has been the moniker for the core of all my work: Ghost Nets, the project. I can still rage at their existence, despair at the short sightedness of people who use them and extrapolate about the implications for all the habits and routines of thinking and behavior that permits this horror and is reflected in so many other aspects of social and cultural norms. They have been outlawed in many places but ocean currents wash them up from illegal or simply unregulated boats to be deposited wherever the tides take them. I can still be sadly reminded of how apt the metaphor is.
What I can say that's positive, is that there are cadres of volunteers trying to clean them up. Gary Luchi of the Carpenteria Ghostnets Program wants to initiate educational programs in the countries of origin for these deadly nets and invite volunteers to come help clean them up. One day walking the beaches and seeing dead animals entwined in the monofilament wires may speak louder than anything else.
Since the election, I have felt a great sense of elation and deflation. The elation is that the Republican corruption and mis-management is at least temporarily purged; that youthful idealism and hope once more has a place in this democracy. The deflation is what a big job is ahead and the fact that all the same problems prevail.
One of those problems is the difficulty of being heard with innovative thinking. Al Gore posted a long editorial in the NY Times Sunday, listing what the administration needs to do to address global warming. It was shockingly tame. It included obvious points such as low emission cars. It did not mention the potential of art to introduce entire fresh thinking.
It was my honor to work with Dr. Jim White of the INSTAAR Institute and the Unversity of Colorado at Boulder, in 2007, to create "Trigger Points/ Tipping Points," an installation and DVD for the "Weather Report" show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder. Now we are planning to resume work in January 2009. In our original project, we compared conflict zones in three deltaic systems impacted by global warming and climate change: Darfur in relation to the Nile, Bangladesh in relation to the Ganges and New Orleans in relation to the Mississippi. We are not sure where we will go now. Our goals are to break some new ground and open some doors and windows in how to think aboutt he problems ahead.
In sum, it's a heartening time despite the mountain of ecological problems to address. I sense in colleagues, that we are all entering a new era of possibility in the face of our challenges. May it be so.
