Posts (page 2)
I find my own definition of sustainable is constantly evolving and I suspect this may be an important point to consider in any discussion of sustainability: that it is a fluid and moving target.
The question I have is related to this same thought, re: the decision that is being given a lot of attention in the liberal press here in the states, for Europe to rely on coal again. China’s overwhelming reliance on building new coal refineries is troubling enuf, but I was shocked to learn that some European plants are converting to coal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/europe/23coal.html?th&emc=th
I wonder what others, esp from Europe might comment about this?
In my own work, what I keep returning to is the question of population: pressure for energy, food, water that is being supplied with coal, biofuels, Monsanto-type products, building densities, over-fishing, etc. This is causing irremedial problems whose source seems to go back over & over to population control. Yet no one seems willing to address this head on re: sustainability.
To return to my recent theme of correlaries with CFS, a recurrent issue is how whatever this illness is, it seems to mutate the symptoms. But what is consistent is that any effort based on driving myself, stress, exertion of any kind, seems to exacerbate symptoms, whether I have control of events or not- a shift in weather, someone else's distress- everything affects me and my illness. I do meditate and so on yet things activate my CFS anyway. Symptoms range from swollen glands & low grade fever, to msucle spasms, to sleep disturbance, to irritability to fiantness and so on. In other words, any effort to exert myself past my limits, has an impact that reveals how unsustainable CFS makes life. The analogy I see is that the earth simply cannot sustain more people. It is too fragile. I cannot sustain equilibrium under any added (normal) load because my system has become likewise fragile. The earth cannot accomodate a demand for more food, water or energy past a finite point of no return. It responds as unpredictably as CFS does with me, with inexplicable located tornados, droughts, food riots and cliamte extremes that require us to retrench. Likewise, CFS requires me to accept that any jostling of my status quo has an impact that requires me to be immobilized for days or at least hours, at a time, to recover.
Yet the world, in response to global warming and climate change, has NOT shifted gears. More coal plants does NOt represent admitting that increased energy output is unsustainable.
It has been my goal in recent years to experiment with virtual solutions to global warming. The recent NY Times Sunday magazine section is an encyclopaedia of earth/ climate friendly ideas and solutions. There is a bandwagon but so far it is restricted, with most artists at the sidelines.
Today I sent out a press release for Earth Day, reiterating what I've been doing and why, about virtuality and global warming. What I don't explicitly say but that is implied in the image, is the exhaustion of doing this despite CFS. What I think about that, is that just as we must spend some up front cash now to mitigate the worst effects later, so have I been spending my stamina.
This weekend I will be in Ithaca, New York, at the Level Green Institute there, as part of a weekend symposium on what we can do, a precursor to an UNESCO event in 2009. I had proposed a virtual project as a public art event for the weekend. The organizer, Patricia Haines. explained that the financial powers that be didn't get it. So my task this weekend, will be to try to help them get why it's critical to support artists who are experimenting with virtual solutions to global warming.
Not a moment too soon.
The Ghost Nets project was based on the premise that just like acupuncture might cure my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) by identifying places where energy is blocked, critical points in the landscape could be identified for restoration, with larger impacts. In the future, I'd like to devise and find funding to prove whether that can be proven.
Meanwhile, the process of actually doing that, restoring the former coastal dump site of Ghost Nets on Vinalhaven Island, despite being debilitated by CFS, has meant that I have had to work very slowly, learn a lot and depend on the kindness and interest of others. These were lessons I have needed to learn as much about healing myself, as healing the land.
One of the things I had to learn was just how interdependent my personal healing would be with the land's healing. This was something I had intuited & presumed, but living it over a ten year period was a different experience. A lot of what I experienced was adapting to and accepting the uncertain consequences of risks I chose to take. This is a difficult lesson for anyone but it is the same sort of lesson we need to learn to cope with global warming.
For me, that has meant paying attention to bottom lines of how I take care of myself. At the Ghost Nets site, that meant sitting and studying the plants, the winds, the volunteer indigenous interactions and the persistent eruptions of of exotic species- from meadow grass to green crabs: monitoring the site. That monitoring is always as much about the physical, external site as about my own well-being.
When my journals indicate I am chronically exhausted, more than my usual exhaustion, to the point where I can't care for myself, that is a warning sign that the means I'm applying are unsustainable. When I can't sustain myself, I can't do much for my sites.
In the case of Ghost Nets, the risks I've been taking have included to trust my judgement as an artist to interpret and apply what I was reading, discussing and naturalistically observing about questions that are basically scientific. Since there was no institution to support me and I was devoting my limited time, finances and stamina to an uncertain cause, it sometimes felt very scary. Thatw as especially true as time went on.
The risks we take today to invest in strategies to address global warming are equally problemmatic. The trick in all these models is to move forward short of collapsing the very systems we want to save.
My premise, that critical Trigger Points can become points of biological leverage, may be extrapolated to global warming. It is for that reason that Ghost Nets continues to be my source of inspiration. It remains a metaphor, an avatar of how I continue to work on recovery from CFS. The Ghost Nets site as landscape Trigger Point, CFS and global warming are all like mirrors within mirrors, riddles with as yet vague answers.
The Ghost Nets project was based on the premise that just like acupuncture might cure my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) by identifying places where energy is blocked, critical points in the landscape could be identified for restoration, with larger impacts. In the future, I'd like to devise and find funding to prove whether that can be proven.
Meanwhile, the process of actually doing that, restoring the former coastal dump site of Ghost Nets on Vinalhaven Island, despite being debilitated by CFS, has meant that I have had to work very slowly, learn a lot and depend on the kindness and interest of others. These were lessons I have needed to learn as much about healing myself, as healing the land.
One of the things I had to learn was just how interdependent my personal healing would be with the land's healing. This was something I had intuited & presumed, but living it over a ten year period was a different experience. A lot of what I experienced was adapting to and accepting the uncertain consequences of risks I chose to take. This is a difficult lesson for anyone but it is the same sort of lesson we need to learn to cope with global warming.
For me, that has meant paying attention to bottom lines of how I take care of myself. At the Ghost Nets site, that meant sitting and studying the plants, the winds, the volunteer indigenous interactions and the persistent eruptions of of exotic species- from meadow grass to green crabs: monitoring the site. That monitoring is always as much about the physical, external site as about my own well-being.
When my journals indicate I am chronically exhausted, more than my usual exhaustion, to the point where I can't care for myself, that is a warning sign that the means I'm applying are unsustainable. When I can't sustain myself, I can't do much for my sites.
In the case of Ghost Nets, the risks I've been taking have included to trust my judgement as an artist to interpret and apply what I was reading, discussing and naturalistically observing about questions that are basically scientific. Since there was no institution to support me and I was devoting my limited time, finances and stamina to an uncertain cause, it sometimes felt very scary. Thatw as especially true as time went on.
The risks we take today to invest in strategies to address global warming are equally problemmatic. The trick in all these models is to move forward short of collapsing the very systems we want to save.
My premise, that critical Trigger Points can become points of biological leverage, may be extrapolated to global warming. It is for that reason that Ghost Nets continues to be my source of inspiration. It remains a metaphor, an avatar of how I continue to work on recovery from CFS. The Ghost Nets site as landscape Trigger Point, CFS and global warming are all like mirrors within mirrors, riddles with as yet vague answers.
This past month, I have struggled to function on a high professional level, despite knowing that I am in a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome relapse. I showed up at openings, in meetings woth colleagues and patrons, completed and sent work to various venues and perfomed Virtual Concerts faithfully every Tuesday. But this week, I began to realize I would have to admit defeat. Things began going wrong here and there. A bill was paid late. An argument with a friend. Excruciating pain I couldn't ignore and so on.
That's also how global warming works. You keep trying to do things the same old same way. But then a tornado hits a part of the world that doesn't have tornados. People begin to starve from prolonged droughts and they riot or die. Wars erupt in competitions over resources. A hurricane hits a city and obliterates it.
And eventually, one has to admit defeat. The defeat of arrogance at any rate. Arrogance that we can continue as tho we are immune to this abstraction, whether we call it an illness of the body or of the earth. And then comes the grief for what is lost.
When I grieve for the implications of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it is for the lost income that forces untenable choices on me- for the alternative health I cannot afford and my insurance doesn't cover but that does alleviate my symptoms. For the periods of isolated bed rest I endure from time to time. Opportunities and joys that pass me by. And then I accept a measure of humility. And it is humility that must be embraced if we would limit our use of resources in this world.
And when I hit bottom, as I did a couple days ago, something makes me remember that all is not lost yet: as when I walked by a park, almost too weak to continue to take one more step forward and stood transfixed for fifteen minutes watching two squirrels chasing and tumbling eachother around the base of a tree surrounded by yellow daffodils with orange trumpets and tulips of apricot mixed with gold.
It is painful to forego the travel or the air conditioner or the imported foods for Westerners that contribute to a large carbon footprint. Far more painful to see someone else die because of our insouciance. Most painful of all, when we suffer the consequences of our own resistance to an honest accounting of reality.
Life is so beautiful and precious. Isn't the greatest gift we might give back reconciliatory, a respect for and peace with life's limits?
In a news report today, it was commented that cutting meat consumption by just 20% per year was the equivalent of driving a Prius in terms of the load on the environment. That's because of the volume of grain that has to be dedicated to produce the meat from cattle. I rarely eat meat so that's not one of my options to reduce my footprint. But when I see my family this weekend, I may quiz them about their eating habits.
I do want to look at other options and am curious about following this idea that my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome may have some unexpected answers. Yesterday, I had the stamina to conduct my normal morning routine: exercize, an on-line meeting, responding to emails & directing my assistant, singing practice & a few chores & erands until 2:PM. Then I was flat on my back for four hours, blinking and listless. There was no muscle strength to stand upright without support. Little concentration to answer the phone or execute good judgement in response to questions. I tried anyway of course, which just prolonged the time I was flattened. I rallied at 7: PM to do another few hours of work.What was lost was the entire afternoon of work. But what may have been gained by that period of inactivity? Perhaps the experience of being fallow?
If I extend the metaphor, the translation many be similiar to the question of how much meat is consumed. What if there were fallow periods to producing children, esp in developed regions where energy consumption per child is enormous? What if there were fallow periods in travel of any kind, inc via a Prius? What if we were each fallow for 20% of our day? In the old, European days, that was called a nap or a siesta, or a long meal with others. Four hours, the time I was decked yesterday, is way more than 20% however. It is at least 30% of my functional day. So do we extrapolate? 30% of fallow time would translate to how much savings in carbon emissions, power demand and consumption?
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a little understood immune system disorder with symptoms similar to Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus and other major but better understood illnesses. The primary symptom is simple: the loss of 50% of your energy & stamina for a minimum of 6 months. On the classic Minnesota multi-phasic depression test, the results are markedly different. There has been specualtion that it is viral and possibly related to brain injuries but no one knows for sure. Secondary symptoms range from sleep disorders, muscle & joint pain (fibromyalgia is a subset), neurological disorders, unusual headaches, significant weight gain or loss (averaging 70 lbs) and so on.
I was cross-diagnosed with a severe form of CFS in 1991. I was told then, "the good news is you won't die. The bad news is there's no cure."
Since then, I have come to own the illlness, in defiance of Susan Sontag's Illness and Metaphor, as my own personal educator and model to deal with environmental concerns that concern me. Sontag argued that we ascribe moral implications to any disease that as yet is poorly understood and has no cure, as the Bubonic Plague as a symptom of immorality, in midieval Europe until it was related to hygeine, or Tubercolosis as a sign of spirituality in the nineteenth century, or cancer as a reflection of emotional cowardice in our own times. CFS has been stigmatized as a euphemism for laziness, among other derogatory terms.
Instead, I have chosen to see it as a an analogy for how we must treat the earth these days, particularly in relation to global warming. I have also come to accept how it determines my practice as an ecological (or any kind of) artist. I have decided to begin regualrly writing about that here.
The analogy is that earth's resources are limited. Our choices must be cognizant of those limtis, or dire consequences ensue.
For example, last month, I came down from Vinalhaven Island to NYC about three times to participate in or attend major art events or meetings. In the same month, I flew to Los Angeles, using Virgin Air (they are the only ones experiemtning, albeit mis-guidedly) with alternate fuels, as biofuel. The occasion was the major retrospective at MOCA, for my long time friend & mentor, Allan Kaprow. It was a fabulous, exciting visit. Inbetween, I ground out several grant applications to support my work. That was the good news: I showed up.
When I returned, in my exhaustion, I flubbed a major legal deposition, totally missed two crucial appointments and since Friday, have been mostly bedridden. Based on past experience, this may last at least a month. It could be much more.
Today, at 8:23 AM, I am already exhausted. I have attended one on-line meeting and will have a phone call to answer in thrity-five minutes. I hope to exercize, wash my hair, do my singing practice, perhaps do some reading, writing, phone calls and a small painting sketch. That would be a normal day. I may not be able to do any of that unless I am willing to extend my days of being bedridden and isolated by CFS.
Just so, the earth. There are many ways to expend her resources. She may have none left to give. We can certainly keep extracting them, but at what future price?
My friend Barbara T. Smith has been launching an archive video of her past work, as a spiritual odessey. Another old pal, Suzanne Lacy, with Leslie LAbowitz, working with Annette Leddy of the Getty, are organizing their archives alongside a series of video interviews, about the aost histiry of Southern California Performance Art. Martha Rosler, yet another collegaue, has been touring her library. Allan Kaprow, several years before his death, warned me to begin then to organize my archives. He told me he had spent $80 000. on his own, before selling them to the Getty. I began at once but didn't have $80 000. to spend or a clear idea of an ovevrall strategy. That has emerged slowly for me and is still taking shape. But with ephemeral art, it is essential. No artw riter on a white horse will rescue any of us from the reality that the culture is accustomed to familiar objects presented in familiar ways.
And the reson we want to be rescued? Different I'm sure for each of us. One is simply: sales. Sales equals support. For em, there is also the emssage aprt. My lifetime body of work represents what I have to say about life. In this case, all the elements of ideas about global warming, expressed thru the filter of art. One small aprt of that process has been re-organizing my website.
There's a ways to go but it's a start. What's left to do is the coherent narrative of the voyage from environmental concern and art passion to the conclusions articulated in media.
I have now spent a couple months re-organizing my website. I now have a site map, a gallery of artifacts and all the Virtual Concerts are listed as a separate archive collection. For the first time in years, I can find things and so can visitors. This is part of a long trajectory of inner work I've been doing about becoming visible. It is said that all art is about making the invisible visible. Much of what interests me is relationships- between world events and and global warming, human nature and choice, between media and ideas, between people and means. So organizing my web site was one small step towards my goal of making some of those connections visible in my work. Thank goodness it's not all up to me to connect the many dots in the world that might be answers to global warming.
59 Degrees
Blue Skies
Perfumed Air
My last post complained of not enuf snow. To be fair, this winter, we've had plenty & got plenty more, right after I wrote that. But I'm greedy and anxious because I know this won't last. As Andrew Revkin wrote in the Times today, it's a perceptual mirage in an ocean of data and reveling in the snow part, just encourages the skeptics to stall the rest of us on addressing the real urgency, as Revkin points out in a quote from the atmospheric scientist Michael Schlesinger, U Illinois.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/science/02cold.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Maybe the candidates don't want to engage in the intricacies of the discussion with people who point to snow & scoff. Either that means we really are as stupid as they think we are, or their commitments to a green future are pretty shallow. Or both
