Pushing Rocks
Ecocide, Genocide and Blued Trees
August 26, 2023, we will debut a premiere of the Blued Trees opera about ecocide at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
The consequences of ecocide have been discussed for decades, particularly in the work of the late Polly Higgins.
Why is this so difficult?
"Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience."
Consider these three words: pity, compassion, and empathy. Pity has its roots in a religious experience of withness as a communion with divine mercy. Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience. It is provocative to consider that obedience to the sacred coexisted so intimately with great class disparities, aggressive colonization, and subjugation of the nonwhite world.
On Heroes and Fatal Flaws
"At the end of the 1980s, after I had already created decades of work about violence between people—not only rape but child abuse and domestic violence, violence between men, and animals victimized by people, always trying to understand the link between human behavior and environmental disaster—I heard a sociologist on the radio say, “It is amazing how much pain you can inflict if you don’t feel your own.”
Lumumba in Chongqing
A great deal has been written about Earth rights, environmental rights and increasingly, ecocide, from the point of view of politics, law and sociology. I will write about it as a practicing artist and as someone struggling with personal implications.
Department of Random Insight
I have always thought transparency is a good thing and that it's impossible to be truly generous without openness. The opposite of generosity is withholding. withholding in personal relationships is cruel sport. In relationship to the rest of nature, it is just profoundly short-sighted, even, stupid. This is our present challenge: environmentalists are being outgunned and outspent and outpowered by people who have no problem being transparent.
Land
Art has historically been cultural glue for communities under stress. As an ecoartist, I have struggled with the realities of environment danger, seeking where I might position myself with integrity. I decided to risk my entire life's work in the most dramatic act of ecoartivism I could imagine.