Ready or not, time's Up?
Still from "Studio Tour" recording by Aviva Rahmani, April 2024.
This past winter, the sea seemed to announce that the time for negotiating in ways we've known, over the consequences of ecocide caused by the effects of fossil fuel use on climate change, was over. During this winter's storms, I watched the waves claw back the land under my neighbor’s wharf, Then the rising sea demolished the pier from which he earned his living as a Maine fisherman. The impact of storm damage on coastal fisheries is enormous but another sector has also been impacted and may be less visible or elicit equal empathy, artists who work along the coast.
Artists contribute massively to the Maine economy. "The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that the arts and culture sector (artists, university arts, commercial, and nonprofit arts organizations) contributes $878 billion to our nation’s GDP and $1.55 billion to Maine’s economy, representing over 2.5% of the state’s GDP." https://www.islandinstitute.org/2021/03/18/impact-of-maines-creative-economy/. My life's work as an artist, some of which was promised to the Smithsonian, is in a building 3' from deep water.
This winter, it seemed to me that the sea roared its judgement of humanity's feeble responses to reality with particularly bitter winds and voracious storm surges. Wind gusts of 70- 90 mph pummeled Maine and New Hampshire. One came with a King tide announcing, "time's up." Human leaders who might have mitigated these consequences found excuses for the fossil fuel use that causes climate change. The effect was terrifying, humbling and confusing; confusing because there are no clear answers to our emergency. Our emergency is echoed across the globe in myriad variations.
Lest I had any doubts about Mother Earth's convictions, I found calling cards of massive seaweed deposits on my own land, left in 360 degrees around my studio. "State officials in Maine said the storms, which were later declared a “major disaster” by President Joe Biden, caused about $70 million in damage to the state." https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/other/maine-to-spend-25-million-to-rebuild-waterfront-after-devastating-winter-storms-and-flooding/ar-BB1mk7ZO?ocid=BingNewsSerp. As an artist, I look at how parts may fit together in unexpected ways.
Narcissism has become common parlance in describing one of the front runners for the presidency of the United States. There are many historical precedents for narcissism in politics, going back at least to the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. In the United States, our most romantic mythologies often revolve around "Lost Cause" paeons to the Confederate army and the promotion of the cowboys and Indians narrative. The Lone range and marauding cowboy has become a false model for heroism. The truth is wild west stories have justified both genocide and ecocide. The historian Heather Cox Richardson has tracked the evolution of the cowboy metaphor in support of narcissistic delusions that enable extractions. In a May 12, 2024 newsletter she wrote of the extreme contortions that have poisoned the American political well in service to those delusions.
... last month, at a private meeting with about two dozen top oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, Trump offered to reverse President Joe Biden’s environmental rules designed to combat climate change and to stop any new ones from being enacted in exchange for a $1 billion donation. Trump has promised his supporters that he would be an outsider, using his knowledge of business to defend ordinary Americans against those elites who don’t care about them. Now he has been revealed as being willing to sell us out—to sell humanity out—for the bargain basement price of $1 billion (with about 8 billion people in the world, this would make us each worth about 12 and a half cents).
As Richardson pointed out, the solicitation for this bribery would also be a felony. And yet, Trump's support for a large portion of the American electorate remains as rock solid as it is baffling. My task is not to judge their opinions. Instead, I need to address how and why those attitudes might hamstring our capacity to respond to the consequences of narcissistic responses to ecocide.
In the annals of narcissism, two words jump out: supply and discard. Supply refers to the resources and control any narcissist extracts from those around them. Discard refers to what happens after those resources have been exhausted. In ecosystem terms, the implication is that extracting supply is finite. Discard is what we have been doing when extraction causes systemic collapse. Disregarding the consequences of extraction and discard to natural systems is what now puts human existence at jeopardy.
In human terms, any relationship with a narcissist risks the day of discard. It isn't always possible to evade dependency on a narcissist, for example, in personal family relationships, ie., where the parent is a narcissist with young children. As an artist, in cultural terms, I am all too familiar with notions of supply and discard. Every artist recognizes we labor to supply beauty and inspiration to a market but risk cultural discard. Humanity, driven by narcissism on a global scale, manifesting aa greedy capitalism, has extracted supply from Mother Nature with impunity. Apparently, She has finally reached her limits. Unlike some human sources of supply for narcissistic extractions, Mother Nature can manifest indiscriminate outrage over those insults with even more impunity than the perpetrators of ecocide.
Those of us who have lived in coastal zones have recognized many nagging warnings, even as we have enjoyed the splendor and richness of the ecosystems that have nourished us: the creeping markers for highest known storm surges, the changing demographics of animal populations. Many of us had good solutions, none of which could be implemented in isolation. Residents across the globe, in New Orleans, Bangladesh, Vanuatu, and now on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, have vainly appealed to the world to abandon fossil fuels before we drown in an inhabitable world. But the lure of supply was too intoxicating to corporate executives and their enablers who can only see pots of gold.
Where the working Maine fishermen have scrupulously protected ecosystem health, corporations have had no compunctions at all about discarding the collective wealth for the, "2.15 billion people (who) live in the near-coastal zone and 898 million in the low-elevation coastal zone globally https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-coastal-futures/article/population-development-as-a-driver-of-coastal-risk-current-trends-and-future-pathways/8261D3B34F6114EA0999FAA597D5F2E2." Drunk on power and wealth, the heedless squandered the futures of the mindful. Children have been driven to bringing suit for their squandered futures against the adults who might have protected them https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/us/montana-kids-win-climate-trial/index.html.
Any narcissist will dismiss the cruelty of their own self-centeredness. This is true of perpetrators of ecocide. Stockholders invested in fossil fuels appear to be reveling in their profits. We are witnessing pornographic scales of excess consumption by a tiny number of wealth holders https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66-report-says.
In coastal Maine, families who have spent generations on land and in waters they cherish are facing hard decisions about their imminent future. In the Gulf of Maine, this uncertainty is shared along the Gulf of Mexico, where Indigenous Peoples know how to care for barrier wetlands but oil industries have over-written wisdom and created massive land subsidence in those same wetlands to extract oil.
I have devoted the past 35 years to learning from the land and the island community that has supported me and sharing those teachings in my practice. Now the land under me is defenseless against the rage of the Earth. I am struggling to know how to respond as part of a local and global community. I now face the costly uncertainty in my own life. This is the studio I've used for over 35 years and that I may lose now: https://vimeo.com/938815670?share=copy
Internationally, governments have initiated programs to incentivize "managed retreat," as though humanity were so many herds of cattle to be moved to higher land for grazing before they too might be consumed by a society that extracts supply before discard. So, as best they can, people load their culture on their backs and flee the waves. But those are bitter, grief-laden choices.
I must consider the same options any coastal resident must face with the same time sensitive choices as my fellow climate refugees across the globe: what can I load on my back and where is higher ground? How well or how far can I flee? Back 100' or off island entirely? I am not young, flush or sturdy. But climate change and sea level rise have placed me where I am most vulnerable, where my challenges mirror a reality that is about more than the colors of the pigments I choose or my personal grief.
A year ago, I began declaring with bravado, that if the rising waters took my life's work to Portugal or France, it would be my act of defiant self-immolation to protest global inaction over fossil fuels and climate change. working from my studio by the sea, I spent thirty-five years developing trigger point theory, wrote a book and many articles and took on a project, Blued Trees (2016- present), to prove to others what could be done to mitigate and reverse damage. But today, as images of the seaweed surrounding my life's work burns holes in my mind, I am not willing to relinquish all I have accomplished to make a statement that will mean nothing to the narcissists gloating over their supply and content with their discards. Neither sacrifice nor brilliance holds sway with easy answers.
What are any of our alternatives? From Greta Thunberg to my neighbor? What can we salvage of civilization now that time for negotiation appears past due and over and the hegemonies of greed that have made their indifferent intransigence clear? I have scant months to solve my problem before winter storms return to coastal regions. This is my task, ready or not, adequate or not, willingness to the face consequences or not, we are all facing the same conflicts about grim realities of our own making.