Metaphors and Murder

Image: Bed of Nets Aviva Rahmani 1992

Ecocide is murder, whether you consider a forest sentient or calculate how many people die because their habitat is destroyed, it is a crime against humanity that ends in death. Halfway through the new aria to be performed by the soprano Alison Cheeseman at the Anita Rogers Gallery October 30, the wife of the fossil fuel executive accused of ecocide sings, "I was standing alone, naked in a dead forest." How did she end there? As she laments her cold marriage and the Earth her husband has scorched, her alter ego, played by the dancer Rishauna Zomberg, wrestles with a large blue-painted branch from the dead forest, the reality she had been oblivious to see.