Pushing Rocks
Is There A Cure?
As I write, President Biden has withdrawn from the Democratic campaign, paving the away for Kamela Harris and perhaps Gavin Newsom. Speculating on future world politics, brings up the question of what the United States considers a head of state should look like? Instead of answering that question, I will explore the implications of appearances and how that inflects something bigger.
The bigger question is that the world has a very serious problem. Powers that be are hurtling us over a cliff of self-destruction whose legal term is ecocide.
At the Intersection of Narcissism and Legal Standing
This week, the Supreme Court of the United States granted the convicted the former President of the United States broad impunity from criminal activity and the consequences of what has looked like treason to many.
At the Blued Trees Intersection
Some years ago, I taught a drawing foundations class in the Art Department at Stonybrook University about how to draw on a surface. The first day, I took my students through a number of art historical slides that illustrated all the ways around the world that we recognize as aesthetic expressions of formal ideas like line, shape and texture. We spanned a range of American, Asian and African tropes from court imagery to animal art (animals that make deliberately creative objects and events we recognize as beautiful).
Ready or not, time's Up?
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.
I woke from a dream today
Slowly but surely, a culture of impunity is being dismantled as though we might all be waking from a bad dream. This despite every effort on the part of the dominant culture of capitalism and extraction to continue to run rampant.
Notes in Advance of Blued Trees www.bluedtrees.com, an Opera About Ecocide
“The original ecocide proposal is almost 50 years old
The intent to make ecocide an international crime isn't new. The idea was brought up by then-Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme at the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. In his speech, he warned that rapid industrial progress could deplete natural resources at unsustainable levels. But even before that biologist and bioethicist Arthur Galston used the word "ecocide" at the 1970 Conference on War and National Responsibility in Washington, D.C.”
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.