Yearly Archives: 2009
Bill McKibben on 350.org
I’ve just put up the Bill McKibben interview. He’s asking artists to become involved working somehow with the figure 350. (That’s the number of parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere which NASA scientist James Hansen thinks will allow a sustainable civilisation).
 There are moments when you get excited about meeting great people who are doing great work. There are moments you remember when you wake up in the night sweating. This is either one, or the other. Or both: “When his team put it out that’s what they found, yes it is shocking.
I’m no Pollyanna on this, you know. I wrote a book about it 20 years
ago called The End of Nature so I’m not chipper about the whole
thing. But, I think like everybody else, I’d assumed that we had a
little more room than we do. I mean, the Arctic melted 50 years ahead of schedule. That was the real daunting wake up call.”
Read the whole thing here.
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Illustration: Heather and Ivan Morison Dark Star, 2007. Film still. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Fluxus
More Milk Yvette’s David Berridge considers whether some notion of ecology is implicit in the Fluxus scripts in a new article for RSA Arts & Ecology:
Take the act of writing a score such Ono’s Piece for Nam June Paik No.1
and its one word “Water.†Such a piece embodies a host of
contradictions. It’s a written text, and a visual art work; a
performance in itself and a script for a performance that will follow.
It is precise, but not prescriptive; a gift for a friend that also
asserts an ecological dependency transcending the particular.
A
similar web of possibilities effects the reader of the score. The text
is self-contained and complete, yet such cryptic minimalism seems to
invite a response to complete it. That response is subjective, yet also
seems an objective response both to a word – water – and a substance.
Here a text seems to be becoming its own organism, both word, nature
and not.
Read more here.
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Pessimism, optimism, pt 3
Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory, one of the best bloggers in the arts/ecology zone, has an excellent article in the Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine about the high level of public indifference to climate change, suggesting that our strategies are all wrong.
Environmentalismâ€, recently wrote that, “Global warming remains a
low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Centre for
People and the Press’s top 20 priorities. By contrast, public concern
about gasoline and energy prices has shifted dramatically.â€Â It’s
no surprise that most people aren’t listening. Some years ago, NOP
conducted a survey where they went out into the street and told people
that they were going to mention a string of words and as soon as people
heard each one they had to say whether their energy levels went up or
down. The word “environment†was included in the list. “The horrible,
horrible conclusion of this surveyâ€, recalled Jonathan Porritt,
“was that for the vast majority of people the mere mention of the word
‘environment’ sent their energy levels plummeting downwards.â€
Instead he quotes Buckminster Fuller: “You don’t change things by
fighting the existing reality, you change things by building a new
model that makes the existing one obsolete.” People respond to a positive vision of our future life, not dire warnings of the impending grimness. Read it here.
Buoyed by the internet generation, there are many who have great faith that entrepreneurial creativity can dig us out of this. The difficulty is not so much the lack of new models though, but the lack of success of those that are being worked on. There are dreams like Winy Maas’s brilliant new city in Seoul, but in reality those dreams are proving extremely hard to make concrete. Not so long back, Robert wrote glowingly about Arup’s great plans for the new eco-city of Dongtan in China, arguably the best practical blueprint yet for mass urban living. But plans for building the city appear to be slipping as economic will disappears. The site remains as “sodden farmland”.
Both the warnings of scientists and environmentalists and the creators of new models are frustrated by the public’s indifferent response. People feel too disempowered, too fatalistic or too apathetic to embrace change. If the public, the activists and the dreamers are unable to create the energy for a solution, maybe it’s a failure of leadership.Â
In yesterday’s interview about the need for artists to engage in his campaign, Bill McKibben invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill. Now that was possibly an attempt to flatter us Brits, but intentional or not, there is a point there. Churchill’s depiction of himself as the lone voice speaking out against Nazism in the 1930s may be a historical exaggeration, but he was one of several politicians who took a vocal stand though initially unfashionable stand against the appeasement of Nazism.Â
Secretary of State for Climate Change Ed Miliband, as reported below, has been repeatedly calling for a popular movement about global warming, to give politicians like him a base on which to act. In his post on the Gaza conflict, Matthew Taylor points to the leadership deficit in Israel that allows the hawks to speak the loudest. When a Secretary of State for Climate Change starts asking Jarvis Cocker to lead a popular movment on climate change so that he can have the freedom to act, are we also suffering from a leadership deficit?
The Closest Packing of Spheres, Buckminster Fuller, 1980, Chrome-plated steel rods, acrylic spheres.
Sebastian + Barquet Gallery
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Dear Barack and Michelle
From the recent open letter from NASA climate scientist James Hansen to Michelle and Barack Obama, urging radical action when he takes office:
There is a profound disconnect between actions that policy circles are considering and what
the science demands for preservation of the planet. A stark scientific conclusion, that we
must reduce greenhouse gases below present amounts to preserve nature and humanity, has
become clear to the relevant experts. The validity of this statement could be verified by the
National Academy of Sciences, which can deliver prompt authoritative reports in response to
a Presidential request. NAS was set up by President Lincoln for just such advisory purposes.
Tomorrow at the RSA Arts & Ecology site, I’ll be publishing an interview with US environmentalist Bill McKibben in which he argues for a worldwide campaign in support of action to reduce carbon emissions to 350ppm, in line with James Hansen’s recent paper that suggests that our emissions are already too high for sustainable modern life. McKibben is taking the reins on this one with 350, which lets Jarvis Cocker off Ed Milliband’s hook.
Photo: RIBA President Sunand Prasad’s The Volume of One Tonne of CO2. As featured in Best of 2008. Photo by Nathan Gallagher
Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog