That friend is the Arctic, or so it seem to residents of the Arctic. The third point of focus for this project, this forum on the radiating effects of climate change, is the Arctic. The arctic is the very cold canary that tell us what is happening with our climate before we feel it in more temperate zones. The changes, as we have heard here from Larry Merculieff, are more drastic and hit home not just to the large community of people who live above the imaginary line that describes the arctic Circle, but also the the rest of the world’s land and people. Changes include the much reported: spring thaws are earlier. Fall freeze-ups are later. Sea ice is shrinking. Unfamiliar species of plants and animals are appearing. Intense storms are more frequent.

[Thanks to Peter Coyote for sending this to his list.]

Friends,

We tend to forget that the suppression and exploitation of Native people continues unabated to this day. Here is a record of a so-called “public - input” meeting on the Navajo reservation recently. After strip mining their sacred mountains and lowering the water-table over 80 feet using drinking water to send coal to LA in a water-slurry, the Black Mesa project was finally stopped by the struggle of Native people. However they are dealing now with poisoned aquifers, and 30 years of pollution and neglect. My friend Vernon Masayesva, a traditional Hopi elder sent me this. He is looking for support in the on-going struggle against the ruination of the Hopi/Navajo reservations in the name of white ideas of progress. The electricity we burn in our homes to run our lights, tv’s DVD’s, computers and games comes in part from projects like Black Mesa. Where the average white person uses 50 gallons of water per person a day, the average Hopi uses 5. Not only is this a problem of our own wasteful way of living, but also of the Hopi/Navajo lack of power to defend themselves. As part of the probllem, the least we can do is to help them in their struggle. If any of you are moved to help you could contact Vernon at:

Hello friends–this is a wonderful site–there have been many times over the past two decades when I’ve wished for just such communities, and to see them start forming and getting to work is truly an inspiration.

This winter, a few of us decided the time for mass action on climate change had finally arrived in this country. We’d organized a walk across Vermont last summer–fifty miles in five days–which drew a thousand people. That was great, but it was dismaying to learn that a thousand people was the largest crowd that had ever gathered anywhere in the U.S. about climate issues. So a week ago we launched stepitup07.org. Our plan is to get local people and groups to host rallies in hundreds of places across the country on April 14, and then link them together electronically. And so far it seems to be working–in that week, 111 rallies in 32 states have already been set up. There’s no question that this will turn out to be the largest demonstration on global warming in U.S. history.

I gave five talks about my exhibit up at the ICA in Boston last night–8 minutes five times in a row.  After the blinding headache that ensued no doubt from the effects of my own droning repetition, I started thinking about the most significant part of what I was saying about the project.  Basically the images I was talking about, as you see here, take DEMs from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of the mass balance of glaciers around the world to environmental factors and I render them in a 3D program with temperature, light, cloud, snow covers that are relatively accurate to the sites (the picture you see here is the edge of the Austfonna glacier in the northernmost tip of Norway, an area known to be a common jumping off point for early north pole expeditions).  I then insert these tableaux of vaudevillian performers (here Mike Waters, the project manager for the ICA building construction supervises Naomi Greenfield, a local balloon artist, making an umiak, a common boat form in the arctic, out of pin balloons).

This is an image from early afternoon, looking out on the Mackenzie River delta in Aklavik, NT Canada. What do you see when you look at this image from out the window? What do you see out your own window?

When I look at this image I see a connection between land and sky and I get a sense of quiet and peace. When I look out my window here at the University, I see contrasts and a sharp distinction between land and sky. It’s interesting the colors of our world and what we see and percieve out our own windows.

What do people think are the reasons why no effective action has been taken to restrain climate change? We are certainly monitoring and calibrating our species extinction with respectable thoroughness. But we are less dedicated in our solutions. Neither the option of keeping fossil fuels in the ground nor the very concept social change are mentioned in polite society, for example.

Here’s my three suggestions why we are not doing enough quick enough to reverse the ecological meltdown. (I’ve actually only got two but ‘three’ sounded better and I’m hoping the third will come to me while I’m writing the first two. If it doesn’t I’ll just quote some poetry.) .

1. Being prescriptive makes you look silly.

We had a discussion at work yesterday about what it would mean if sea levels rise, possibly up to 20 feet, in our children’s lifetime if not ours. What would Boston look like, or the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts? One person insinuated that a lot of rich people in our area would be in trouble - think Cape Cod, Back Bay - to which my boss responded, “No, those people have cars. They’re fine.” So what will this do to other parts of the world where people are often way more crowded along the coasts than we are?

It is hard not to get “gitty” over the new political scene in our Government, but we must stay cool. Barbara Boxer who is the chair of the environment and Public works committee has climate change as a priority issue. And she is not the only one. We will hopefully see great strides in discussion about climate and ultimately regulation. I am proud to come from a state that is setting an example for others.

Now, if we can impress on the population that each one of us has a personal responsibility to do our part, we may just turn this problem around. We might also have a list of things ready to say when someone asks, “but what can I do as an individual”? As climate change enters the mainstream, those of us who got here first must be ready to answer that question. It is a new and uncharted place for us for us to be. If people want to help, we need to be able to help them help us (and themselves). Up until now, global warming has been something “out there, in the future” to most Americans, but we will have a chance now to be advocates for change, so lets use this opportunity to its fullest.

I am sure that environmentalists and environmentally conscious individuals ponder what has been accomplished since the beginning of the movement in the U.S. There have been many notable successes, and yet things seem to be getting worse. And, of course, much traction was lost during this U.S. presidency as laws were rolled back or changed. It is time to do some serious introspection and cold assessment of the strategies that have been used, otherwise, I believe, we will continue to experience pendulum swings of public support for environmental causes.

The Ayles ice Shelf, one of a number of key ice masses in the Arctic, has been found to have broken free from land; as noted in the wikipedia:

“The Ayles ice Shelf was one of six major ice shelves in Canada, all located on the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. The ice shelf broke off from the coast on August 13, 2005, forming a giant ice island 37 metres (120ft) thick and measuring around 9 miles by 3 miles in size (approximately 66 square kilometers or 25.5 square miles in area). The oldest ice in the ice shelf was believed to be over 3,000 years old. The ice shelf was located at (83°1.5′N 77°33.5′W), approximately 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole.”

Currently, the only long-term direct measurements we have of air temperature change in the US arctic come from a single station – Barrow, located on the coast. So for all this talk of arctic climate change, the US has only one direct measurement representing an area the size of the California, and this comes from a coastal station which is no more representative of California than is one in San Francisco. Other stations had been discontinued 20 years ago due to funding, and new ones are not necessarily as robust as they should be for trend monitoring. I’m involved with several projects to install new long-term sites, but long-term funding remains the central problem. That is, even though I can get funding to install new sites today, there are no guarantees that funding will exist tomorrow to maintain them. These sites are about as remote as it gets and the equipment costs are almost negligible compared to the logistical costs.

Happy New Years, here are some pictures from New Years Day 2007 from the Windows Around the World program.

When you look out a window, we frequently see what we expect to see. Windows Around the World is helping children see different environments and to watch the changes that occur out that window over time. In another posting someone was talking about trying to get a handle on climate change and coming to realize to that they learned the most by just observing. This is part of the study on climate change - observations. It takes time, but if we watch a place over time we can see changes in the environment. It is fun and all of us can take part in making observations.

Happy new year everyone! Lets change the world this year, OK?

I’m still thinking about the questions raised earlier in the comments to various posts on this site, asking what kind of role art can play in climate change issues. As I plan out my year, I am trying to keep my feet to the fire of my focus this past year or two: thinking about how to continue creating projects that combine visual, technological, interdisciplinary, collaborative, conversational, and site-responsive works about our human impact on climate change in the arctic in the past and future. In a nutshell I think that I will be gathering much more information, perspectives, narratives, images, and collaborators, trying to keep a balance between my studio practice and a practice of aesthetic alliances with so many different people. I want to go to a science research station in the arctic (any ideas anybody?)–Toolik in Alaska has been suggested to me, so that I can do some work there in the actual landscapes and technologies of the site itself. I’m trying to create visualizations of what the deep arctic will look like in 2110? What kind of transportation will we use to get there and travel around while we’re there? Will we live there? And if so in what kind of house? How will we grow food? What kind of phones will we have to communicate with? How will we get pictures/news of the rest of the world? I want to imagine these things with the combined mind of a science fiction illustrator and a sustainable design innovator.
Will these efforts or their resulting art/activist/conversation projects make a difference? Still wondering. Probably its a one person at at time thing.