Climate commons was intended always to be a short term experiment with two primary goals. First to bring together researchers/thinkers/producers from a wide range of fields to contribute information/ideas to a multidisciplinary pool. Henry Jenkin’s writes about this in his blog: “In a networked society, people are increasingly forming Knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.”

The second was to create on the internet in a blog form a space for conversation, questions, and contributions from anyone–a participatory network. As I contemplate what happened in the more than one hundred posts and three hundred comments with the site visited by an average of 3000 people a day, a number of new questions have formed:

what is the nature of participation on the internet?

A local network of home gardens = A community of food producers!
Victory Gardens 2007+ calls for a more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. It is a concept we are trying to get adopted by the city of San Francisco that would provide a subsidized home gardening program for individuals and neighborhoods.

This program offers tools, training & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards into productive growing spaces.

The project draws from the historical model of the 1940’s American Victory garden program to provide a basis for developing urban agriculture as a viable form of sustainable food practice in the city.

See the Video

I have been working at the Alaska Native science Commission for the past five years, and in the last two as its Deputy Director. In this position, I have the privilege of traveling to many Native and rural communities throughout most regions of Alaska. In these communities, the stories about climate change are the same. The list of observed changes can fill several pages, and many of them are alarming. There is no debate in any of these villages that climate change and global warming is here and intensifying in its effects. The State of Alaska has created a climate change Commission that will conduct hearings throughout Alaska. Many Native groups have already held several meetings and conferences where climate change was discussed. I also chaired the science Working Group of Snowchange, an international gathering of indigenous peoples from 8 arctic countries and no one disputes that climate change is upon us and describe many adverse consequences in graphic detail (see www.snowchange.org).

Hello All,
I’m happy to announce after several months in the lab, we will be launching the eSAT campaign in March 2007.
eSAT (which stands for Environmental Standardized art Techniques) provides free environmental signage to schools around the world.

Teachers and students will be able to pick their favorite cause, favorite artist, and favorite language. Artists designing eSAT signage includes an all-star roster of artists, designers and celebrities. I currently have a recycling bin that Hunter S Thompson designed for us in the Global Inheritance. The artists designing for eSAT are in the same neighborhood (but probably not as rad as Hunter). All eSAT signage will be logo free.

Back when I was going to school, any cause based signage you’d find in the classroom or in the halls was usually super corny, horribly designed and communicated the message as if you were a total moron. kids today have been marketed to since Day 1, so the artwork, message and messenger is paramount.

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.

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.

I was discussing the Climate commons project with a friend last night, and at one point she expressed frustration she was having with a group of people close to her. These were well educated people who knew a lot about the problem of global warming and were probably very sympathetic to concerns over it. But even given that, they did little-to-nothing to take real action in their daily lives, even very small, almost trivial steps. My friend found this even more troubling given that these people would have the ready and enthusiastic support of institutions they are involved with if they attempted such action.

Preemptive Media, a new media collaborative art group, have a great project right now called AIR, which distributes small sensor units to calculate the carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide levels in the surrounding air–the data collected from these sensors can be seen on their website, the sensors, and in exhibitions.

Check out a good description of it here.

Katie Kurtz of WorldChanging did a great writeup of this project the other day and I wanted to mention one part of it here because it so interestingly describes what I think this project can do:

“Climate commons has slowly revved up since Marsching’s introductory post November 26th, serving as a collective diary by folks with varying backgrounds who are doing something worldchanging within their sector to address the affects of climate change. Contributors include artists, architects, a climatologist and a glaciologist, activists, even an Episcopalian priest, and others (including Worldchanging’s own Sarah Rich)… Rather than forge ahead alone to understand the intricacies of ice, the problem of soot, the science glacial changes, and other Arctic-specific topics, Marsching assembled a dream team that could offer new and alternative perspectives on the site.
Aside from a collective diary, it can also be seen as a text-based panel discussion. Or a potluck conversation. Or evidence of how people from different backgrounds are exploring ways we are connected to a landscape that may be remote in terms of distance but is around the corner in terms of our impact on it.”

Full text of speech given in Trafalgar Square on November 4th.

(Due to the event over-running, this speech was cut a little on the day.)

I have done several talks and interviews for media about my this project—Climate Commons—and the other works lately and find myself reiterating a desire for artists to throw themselves into the arena of activism and politics. The follow up questions are usually about things like what are the similarities between science and art, or how does this work function as activism, how can art effect a “real” change. Not bad questions, but are they the point? These fields or endeavors are corralled into their rigidly defined pens and only a specialized Knowledge pass allows one to enter. Why not move from one to the other, insist on permeable states of being, encourage intersection and analogy?
for those who’d like further reading: a great collection of essays on art and activism.

image: ”No Way Back?” poster. design by César Sesio