If a glacier melts and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

Al Gore's slideshow on global warming, morphed into the Academy Award-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth," is perhaps the most famous set of images showing the impact we are having on the earth's climate. The images are powerful, but heavily-grounded in the science of global warming and include many charts and graphs. One alternative option for spreading the message is to get artists involved by capturing and interpreting the effects of global climate change.

Enter "Human/Nature," a project that sent 8 artists to 8 locations around the world to record nature in their choice of media. Most of us won't make it to most of these places in our lives, but we can witness them through the works of these artists. If a glacier melts and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? You betcha, because artist Dario Robleto captured it on tape. Other artists used film, local materials, video, and one artist even designed and created a mobile library cart for park rangers in Komodo National Park in Indonesia to carry necessary items as they make their rounds.

The exhibition is currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through February 1st, but will be travelling to other locations.

A movement born of a moment to address a moment in time

Art and politics have a symbiotic relationship. Art has a power that influences and determines public perceptions of political figures and events, and politics has a power to influence and determine the content and message conveyed in art. Consider David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps," Goya's "The Third of May 1808," Picasso's "Guernica," Fairey's "Hope." Even artists who present a subject simply for their appreciation of its beauty, like Subhankar Banerjee's photos of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, can have a decidedly political message, which became evident when his exhibit at the Smithsonian was scaled back and moved from a prime location in the gallery to a back hallway off the cafeteria after his book was wielded on the floor of Congress by a congresswoman who opposed drilling in ANWR.

Artists whose work addresses explicitly political material can suffer for their depictions of potentially sensitive events and subjects. In 2004, an artist named Guy Colwell exhibited his painting, "Abuse," which depicts the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US forces, at a gallery in San Francisco. The gallery owner was physically assaulted and Cowell went into hiding in order to avoid harm. A campaign of threat and harassment eventually closed the gallery permanently. So much for the 1st Amendment, one of the main tenets of American freedom that is ostensibly being defended in the several wars in which we're embroiled. Irony.

Recently, a group of US artists organized art exhibitions around the country that respond to "the radical shift in politics and governmental policy in America that has come about in recent years." More than 50 shows were organized across the US. Although the exhibits were scheduled to take place before the election, The Art of Democracy continues its work in varying ways, with interesting guerrilla efforts like Max Infield's "To be returned: underrepresented people in picture frames," in which he purchased frames at Wal-Mart and inserted photos of people who are "underrepresented in the language of Wal-Mart's low prices" and returned them for a cash refund, after which they would be replaced in the frames section. There will be an exhibit at the Red Door Gallery in San Francisco beginning the day after Obama's inauguration called The Art and the Body Politick that focuses on "how the creative visions of artists can help heal our collective body and ensure that healthy debate and diversity continue to be the hallmark of American democracy."

During his campaign, Obama, to an unprecedented extent, pledged to support the arts through everything from increased support for arts education and the National Endowment for the Arts to changing the federal tax code for artists. This is welcome and heartening news, and I hope that he will follow through on his promises. While he should not be exempt from perhaps unflattering representations, he is to be praised for recognizing the important role art plays in a healthy democratic society.

Freedom

Obama & Future Factory Farms of America

Despite a massive public outcry, including over 20,000 emails from the Organic Consumers Association, President-Elect Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the next Secretary of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture is a huge agency with a $90 billion annual budget, including the National Organic Program, food stamp and nutrition programs, and agriculture subsidies. It oversees rural development, forests and grasslands, and overseas aid.

During his time as governor Vilsack aided and abetted factory farms; he oversaw the largest proliferation of hog confinements in the state's history. Factory hog farms are horrible, inhumane places. (A new report calling for action on hidden costs of factory farming has been issued by the World Society for the Protection of Animals.*) Described in a piece in The Rolling Stone, "...pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond."

Besides the obvious moral and ethical questions around subjecting animals to such abhorrent conditions, those farms put tens of thousands of independent family hog farmers out of business in the state. The end result was a decimation of rural Iowa and serious degradation of the state's drinking water.

Vilsack has also been a strong supporter of genetically engineered crops including bio- pharmaceutical corn. The largest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership.The undemocratic and highly unpopular 2005 seed pre-emption bill was Vilsack's brainchild. The law strips local government¹s right to regulate genetically engineered seed.

Vilsack's ardent support of unsustainable industrial ethanol production (corn and soy-based biofuels) is equally troubling, which use as much or more fossil energy to produce them as they generate and has caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket. Food is literally taken off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The Organic Consumers Association is calling on organic consumers and all concerned citizens to join their call to action and block Vilsack's confirmation as the next Secretary of Agriculture.

Just how do you mean that, sir?

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

Anyone who's seen the 1967 film "The Graduate" will no doubt remember that exchange between Mr. McGuire and the young Benjamin Braddock at Ben's graduation party. Ben was an angst-ridden recent college graduate, not sure what he was going to do next. It's hard to believe how prescient Mr. McGuire's word was because who would've guessed we'd be swimming in the stuff. Literally.

Plastic was invented in 1862 by Alexander Parkes. Plastic shopping bags were created in 1977, but became widely used beginning in 1982. While they may have been a good idea initially and are now taken for granted by shoppers around the world, plastic bags are a scourge. It only takes 4 grocery trips for an average family to accumulate 60 plastic shopping bags. Consider these facts:

• Four to five trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year
• Americans use over 380 billion polyethylene bags per year
• Americans throw away approximately 100 billion polyethylene bags per year
• Of those 100 billion plastic bags, 1% are recycled
• Plastic bags are made of polyethylene, which is a petroleum product
• It takes 1000 years for polyethylene bags to break down
• As polyethylene breaks down, toxic substances leach into the soil and enter the food chain
• Production contributes to air pollution and energy consumption
• Approximately 1 billion seabirds and mammals die per year by ingesting plastic bags
• Plastic bags are often mistaken as food by marine mammals. 100,000 marine mammals die yearly by eating plastic bags.
• These animals suffer a painful death, the plastic wraps around their intestines or they choke to death
• Plastic bag choke landfills
• Plastic bags are carried by the wind into forests, ponds, rivers, and lakes

Fortunately, countries around the world and some cities and states in the US are beginning to limit availability of plastic bags to shoppers. We can each contribute to the decline of the plastic bag in obvious ways, particularly by bringing our own reusable shopping bags when we shop. It may seem like a small step, but it can have a huge collective impact.

A conversation about conservation

There was a time when conservation was a popular notion. Conserving nature, conserving resources, conserving a way of life that balanced human life with the natural world. Over the past 20 years, the concept of conservation seems to have fallen out of fashion among environmental movements, it seems to me. It has been replaced with "buy green." This is perhaps because the environmental community recognized that Americans are going to consume no matter what, so why not at least point them in the best direction for the planet. Buying green is a good choice, but a better choice is adjusting expectations for what people need to buy, and especially for what people want to buy. Every time I walk into a store, I am simultaneously flabbergasted and disgusted by the number of products and amount of junk available for purchase that we now take for granted. I walked through a Bed Bath & Beyond store yesterday, and was assaulted by the excess. And while many more products on shelves are being sold as "green," does that really solve the problem?

Because we can

Looks like the bailout of the Big 3 US auto makers is going to make it through the government's chutes and ladders. In one sense, this is a good thing. America once had a healthy manufacturing base but now the auto industry represents a big part of what's left. It would sadden me to see our place in the world of making things further diminished by letting the US auto industry die. And, as has been pointed out, the jobs that would be lost if the Big 3 go belly-up are largely blue collar jobs. For these reasons I support the bailout.

However, the Big 3 have consistently ridden the wave of cheap oil by producing huge gas guzzlers. Plus, like most corporations in this country, the auto makers already get huge tax breaks, and are demanding more tax breaks to manufacture more fuel-efficient vehicles. Also, no thanks to GM for killing the electric car*, which was hugely popular during a trial run in California in the 90s and which offered an affordable, sustainable alternative to gas-powered transportation.

But the other half of the formula is American drivers. During the era of cheap and abundant oil, we loved our big ole SUVs. Who cares that they only get 16 mpg? And then there are the mega trucks and Hummers that abound and get even lower gas mileage. In consternation, a friend of mine once asked a driver of a huge truck, "why such a big car?" He scowled at her and growled, "because I can."

In the meantime, I find myself hoping that gas goes up to $5 per gallon. Maybe then the attitude will be, "I can't."
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*Watch the documentary, "Who killed the electric car?" to learn the whole story http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

The nightmare of the American Dream

The concept of home ownership for all Americans is failing; in effect, the home ownership dogma is a house of cards. While the mega industry built around home building in the past 10 years has made home ownership possible for many people who might otherwise have been locked out, so to speak, it's my belief that the wanton construction and purchase of single family homes has been a more destructive than positive development for this country. Home ownership is the foundation of the so-called American Dream, but maybe it shouldn't be.

I've watched many excellent wild fields destroyed so housing developments could be built, driving out wildlife and destroying natural grass landscapes. I've observed suburban blight grow like fields of mushrooms, enveloping perfectly good acres of open land. I'm aware of the materials that are required to build thousands of single family homes, many with square footage in ten-plus thousand range. Perfectly good forests have been harvested, some no doubt illegally, to provide wood to build thousands of single family homes. The energy consumption around building and occupying suburban developments is outlandish, particularly for the mega-homes that have sprouted up around the country. Think about the poisons and toxins that go into making and keeping hundreds of thousands of lawns green, trees, shrubs, and flowers pest-free. Consider the resources used to deliver raw materials from their source, perhaps halfway around the world, to some half-acre plot of land in some average American city where people are eager to own their little piece of the real estate pie.

We are the greatest consumers of everything, but notably of petroleum products. Part of the reason is that people have moved to suburbs that are increasingly distant from their workplace. Living in the suburbs requires people to drive everywhere: to work, to the grocery store, to McDonalds, the post office, etc. James Howard Kunstler, a scholar of architecture and noted commentator on the American condition, has written extensively about the hazards of suburban sprawl. He notes, "We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period."*

It's not that I want to deny people the opportunity to share the experience of owning a home of their own; it's that it is not a realistic and sustainable arrangement. Although the financial meltdown that we're living through today is a threat to the "American Dream," the greater threat posed by rampant suburbanization is a real national and global nightmare.
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*"Making other arrangements, a wake-up call to a citizenry in the shadow of oil scarcity," Orion Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7

The house that Butts built

If Americans were asked to list who they think controls their daily lives, many people would cite God, of course. Perhaps the president, maybe a boss, parents, spouse, kids. Think about it. Who do you think wields inordinate power over your daily life? Would you consider a former US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butts? Mr. Butts was Secretary of Agriculture under President Nixon, and was in charge of the agency that controls many aspects of our food supply. Thanks to government subsidies to agriculture created by Mr. Butts, our food system leans heavily on the side of beef and corn, not necessarily bad to eat in and of themselves. But their dominance in our food supply has had overwhelmingly negative impacts. Our abundance of corn came about after food prices rose in the 70s and President Nixon, desperate to quell an uprising, commanded his Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butts, to do something about it. Thus was created the cornfed beast known as agribusiness, and which in a period of just a few years altered the food chain unrecognizably. Corn is used in hundreds of food products, frequently in the form of high fructose corn syrup (hfcs), a proven contributor to obesity and type 2 diabetes. It is also used in the production of meat and poultry products, in the form of feed for cows, pigs, and chickens. These industries have grave consequences on both our health and the health of the planet.

It's hard to remember a time when cheap, highly-processed, and unhealthy foods didn't line shelf after shelf in the grocery store. In fact, grocery stores had to increase their square footage just to accommodate the thousands of new food products that were developed after agriculture subsidies were created. The number of products offered per store increased from about 14,000 in 1980 to over 30,000 in 2004, and store sizes have increased an average of 1000 square feet per year for the past 30 years. Our urban landscapes have also been negatively altered with the proliferation of fast food joints riding on the coattails of cheap, subsidized corn.

The planetary consequences of our corn and beef diet stem from the poisons in fertilizers and pesticides used to grow and protect the corn monoculture, and the methane and solid waste pollution from cows that pollute the air and water and contribute to global warming.*

This is the house that Butts built.

And we live in it.
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*Check out the PB&J campaign to see how simple changes in diet can help change this unsustainable chain. By pledging to eat a plant-based lunch just one day a week (preferably without hfcs or other corn products) you can have a measurable impact on the environment, and on your health. http://www.pbjcampaign.org

Pulling the lever for poverty

If you think politics doesn't impact your life, think again. I'm not just talking about who we elect for president; this year's election was on many peoples' minds, including those who purport to be apolitical. But if you participate in economic activities of any sort--even giving money to a homeless person--you are political. If you buy cheap products from Walmart or Kmart or Target that are made abroad, you've pulled the level at the ballot box in support of exploitive import policies. Frequently, the individuals who produce our goods are poor. So in a sense by purchasing those cheap products, you're also pulling the lever for sustained poverty around the world. These products also contribute to environmental problems because they are shipped from across the globe. So you've pulled the lever for the oil economy, pollution, and global warming. We need to reclaim our manufacturing base and allow those countries that we exploit for our cheap goods to re-establish their economic independence. In the meantime, buy local, buy American, buy Fair Trade, buy LESS, and pull the lever for progress!
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http://buyamerican.com/
http://shop.thehungersite.com/store/

Evolution and Creation

Politics and culture of torture

I'm always interested in the reflection of our political world in our entertainment choices. Since George W. has been president, for example, I've noticed that Westerns have enjoyed a resurgence. Easily a dozen films have come out in the past five years that reexamine the Western mythology. Another genre that has made a killing, so to speak, is the torture horror film. "Saw V" recently opened and, I'm happy to say, received little notice and will, with luck, be the final chapter in the whole torture-as-entertainment genre that has plagued us for the past several years. Was it a coincidence that the first "Saw" movie opened the same year (2004) that the photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were released? The release of "Saw" in 2004 came too soon after the revelation of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib to have used it as an inspiration, but it raises the question of how we could be shocked by photos showing prisoners being subjected to inhumane and cruel treatment and still flock to the movies to watch the "Saw" movies, the "Hostel" movies and others like "Turistas" and "Captivity," both of which received a place in the Women Film Critics Circle Hall of Shame. Have we perhaps lost some of our humanity, or is it just part of who we are as a species?