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Memorializing Loss: The Convergence of Funerary Art and Climate Change

An Art Review by Carol Joo Lee

To talk about Climate Change is to lament what we have lost – land, water, air, and the species that depended on them, human and non-human. The onset of the sixth mass extinction looms large over our collective minds – at least those who don’t deny the indisputable data – and it creates existential conditioning that vacillates from dread to despair. Throughout history artists have been moved to memorialize the losses and traumas that have been inflicted upon humanity: a 14th century illustration depicts Black Death; Poussin’s “The Plague of Ashdod” records the horrors of the plague outbreak of the 17th century; and Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica” captures the inhumanities of Nazi bombing. In the face of tragedies of epic scale, art can universalize the unimaginable and humanize the incomprehensible. Contemporary artists of the Anthropocene, for many decades now, have tried to contextualize, eulogize and memorialize the losses/deaths stemming from ecological and environmental collapses. Essentially, the losses spurred by the Climate Crisis is the loss of home – literal and metaphorical, biological and geological, material and immaterial, multitude and one.

An early illustrated manuscript depicts the Black Death (Credit: Courtesy of Louise Marshall/ Archivio di Stato, Lucca)

Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31 (Credit: DEA / G DAGLI ORTI/ De Agostini via Getty Images)

“I control the pain. That’s really what it is.” – Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘s works do not explicitly speak of the climate. Nonetheless, they exemplify governmental negligence and political inertia during the AIDS epidemic, which began in the 1980s, thus in the wake of the woeful bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic on the part of the federal government and the continuing denialism of Climate Crisis, it seems apt to re-examine his most famous piece “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 in our current context. Commonly referred to as “candy spill,” this participatory work, a mound of wrapped candies weighing approximately 175 pounds, the healthy weight of his lover before succumbing to AIDS, spill out from one corner of the room. As visitors take candy from the pile, the artwork shrinks then eventually disappears altogether. The candy has a twin function – representing the body and the placebo. In taking the candy, the audience becomes complicit in the erasure and masking. The site of the installation becomes an in-situ memorial to his lover and all who perished during the AIDS epidemic. It is sweet and heartbreaking. It is also a foretelling of Gonzalez-Torres’s own life, who died 5 years later of the same disease. We can very well imagine the mound of candies as our home, Earth, and the work, already powerful, begins to take on a whole new meaning.

How, when, and why do we invest culturally, emotionally, and economically in the fate of threatened species? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we not tell, about them?
– Ursula Heise

“What Is Missing?” is an interactive web project spearheaded by artist and architect Maya Lin, who’s most well-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. No stranger to liminal sites where the dead and the living collapse to create a third space, Lin’s “What Is Missing?” is a portal of remembrance, reacquaintance and resurgence that works on several levels: a digital tribute to the now extinct species; an anthropogenic record of places; and a depository of people’s personal biocentric memories of “what is missing.” Flickering dots of various colors and shapes indicating different categories like disaster, conservation, timeline and stories across the darkened map of the world bring to mind constellations in the night sky. One can click on East Asian Cranes (coming back) or Heath Hens of Martha’s Vineyard (extinct) and get an overview of their survival history dating all the way back to 600 in the cranes’ case and 1620 for the hens. Launched in 2009 and updated up to 2018, the site itself feels like a digital relic given the further exacerbation of the planetary conditions under which all living species struggle to survive, and losses of an untold number of species from our biosphere since the site’s launch.

In 1982, Hungarian American land artist Agnes Denes transformed 2 acres of landfill in lower Manhattan into a wheat field. Created at the foot of the World Trade Center and a block from Wall Street, the golden patch of agriculture, titled, “Wheatfield – A Confrontation,” on the land valued at $4.5 billion, which has since become Battery Park City, was “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate.” Denes and volunteers cleared the piles of trash brought in during the construction of the Twin Towers, then dug furrows and sowed seeds by hand. In four months time, the land yielded 1000 pounds of wheat. The harvest became horse feed for the city’s mounted police and the rest traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.” The seeds were also given away in packets for people to plant them wherever they may end up in. Denes, in her prescient ways, was calling attention to what she deems as our “misplace priorities”: “Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”

The harvest also marked the end of the physical artwork but the idea lives on through the visual documentation which offers a surreal angle and an uncanny audacity imbedded in the work. It is a rather strange coincidence that the work happened 19 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center and we are now 19 years out from the 9/11 attacks. In 1982, the field was a living, breathing counterpoint to the unbounded appetite for capitalism. Today, the work, at least the photographs with the towers in the background, function as a memorial for both.

Whether imbued with soft activism like Lin’s digital project or offering interventionist criticism like Dene’s wheat field, art under the umbrella of environment and climate challenges may not offer solutions but by showing and making us confront the losses and our lost ways, art does what it has always done throughout history, it reveals the nature of our time.

Top Image: Plaque Memorializes First Icelandic Glacier Lost to Climate Change
(Dominic Boyer/Cymene Howe)

Our Best Chance: Igniting Social Justice through Climate Activism

Students march in DUMBO, Brooklyn during the September 2019 New York City Climate Justice Youth Summit. (Jesse Ward/for New York Daily News)

“We live in a strange world where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things.”—Greta Thunberg¹

Death caused by the novel coronavirus is tied to climate change, as pathogens are carried to newer hosts by insects or animals, or released from the warming permafrost, to wreak havoc. The communities hardest hit, for a number of environmental causes fueled by racism, including toxic atmosphere, inadequate healthcare, and economic inequality, are communities of color across the US and the world.

The ground is shifting: the national and global is connected to the local in unprecedented ways, and activism is alive and well in grassroots organizations of New York City. Anti-racism and climate justice activism are uniting.

“I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.”– Rebecca Solnit²

In NYC, the Environmental Justice Alliance, its tag line On the Ground and at the Table, has published NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2020: A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health in April 2020, marking the 50^th anniversary of the first Earth Day. It details an essential local strategic plan to reduce greenhouse gas and local emissions; to advance a just transition from an extractive economy toward an inclusive, regenerative economy; and to cultivate healthy and resilient communities. In clear, concrete objectives is a comprehensive action plan for policy affecting low-SES neighborhoods: reducing waste transfer emissions, rebuilding stormwater systems, blocking big-box retail centers on the waterfront in favor of retaining the industrial infrastructure to be put in service of eco manufacturing (and the better and better-paying middle-class jobs that industrial output creates). It is an indispensable resource for understanding issues—such as unconscionably high rates of asthma in public housing—and paving a way forward.

Amplifying one of the goals in NYC EJA, Transform, Don’t Trash is a lecture by Justin Wood from the New York Lawyers for Public Interest (NYPLI) on waste transfer and the system that NYC has had in place since the 1950s, given as part of the Climate Action Lab in the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center. Municipal garbage collection is duplicated by private carters for all NYC restaurants and businesses. The resulting truck traffic burdens already-congested routes creating more damaging emissions. Add to this the abysmal rate of recycling from private carters (and, as noted in the NYC EJA report, compounded by the virtually non-existent recycling available to NYCHA residents), and there is action to be taken to reach 0 Waste to Landfill and composting goals. NYC EJA gives a shout-out to Green Feen consultants who use “Hip-Hop to teach sustainability as a lifestyle through green technology and compost education.”

The weaknesses of the NYC schools system continue to be highlighted in the crisis, as resources are scarce and access not just to the internet, but to stable housing and food security are lacking. An encouraging initiative is the one described by Saara Nafici in another Climate Action Lab Rethinking Food Justice in New York City who galvanizes youth from NYC’s 2^nd largest housing project on the Value Added Red Hook Farms. Joining forces to address environmental changes by empowering youth and community engagement—while creating a source for fresh, healthy food—is a great example of the types of transformation needed.

The situation is dire. Greta Thunberg asks, “What do we do when there is no political will?” We begin on the ground, drawn together for common cause. We reverse the effects of neoliberal privatization for what Solnit calls “the lifeless thing that is profit.” Solnit writes that the times may lead us to consider universal healthcare and basic income.

Instead of standing idly by, aghast, change is being enacted locally, a model on which to build. It cannot supplant sane national policy on emissions, the fossil fuel industry, or support for renewal energy sources, but it will absolutely inform the policy debate as more people realize that climate chaos affects all aspects of our lives, unequally. It is a time when the critical fight to end racism and climate degradation are joined. We must all be at the table, together. The resource that NYC EJA provides is a welcome local focus for change.

¹https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lw_qHVaJk8-QIpGv42m6bGHWo7Bg4bOG/view

²https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit?

Oko Farms: Fish, Food and Friendship in Brooklyn

The Oko Farms Aquaponics Education Center located at 104 Moore Street, Brooklyn. It is the only outdoor aquaponics farm in New York City. The farm was established in 2013 and serves as a production, research and education farm. It’s an incredibly interesting and fun place to be, and they’re expanding to another site in Weeksville soon.

Their stated mission is twofold:

1.Practice and promote aquaponics as a sustainable farming method that mitigates the impact of climate change, and increases food security for New York City.

2. Spread the knowledge and skills required to practice aquaponics farming by educating children and adults of all racial and socio-economic backgrounds.

A little primer from The Aquaponic Source website in case you’re not sure what aquaponics is. I wasn’t until I visited Oko Farms!

Many definitions of aquaponics recognize the ‘ponics’ part of this word for hydroponics which is growing plants in water with a soil-less media. Literally speaking, Aquaponics is putting fish to work. It just so happens that the work those fish do (eating and producing waste), is the perfect fertilizer for growing plants. Aquaponics represents the relationship between water, aquatic life, bacteria, nutrient dynamics, and plants which grow together in waterways all over the world. Taking cues from nature, aquaponics harnesses the power of bio-integrating these individual components: Exchanging the waste by-product from the fish as a food for the bacteria, to be converted into a perfect fertilizer for the plants, to return the water in a clean and safe form to the fish.
The Aquaponic Source

I visited Oko farms at the end of 2016 interview the founder and director, Yemi Amu, for a podcast I made called ‘Maeve in America: Immigration IRL.’ This was a podcast about immigrants, in our own voices. Yemi featured in “The Yemi Episode: Coming To America” where we discussed her immigration from Lagos, Nigeria to New York City as a teenager, her eating disorder, and her path to becoming one of the city’s leading aquaponics experts and a committed educator. Thinking on it now, I wonder if disordered eating intersects with climate injustice in that colonialism and capitalism contribute massively to both. In striving for some impossible idea of constant growth and perfection, we harm what already serves us well and keeps us alive: our bodies in the former, and the latter, the planet.

Of the Climate Action Lab videos we watched, one of the participants really stood out to me. Saara Nafici from Value Added Farms in Red Hook, Brooklyn spoke about that two site urban farm project as a “space of joy” for the young people that work there, what the Lab summarizes as “providing a kind of collective psychic and spiritual sustenance in tandem with the healthy products grown and distributed by the farms themselves.”

Oko Farms echoes this message, that joy is an important part of their work, saying in a recent post about growing jute:
“It is a great opportunity to be able to grow food that sparks joy in people, connects them to home, and reflect our diverse food cultures.”

Oko Farms has had a vigorous response to the recent shifts in the Black Lives Matter movement, using their social media to support and expand on the BLM message. This includes educational posts about Juneteenth as well as fundraising and distributing funds to pertinent black organizations and individuals, like ‘Gardens Not Guns’ with the goal of getting money directly into the hands of BIPOC land stewards, healers, community gardens and mutual aid organizations.

This summer the farm is largely closed to visitors due to COVID-19, meaning no workshops or tours like they usually host, but they still harvest and sell food at local Brooklyn food markets.

The best place to follow them right now is Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/okofarms/?hl=en

When Environmentalism Goes Too Far

A reading response, by Lala St. Fleur

The social consequences of putting deep ecology into practice on a worldwide basis (what its practitioners are aiming for) are very grave indeed.
Ramachandra Guha, Environmental Ethics, 1989.

Environmentalist Subhankar Banerjee’s 2016 paper, “Long Environmentalism: After the Listening Session,” demonstrates how indigenous resistance movements inadvertently highlight the pitfalls of certain conservationist issues that prioritize nature over human beings. Banerjee coined the term “long environmentalism” in reference to ongoing environmental engagements that create their own histories and cultures of environmentalism (2016: 62). According to Banerjee, long environmentalism can foster coalitional relationships between indigenous people and government institutions, by doing four things: (2016: 62-63)

illuminating past injustices
highlighting the significance of resistance movements to avert potential social-environmental violence (fast and/or slow)
showing how communities respond to slow violence, and
pointing towards social-ecological renewal after devastation

This is especially important in the face of biocentrism, or deep ecology, where nature is given “ethical status at least equal to that of humans,” to the point that the preservation of nonhuman biotic life and biospheres becomes is served to the detriment of preserving indigenous ways of life, (2016: 63).

Banerjee’s paper uses the plight of the Gwich’in and Iñupiat Alaskan natives as case studies for examining ways that environmental conservationist concerns need to be reconciled with the protection of human rights. For decades, Alaska’s indigenous tribes have found themselves in land disputes against the American government over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cordoned off by the Public Land Order of 1960. This Alaskan coastal territory held precious oil and gas reserves for industrialists; pristine wilderness land conservationists lobbied to protect; and “nutritional, cultural, and spiritual sustenance” for the Gwich’in and Iñupiat (2016: 65).

*Arctic_National_Wildlife_Refuge, Wikimedia Commons*

With the indigenous cultural traditions enacted in their own homeland criminalized as everything from poaching, arson, and outright theft by the conservationists, the Alaskan indigenous groups were summarily stripped of their rights to access their own ancestral land, all for the sake of “preserving unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values,” of white tourists and conservationists, not the original inhabitants, (2016:67).

Hard-fought coalitions like the 1980 Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act (ANILCA) and the 1988 Gwich’in Steering Committee have worked to bring together tribes and environmentalists to both protect precious wilderness from drilling and deforestation, as well as protect indigenous rights to subsistence hunting–though the former is often prioritized over the latter.

Banerjee’s paper reminded me of other instances where eminent domain was enforced in the name of environmentalism, to the detriment of the original inhabitants. As a resident of New York City, my mind was immediately taken back to the creation of Central Park, the emerald jewel in the heart of Manhattan’s concrete jungle.

Panoramic view of Central Park from Rockefeller Center, 2008. Wikimedia Commons.

Central Park was the magnum opus of New York City’s 19th century Environmental Movement, which was a direct response to the the destruction of the natural landscape and shrinking of the “green” environment of the city, as the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population boom of the mid-1800’s took over what was once lush wilderness. Municipal sanitation was still in its infancy, and in no position to tackle the overwhelming pollution littering the streets.

The city is dirtier and noisier, and more uncomfortable, and drearier to live in than it ever was before. I have bad my fill of town life, and begin to wish to pass a little time in the county.
William Cullen Bryant, romantic poet (Letters, September 1836: 87).

Inspired by the writings of naturalists and reformers including Henry Thoreau, Ralph Emerson, and Horace Greely, landscape architects Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were hired by NYC in 1858 to beautify the city, and create a public park in the spirit of environmental preservation. Thus, Central Park was born, the most visited urban park in the USA, and most filmed location in the world.

However, what is not so famously known is that in order to create Central Park, an entire community of over 1600 free African-Americans who lived on that land from 1825 – 1857 were forced off of their property through eminent domain; their communities scattered throughout parts of NYC and New Jersey; their homes leveled so that Central Park could be built.

A temporary outdoor exhibit, called Discover Seneca Village.

Remnants of Seneca Village were uncovered in a 2011 excavation by archaeologists from Columbia University and CUNY schools. Amidst the foundations of Seneca Village’s buildings were several thousand 19th-century artifacts, including household items and other abandoned or discarded personal effects.

Seneca Village Teapot (1843-1857), NYC Archaeological Repository

With Seneca Village and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in mind, one really must consider both the benefits and pitfalls of unchecked industrialization and development, as well as overzealous and inconsiderate environmentalist movements. There have been amazing strides taken to preserve natural landscapes and endangered biospheres. But there have also been heinous crimes committed against the rights and lives of human beings, who are disenfranchized by biocentric conservationists who care more about land than the people who live in it.

Through the Climate Artist’s Lens

Following are profiles of a few climate artists and how their works explore our relationship with the environment. Though the artists mentioned here create various types of work, this blog focuses on their installations in urban spaces where we are most likely to forget our relationship with nature.

STACY LEVY – The site specific installations of Stacy Levy visualize natural elements such as wind, rain, sunlight, and waterways. These installations are weaved into urban design and placed in public spaces. They invite the public to interact with the natural world that lives and breathes alongside them, but is often unnoticed. Levy’s series of works called Tides are installed in city parks. “River Rooms” are boat shaped structures placed along the Schuylkill River. They allow people of the city to sit by the river and observe it all year round. Similarly, “Tide Field” in the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia and “Tide Flowers” in the Hudson River in New York are floating devices that respond to the river’s tides. They change based on how high or low the water in the river is. Both installations are placed where city dwellers can see the rivers change throughout the day. It’s a reminder that the rivers are alive even in densely populated urban areas.

*Reduce Speed Now!* by Justin Brice Guarriglia, 2019

JUSTIN BRICE GUARRIGLIA – Messages about the existential crisis of climate change are brought to public spaces through Justin Brice Guarriglia’s LED light installations and marquees. Guarriglia reminds us that “We are the asteroids” that are threatening our world. His project, Eco-Haikus for Marquees, places haikus about climate change at the entrance of theaters in Los Angeles and New York City. Guarriglia draws inspiration from the writing of Bruno Latour and attempts to make abstract ideas about climate change more accessible to the public. Reduce Speed Now is another project of Guarriglia’s. It’s an installment of solar powered LED lights that share messages from climate activists, artists, philosophers from around the world. This project was created for a 2019 Earth Day event in London and it invited the public to share their own messages through the LED light installations during the event.

OLAFUR ELIASSON – When looking through the images of Ice Watch and how people interact with it, we see a combination of spectacle and mourning. Olafur Eliasson created Ice Watch, an installation, by transporting floating icebergs from the fjords of Greenland to public spaces in London and Paris. It confronts the public with the fact that the glaciers are melting in a more intimate way. The installation evokes the cathartic feeling of time running out and watching something bigger than us slowly fall apart. While walking through these icebergs, some people are in awe and can’t help but take selfies with them. Others kiss, hug, or hold the icebergs in a regretful way because they understand what we’re losing. For most of us, the melting glaciers is something that is happening far away. Watching videos of glaciers melting in the news or in documentaries doesn’t begin to describe the profoundness of this loss and the danger associated with it. Eliasson tries to change that with “Ice Watch”.

To ignore or not to ignore?…There is no question

Stengers encourages her audience to see beyond the superficial fallback excuses and typical ways of viewing the problems of the climate crisis. She invites us to catch common phrases which do us no good, but rather keep us in different forms of division. She sees the consistent default being that there is no confidence in “the guardians,” there is no choice, there are no alternatives (save the “infernal alternatives,” resulting in different forms of division).

Her sharp terms “cold panic,” “infernal alternatives” play on the situation as metacommentary on the climate crisis. They operate in the rhetoric of the climate crisis, and, by such a way, remind us of the layered political issues that result from the debates.

In her chapter on capitalism, Stengers writes that an idea or party will mobilize, claiming to transcend the conflicts and unite everyone. She writes: “I anticipate and equally dread such appeals to sacred unity and the accusations of betrayal that automatically accompany them” (57). Alliances, as she sees them, are inevitable. I follow Stengers by adding that choice of alliance, it seems, could fall on minor issues, but, with the current lack of accurate information, access, and trust, the general arguments seem stuck on the topical surface—is climate change really happening? what do we call this climate issue? Etc.

Image by Garry Knight

Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

In his article “Will Climate Change Destroy Democracy?,” Damon Linker writes: “There’s an oddly apolitical character to most of our talk about environmental threats… Arguably the problem of politics is getting individuals and groups in a given political community to put aside their own self-interest in favor of the common good.”

Linker’s argument meshes well with Stengers’s understanding of what is actually going on with climate change issues. We are stuck in the theory side of “climate change”–remote, inaccessible, and, therefore, apolitical. The “right to not to pay attention,” as Stengers calls it, is deeply protected by default from these conditions. This right being upheld leads to incremental corruption, further instability, and an inability to trace where it all went wrong (Povitkina). The right to not pay attention to climate change stems from “the guardians'” policy of not paying attention to citizens: it has become a mutual looking away.

The point, however, is to understand what does not work, in order to fix the issue—capitalism, the impossibility of “meddling with” governance by asking questions (55), lack of clarity and trust in leadership…

Fair, efficient assemblage on the climate crisis has been foreclosed for a long time, but it is Stengers’s hope that with open interactive questions and with reconceptualizations of “the guardians” as human, citizens as participants affected, and of capitalism as an evil spirit preventing unity and stability, collaborative efforts to mitigate panic and to establish a proactive defense against climate change and political risk-offsetting could be achieved.

Stengers’s underlying message could be read as a call for a true, active democratization of climate crisis discussions. Her chapters here advance the discourse by demonstrating alternative ways to seeing oneself (whether “guardian” or citizen) in the space of climate change discourse and participation.

References:

Linker, Damon. “Will Climate Change Destroy Democracy?” The Week.

https://theweek.com/articles/839648/climate-change-destroy-democracy

Povitkina, Marina. “Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era,” E-International Relations. 6 May 2020.

Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

(Yes We Can) Change the Story

A pond collects soil and water residue from oil-sands mining near Fort McMurray, Alberta. The oil sands account for 60 percent of Canada’s oil output.Credit…Ian Willms for The New York Times

This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein’s 2015 documentary based on her book subtitled “Capitalism vs. The Climate,” did not—yet. But it has had important impact. Klein’s overarching message hits home especially now given the world-changing pandemic disruption and activism for social justice as we face endemic racism and inequality. The documentary does feel current as though today’s moment is our “Best chance to build a better world.”

Klein’s message is revolutionary, based on the timeless truth that humans are inveterate storytellers, are compelled to tell stories to make sense of our world. The problem is that for the last four hundred years, the dominant cultures of the West have been telling a story based on the idea that the Earth is a machine, and humans are its master. Through the course of the documentary, Klein shows that the economy is a machine, too, capable of being manipulated to feed perpetual growth.

Klein intimately narrates the journey from a Royal Society gathering, where an energized scientist sunnily proposes we have the ability to solve climate change by essentially putting a hose to the sky and spreading tiny particles to block a bit of the sun and therefore the heat. Switch to a clip of Stephen Colbert interviewing this surely brilliant man, “You’ve buried the lede: it’s sulphuric acid!” A touch of levity, but it offers enough of a glimpse of the hubris behind the exercise. By beginning with the Royal Society, the film places Enlightenment thinkers at its outset. Locke and property ownership–the use of the land–forefronts the displacement and removal of indigenous peoples in North America. The film is about the abuse of the land.

Deftly directed by Avi Lewis, the cinematography is breathtaking: boreal forest in Alberta, prairies stretching to the horizon, and verdant tropical landscapes contrast with the savage rape of the earth and the flight of its native communities. The scenes of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, are akin to barren moon shots. ‘No one would ever have a reason to come here if we weren’t extracting the bitumen (thick, tar-like oil)’ one company manager says, without a trace of irony. The tar sands site produces 60% of Canada’s oil, itself the 4^th largest oil producer in the world.

The documentary explores seven areas around the world, including Canada, the US, Greece, India, and China, where fossil fuel extraction and gold mining is a blight on the land and in communities mostly powerless to fight the exploitation. The film’s strength is in the human narratives elicited: a grandmother and granddaughter switching naturally to their native Cree Nation language (think about the forced assimilation schooling and denial of native languages), even if it’s to call a white bureaucrat a Moniyaw for blocking their access to see their ancestral lands. “The land owns us,’’ says the Cree activist, not the other way around.

“Sacrifice zones” are offered as a source of profit; it’ll grow back to the way it was, they say, thirty years after the extraction, while releasing toxins to the communities downstream. There’s a gross but real scene of a brash young oil worker—making 150k for 6 months’ work—excusing himself to blow his nose on some cash, gleeful over the scads of money he’s making.

In Beijing, a small boy is asked whether he’s ever seen a star, a blue sky, or a cloud. No, he answers to each, though allows for ‘a little blue’ in the sky, due to the horrible air pollution.

“Sustainability is a Marxist concept” masquerading as the redistribution of wealth, shouts one capitalist.

There’s good news: China has since closed its last coal mine and is heavily invested in producing solar panels. The Alberta tar sands expansion proposal collapsed in 2019 under pressure from environmentalists and indigenous groups https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/business/energy-environment/frontier-oil-sands-canada.html.

We can take care of the Earth and each other, creating a path to a different future where we can improve quality of life, create meaningful work, greater equality, and an end to ‘sacrifice zones.’ There’s a beautiful transition of Cree Nation singing segueing into Greek, the ethereal nature of the intonations being universal. It is the less powerful who are compromised by unregulated capitalism and who suffer effects not of their making. As we protest that Black Lives Matter in our unjust society, we also know the relationship of climate change is one of exploitation. They are tied together and an epic Best Chance to make a better world is upon us.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/

Will We Enter a New Wave of Energy Development? Shifting Capital via Shifting Paradigms

Andres Malm’s “Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital” analyzes how the historic phases of capitalism’s evolution required technological leaps in the sources of energy that drive production. Based on Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff’s theory that capitalism moves in waves consisting of “two phases: an ‘upswing’ characterized by boom conditions, succeeded by a ‘downswing’ of persistent stagnation” (162), we can see how the first long wave of capitalism beginning around 1780 denoted by water-powered industries such as cotton and iron gave way to a second wave propelled by steam, a third run on electricity, the fourth driven by gas and oil, and the fifth long wave we are currently in, typified by computerization of the economy. The transitioning from one long wave to another is not even, incremental growth but rather “proceeds through upsetting contradictions…which impel the expansion and renew the momentum again and again, and it might be these contradictions and the convulsions they generate that do most to produce and reproduce the fossil economy on ever greater scales.” (162).

But it seems that now we have come to an impasse because science is unanimously conveying that humankind has thrown off the balances and processes of the Earth System due directly to continued, elevated levels of C02 emissions from burning fossil fuels. And to reproduce the fossil economy on a larger scale than we are currently maintaining in the name of capitalist gain would have dire consequences to our planet and human civilization. Malm speculates that capitalism could instead propel itself into a sixth long wave by casting off fossil fuels and transition to renewable sources of energy which is exactly what humanity would require to prevent the disastrous scenarios of climate change. Solar, hydro, and wind powered technologies are already established and proven to effectively integrate into our electricity grids but still, our dependency on fossil fuels has not yet been curbed. Malm suggest that a “universal rollout” of these advantageous technologies might “breathe fresh air into languishing capitalism and ensure that we collectively back off from the cliff in time” (181).

Following the theory of long waves of capitalist development and arguing that we have been on the downswing of the fifth wave since the global recession of 2008, Malm implies that we are in fact on the brink of a turning point to a sixth phase. Historically the transitions between phases “are determined by such unforeseeable events as wars and revolutions, the colonization of new countries, or the discovery of new resources—‘those external conditions through whose channel capitalist development flows’” (167). Our current state of affairs is, quite literally, a crossroads of “upsetting contradictions” inclusive of the consequences of climate change compounded by a global pandemic, severe economic downturn, and political and social instability. Could COVID-19 be the existential threat that pushes us past our paralyzed response to emissions reductions and the climate crisis into the sixth long wave?

Malm asserts that “the eruption of a structural crisis is usually attended by high unemployment, deflation or inflation, deteriorating working conditions, aggressive wage-cuts as capital seeks to dump the costs on labor and widen profit margins—all conducive to intensified class struggle” (171). And I would argue that we are amid these occurrences right now! But “capital has the power to “lay the foundations for a new epoch of expansion” by creating “a technological revolution, concentrated to one particular sphere” (171). Historical revolutions, between the first and the fifth long waves of capitalist development have remolded the entire economy, reimagining the technologies of transport and communications systems time and again. “If new life is to be breathed into sagging capitalism, it must come in the most basic, most universal guise: energy” (172).

Malm contends that renewable energy technologies “perfectly fit the profile of a wave-carrying paradigm” (181). They are of virtually unlimited supply, allow for costs to be reduced, and have vast potential for applications, “causing productivity to spike, spurring other novel technologies — electric vehicle charging systems, smart grids managed online, cities filled with intelligent green buildings — opening up unimagined channels for the accumulation of capital” (181). The groundbreaking innovation of switching completely to renewable sources of clean, emission-free energy would inevitably call for new government policies and financial systems, public education, and an overhaul of our behaviors and habits. Malm worries that “society, however, is slow in adapting, for unlike technology, social relations are characterized by inertia, resistance, vested interests pulling the brakes, always lagging behind the latest machines” (174). We have seen just that when new, renewable energy technologies emerge. They are initially received by society as a shock and spur push back in the form of skepticism, NIMBYism, etc. which must be overcome in order for them to take hold. In our current situation wherein the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening both global health and economic security, exacerbated by elevated social and political unrest and the ever-looming climate emergency, perhaps a paradigm shift in society at large is inevitably and necessarily what is being set in motion.

A Tutor and its Pupil: An Overhaul of Market Economics

A comparison of two economic models to address Climate Change (from Bina and La Camera’s paper)

In the realm of market economics, though there are several schools of thought, one common denominator remains: the market should be optimized for sufficient gains and growth. As a former economics student, I recognize the importance of governments to balance the desire to sustain economic growth with that of other variables. From Brady Bonds to the market/controlled economy of China to carbon tax initiatives, different economic strategies have been deployed to deal with a host of problematic scenarios from developing countries embroiled in debt to a Communist country wanting to reap the benefits of market economics without succumbing completely to its free enterprise model to the ongoing and existential threat of Climate Change, which, taken to its most logical extreme, represents the most severe threat to our world (not that debt riddled countries and countries desiring to hold onto their customs aren’t important).

Such logic pervades Olivia Bina and Francesco La Camera’s research paper, “Promise and shortcomings of a green turn in recent policy response to the ‘double crisis,’’ which brings into question the efficacy of market economics as an economic system to address the ongoing environmental crisis and a framework to handle contemporary and future economic issues. Bina and La Camera consistently cite “Ecological economics,” drawing on the work of the subfield’s founder, Georgescu-Roegen, whose pioneering work demonstrated the limiting factor of a market economic world is natural capital, for “Historically, the limiting factor that focused attention was that of manmade capital, but as humanity’s impact on resources and the biosphere move us closer to the so-called Anthropocene (Schellnhuber et al., 2005) and to growing scarcity of natural resources (MEA, 2005; Rockström et al., 2009), the limiting factor shifts to natural capital” (2311).

The idea that growth is unsustainable and cannot be endless is central to ecological economics and with that, Bina and La Camera offer an alternative model to modern economies privy to both environmental and economic crises (during a ravaging pandemic, a global recession and unrelenting environmental catastrophes, this article feels far too familiar). In their model (see above), aptly labeled “An Alternative Turn,” “Distributive aspects” replaces “equality of opportunities” in the “mainstream economics perspective” of a system of economics centered around bettering both environmental and economic crises, “Eco-efficient Capitalism.” On this model, the researchers explicate that “justice becomes the expected outcome of a redistribution of wealth through the initial equality of opportunities and, at global level, the ‘trickle down’ effect, whilst sustainability is secured as a result of eco-efficient capitalism” (2314). In contrast, Bina and La Camera’s proposed model “requires that the environment be considered an ultimate means (i.e. not substitutable)” for it “envisages the ‘Ultimate End’ linked to a development that embraces the moral and ethical dimensions of the relationship between humanity and the environment” (2314).

In essence, if there is not a significant recall of the market economics model, the current trajectory of the Climate Change crisis may result in a “Green” economy, but, as Bina and La Camera show, if the overarching goal of the model is to sustain economic growth, treating environmental sustainability as an added benefit of the model, the type of systemic overhaul needed to mitigate the damage of Climate Change won’t come from such a model.

In the article, Bina and La Camera keep referencing “Robert Skidelsky’s (2009) observation that economics is the ‘tutor of governments,’” underlining the importance of alternative economic models mainly focused on fighting the Climate Change crisis. Skidelsky’s classification of the role of economics in government is on point and though this paper was published in 2011, a wealth of literature has since been published on economic modeling centered on Climate Change. If economics is indeed the tutor of governments, then we should continue to act as facilitators of education for the pupils that are our governments, bridging gaps between disparate fields and disciplines as we work to better the gap between our present and future.

Green New Deal: Economy or Ecology?

The Green New Deal: The top-down initiative that is going to save us from ourselves!

Based off of the New Deal, everyone’s new favorite part of 20th century United States. (Though no one ever talks about the square deal anymore, poor Theodore Roosevelt and his racist statue in front of the Natural History Museum. You naughty rough rider you).

Yes, that is what we need. Because according to history, life was bad, but then it got markedly worse with industrial capitalism in the late 19th century. And it was the New Deal: Government, Keynesian Economics, and investments into social services that steered capitalism onto it’s famously somewhat equitable run post WWII. (Though let’s not mention the Housing Act, a centerpiece to the New Deal and the subsequent redlining of every city in America. Equitable for who?)

And since then we’ve had neoliberalism, which has put us back in the ‘markedly worse,’ section, and we need to shift back to Keynesian economics, to ‘marxism,’ as some would call it, to shore up capitalism yet again and have it more evenly distribute things.

Except now, we have climate change. So no problem, we’ll just invest in renewable energy that will create “jobs,” and we’ll expand the power of our government, even though we also don’t trust our government at all, and have problems with every single leader who rises up to the task.

I guess what I’m saying is, this “Green New Deal,” can’t just be a ‘Greened’, ‘New Deal,’ it truly has to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about growth and the economy in general. As much as everyone loves it, the New Deal created urban sprawl, single family home ownership and segregated redlined cities. The whole socio-ecological mess we are in today is a result of the trajectory of growth that the New Deal put us on.

We need a whole new way of imagining things. The New Deal at the time, was a whole new way of looking at things. Government? Mortgages? Social Security? Until the New Deal, the government in the US was the post office and the armies who chased the Indians off their lands. That was pretty much it. We need a way of looking at things that is not based on Keynesian or classical economics, we need to look at things from a ecological economics perspectives. Cause that is really what this is about, is how to weave our economy in to our larger ecology. It’s not how to weave ecology into our larger economy.

As Bina and La Camera write, “Their framing of problems and solutions remains narrowly conﬁned to the realm of market economies: capital accumulation, innovation, technology and growth remain unquestioned… Ultimately, it is the very notion of goals (ends) that informs the deﬁnition of problems and solutions.” (Bina, La Camera, 2314)

The GND proposal put forward by AOC has potential to be many things. It can be either steered towards the economy or our collective ecology. Neither of which would be bad, in fact either would be markedly better than what we have now. But until we reorient ourselves in terms of what we want our societies to do, give us all an “equal” chance at pursuing happiness, or come together and decide on what happiness would mean for each other, we will still be on the same path towards socio-ecological collapse.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change

MALS 78500 Summer 2020 Dr. Kaitlin Mondello