Barn 8: Who Let The Hens Out?

Core Text

Olin Unferth, Deb. Barn 8. Graywolf Press, 2020.

Summary

This novel follows two egg farm auditors whose job is, well, auditing egg farms, in Southern Iowa “a gray land of truck stops, crowded prisons and monocrop farming.” Janey is one, a heartbroken young girl who from the outside has almost completely shut down, though we are the lucky readers who hear her inner life narrated, and know that she still has imagination and wit. Janey meets Cleveland, a seemingly strait-laced auditor “Expressionless face. A rigid way of turning her head.” But beneath Cleveland’s uniform beats the heart of a rebel, one who has recently started to rescue the hens she’s supposed to merely check on. When Janey joins her, the book really takes off. The women are bound together in an unusual mother/daughter triangle that sheds new light on that ever fascinating relationship, adding complexity and beauty. Auditing is a simultaneously banal and evil role, they see to it that regulations are being followed so that there is no hiccup in the flow of eggs to the American consumer.

The impetus to right a wrong, to do whatever tiny thing we can against something as inhumane and damaging as big agriculture, or rampant inequality, or racism? The characters in the book understand that it’s easy to feel helpless. But Janey and Cleveland’s voices telling their version of the planning and rescue, hearing their fears, jokes and growth, this is a pure delight. Janey can’t get used to the barns, packed with hundreds of thousands of crammed hens. “The unimaginable scale, the tiny beside the huge, the existential power of size.” But they do something, at least they try to. They plan a huge heist, to free the chickens. Others join in too, there’s Dill, the burnt out director of undercover investigations, and Annabelle, a radicalized farmers daughter, and there’s even Bwaaukk, the first rescued hen, a brave and dopey little creature. Deb Olin Unferth verbalizes the vague unease I feel living in this militarized and profit obsessed country that still manages to be full of wonderful people. “Think high-rises, gated communities, all the places that give you a twitch of existential dread. The Amazon shipping facilities, the dying superstores, the prisons and detention centers, the pig farms, all the boxes that hold products and people and animals, the LeCorbusian landscape one skirts over or through, avoids.” This book does not avoid those places, instead bringing us inside for a close-up look at big agriculture and self-styled eco-terrorism.

Resources

Olin Unferth, Deb. Cage Wars, A visit to the Egg Farm, Harper’s Magazine, November Issue, 2014.

This is a deeply-reported piece of long-form journalism from the author of Barn 8. In it, Olin Unferth traces the history of American egg production from the 1879 invention of the incubator through to the time of writing in 2014, taking in all of the regulations imposed on what became a massive industry. The writer describes the sight and sound of 147,000 chickens in cages in massive barns she visits, and includes expert testimony and insight from farmers and scientists. She makes contact with activists for this piece too, and while they do not reveal their identity, they send her DVDs of animal abuse collected by whistle-blowers. She sees battery farming herself too, and her depiction of the suffering and death therein is quite devastating.  The piece ends on a sweet note of relief, with a group of former barn hens long ago given to an animal rescue center. They wander around outside with opened wings, sunning themselves and pecking about for worms.

Big Bird, Season 1, Episode 4 of Rotten, aired on Netflix US from January 5th 2018

Each hour-long episode in this documentary series follows the industry behind and production of a different food-source. This episode is about chicken farming, a massive and growing business in the US and around the world, with particular competition coming from China and Brazil. As a viewer, you will see inside the huge barns full of broilers, chickens bred specifically for meat. Corporations have a chokehold on the chicken industry and family farms get squeezed out, so this is about more than animal welfare or food production, it’s about neo-liberalism and a living wage for the people who work within. This documentary also depicts a terrible crime, when a disgruntled former chicken ‘grower’ killed thousands of chickens in neighboring farms after he was fired, with those farmers still seeking justice and compensation. We learn in the book about the cut-throat nature of poultry farming, and this documentary backs that up. This is an important look at what remains an opaque industry that in 2019 alone produced 9.2 billion broilers, in a country that eats more chicken than any other, with Americans consuming 98lbs of chicken per capita in 2019.

Lamarca, DSF, Pereira, DF, Magalhães, MM, & Salgado, DD. (2018). Climate Change in Layer Poultry Farming: Impact of Heat Waves in Region of Bastos, Brazil. Brazilian Journal of Poultry Science, 20(4), 657-664

This paper models the effects that climate change, as forecasted by the IPCC, will likely have on poultry farming in Bastos, a municipality in state of São Paulo, Brazil, specifically on layer farming. Layer farming is specifically for egg production, and this region accounted for 7% of they country’s egg production in 2015. It was also the scene of a mass chicken death, when over 500,000 chickens died during a 2012 heatwave there. The authors model using data from the IPCC and discover that worse and longer heatwaves are on the way, therefore they predict higher hen mortality in the future, unless the farms can convert to air conditioning. It’s vital to plan for the welfare of humans and animals in this industry as the environment becomes more deadly for both.

 Discussion Questions

  1. Cleveland’s character has an arc, what is it and what are the pivotal moments throughout the book that we see it bend?
  2. The final chapter of the book mirrors the final scene in Olin Unferth’s non-fiction piece, where a group of former barn hens are living in relative freedom. How successful is this as a plot point? What emotions does it stir, if any? Does the contrast between the graphically depicted misery of a barn chicken with the glowing image of a free chicken motivate you to change your view point or actions when it comes to buying and consuming chicken or eggs?
  3. How would you characterize humanity’s relationship with both chickens and climate change in relation to these readings? Does this relatively inexpensive source of protein discount the fact that big agriculture (the chickens and the grains that feed them) are damaging our climate? And what about than the modeling done in Brazil predicting more mass deaths during climate events like heatwaves, will that change our relationship?  

In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism by Isabelle Stengers

CORE TEXT
Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey, Open Humanities Press, 2015. 

SUMMARY
In this book, Isabelle Stengers reminds us that we’re at the juncture of two histories: one that is familiar to us and one that is to come. The familiar history is dominated by capitalism. It is a history in which we deify the market. Progress is defined as economic growth and scientific and technological innovation. We must strive for progress at all cost in this history, even if that progress will cause widespread environmental damage and profound suffering of humankind. Stengers encourages us to question who benefits from the systems and narratives we take for granted. She gives us the theoretical tools and language to question the status quo. It is the only way we can top being complacent and prepare for the coming history. The history to come will be dominated by the intrusion of Gaia, who will be just as indifferent to our reasoning as capitalism is. The intrusion of Gaia is climate change personified. Stengers suggests that we provoked Gaia to intrude because of the destructive way in which we treated the planet. Rather than struggling against Gaia, we should be struggling against the systems that provoked Gaia. If we fail to do so, Stengers warns, we will be complacent in creating a barbaric future in which we will be condemning millions of lives to the hazards of climate change. We have been taught to believe that our existing way of living, no matter how destructive it is for the planet, is the only way to be. To question this narrative and to think and imagine a different kind of future are political acts, according to Stengers. 

TEACHING RESOURCES
Arendt, Hannah. “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of The Rights of Man.” The Origins of Totalitarianism. Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1958, pg. 267-302. In her seminal essay, Hannah Arendt describes the way inmates of concentration camps were treated and suggests that what is barbaric are the concentration camps designed by civilized society.  She states. “Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer to come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to destroy what they cannot understand. . . The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst” (Arendt, 302). Without the complicity and indifference of civilians, it wouldn’t be possible to maintain systems that are designed to inflict structural violence. That’s why it’s necessary for civilians to participate in structural violence and crimes committed by political leaders. Indifference is a passive form of participation. Arendt claims that the inmates of camps were the model citizens of a totalitarian state because they will behave as they’re trained and won’t question authority even when they’re led to their death. This depicts what is at stake if we don’t question structural injustices and don’t fight against them.

Coetzee, J.M.. Waiting for the Barbarians. Penguin Books, 1999. Throughout J.M. Coetzee’s novel there is a constant sense of anxiety about the barbarians who are considered enemies of the Empire. The Empire symbolizes civilized society which lives according to law and order and the barbarians represent those who exist outside of civilized society. Therefore, it’s presumed that they don’t have any order or law that prevents them from being violent. They’re portrayed as rapists, looters, and ultimately a threat to the sense of order created by the Empire. However, the paranoia about the barbarians draws the reader’s attention to the internal world of the Empire itself rather than the barbarians. Coetzee shows us that under the control of a regime like the Empire, no one can claim innocence. In exchange for the protection of the Empire from the Barbarians, everyone must participate in the Empire’s crimes and be complicit. Therefore, everyone protected by the Empire is collectively guilty.

Human Flow. Directed by Ai Weiwei, AC Films, 2017. In this documentary film, artist Ai Weiwei travels across twenty-three countries to capture the mass human migration that is taking place due to war, famine, or climate change. The current mass migration event is bigger than one war or one incident. The film documents individual narratives of suffering as well as the massive scale of population migrating worldwide. It’s a glimpse of the future that is ahead of us, as climate change continues to alter the political and physical landscapes we live in. Ai Weiwei’s film depicts the consequences of the choices we make to address migration and movement. 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Stengers describes our political leaders as our guardians who are responsible for keeping us complacent. She states that we must distance ourselves from their perceptions and narratives, and we can’t expect much from them aside from “disappointment and indignation” (Stengers, 35). Can civilians take meaningful action to prevent social injustices without engaging with political leaders?

Stengers personifies climate change by referring to it as the intrusion of Gaia. She describes Gaia as “as the fearsome one, as she who was addressed by peasants, who knew that humans depend on something much greater than them, something that tolerates them, but with a tolerance that is not to be abused (46).” To what extent is climate change a spiritual crisis?

The writers and artist listed above demonstrate that civilians play a key role in upholding structural injustices. Are inaction and indifference passive forms of participation in structural violence? In what ways do we contribute to harmful systemic injustices and how can we prevent them?

Reaching the Grassroots across the World: Suffering as Motive for Global Climate Justice

In his essay “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities,” Paul Routledge emphasizes the significance of transcending personal and spatial limitations by widening basic conceptions of solidarity, particularly as it pertains to climate justice and climate-related conditions of hegemonic structures, so as to posit achievable means to alternative models for just and efficient co-habitation.  

Touching on capitalism’s structural “accumulation by dispossession,” especially in contrast to factors such as “food sovereignty,” Routledge’s essay harks on the understanding that the current climate system already works translocally but by the means of exploitation of resources and of peoples. The political counter-power rests, therefore, in the people affected by these exploitations.  

But which people? How are they affected? These questions may not be able to be answered by those functioning at the top of the hegemonic power structures, but rather, the answers to these questions, too, emerge from below, from the people affected by the injustices. There are differences between peoples and differences between consequential climate injustices.  

Image by Sam-Lund Harket

https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2018/nov/19/climate-justice-and-extinction

Routledge writes:  

[A] key issue concerning the forging of meaningful solidarities is how the 

network’s ‘imaginary’ is visualized and developed at the grassroots: how to construct 

senses of shared (or ‘tolerant’) identities (della Porta 2005) concerning climate justice 

amongst very different place‐based communities. This will require the co‐recognition and 

internalization of others’ struggles in a ‘global’ community. In part this must be based on 

shared values and principles (common ground) concerning economic and political justice 

and ecological sustainability (9). 

Local, cultural and linguistic differences may pose further limitations, but, as Routledge supports, co-recognition and solidarity based through chains of equivalence can be the starting point of a power that rises against the hegemony at the strings of climate change. Routledge believes that climate justice networks can be formed from this starting point and can develop a medium through which local place-based and group-based concerns can be acknowledged and implemented. 

Determining an “imaginary” of the network, as Routledge describes it, relies, at root, on the basis of shared values and principles. This inevitably roots the issue in discourse; but through discourse, what is at heart of the issue can extend beyond discourse, into practical and effective bonding for social change. As Rob Leurs explains, Laclau’s and Mouffe’s “chain of equivalence” provides a discursive practice that goes beyond essentialism, without turning things into eclecticism. Meaning of the issue may be subjective to local groups, but meaning from the issue, as it is agonistic to hegemonic injustices, becomes grounds for solidarity translocally.  

Upon first reading, Routledge’s essay appears a bit dense in build-up of referential discourse on the challenges and pathways to solidarity; but further analysis has me wondering whether communication technologies (such as social media) could facilitate climate justice network models and whether third spaces and fourth spaces could produce alternative effects through changing cultural structures and avenues to access of information and participation. Routledge believes that the imaginary must begin at the grassroots, but how is a grassroots accurately conceptualized without linguistic and cultural conventions? We end up at de-contextualized values and principles that discursively operate as a mode of charged symbolic meaning-for (for justice) in order to reach a meaning-from (from structural change). The core grassroot non-distinction, therefore, is a matter of mutual impressions of suffering.  

Leurs, Rob. “The ‘chain of equivalence’. Cultural studies and Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory,” Politics and Culture. Issue 4. NOVEMBER 9, 2009.

https://politicsandculture.org/2009/11/09/the-chain-of-equivalence-cultural-studies-and-laclau-mouffes-discourse-theory/

Art and Translocal Solidarity

Brooke Singer, Excess NYC Compost-Bike Design

Art can be key in creating translocal solidarity. In his article, “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarity,” Paul Routledge describes different local groups, located in global north and south (though with a case study in the south,) who are trying to organize to resist capitalism and also share in the negative effects of climate change. In dealing with the negative effects of climate change and capitalism, there is the assumption that natural bonds would form that would ally groups together and share resources, or help them take larger global initiatives against capitalism/climate change in what is deemed ‘translocal solidarity.’ But Paul points out crucial barriers that exist such as language, time, the physical spaces of where these groups are, are completely different from those of other groups and they struggle to unite even though they share a common enemy. He writes:

“Therefore, a key issue concerning the forging of meaningful solidarities is how the
network’s ‘imaginary’ is visualized and developed at the grassroots: how to construct
senses of shared (or ‘tolerant’) identities (della Porta 2005) concerning climate justice
amongst very different place‐based communities.” (Routledge, 2011).

A powerful way in which to share this sense of identity concerning climate justice is through art; a universal symbolic language that transcends local spatial boundaries. One example of this would be found in the photographs of Edward Burtynsky.

Edward Burtynsky, Anthropocene, Makoko #2 Lagos, Nigeria, 2016
Highway #8
Santa Ana Freeway, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2017

The juxtaposition of these two photographs from his Anthropocene series show how the scale of human development goes beyond any particular locality and is a global phenomenon. In both of these photos, the edges become an endless horizon of houses, crowded together and completely filling up all the space of the image. They convey the largeness of human dwelling on this planet, and challenge viewers to futilely try to reconcile that. They are very different localities, one being a slum in a ‘developing’ nation, the other being a suburb in one the richest countries in the world. However, these divisions become irrelevant when viewed as outcomes of the same anthropogenic growth.

Art like these photographs can help establish translocal solidarity when it can be seen that different localities share similarities. Both of these deal with how to manage growth, what to do with all their waste, where they get their energy from, and how they are at risk from climate change. This will still require being “attentive to the place specificity of each movement,” as there is an unequal distribution of vulnerabilities and material wealth. But art can help localities relate to each other, and strive for solidarity.

A letter to the Governor urging for increased wetland protection and restoration funding to support coastal resiliency

Dear Governor Andrew M. Cuomo,

I am writing to express my strong encouragement for New York State to specifically direct funding to tidal wetland protection and restoration initiatives to support coastal resiliency, or the defense against extreme weather events which are becoming more frequent and exacerbated by climate change and sea level rise. As you know, New York contains five estuaries which are managed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in cooperation with other state, local, and federal government agencies. Tidal marshes within New York’s estuarine areas are not only some of the most productive habitats in the world, supporting numerous species of finfish, shellfish, terrestrial wildlife, and avian species, they are also vital for improving water quality by filtering stormwater runoff and metabolizing excess nutrients. This ecological service is critical for clarifying the water and creating more suitable conditions for natural resource and commodity production and supporting the State’s economically important commercial and recreational estuary-related industries such as the fishing and tourism.

Osprey with a fish. By: George Gentry, USFWS

Another significant ecosystem service that tidal wetlands provide is coastal resiliency in the face of impending climate change and sea level rise. Healthy functioning tidal marshes can protect public health and infrastructure by providing natural resistance to storms and flooding through rainwater absorption and protecting shorelines from erosion by buffering wave action and sediment capture. So coastal wetlands are a critical line of defense against extreme weather events which are becoming more frequent and exacerbated by global climate change and sea level rise trends. These environments also play an important role in the global carbon cycle due to their ability to act as a carbon sink by accumulating and sequestering carbon dioxide in vegetation and soil organic matter. Tidal wetland carbon sequestration abilities may be significant in relation to the urgency to reduce global carbon footprints contributing to warming and climate change.

Although coastal wetlands are economically and ecologically invaluable to the State of New York, many of these areas have become severely degraded to point where the ecosystem services they provide are compromised. Historically, a number of anthropogenic stressors during the last century have had major impacts to tidal wetlands in New York. Public nuisance and health concerns about marsh mosquito populations during the late 1800’s into the early 1900’s led to the promotion of the historical practice of grid-ditching existing wetlands. Filling of low-lying lands for residential and commercial uses as well as the construction of roads, bridges, and canals has led to severe wetland acreage loss. And cross-continental travel and trading, induced the proliferation of non-native plant species which effectively displace diverse native vegetation and compromise the integrity of tidal wetland ecosystems.

Smith Point Park, Shirley, New York. Looking South. Photo taken by Suffolk County Vector Control.

Currently New York’s most densely populated communities are in close proximity to coastal wetlands and have caused degradation of these environments due mainly to urbanization. Excess nitrogen inputs and other pollutants to New York’s coastal estuarine systems from human land uses generally originate from fertilizers for agriculture, commercial, and residential applications; stormwater runoff and combined sewer overflow discharges; and antiquated cesspool and septic systems. These anthropogenic stressors from terrestrial land uses affect tidal wetland functioning and compound the vulnerability to coastal ecosystems and communities in the context of impending climate change and sea level rise.

With sea levels rising and increasing storm intensity and frequency, New York’s coastal communities need to be better prepared for future climate related scenarios. Public health and safety, reduced risk of structural and non-structural damage, and improved recovery plans should be at the forefront in resiliency planning. But protection and restoration of the natural estuarine environment and its ability to mitigate storm damages should also be of highest priority. For these reasons, I strongly urge you to make adequate funding available for tidal wetland protection and restoration to support the coastal resiliency of New York.

Sincerely,

Jennifer McGivern

Senior Environmental Analyst and Environmental Advocate

Cc:       NYSDEC Commissioner Basil Seggo

            NYSDEC Division of Fish, Wildlife and Marine Resources

Kintsugi: Repairing Our Damages (Art)

blue by Mo Muzammal
color by Mo Muzammal
white by Mo Muzammal
divided by Mo Muzammal

In attempting to post a creative segment for my “blog post” this week, I was reminded of the cost of giving into the charms of contemporary technology, specifically the ways in which artists, especially those working with more technologically advanced mediums (such as film or photography) can lose sight of the overall damage left behind by the remnants of such a technology. In chapter four of T.J. Demos’ book, Against the Anthropocene, Edward Burtynsky’s Oil Fields #27, Bakersfield, California, USA is described as a photograph wherein “technology merges with nature, unified aesthetically, composing a picture that is, monstrously, not only visually pleasurable…” (65).

Though Burtynsky acknowledges the dangers of Climate Change, he does not see the full repercussions of the moment. Despite this, Burtynsky’s art is beautiful and tends to evoke strong feelings from the viewer. However, Burtynsky’s photographs “naturalize petro capitalism” with their framing choices and editing.

Therefore, I found it liberating to work on my art pieces with the desire to perhaps open the door to more pressing discussions and questions about Modern Art and Climate Change. In these works, I use super imposition along with other photo editing techniques to try and make sense of the paradox of working with advanced technology, of having to give in to different media platforms upon which capitalism has made its mark, to ultimately critique the system by showing the ways in which it fractures the world. In this series of photographs, I seek to find a balance between our world and the one outside of us, hoping the worlds can be reconciled through the “putting together” of disparate parts (in this sense, Art is contrary to Capitalism which, despite appearing to also “put together” the world’s disparate parts through the global supply chain, only further fractures and divides the world through growing inequality and growth models which exploit the environment). 

Influenced by “Kintsugi,” the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending broken areas with various materials (lacquer, gold, silver, platinum), this artwork is aesthetically fractured, but whole, desiring to repair our world through the stitching of its various broken and damaged parts. In this sense, photographic superimposition is a symbolic reification of a harmonious repair of what is left and what is damaged.

I hope everyone enjoys this “Climate Change/Art” post and ponders interesting questions and thoughts on the project.

Can Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities transcend Segregation?

The word solidarity is used over and over in the article “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities” written by Paul Routlegdge, which was published in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. As written in the Abstract, “This article argues that a specialized understanding of both particular placed-based struggles as well as how such struggles attempt to forge solidarities beyond the local are crucial in order to construct meaningful translocal alliances.” By briefly discussing climate justice concerning climate change and food sovereignty specifically in Bangladesh, the article discusses the manner in which a potential solidarity can be formed at the translocal level. While other keywords mentioned are translocal alliances, food sovereignty, climate justice agenda, translocal climate justice solidarities stand out the most to me. While I could not agree more with Routlege that solidarities and alliances are formed from shared experiences I think it is interesting race, racism or segregation is not mentioned once in the article.

The style of Routledge article is quite clear. He uses specific occurrences happening at  global and local levels to back his argument that translocal solidarities are effective in organizing against climate change. People are more engaged and proactive when they have a shared sense of struggle or injustice. Routledge does discuss the spatiality of struggle, covering broad categories yet still not mentioning race.  “The distribution of vulnerabilities among bodies households, neighborhoods, etc. are unequally experienced by men and women rich and poor.” As accurate as this statement is, how could he not further add between white and black, and people of color?

Interestingly, Routledge notes, “An initial requirement for the construction of such solidarities has been the construction of ‘convergence spaces’…” His two examples are interesting as they do not discuss racial issues: the ‘global south’ and Bangladesh. While Bangladesh is a poor country, vulnerable to climate injustice, it is a largely ethnically homogeneous society where it would be easier to find solidarity. Conversely, the global south, while affected greatly by capitalism and the front line of climate change spans broader across diverse countries and regions that are greatly affected by racism and segregation. Although the global south pertains to regions outside of North America, this can be seen in the southeast regions of the United States, where locations such as ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana predominantly affect black neighborhoods. Many third world countries considered part of the global south are also structured in this way with poorer and oftentimes black or minority populations lumped into spaces separate from the majority. The shared experiences can be night and day, even if location wise they are close.

While racism and segregation do not have to limit translocal solidarities, as can be seen currently with the Black Lives Matter movement, after the George Floyd murder, it still presents an ongoing struggle and obstacle when discussing the fight against injustice and specifically climate change injustices. This article, while clear and informative would be more persuasive if it had included discussions on racism and segregation as potential obstacles to climate justice solidarities. As George Floyd’s murder was recorded and thus seen by people of all ethnicity and nationalities, climate change injustices can go on, hidden in many spaces due to segregation by way of racial injustice. As the majority of climate injustices affect segregated spaces due to racism, are consequently hidden from view, shared alliances would be hard to form.

St. James, LA – Oct. 23, 2019 – Sharon Lavigne (L) leads community members and activists from New Orleans on a march through her hometown of St. James. “The March Against Death Alley” was coordinated by a coalition of environmental activists to raise awareness and advocate for residents who live nearby heavy industry along the Mississippi River.

#climatejustice #segregation #CancerAlley #translocalalliances

Greta Thunberg urges MEP's to show climate leadership.

Social media reaction to flight shaming and Greta Thunberg’s trip across the Atlantic

If you’re a regular flyer, odds are that your biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions each year is air travel. It likely dwarfs the footprint of all the lights in your home, your commute to work, your hobbies, and maybe even your diet.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-thunberg-climate-change-flying-airline

Last summer, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg set sail from the UK on a zero-carbon racing boat (NOT a luxury yacht) to attend the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York. Thunberg has vowed not to fly — and has persuaded her parents to do the same — because of the greenhouse gases emitted by airplanes (cruise ships are even worse). In making her trip to the United States by boat, she gave a significant boost to the “flight shaming” movement, known in Sweden as “flygskam.” She also provoked wide ranging responses on social media, many of them distorting her message.

Perhaps the most egregious social media response was a photo of Thunberg eating breakfast on a train, with a scene out the window that was manipulated to depict hungry children of color looking inside. The photo was shared by the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

Presumably this was to discredit Thunberg by portraying her as a clueless child of privilege, unaware of real needs around her. Discrediting Thunberg because of her youth is a common response on social media.

In a March 2020 article in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism titled “Hero or villain? Responses to Greta Thunberg’s activism and the implications for travel and tourism,” Mucha Mknono took a closer look at reactions such as this, analyzing hundreds of Facebook responses to Thunberg’s trip across the Atlantic. The authors read and categorized responses across three Facebook pages: Sky News, BBC and CNN, coding responses into five categories, four that scapegoated Thunberg and one that heroized her.

The following are the broad categories, with examples of comments from each:

  1. Insults of Thunberg’s personal characteristics, including being dismissed for being young, mentally sick, ignorant, irrational, or idealistic.

Amazing! If my parents had not loved me and I suffered from a lack of attention I’d do the same! (y)’; and ‘I’m not that special’??? Oh please- you’re not special at all. Nothing but a silly little attention seeking brat.

Comment on BBC Facebook page

2. Conspiracy theories

Who’s puppet is she? Its clear as day that she isn’t doing this on her own, you can see it when she speaks, like shes being forced to read from a script that somebody else has written for her

Comment on Sky News Facebook page


3. “Hypocrite villain” to create an “us-and-them dichotomy; a sort of class struggle representation of the climate change debate.”

Emissions free until I fly one crew home and fly another crew in for the return trip. Practice real ecology not Eco theatre your more fake than cool whip. I’m tired of people falling for these stunts that are not green and accomplish nothing other than making a carbon spewing fake Eco warior famous for fifteen minutes. Your a discrace to the very cause your besmirching.

Comment on CNN Facebook page

4. Dismissing personal responsibility and portraying Thunberg’s anti-flying message as without a sound scientific basis

I DO listen to the science. HUNDREDS of predictions of our doom, we should have been flooded and burned to death long ago, and none, not a single one, has come true yet. We were even told that by the 1990s we would see a new ice age kill us off. Didn’t happen either. When your predictions don’t match actual observations, the theory is wrong and you throw it away. Why this theory proven so wrong hasn’t been is very telling. It’s not about the environment, it’s about something else.’

Comment on CNN Facebook page

5. And finally, “hero ecology,” wherein she was viewed as inspirational, and her anti-flying message as worth heeding.

This young woman is doing an amazing job in highlighting the climate crisis and bringing young people into the demand for change.
Well done Greta!

Comment on CNN Facebook page

The analysis found that 70 percent of the comments fell into the first four categories, which the authors refer to as “scapegoat ecology,” where Thunberg becomes the target of vitriol toward climate change activism and the anti-flying movement.

It is depressing to consider that absent from these comments is a sincere, productive discussion about the role of air travel — or any travel — in contributing to greenhouse gases.

Also absent from the comments ridiculing her age is Thunberg’s own words acknowledging that she would rather scientists be the ones speaking out: “We know that most politicians don’t want to talk to us. Good, we don’t want to talk to them either. We want them to talk to the scientists instead. Listen to them” (Brussels, 21 Feb 2019).

I am reminded that Susanne Moser’s, “Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science‐Action Gap” was written in 2011, when social media was still in its early years. The author has since written much on climate change communication. With so much of our communication happening via social media, perhaps it is time for a study of best practices for activists to most effectively communicate the realities of climate change — and solutions — amid this vitriolic online environment.

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)
© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

“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?

“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. 

© 1982 Agnes Denes

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.”

© 1982 Agnes Denes
© 1982 Agnes Denes

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 50th 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 2nd 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?