Tag Archives: pandemic

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)

The Other Side of Petro-masculinity: We Don’t Have to Engage in the Coal Culture War

A Post-class Followup by Carol Joo Lee

As much of the talk around combatting Climate Crisis pivots on “net-zero global emissions,” the phase-out efforts for fossil fuels vis-a-vis coal industry have become a flashpoint for a culture war. Part of the reason is the genuine reaction at the loss of income, family history and sense of community, but the other part, as Cara Daggat points out in “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” is more cynical and drummed up by PR campaigns to associate coal with “traditionally aggressive masculine symbols,” such as football and military, and working-class trope of a family provider while appealing to white nostalgia. During the in-class discussion on the criticality of top-down approaches to mitigate climatic and environmental challenges, I became curious to find out if there’s an alternative script to the petro-masculinity narrative and what that might look like. Surely, on the ground, not every man, family, who’s been affected by the coal industry blight is holding on to the “coal is king” mantra and participating in “rollin’ coal” when they’re economically pinched and layoffs abound all around them regardless of how much Trump professes to love “beautiful, clean coal” and slashes EPA regulations. 

Rethinking, reimagining, reinventing and retraining are the words that are most often used to describe the economic future of the Appalachia, signaling a new era – a death of the old way and a dawn of the unknown – and as such there’s a lot of fear and resistance around the transition and most certainly it won’t happen overnight. During the Obama years, there were efforts to ease the transition from coal-based economy through programs such as, POWER Initiative, ARC (Appalachian Regional Commission) and TechHire. Unfortunately, the “war on coal” became the more dominant narrative and drowned out any good intentions. Incremental success was found in more regionally based organizations like SOAR (Shaping Our Appalachian Region) and Appalshop in Kentucky and UMWA (United Mine Workers of America Career Center) in West Virginia, which proved to be more effective in direct communication, resonance and engagement. 

A 2015 WIRED magazine piece recounts how after attending a SOAR conference, Rusty Justice (a fitting name if there ever was one), owner of a land-moving company, was inspired to co-found BitSource, a tech startup, in Pikeville, KY, that recruited coal miners to code out of an old Coca-Cola bottling plant. Another motivating factor was Michael Bloomberg. Justice heard Bloomberg say, “You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code” in a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and was incensed by his patronizing attitude. Justice and his partner received 900 applicants for 10 openings. The whittling down process included a test that evaluated three criteria: “Were they logical? Were they technical thinkers? And could they actually sit in a chair for eight hours a day?” The new tech job after training brings in about $18 an hour which is lower than an average miner salary of between $60,000 – $80,000. But the article points out that among the recruited there’s hardly any nostalgia, one of the BitSource employees, a former coal mechanic, tells the reporter, “No, I don’t miss this at all… I didn’t like the work, I liked the people.” 

A former Coca-Cola bottling plant is the new home to BitSource. Photo: Philip Scott Andrews
BitSource coders work on troubleshooting two of their current projects. Photo: Philip Scott Andrews
Homes clustered together are seen out a second story window at BitSource. Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

There are other ways of reinventing work in the coal country besides coding, which is only viable to a small segment of the coal population. There has to be. It’s no secret that coal jobs have been on a steep decline for decades and employment is at an all-time low since the late 1800’s. In Kentucky alone, in 2016, the number of jobs dropped by nearly 1,500 during just the first three months leaving an estimated 6,900 employees in the industry. The 2020 pandemic accelerated the loss: Over 6,000 coalmining jobs were lost in March and April 2020. In West Virginia, UMWA Career Center helps laid-off coal workers find jobs in commercial driving, electrical technology, chemical processing and medical jobs providing $5,000 toward retraining and $20 for each day they attend classes. While many ex-miners look for skill-based work, some are turning to farming. With the help of Community Farm Alliance, a group of multi-generation Kentuckians have started growing heirloom tomatoes and hemp on reclaimed surface mine. 

An old coal processing plant in Hazard, Kentucky. Photo: Robert Hall/SmoothPhoto
Nathan Hall, left, and Todd Howard checked a field of hemp, one of six sites the pair manages. Instead of a silver bullet, Mr. Hall said, “We want to be a part of the silver buckshot that’s going to hopefully transform this region.”
Photo Credit Mike Belleme for The New York Times

In February 2019, the Washington Examiner published an article titled, “Green New Dealers look to support miners while killing coal.” Against the pushback the GND received from coal lobbyists – “They are wrong. The coal industry is not dead. It can come back, and will, when prices become favorable;” “They are getting ready to disrupt the lives of folks who want to live in Appalachia…” – the conservative news site outlined the coal decline in stark terms for its readership: “[Even before the Green New Deal] more coal plants shuttered in President Trump’s first two years than were retired during former President Barack Obama’s first term.” Greg Carlock, GND research director at Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, describes the intended approach as follow: “You overcome the perception about the Green New Deal by engaging in conversation on where they see themselves in the energy transition… You honor the culture and the role coal communities have played in making the American economy a strong, energy-rich country.”

As illustrated above, there are promising examples for life post-coal in the Appalachian regions. However, the anti-clean energy campaign will intensify before it withers and other logistical challenges impede a new technology driven industry to take hold, such as lack of high-speed internet due to rough terrain and remoteness. Logistics aside, there are other problematic areas with focusing so intently on the people of coal work: Politically and culturally, coal mining has been a shorthand for a dignified white blue-collar job and is given an imbalanced amount of priority because of the narrative associations given to the work and the geography – the backbone of American industry, American heartland, when America was great, etc. – and when we’re tapping into the rage of coal miners, we’re tapping into white rage, discounting and erasing the history and existence of Black miners in America. So while the work towards converting the minds of the people who are most resistant to actions towards Climate Change is essential, it is also equally paramount that every vulnerable group is given the care, attention and funding. 

Trumpstoreamerica.com

The Rug Has Been Pulled Out: Distributional Failure’s Fallouts

A Topical Analysis & Sort of Reading Response by Carol Joo Lee

One of the most indelible images of this unprecedented time of Covid-19 is of a dismayed farmer in a field littered with his rotting crop. Another is a line of cars stretched on the highway beyond the frame of the picture outside a food bank – the location could be Anywhere, USA – awaiting hours for a box of groceries. As we witnessed these two heartbreaking, non-intersecting worlds, we saw clearly, among the many systemic vulnerabilities the 2020 pandemic has exposed, the limits and dangers of our current ways of distributing food. As crop and dairy farmers across the country faced the grim reality of having to dump their produce, milk and eggs as schools, hotels and restaurants shut down, millions of Americans, laid off due to no fault of their own, were on the precipice of going hungry. Neither food waste nor hunger is a new phenomenon. However, it is something else to see them side by side, interlinked and unresolved. Many wondered upon seeing these two realities juxtaposed against each other, why can’t this food reach the hungry in an advanced country like ours? It was hard to argue with Rebecca Solnit, that “We are a country whose distribution system is itself a kind of violence.” 

Hank Scott, president of Long & Scott Farms, stands in a field of rotting cucumbers that he was unable to harvest due to lack of demand on April 30, 2020 in Mount Dora, Florida. Joe Raedle | Getty Images
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank distributes food in Carson, California, on April 18. Getty Images
Dairy Farmers in West Bend, Wisconsin. Copyright 2020 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc.

The pandemic put the strains of centralized food distribution systems under a microscope – we saw the failures plainly. It pulled the rug out from under our feet and as Bruno Latour asserts, the challenge became “much more vital, more existential… also much more comprehensible, because it is much more direct.” We were forced to “be concerned with the floor.” But Climate Change has been wreaking havoc on the status quo modes of food distribution for decades yet the government has done little to improve the situation. According to EarthIsland.org, In New York City, most of the 5.7 million tons of food that arrives in the city annually passes through Hunts Point Distribution Center, the largest wholesale market in the United States, which sits on the edge of the Bronx River, surrounded on three sides by water. Almost all this food comes by truck – nearly 13,000 semis each day. 

The structure was spared during Hurricane Sandy but traffic restrictions and road damages in other parts of the city caused a major disruption. The hurricane also triggered power outage causing refrigeration and payment systems failures. This is just one example of how a perfect storm of long-distance transportation, centralized wholesale markets, the concentrated food production under a natural disaster can paralyze food distribution affecting a large scale food waste and insecurity, especially to the already vulnerable population. In another instance, the severe drought of 2012 led to near-record low water levels of Mississippi River, a major transcontinental shipping route for Midwestern agriculture, forcing barges to carry lighter load and increasing shipping costs, which resulted in significant food and economic losses.

This map indicates the amount of freight moved across portions of the United States via different modes of transportation in 2007. (US Climate Resilience Toolkit)

Distributional failure amplifies the obscene problem of food waste. Yale Climate Connections reports, 30% of the food produced globally is wasted every year. In the US, that number jumps to a whopping 40%. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the U.S., according to the World Resources Institute. These numbers are not entirely surprising, yet, nonetheless shocking and disturbing. The main factor in this scandalous amount of waste is over-production which also contributes to unnecessary GHG emissions. Add to these already grievous facts, unforeseen distribution breakdowns as we witnessed on the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns compound the food waste problem, which compounds the food insecurity problem. When I look at the faces of the people lined up for food in much circulated photographs during this pandemic, I suspect that I will see almost the same makeup of people in the near-certain future climate-related catastrophes that disrupt access and means to food – largely BIPOC, elderly and low-income. 

Nelly Avila, wearing personal protective equipment, waits in a line for a pop-up food pantry in Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17.   REUTERS/Brian Snyder
People queue to pick up fresh food at a Los Angeles Regional Food Bank giveaway of 2,000 boxes of groceries in Los Angeles, April 9.  REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

The 2018 IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C filed “the impacts of global and regional climate change at 1.5°C on food distribution” under Knowledge Gaps and Key Uncertainties. It now seems, in the wake of a pandemic, the outlines that weren’t so clear two years ago have been brought into sharper relief. Though we may be lacking definitive data, on a visceral level, the impacts are and will be widespread, panic-inducing and life-threatening. As we strive for mitigation and adaptation to 15°C pathways, alternate and equitable modalities of food distribution systems are critical in reducing poverty and inequalities, as well as GHG emissions. In a larger sense, in Solnit’s words, Climate Change is not suddenly bringing about an era of equitable distribution. But surely, without concerted efforts to change the broken ways and redirect our climate and moral trajectories, there will be no rug and no floor to land on.