It’s (fourteen minutes past) October 26th 2020, and today was the day of Saskatchewan’s Provincial election. For this week’s exploration of non-material art-making, I chose to read a chapter of Roy Scranton’s We’re Doomed. Now What? across from the Legislative Building across Wascana Lake.

This chapter is titled “Raising a Daughter in a Doomed World,” and it spoke to me when I read it a few weeks ago. Scranton articulates a lot of what I’d like to say in this moment, on this day when the people I live among are locking in another term with the Sask Party, complete with their near Trump-like dismissal of climate change.

I also feel like reading a book like this is itself a performance these days; Rob Nixon puts it concisely in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor:

one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental injustice (8)

Who reads a book like Scranton’s today? Is anyone reading it who isn’t already converted? Would my reading this chapter out loud here in Regina actually invoke an interest in this topic in anyone who isn’t already interested? I doubt it. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, the people are voting (literally as I read out loud) and honestly, it’s hard not to focus on the “we’re doomed” rather than the “now what?”

Once again, today was cold, and Wascana Park was sparsely populated. A few people went by. No one said anything to me, which was actually what I was expecting. I didn’t make eye contact, as I kept focused on reading the text; all I know is people passed in my peripheral view of the area in front of me. What they took from seeing me there will remain a mystery to me, but I know for certain that I didn’t invoke an urge in anyone to go to the polls and vote Green. The geese in the lake behind me got more out of this show than anyone else.

David asked me in class last Friday: “What are my goals? If my goals are to solve climate change, I’ll fail. If my goals are to engage participation…?”

What were my goals with today’s performance? (It wasn’t participatory, so there goes that goal). They weren’t really to convert anybody — I knew I wouldn’t. My goal was just to express how I was feeling today and in the lead-up to this election, and really, I knew ahead of time that this was a pointless objective.

I’m starting to feel a real crisis set in; I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, I don’t see much purpose in it, and I don’t know how to change these facts. Today was the third time I’ve tried to create non-material art for my work in this semester of my MFA, and I’m not very happy with any of these attempts. While I don’t feel I have the means to assess their success or failure, I know “in my gut” that they aren’t doing what I want them to be doing.

I’m grateful to Esperanza for documenting this attempt at doing something. She’s sent me the video she took of the entire 33+ minutes I stood there reading, and I’ll need to figure out if or what I’ll do with it. Is there any point in uploading it to the cyber-world? I don’t know if the one or two views it would get would be worth its carbon footprint, honestly. Should I turn the video into a documentary “film” of sorts? Esperanza and I wandered around the lake, and she photographed and videoed scenery, birds, a bunch of ducks telling a few good jokes. She’s offered to produce a short film using this material. I just don’t know at this point.

I have a lot of figuring out to do.

Now what?

My first attempt at performance art took place on October 17th, and I’m not quite sure how to think about it.

One thing that surprised (and disappointed) me was the lack of people around. The farmers’ market was a ghost of its summer self with only a few diehard vendors and nearly no customers. Victoria Park, nearby the market, where I set up, was void of human life… I suppose I shouldn’t have expected to have an audience on a cold autumn day in Regina. Stil, it was disappointing that I didn’t give out (via Jakob — this was his role) any of the 120 small slips of paper I’d printed with information about the climate action signs on one side, and this on the other:

I’ll have to consider projects/events I plan for the near future and how integral having live viewers, or participants, should be. I can’t really do much indoors these days either due to Covid19. I really have to think about how these facts of my reality (winter; Covid) will impact my work over the next few weeks.

If no one was there to really observe or experience this event in person, at least it was “put out there” via the media. A local radio station, Regina 980 CJME was out to interview me, and I while I didn’t hear myself on the radio, I was pleased to see that they also printed a summery of it. I’m pretty okay with how the reporter presented was I was doing.

Global TV also interviewed me, though again I didn’t get to see the interview when it happened on the 6pm and 10pm news that day. (I gather from friends that it was a decent interview). Like every other aspect of this new (for me) art practice, I need to think more about how to assess what I’m doing with the media. Do I consider it a good thing as far as my art work goes to get this type of attention? It has no real connection to the actual event itself — the immediacy the moment, the feeling it creates, is lost. I’ll have to ask Risa about this.

About the performance itself: it was hard. Physically hard. This was how I felt immediately after: tired and having trouble breathing.

I hadn’t really put much thought into what this performance would do to my body. As I read in the Marilyn Arsem’s “Some Thoughts on Teaching Performance Art in Five Parts,” after doing this work,

There are real consequences to every action in which one engages. Any action affects one both physically and psychologically. It is happening by and to one’s body, and its impact cannot be discounted simply because it is called art.

And in “This is Performance,” Arsem writes

Performance art requires risk.
The artists take physical risks using their bodies.
The artists take psychic risks as they confront their limits.

Physical risks: I had an asthma attack immediately after my seven minutes of jumping hurdles in -10 degrees. It was my first attach in over two decades, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind to bring the old (expired) Ventolin inhaler I keep at home for “just in case.” I had to rush home to take several puffs, and it took me three days before I was able to speak normally and a week before I wasn’t wheezing and hacking. Who would have thought that suddenly running in freezing temperatures without any warm-up would be such a shock to the lungs? Really! Also, in one particularly graceful hoist over a lawn sign, I snapped its metal stand, and in a subsequent effort to haul my 125 pounds over this object, I scraped my leg. That was no big deal; I didn’t even notice it until that evening. Still, these physical effects of the performance gave me a glimpse into just how unpredictable this type of work is.

Psychological risks: I’ll get to that in another blog post.

As far as getting feedback from viewers, there really isn’t a lot to report. My husband said that night as I wheezed and coughed, “Jakob saw, I saw, and God saw.” We’re devout atheists, so what he meant by the latter was really that I did something he considered a good thing to do. Period. Everyone else who’s said anything about this performance (feedback from friends after seeing my Facebook post or the radio/tv news about it) just said it was “amazing.” Of course, that’s what friends are for, right?

As an aside, I have received more feedback from the “happening” I organized for the previous weekend (the “house of cards” event). Naomi Hunter, leader of the Saskatchewan Green Party, told me that she felt rejuvenated for a week following the event. Florence Stratton, a well-know local activist, told me she felt great after participating too. A stranger who got in touch after reading the Leader Post article about what I was doing said, “your performance helps promote the environmental cause. Good job.”

Good job? I really don’t know. Overall, I’m feeling lost, and it’s hard to say if this is feeling is just a sign that I’m doing what Arsem says students of performance art must do (“I believe it is critical for artists to learn to assess the progress of their work, and challenge themselves to develop it further”), or if this type of work just isn’t me.

Photo credits: Esperanza Sanchez Espitia

I’ll end by quotoing from Arsem again (thanks for introducing me to her, Risa!):

Artists need to find ways to sustain their practice without becoming too reliant on validation by outside authority figures, who rarely have the same focus or agendas as the artist. The more clarity that one has about one’s goals, the clearer the avenues of options become.

This is what I really need the most: to have clarity about my goals.

Tomorrow at noon, I will put on my first ever “performance art” piece.

I will set up several of the “I vote for climate action: talk to me about your plan” lawn signs on the lawn near the Farmers’ Market in Victoria Park, downtown Regina. My husband will blow a whistle and start a stopwatch. Wearing an exceptionally bright red-orange and yellow tracksuit jacket and bright blue leggings I found at Value Village, I will run and jump (hurdle style) over the lawn signs for 7 minutes without stopping. My son will hand out small flyers to anyone who wanders by wanting to know what I’m doing. One side of the flyer will be EnviroCollective’s mission “to build networks and share resources to support environmental and climate action” and website (where people can order one of these signs).

The other side will say the following:

In 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that we had 12 years remaining to make drastic reductions to our greenhouse gas emissions in order to maintain a global heating temperature increase of 1.5◦ Celsius. Global warming beyond that point would have catastrophic results.

Aligning with the IPCC’s data, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (in Berlin) keeps a running tally of how much time we have left before we will exceed 1.5◦ Celsius and 2◦ Celsius global warming. Due to increased emissions in the past two years, they now predict we have only a bit over 7 years and 2 months to make these radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions (at current emission rates).

For 7 minutes, I will hurdle “I vote for climate action signs” to express the urgency of voting in candidates in this fall’s elections who will take climate change as seriously as it needs to be taken.

Search for the MCC Carbon Clock to see how much time we have left.

For some reason, I had the figure of eleven years in my head when this idea came to me. I knew the IPCC had reported on 12 years a while ago… I didn’t realize that it was 2018 when they came out with that figure. I’d also heard the figure of 7 years floating around, and in fact Tanya Dahms suggested I should use that figure instead. I wanted to stick with the IPCC’s number as they carry some clout (as they should…). However, looking into it further, I’ve learned what the situation is: In 2018, the IPCC based their prediction of when the world’s “carbon budget” to keep us at 1.5 degrees Celsius would run out. Two years ago, this window was 12 years.

Now, it is just over 7.

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change keeps a running clock of how much time is remaining to keep to 1.5 and 2 degrees heating. As of this moment, we are passing:

This has convinced me that I should use the figure of 7 years in tomorrow’s performance.

I’m aware that as much as this figure is based on scientific research, it’s also a prediction. Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change’s Carbon Clock website explains that

“The Special Report of October 2018 presents new figures: The atmosphere can absorb, calculated from end-2017, no more than 420 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ if we are to stay below the 1.5°C threshold. However, since around 42 Gt of CO₂ is emitted globally every year—the equivalent of 1332 tonnes per second—this budget is expected to be used up in just over nine years. The budget for staying below the 2°C threshold, for its part, of approximately 1170 Gt, will be exhausted in about 26 years.”

I have Tanya to thank for knowing about this resource. She sent me a message tonight saying “I think the installation piece in Manhattan is logging 7-8 years…”

I did a quick Google search for “Manhattan installation art climate change” and read about this piece in a New York Times article:

A New York Clock That Told Time Now Tells the Time Remaining

Metronome’s digital clock in Manhattan has been reprogrammed to illustrate a critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible.

I’m in awe that such a piece exists — that artists created it, but also that it’s come to this.

And also, that life is going on as usual just below this 62′ wide clock that’s spelling out our doom.

The truth is, the “hurdle” I’m jumping tonight as I do some final preparations for tomorrow is dealing with my son. He hasn’t been sleeping well for months, predating Covid19. While my husband and I don’t talk a lot about climate change in front of him, and we certainly avoid the “doom and gloom,” he definitely knows more about it than the average ten year-old in Saskatchewan. He’s heard us say enough. He’s seen the books we have lying around (even though I try to hide the worst titles, such as We’re Doomed. Now What?). He’s been to the Fridays for Future climate strikes and other rallies. He’s heard people shout out really horrific things — “There’s no Planet B” and “You’ll die of old age. We’ll die of climate change.” He even participated in a “die in” in front of the Legislative Building last year. He’s smart, and he knows that we believe in science, and that the science says the shit is going to hit the fan. I wondered tonight, as he burst into tears when I pointed out that his (long) hair is tangled, how much climate-related anxiety he’s unconsciously experiencing. I wonder about this when he’s so upset because he can’t stick with a story idea long enough to write it (he’s a young writer). Why are his stories not worth writing to him? Is it at all connected to the overall anxiety that’s in the world right now about the ending of our own story? This really worries me.

How is a concerned parent supposed to act?

I want my son to know that I’m doing what I can to help the world realize that drastic change is needed for this drastic situation. At the same time, if he’s handing out flyers for me tomorrow, of course he’s going to read one. Do I change the wording to take off the edge? Perhaps remove the part that says, “Global warming beyond that point would have catastrophic results.” Do I try to add some level of “hope.” Apparently, “hope” and “solutions” is what sells people on the idea of making behavioural (and political?) change in the right direction.

I’ll have to give this some more thought tomorrow morning and when planning my following events. For now, the clock’s ticking, and I better get to bed to have the energy to face tomorrow.

Thoughts from day one:

The CTV crew set up to interview me right at 3pm, and this threw me off. I hadn’t predicted them being there. In hindsight, maybe I should have ignored them or asked them to come back after 4:30 so as not to take up any time of the actual happening. I’m not sure.

No one could build a “house” in 70km/hr winds, obviously. It didn’t seem like there was any real competition to do so, either. People just made an attempt for a while, stopped, tried again, and then left. There wasn’t any real opportunity to award anyone a free sign, of if there was, I missed it.

I’d brought a ladder as a prop, knowing that with the wind we wouldn’t need to use it. One of the best parts of the event was Mike sitting on it, holding a sign — that was a great performance.

Kids! I hadn’t really anticipated how having kids present would drastically affect the feeling/tone of the event. In some ways it was great having them there — they helped maintain a level of energy for building a house of cards despite the fact that it was clearly pointless. In other ways, though, it made the event feel more like a family event than I’d predicted it would be. There isn’t anything wrong with that per se, and in fact kids are a big part of why I’m doing what I’m doing. At the same time, it felt a bit like the adults were there to help the kids do an activity that was solely for their entertainment, and that’s just different from how I’d imagined things would feel.

Another way to put it is this: kids are used to doing things that may appear silly or pointless to grown-ups; to them, it’s fun and games. In a way, this was great, but in another way, I’d wanted the struggle we were going through to be serious at the same time as it was ridiculous, and I don’t feel like that came through. Maybe it did for others though.

I’m questioning what my position should be at an event like this. Should I have persisted on trying to build a house of cards alone instead of mostly with others? Should I have acted more theatrically? It was hard to know what my role was or how I should act, and I was aware of this through the event, which felt awkward. Then again, this is a new medium for me, so I guess it makes sense that I don’t feel confident about what I’m doing.

You know, thinking about it now, it actually felt like it didn’t matter what I was doing. People there were busy doing their own thing, and that was entirely fine. Great, actually. I wasn’t the happening, the participants were.

I had a number of brief exchanges with participants. People noted the metaphor of what we were trying to do… building a “house” despite the extreme challenges the environment around us (the weather) presented. I think one of the best moments was when one little boy said “we built it once, we can build it again!” after the wind collapsed a “house” we’d spent time building. Later he said “we can do this if we work together!” What a great attitude, dude!

I was too busy trying to build a house of cards (and running after signs) to really see if there were any passersby who stopped to ask about what was happening, but my guess is that there weren’t. It was a bit too blustery for many people to be out, and it was also many people’s Thanksgiving. So, it really felt like “my people” came out but no one else, and while I’m entirely grateful that they were there, I’ll have to think about how to change this for the next time if I want to attract the “unconverted.”

I didn’t get the chance to talk to anyone who was there to argue.

On the other hand, at least we were subjected to any violence.

Another EnviroCollective board member suggested that I hold upcoming happenings/performances in different locations, and I think that’s a great idea. I’ll try to pick places where there would be more people walking by. Perhaps I’ll set up in front of City Hall next time, and maybe on Friday afternoon when there’s more foot traffic. I just need to finalize what I’ll actually be doing …

We’ll see if things are any different tomorrow, and what else I can learn from this experience.

Again, I’m grateful to all the people who took time out of their Thanksgiving Sunday (including Risa), and I’m also grateful to Esperanza for playing the role of documentarian.

Last night, as I was putting my ten year-old son, Jakob, to bed, he was telling me about the model Winnebago Cheiftain he’d just built in Minecraft. He knows a lot about RVs as dreaming about owning one is new “thing” these days, and he’s being doing research on all of the makes and models that are out there, new and used. We’re big on camping, but we’re all getting a bit tired of tenting, and owning an small camper van is moving from the realm of dream to ambition. Jakob’s research may inform this major decision that we could potentially be making in the next year or two.

In bed last night, we chatted about his recent Minecraft creation:

This is the RV that Jakob’s dad’s family had back in the 70s. (It also happens to be the same RV that the crew in The Walking Dead use to avoid zombies in the early seasons of the post-apocolyptic show.) We were talking about how un-aerodynamic its design was, and how much gas it must have burned. Being raised as a young environmentalist, fuel efficiency is one of the key considerations Jakob is making when doing this research into camper vans.

At this point in the conversation, Jakob said how he wishes he could be having a childhood “like Daddy’s.” Mike grew up in a small town, spent days “running wild” (Jakob’s words) through the woods that backed his family home, and spent weeks on the road in the family’s Winnebago without any knowledge of climate change.

I can’t express how sad I am that Jakob, and all the kids of his generation, have this existential problem looming over their childhood. It’s a real dilemma for me as I raise Jakob: part of me doesn’t want him to know anything at all about climate change; part of me wants him to know that his parents are doing what they can to spread awareness of the need for urgent action to mitigate and reduce its effects. Today will be an example of big a part of my life climate activism has become.

Today and tomorrow, I’m going to make my first attempt at performance art. I’m going to spend an hour and a half attempting to build a “house of cards” out of the “I vote for climate action: tell me about your plan” lawn signs that EnviroCollective, Regina’s environmental initiative “hub,” has produced.

These non-partisan lawn signs are meant to be a way to get more people thinking about climate change as they go to the polls for the upcoming provincial and municipal elections. EnviroCollective ordered 1000 of them. They are plastic, unfortunately, but they are completely reusable for future elections. We are selling them for just a bit more than cost as a fundraiser for EnviroCollective and a sponsor non-profit organization, The Council of Canadians.

As a board member of EnviroCollective, I’ve been trying to get these signs “out there.” We’d hoped to have a table at the Farmer’s Market, but this plan fell through. I’ve tried asking a few local and sustainability-minded shops to consign them for us, but most small business owners I’ve approached have politely declined. Our provincial election is just over two weeks away, and we’ve only sold about 100 signs.

Four days ago, disappointed at how slow our sales have been, I decided to find a way to use these signs in a performance art piece with the hopes of getting more publicity for this initiative, and to say something about the ridiculousness of the situation we’re in: that the most important issue of our time is not being treated seriously enough.

What immediately came to mind was the idea of trying to build a house of cards out of them on the lawn of the Legislative Building.

Looking at different types of performance art online, I came across the term “happening.” I read about how “Happenings were the forerunners of performance art and in turn emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism” (Tate). I read how Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1959, and how “Kaprow emphasized the importance of artist’s action and the process of creation above the finished work” (Widewalls).

Honestly, I wanted to get an event “out there” asap, and so I decided to post to Facebook that I would be putting on a “happening” today and tomorrow, attempting to build a “house of cards” out of these hundreds of “I vote for climate action” signs that we haven’t yet sold, even though I’m still trying to understand the semantics of the terms “happening,” “participatory art,” “social practice art,” “community-based art” and others that refer to art performances that involve the public in one way or another.

The event description is as follows: “Reginans: Join me on the lawn of the Legislative Building between 3:00-4:30pm this Sunday and Monday (Oct 11/12) for a participatory climate action “happening.” I will attempt to build the biggest “house of cards” possible out of these “I vote for climate action” signs, and I’m challenging supporters of this campaign as well as passersby to beat me. I’ll be giving away free signs to the winners! Masks are required.”

Amazingly, Ashley Martin of the local newspaper found out about this performance and EnviroCollective’s climate action sign initiative, and within two days of posting about my event, I was on the front page of Friday’s Regina Leader Post.

In a way, this means I’ve already achieved my objective of using my performance to gain attention to the fact that climate change needs to be considered a major election issue. Now, I’ll just see who shows up to participate in this event today and tomorrow. The Leader Post reaches a wide audience in what is a very conservative and “pro oil” town/province; I’m curious to know if anyone will show up wanting to pick a fight.

Somewhat ironically, the weather will be a major participant in today’s performance. I posted the following update to this event:

I’m looking forward to this performance and all of the unexpected situations it will produce. I hope a few people are out there chasing after climate action with me. And I hope we will all, but Jakob especially, get a laugh out of what is actually a very dismal situation.

Quotations from: Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Medford: Polity Press, 2017.

“It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening, it’s the glaciers melting faster and faster; on the 8 p.m. news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified. Every month, the measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are even worse than the unemployment statistics. Every year we are told that it is the hottest since the first weather recording stations were set up; sea levels keep on rising; the coastline is increasingly threatened by spring storms; as for the ocean, every new study finds it more acidic than before. This is what the press calls living in the era of an ‘ecological crisis’.

Alas, talking about a ‘crisis’ would be just another way of reassuring ourselves, saying that ‘this too will pass,’ the crisis ‘will soon be behind us.’ If only it were just a crisis!” (7)

“But here we are: what could have been just a passing crisis has turned into a profound alteration of our relation to the world. It seems as though we have become the people who could have acted thirty or forty years ago — and who did nothing, or far too little.” (9)

“Just imagine: hidden behind the profusion of world wars, colonial wars, and nuclear threats, there was, in the twentieth century, that ‘classic century of war,’ another war, also worldwide, also total also colonial, that we lived through without experiencing it.” (9) (See Scranton’s “slow violence”)

“We can’t say that we didn’t know. It’s just that there are many ways of knowing and not knowing at the same time.” (9)

“This view is much more widespread in the world at large, however, in the form of a low-level madness that can be characterized as quietist, with reference to a religious tradition in which the faithful trusted in God to take care of their salvation. Climate quietists, like the others, live in a parallel universe, but, because they have disconnected all the alarms, no strident announcement forces them up from the soft pillow of doubt: We’ll wait and see. The climate has always varied. Humanity has always come through. We have other things to worry about. The important thing is to wait, and above all not to panic.’ A strange diagnosis: these people are crazy by dint of staying calm! Some of them don’t even hesitate to stand up in a political meeting and invoke the covenant in Genisis where God promises Noah that He will send no more floods…” (11)

“There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world” (13)

(to be continued)

Quotations from: Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: First Harvard UP, 2011.

“By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings — the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s aftermath or climate change — are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.” (2-3)

“Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches […] have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match.” (3)

“In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time.” (3)

How can I take this problem and turn it into a piece… how to represent the notion of “slow violence” in art?

“This book’s second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principle casualties of slow violence.” (4)

Yes, and After the Storm was able to draw attention to this tragic unfairness. It’s just so hard to represent this situation without risking being viewed as the “white saviour” or tourist.

“…this books’ third circulating concern — the complex, often vexed figure of the environmental writer-activist.” (5)

“In this book, I have sought to address our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely form the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time. In an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV” (6)

“Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental injustice? (8)

~about how short-sighted politicians are, and the “yes, but not now, not yet” attitude. “How can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe when the political rewards of their actions will not accrue to them but will be reaped on someone else’s watch decades, even centuries, from now?

Note: So true — reminds me of the conversation I just had with Conservative MP Warren Steinley.

We need to make the effects of climate change relevant to people today. How do we do this? Many use the “do it for your children” claim, but even that doesn’t work well. We are procrastinating ourselves to extinction. How can I show that to my viewers, and how can I do so with some level of “hope” built in as well?

“To address the challenges of slow violence is to confront the dilemma Rachel Carson faced almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she eloquently called ‘death by indirection'” (9)

“Carson herself wrote of ‘a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure'” (10)

It’s really time I read the Carson…

“So, too, feminist earth scientist Jill Schneiderman, one of our finest thinkers about environmental time, has written about the way in which environmental degradation may ‘masquerade as inevitable.'” (11)

“The explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence allows us to keep front and center the representational challenges and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence but by imperceptible change whereby violence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time.” (11)

Paul Crutzen (coined the term “Anthropocene”), Will Steffen, and John McNeill coined the term “The Great Acceleration, a second stage of the Anthropocene Age that they dated to the mid-twentieth century. [They] noted how ‘nearly three-quarters of the anthropogenically driven rise in CO2 concentration has occurred since 1950 (from about 310 to 380 ppm), and about half of the total rise (48 ppm) has occurred in just the last 30 years.'” (12)

So, since I was 13 years old, we’ve seen levels rise 48 ppm (actually more than half of the increase since 1950). People have caused this massive spike in my adulthood.

“If an awareness of the Great Acceleration is (to put it mildly) unevenly distributed, the experience of accelerated connectivity (and the paradoxical disconnects that can accompany it) is increasingly widespread. In an age of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult yet increasingly urgent that we focus on the toll exacted, over time, by the slow violence of ecological degradation.” (13)

“So to render slow violence entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast “glacial” — once a dead metaphor for “slow” — as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss.” (13)

Yes! So how can I do that…?

“It is here that writers, filmmakers, and digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are the people whose quality of life — and often whose very existence — is of indifferent interest to the corporate media.” (16)

From “The Environmentalism of the Poor and Displacement in Place”:

official landscape vs. vernacular one

“More than material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased.” (17)

“I would argue, then, thaat the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time’s scales” (17)

“refugees in place” and “displacement without moving” (19)

“…the resistance posed by nature itself should not be overstated. The recent turn within environmental studies toward celebrating the creative resilience of ecosystems can be readily hijacked by politicians, lobbyists, and corporations who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollution liability. Coopting the ‘nature-and-time-will-heal’ argument has become integral to attempts to privatize profits while externalizing risk and cleanup, both of which can be delegated to ‘nature’s business.'” (21).

If I want to give a positive “spin” to the situation, I need to ensure I’m not in any way inadvertently furthering this “nature can heal itself” idea.

(to be continued)