Plant Planning

Today was an unexpected free day, like a snow day—but without the deluge that folks further south are still shoveling.  Naturally, I spent it poring over seed catalogs, planning for spring.  In some ways, this is my favorite moment in the garden—the one when every seed still has the chance to come to fruition, when I haven’t fallen behind on weeding, when the slugs have not come, the deer have not browsed, the blight is a distant (albeit not quite distant enough!) matter.  The garden is still the Platonic ideal of A Garden, pure potential, like seeds themselves.

In this moment, the garden is always also much, much larger than it will be once the seeds are planted.  Somehow, I persuade myself that we’ve room for not only all the usual veggies, but also wheat and corn and melons—each of which demands a fair bit of space.  My choices are dictated by whether something will grow in a zone five garden, by what we like to eat, by the ineffable something that makes one plant’s name stand out over another’s—though, seriously, how am I supposed to choose between Sumptuous corn and Luscious corn??  I also choose in ways that help maintain biodiversity.  Keeping lots of heirlooms in production and supporting small seed saving enterprises helps to hold monoculture at bay for another day.

And ‘cause I’m me, this way of choosing has seemed completely sensible, seemed patently (oh, how awkward) right.  So it was eye-opening to have lunch last Friday with two landscape architects whose way of thinking about plant selection took so much more into account.  They care deeply about biodiversity and plant quality and ensuring that good plant companies thrive, but in such a different way.  They see the relationships between plants visually and horticulturally, and can intuit the changing look of a garden or yard both throughout seasons and over decades.  They also cherish biodiversity, but not nearly so abstractly.  Maximizing it means there will continue to be plenty of options for relationships among plants.  It means something is likely to thrive no matter what weird weather we get in a given year.  And while they take taste and other human preferences into account, that’s not the ultimate concern.  Rather, their ultimate attention is to place—to the ever-changing relationships between plants, site, weather, light—to the whole they can help craft.

My narrower vision is, in part, because most of my plants stay just one season.  I’m like a painter who re-gessoes her canvases every fall, leaving only a faint trace of that year’s efforts in evidence.  They are like the Starn Twins, directing Big Bambú.  Or, come to think of it, maybe the Starn Twins are more like them…

Eating Local Art

One of my former students, Jena Duncan, has a new blog chronicling her art efforts around eating locally.  “Jena Performing Local” began a week or so ago, as she embarked on a 100-mile diet.  She’s recording her food purchases, yearnings, frustrations, and the like, as well as the questions and problems that this new diet, begun mid-winter, inevitably brings to the fore.

In her opening post, she says that she had not “done a ton of practical research” before starting, so that her own search for food would be part of the experience.  I kinda love that—partly for the spunkiness of it, and partly because it makes eating primal again.

I’m really interested in what happens when well-fed, economically safe folk are able to realize that eating is primal.  When we go from abstractly knowing it to deeply knowing it, for such an understanding is potentially life changing.  In the U.S., about 50 million people are considered “food insecure,” many of them children.  For we lucky folks who are not hungry, learning this primalness in adulthood can change us not only in culinary ways, but also spiritually, politically, environmentally.  It may prompt us to change jobs, grow vegetables, volunteer more.

I’m also interested in the whole art/life blur.  Jena identifies her foray into local eating as art.  (She says in that initial post that in addition to walking her talk, she “wants to translate the experience into aesthetic objects.”  But it’s clear from the title and posts that the performance of eating locally is itself equally part of her artwork.) Quite a lot of people have embarked on similar local diet challenges, without calling them art.  And many people eat a local diet (and have for millennia) without thinking about these concerns at all.  What is it that makes Jena’s efforts art and the others not?

There was a brief and shining moment during the last century in which the answer to that was simply “it’s art because I [the artist] say it’s art.”  (I kinda love the spunkiness of that, too, at least sometimes).  And while plenty of people actually do still say it, that claim doesn’t have the apparent legitimacy it did thirty or forty years ago.  In an era when the unified self has long since been dissolved, assigning that kind of authority to the “I” seems either wildly retrograde or naïve (or, perhaps, super radical.  I’m willing to try to go there…).

So what’s left?  Often, folks point to context—almost invariably reaching back to cite Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917 as the work that re-directed us from object to context as the locus for art meaning.  But what in the physical context lets us see Jena’s “Jena Performing Local” blog as different from that of Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, the pioneers of the current 100-mile diet?  Both appear on my laptop framed by the same wallpaper, nudging against the same dashboard icons.  Both are temporarily called forth from cyberspace, that apotheosis of the postmodern context-of-no-context.

So, if we’ve nixed something innate, the artist’s intention, and context, is anything left?  I suppose I’m left.  Am I making it art because I know Jena is thinking of it as art?  Would you, had you stumbled upon it, think of it as art?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But even if you would, that’s not adequate, either, because it just makes your subjectivity the decisive one, rather than Jena’s.  Plus, what about all those folks who arrive at her site and think of it as a how-to guide for local eating?

I have no idea where this project will take Jena, but for me the possibilities that come from this counterpointing and complicating of eating and art excite.

Not an AVATAR Review: Technology and Environmental Art

So I went to Avatar last weekend.  I figured I’d enjoy the story fairly well, but really, I’d gone simply to see it—to decide for myself if the much-touted cinematic sea-change was all that.  And it was.  Even without the benefit of 3-D, the movie was visually astounding.  Which is probably why the thing I keep thinking about is the strange role that technology plays in the film.  On the one hand, Cameron et al. developed some tremendous new envisioning technologies so that this film could be fully realized.  On the other hand, the movie’s narrative went a long way toward suggesting that tech is aligned with—how to say this gently?—the forces of evil.

What’s up with that?

I have plenty of guesses—some terribly generous toward the film and its makers, others far less so.  Those don’t much matter, though.  What does is that this film manages to have it both ways—to rely utterly on new tech and to critique technology as an agent of environmental harm.  Already, Avatar has become a touchstone for a host of conversations, and it may help us think through an issue that matters greatly to emerging environmental artists:  the “appropriate” roles of technology in their art.

Artists of all stripes balance competing concerns in their work, but environmental artists engage a set of challenges that are particularly vexing.  They must make work that has artistic integrity even as they consider the environmental impact of their art-making decisions.  Other artists might worry about their carbon footprints, the ecological impacts of their materials, the amount of gasoline used in creating and disseminating their work, and the like.  Environmental artists must; those concerns are woven into the very fabric of their practice.

I’ve watched many art students grapple with these issues—sometimes to paralyzing ends.  The near-impossibility of creating absolutely environmentally “clean” work leaves some undone.  Even for those who are willing to compromise (as they see it), the question of appropriate technology often arises.  What are okay technologies to employ?  How can the tech complement or complicate the artwork, rather than dominating the audience’s awareness?  Taking it to the simplest level, they want to figure out whether integrating a GPS or iPhone into a project that takes place in the woods inevitably risks privileging the tech over the locale.  They fear that creating video or new media work that is seen on-line or in a gallery risks further distancing audience members from the natural environment—that they are contributing to the distressing notion that a virtual tour can replace an actual tromp.

To which one might say, “but can’t it?  Sometimes?”  Audiences, like artists, need to pose questions of how much non-renewable energy they should use, of how much tromping is too much in fragile eco-systems.  A virtual visit can’t offer what an actual one can; but certain virtual visits offer something equally valuable.  Going to a national park via EcoArtTech’s “Eclipse” project  is not the same as hiking IRL, but the experience is meaningful and eye-opening.  The value in the EcoArtTech approach is precisely that:  they have crafted a new kind of experience for viewers, one that encourages a different—but powerful—environmental engagement with the Parks.

Moreover, not incorporating technologies into the work doesn’t mean that the technologies are not part of the work.  Paradoxical, yes.  But think about it:  an art work, arising as it does within a particular culture, is of that culture, so both the presence and the absence of relevant cultural elements become part of the work.  A large format, black-and-white photograph of a seemingly pristine mountain made today is what it is in no small part by virtue of being not made with a digital point and shoot, not made in color, not printed digitally, not of an overtly developed landscape.  If we see the image as anachronistic, we do so because these seemingly absent traces of contemporary technology are actually present, imposed by our minds.  They influence our response as much as does our recollection of similar images by earlier makers.  And so we do see it as anachronistic, unless something in the work gives us confidence that the maker knows what s/he’s doing.

That might sound like I’m saying that the environmental artist’s engagement with technology is a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t issue.  That’s not quite it.  Rather, it’s that thinking one can ‘go green’ artistically by rejecting the contemporary technologies is simplistic.  The significance of the technologies permeates the art-making process, the physical landscape, the mental landscape, the lives of maker and audience.

Ironically, that point, itself so central to environmental art, often becomes lost in nuts-and-bolts conversations about gasoline and carbon offsets and the relative merits of (for instance) digital versus analog photography.

Which brings me back to Avatar, and why I’m grateful for Cameron’s extremely ostentatious example of having it both ways.  The film offers an exemplum that’s especially useful for folks like my students, people who are digitally dexterous and environmentally committed.  It gives a concrete case against which we can test assumptions, hone the way we ask our questions, push until we get past knee-jerk notions.  And that’s helpful.

Year of biodiversity

2010 has been designated as the “International Year of Biodiversity” by the United Nations.  Time for an interspecies party….

More on green & morality…

I’ve a good friend who talks about food having replaced sex as contemporary America’s moral fixation, as a site where we publicly act out our ethical concerns, define our own moral high ground, exercise judgments.  I think he’s largely right and I also think he’s baiting me when he says this.

You see, he knows that I fret about food.  After I learned about peak oil and peak water around a decade ago, I planted my first garden.  I started small, but made yearly expansions, as I wanted to eventually grow the bulk of what I ate.  This was partly about doing my environmental bit, but partly pragmatic:  envisioning the world with less oil and water, I figured if I wanted to keep eating delicious things, I was going to have to grow them.  (If you’re thinking that’s a tad extreme, imagine what my friends thought ten years ago!)

This particular friend and I have had the predictable arguments about organic and local foods being a luxury.  And I’m sure it’d all be more expensive if I didn’t have a 640-square-foot garden and folks down the street who fish for their livelihood.  No doubt it’s much harder—and pricier—in his town.

This tussle could put a serious strain on the friendship.  We manage not to let it—but mostly by avoiding getting down to the nitty gritty, which we have the luxury (that word, again) of doing because we aren’t life partners.  But what if we were? Today, the New York Times has an article on green ethical conflicts creating tensions inside families.

In “Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes,” Leslie Kauffman notes that families, couples in particular, increasingly bicker about how green is “green enough,” about recycling, and—quite often—about food.  In the most extreme situations, “Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said he had seen divorces among couples who realized that their values were putting them on very different long-term trajectories.”  I can see this.  Depending upon the couple’s dynamic, it’d be so easy for personal conviction to slide over into judgment.

This overall moralizing of environmental decisions into a much broader framework is akin to the point philosophy professor Stephen Asma made last week in the Chronicle article I wrote about in “Enviro-Faith.”

It is a moral issue, I realize that.  Indeed, when my friend argues about food ethics having supplanted sex, I want to say “and rightly so!” for the network of creatures affected by any one person’s eating decisions is far larger than that affected by one person’s sexual decisions.  (I suppose there are exceptions, but this strikes me as a pretty reliable generalization).  Since morality is the undergirding for the ethical systems we use to maintain society, it makes sense to me that it should come into conversations about how we will interact with lo, these many food-network creatures.

And yet, and yet…. so many articles on morality in relation to environmental issues have their own aura of baiting.  I think it has something to do with the way the issues are framed, with the implication that environmental concerns are inevitably divisive.  More on this later I’m sure, but for now, I’ll just say that might well be a false premise.

Enviro-faith?

In today’s Chronicle (1/14/10), Stephen Asma, a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, offers an extended parallel between contemporary environmentalism and religion.  He posits that environmentalists give a green rationale to their internalized aggression, guilt, and feelings of unworthiness, while religious folk give a godly shape to those psychological struggles.

Asma grounds this comparison in some assertions made by Nietzsche, who wrote that we live in a “post-Christian world” in which the underlying values, the ones that quietly, pretty much invisibly prefigure the beliefs about which we are aware, are “resentment and guilt,” and that these lead to an “internalized self-loathing.”

Great.  That’s bound to be bunches of fun.

Except, not.  Which is perhaps a shame, but is also (as Nietzsche and Asma both note) the psychological condition which allows humans to live together more or less civilly.  Within this framework, Asma identifies a set of parallels between environmentalism and religion that strike me as well-considered:

Instead of religious sins plaguing our conscience, we now have the transgressions of leaving the water running, leaving the lights on, failing to recycle, and using plastic grocery bags instead of paper. In addition, the righteous pleasures of being more orthodox than your neighbor (in this case being more green) can still be had—the new heresies include failure to compost, or refusal to go organic. Vitriol that used to be reserved for Satan can now be discharged against evil corporate chief executives and drivers of gas-guzzling vehicles. Apocalyptic fear-mongering previously took the shape of repent or burn in hell, but now it is recycle or burn in the ozone hole. In fact, it is interesting the way environmentalism takes on the apocalyptic aspects of the traditional religious narrative. The idea that the end is nigh is quite central to traditional Christianity—it is a jolting wake-up call to get on the righteous path. And we find many environmentalists in a similarly earnest panic about climate change and global warming.  There are also high priests of the new religion, with Al Gore (“the Goracle”) playing an especially prophetic role.

We even find parallels in environmentalism of the most extreme, self-flagellating forms of religious guilt. Nietzsche claims that religion has fostered guilt to such neurotic levels that some people feel culpable and apologetic about their very existence. Compare this with extreme conservationists who want to sacrifice themselves for trees and whales.  And teachers, like myself, will attest to significant numbers of their students who feel that their cats or whatever are equal to human beings.  And not only are members of the next generation egalitarian about all life, but they often feel positively awful about the way that their species has corrupted and defiled the whole beautiful symphony of nature. The planet, they feel, would be better off without us. We are not worthy. In this extreme form, one does not seek to reduce one’s carbon footprint so much as eliminate one’s very being.

To be sure, he doesn’t suggest that this parallel is a reason not to recycle.  Rather, he seems simply to be suggesting a little self-awareness about the whole thing:  “Even if it’s neurotic, it’s still doing some good.  But environmentalism, like every other ism, has the potential for dogmatic zeal and obsession…Let us save the planet, by all means.  But let’s also admit to ourselves that we have a natural tendency toward guilt and indignation, and let that fact temper our fervor to more reasonable levels.”

Reading Asma’s list of environmental orthodoxies, I felt awkwardly indignant twinges of self-recognition.  But it’s the last phrase, more reasonable levels, that caught me.  I wanted to say “wait a minute!  What’s a ‘more reasonable level’ when the planet is at stake?”  At which point I imagined Asma smiling knowingly, for I didn’t sound like a neutral interlocutor; even in my own head, I sounded panicky and really earnest.

Which is my pre-critique admission of the tiniest bit of bias because, as much as I feel that Asma has outlined a host of significant parallels between the two ways of giving form to some of our deepest psychological tensions, he has also (at least in this essay) skipped one of the biggest differences:  the place of the planet in each belief system, and the implications of that placement.

For Christians, and for many religious folks, earth is a very temporary home, the interlude spot where humans dwell prior to attaining their true home.  One can rustle up scriptural passages that suggest we need to nurture it or have dominion over it, thereby nuancing quite different arguments about what we owe, or do not owe, the planet.  But in the end, the accounts would similarly emphasize that this life on earth is a pale precedent to the heavenly lives the saved will enjoy in the hereafter.

In contrast, environmentalists point out that “earth is our only home.”  Future visions are thus limited to wondering about what kind of planet we will leave to our progeny.  There’s no promise that being good (green) will directly benefit the individual, no seat in heaven for the best composter.  At most, being green will benefit one’s grandchildren, a kind of gene pool redemption, perhaps, but hardly eternal bliss.

This difference as to whether earth is our only home or simply our current home is thus tied to another key difference.  Environmentalism lacks one of the most compelling attributes of many religions—the potential for personal salvation.  I suppose one could argue that lack makes environmentalism an even better fit than traditional religions for folks who’ve got high levels of internalized self-loathing.  But I tend to see this willingness to work hard without the likelihood of personal benefit in terms of a trait we share with other animal species—empathy.  Even more basic than the conflicts and tensions that living in civil groups generates are the urges and emotions to which we, as animals, are subject.  And yes, aggression is such an impulse—but so is empathy.  And over the last few years, researchers have identified not only instances of intraspecies empathy (easy to find!) but also inter-species empathy, which some scientists, like Dr. Frans de Waal, suggest could be the evolutionary precursors to a moral nature.

I absolutely agree with Asma that it’d be a poor sort of environmentalism that’s fueled only by “guilt and indignation.”  Fortunately, I think our current version is often leavened with empathy as well.

Time in the Times

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

(T. S. Eliot, opening lines of “Burnt Norton”)

Yesterday’s Health section of the New York Times featured an article by Benedict Carey on how humans perceive time, noting that yes, indeed, it does seem to fly when we are having fun and drag on during humdrum moments/weeks.  These are hardly new observations; to the contrary, psychologists suggest these findings “support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time ‘persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place.’”

The new information that made this article timely has to do less with our moment-by-moment experience of time than with our longer-term experience of it.  Citing a recent study in which college students offered their perceptions of how long ago certain events occurred, as well as a well-known experiment in which a French explorer lived in a cave for two months, Carey reports that if the mind creates few new “relevant” memories, then “the brain telescopes the interval that has passed.”

One idea this calls to my mind is that it is not merely “events taking place,” but “events that rise to the level of being (personally) noteworthy,” that helps create our experience of time.  The researchers whose study was described made a potentially similar observation.  They noted that the students in the study could more accurately gauge how long ago the events in question took place if they “remembered developments related to the original event.”  As a follow-up, investigators “tested personal memories and memories of film clips seen in the lab.  The pattern held up:  the more intervening related development came to mind, the longer away the original event seemed.”

Part of the reason this article caught my attention is that I recently finished reading John Hanson Mitchell’s Ceremonial Time:  Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile.  It’s fabulous—a thick description of a patch of mostly fertile lands west of Boston.  Mitchell begins the book by saying that he wanted to really know the place where he was living, wanted to understand it from as many vantages as possible.  So he investigates human history, natural history, geology.  He forages for food and offers forays into local politics.  To his surprise, the effort to know a place leads him to become an explorer of time.  And in that exploration, the Native notion of ceremonial time took on great importance.  In ceremonial time, the past, present, and future are experienced all at once.  Mitchell said that he, himself, couldn’t fully grasp the experience, but sensed that the denseness of history all around him contributed to something akin.

Mitchell also notes that for around 15,000 years (ending with the arrival of European settlers), succeeding generations of Native peoples in the Scratch Flat environs led lives largely like those of the previous and successive generations.  Each life particular, to be sure, but the contours shaped by pretty much the same environmental conditions for comparatively long stretches.

As someone of this place-moment, in which a generation refers as often to the 18 months between software cycles as it does the 20-ish years between human birth cohorts, I try to grasp what that kind of continuity would do to my experience of time.  Yes, as an individual, I imagine I’d proceed along my own personal path, full of my own memorable moments.  But what if all my memorable moments were of a piece with those of my acquaintances?  If everyone I knew, younger and older, seemed to share the same general set of experiences?  How would time taste to us?  Might we perceive, collectively, a telescoping under certain conditions, an expansion under others?  And if that is, indeed, a part of what makes an experience of ceremonial time possible, then is there anything these new brain studies might imply about such a re-aligning of time?

Speaking of Schisms

We like to hike in winter, nothing extremely strenuous, just a trek of a few miles or so in the kind of astonishingly quiet place a wooded spot becomes when enshrouded in fresh snow.   Last week, we headed to a trail maintained by the Georges River Land Trust in Thomaston, Maine.  It’s as full of schisms, of breaks in space or time, of identities that fracture, as a young woods can be.  After parking at a trailhead, we followed the lightly worn crunch of iced bootprints left by previous visitors–until we spied a strange sight:  a yellow sign off to our left that warned us away from a spray zone for the local water treatment plant. Trudging forward, we spotted another, and another, reminders that this space, seemingly serene, was hardly pristine.  Half tired, half rueful, we turned back, happy to have a chance to re-visit the enormous glacial erratic we’d passed on the way in.  No doubt it’s been here for millenia–carried by frozen water that needed no treatment.

New Year’s Day

Year Zero

In 1936, in the preface to a collection of essays, Willa Cather wrote that “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.”  She bemoaned the changes she saw in the world, the rise in industrialization and materialism, the waning power of the individual, the erosion of long-term connections between a people and a place.  It’s an oft-repeated complaint—though the pivotal moment people point to varies according to who’s doing the pointing.

And it’s a notion that I am very interested in exploring.  But not yet.  Or at least not yet here.  First, I want to think about the world breaking in two, about whether such schisms are possible, about what they look like, what they feel like.  I can think of lots of befores and afters—the earth before life, the area now called Maine after the retreat of the glaciers, my life before and after true love, before and after deep loss.  But all those befores and afters are tied, however tenuously, by that thread of thinking of them together—altered states, to be sure, but thinkable in this way only if one secretly believes that the thing before and the thing after are still, really, somehow the same.

This is no mere language game to me (though I am a fan of language games).  You see, half-way through this year—indeed scant days off summer solstice if all goes well—I will move to the edge of the earth, to a spot where ocean meets granite, where unruly woods nuzzle garden beds.  And this new home is in a town poised between possibilities:  will the fishing industry survive, the local economy continue?  Or, will it go the way of many seaside villages, become a cardboard copy of its former self?

From that extraordinary place, I will be able to gaze—a Janus in June—in all directions.  But until then, all I can do is wonder.  Which, from time to time, I’ll do right here.

• About Me

  I wonder about the world . . . [more]

• Recent Posts

  • Plant Planning
  • Eating Local Art
  • Not an AVATAR Review: Technology and Environmental Art
  • Year of biodiversity
  • More on green & morality…

• Archives

  Select Month February 2010 January 2010

• Tags

  art Avatar biodiversity cather EcoArtTech empathy environmentalism food Frans de Waal garden georges river land trust glacial erratic heirloom john hanson mitchell local morality religion seed sex starn twins Stephen Asma sugimoto technology time winter

• Search

  Search for:

• Blogroll

  • Art Sake (mass cultural council)
  • arts & ecology
  • Dark Mountain Project
  • EcoVis.org
  • Edge
  • Free Soil
  • green museum blog
  • Human-Nature
  • Inhabit
  • Jena Performing Local
  • New Climates
  • No Impact Man
  • Pruned
  • Shane's blog
  • Strange Weather
  • Sustainability and Contemporary Arts
  • TreeHugger