just saw a “v”
of geese fly over, honking faintly – my first thought: see? the cycles of nature continue! my second thought: one day soon, we’re going to have to eat those suckers . . . (“there will be winners & there will be losers”) well, we here in the u.s. state of kansas are winners in the co2 reduction sweeps: ↓ 25% over last 10 yrs! (huzzah!) we got the wind, baby! except . . . were we a country, we’d still be the 60th biggest emitter world- wide: we still have all these cars and trucks and stuff in our state of 3 m souls (the actual 60th biggest emitter is norway, a nation of 5.3 m; the 60th biggest country is mali, w/20 m people – “but ach! all these numbers! in a poem! poets are not sup- posed to deal in numbers”; well, i prefer the term “verse chronicle” anyhow) you already know what happened in australia, future reader: “an area the size of denmark” (ominous way to begin a sentence) in flames in new south wales alone – rain forests become fire forests – areas “that have never burned in recorded history” (& 2019 was driest in recorded history); sydney hottest place on earth on saturday – 120 f; emergency mgmt. agency in canberra closes due to dangerous air quality; & meanwhile, men w/guns in helicopters shooting 10k feral camels today, by order of aboriginal leaders: the “pests” slurp precious water – “knocking down fences, getting in around houses and trying to get to water thru air conditioners” (hope that won’t be me some day; hope nobody shoots at me from helicopters) now new zealand’s turn: aukland’s sky darkened by smoke blown in from australia,& “100s of hectares” of forests in flames in e. of n. island meanwhile, bedroughted zimbabwe importing corn from mexico to stave off “serious food shortages”; dam levels less than ½ normal; dam levels in thailand 33-40%; drought in s. brazil driving up food prices (even more) while farther north, avg. temps in japan in 2019 hit highest level ever; & last winter the warmest in ireland since records began (119 yrs ago), while shanghai enjoyed a pleasant 70 f yesterday (record hi for 1/6); record jan. hi in norway; & record hi jan temps for s. tip of korean peninsula, too; meanwhile, dehli had coldest dec. day ever (49 f) on new year’s eve; & tel aviv got 70% of its avg jan rain in 20 min. on sat. (& 20% of annual in 2 hrs; 2 drowned in elevator – what a way . . .) deluge or drought, feast or famine or near-famine; & back here in kansas, winter wheat struggles – not b/c of spring & summer rains (still supersaturated, still flooding farther north), but b/c "the rain shut off in july”; some plants didn’t even sprout; “we'll probably see more farm auction sales because of this." the girl said there was no place like home & she meant kansas, but there are many places like here, or much worse off than here that won’t get the headlines or mention in an epic or chronicle of any kind
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Editor's Note: The following excerpt from Thomas Pecore Weso’s memoir-in-progress, Crow's Nest, struck me as a parable-like example of the cultural-historical causes of the current climate crisis. The Menominee people built both bark dwellings and tepees. In the Menominee creation story it is Beaver-Woman, the first woman, who taught her People to build dome-shaped bark homes. Tepees of the old village sat around the spring. Uncle Buddy showed me tepee rings, bare spots on the ground where nothing grows because something has compacted the ground. We also found a darkened place where there had been long-term campfire—like the kind the Potawatomi built. Uncle Buddy remembered as a child seeing some old people still living around the wet, sandy patch, next to the highway, although the spring itself had already been blocked forty years. He said they always kept to themselves. They never talked to outsiders, even to other Menominees, as far as he knew. “They just got older until they all disappeared,” he said. In the late 1800's, members of the United States Army filled this bubbling spring with boulders and gravel. This was the largest of the bubbling springs in the northern Wolf River valley, essential as a sacred water source, but an impediment to the Army. The reason? An existing foot trail wasn't wide enough for a freight wagon. That trail, an unimproved part of the military road, narrowed as it went between the bubbling spring and the pool of quicksand. Indeed, according to a local Antigo newspaper, a German trader almost lost an entire wagon of goods and a team of oxen when he drove across sand to avoid that spring. According to the local paper, disaster was averted when the oxen were able to extract themselves from the watery pool of quicksand. After complaints to the local Indian Service Office to do something, fast, engineers from the U.S. Army arrived in Neopit and quickly created an ecological disaster. They plugged the spring, treating it like seepage. This bubbling spring was more like a fire-hose. The Army workers who filled the sandy water with tons of gravel and boulders did not realize that water pressure would simply force another opening somewhere else. They created a continuing environmental disaster. A washout resulting from that blockage occurred as the pressure turned sidewise, toward the river, and flooded several acres, including a railroad line. The old tracks still lead into water and disappear. Ghostly stumps suspend above the water’s surface, supported by long tenacious roots that reach into water. The topsy-turvy tree roots create weird wooden sculptures. Some de-barked limbs look like the legs of slug-colored water spiders that beckon passersby into their watery web. They provide evidence of that past environmental disaster. Before the army's interference, the stream from the springs’ overflow was small enough and hard enough for thousands of foot travelers to simply step across. The hydraulic pressure dissipated harmlessly as small water geysers. Its pool spilled over and flowed to the river. After the Army's interference, a jet-stream of water washed away everything. At first it began to wash away the soil that anchored trees. Then it washed away the Menominee-owned railroad bed. There is still some surface seepage to this spring, now funneled under the road by a metal culvert. The highway is built directly on top of the spring. In the mid-1990s a hundred years later, a new spring emerged, part of the same system, just outside the nearby town of Zoar across from an old “Indian” burial ground. Traditional Menominee burials are above the ground. There aren't any Catholics buried underground in that place. Water began to seep, then pool, and finally flowed out of the ground. A large spring hole with a sandy bottom took form next to the highway. Local youth reported the pool to be bottomless. The county highway department plugged the spring with tons of rock. Again, engineers redirected water with brute force. By the 1910s most of the logging and rail barons’ damage to the landscape was complete. The giant white pine forest near the springs drowned, died, and fell. The very ground except for exposed bits of the granite bedrock washed away. All this was exacerbated by a series of dams constructed on the Little West Branch of the Wolf River. Lumber companies used mixed-race logging crews to remove the white pine, because it easily floats. Transportation costs using the rivers was nil. The series of lakes created by the dams were seasonal, and when the dam ponds were released in the spring, carrying thousands of logs, this pent-up flow acted like an avalanche, pushing everything in front of it downstream to the Neopit sawmill. Numerous water-saturated logs still litter the bottom of the Mill Pond upstream to Camp Four Hill. This is very near where my family performs ceremonies. The state highway passes within a few short yards of this last vestige of the Crane Clan on the northeast. On the northwest side is an electric power line, while the third side (south), is a Catholic Cemetery protected by a wire fence. I wonder what the priests erecting the fence thought they were keeping out. The Crane Clan and the bubbling spring, a spiritual center, might be gone, but so are the Catholics. Statues of Virgin Mary and crosses deteriorate as more people on the reservation revert to more traditional Menominee beliefs. So who has the stronger medicine? __________________________________________________
Eastern North Dakota, as seen from space, Dec. 3, 2019. The white areas are snow-covered fields. The brown areas are fields covered by snow that is hidden by unharvested corn. The corn was unharvested because the ground was still too wet from spring floods for farm machinery to operate.. climate disaster all over the news! . . . when it happens to white settler societies in industrialized places, that is; east africa south asia central america not so much (“africa? – o africa, it’s a basket case. but india – i have a colleague from india – i’ll ask her if it’s raining or a drought or something back home”) 19 people dead in australia – watch c.n.n. to find out more (next to ad for “best fire pit on the planet!”), & future readers can read the archives of any newspaper meanwhile at least 30 people dead in jakarta: electrocution, hypothermia, drowning, landslides: the city sinks a little more each year (unregulated pumping out of aquifer), so when monsoons do their thing, the city fills up like a bowl: 8+ ft. deep, in spots; 35k people fled homes – some only as far as their roofs; rivers bustin’ banks, people “wading” w/water up to chin; & o yeah 2 m people in zambia are on the brink: 2 yrs drought = looming famine; “when did you last eat?” “me? almost two days w/o getting food. there’s no- where to get food” – so people gather what roots and leaves they can stomach (what would we do, my american cousins, if we did not know where to get food? what will we do?) – rainy season used to start in october; now, mid-dec.; villagers chop down trees to sell the charcoal – the only source of cash (& buyers burn the charcoal, of course): “that will turn this place into a desert. the villagers will die if that happens” meanwhile back in this white-settler dominated society, another wet spring forecast – rain on top of frozen ground "imagine putting a soaking wet sponge in the freezer, taking it out, and then trying to pour water on it. it’s going to immediately run off” now multiply by millions of gallons running off on fields of corn & wheat & that will cut down on harvests as will a drought, so that “some- one had better be prepared for rage.” someone had. Graphic showing extent of Australian bushfires, as mapped onto equivalent area around (a.) Lawrence, Kansas (b.) New York, New York
A Modest Critique of Everything Existing (for the Glorious Dawn of a New Decade), part 2 of 21/2/2020 Now, there were certainly avant-garde artists who were only too willing to make art in the service of political ideology (the Futurists, for instance). Indeed, Rancière has a specific version of the avant-garde in mind, as exemplified in early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which is “not an instrument in the service of a political line,” but rather is “already an expression of communism in sensual terms, proceeding from all the everyday activities that are connected via montage and will form a sort of communal, egalitarian and dynamic fabric of sensual life” (49). Vertov’s film expresses not ideals or ideas; rather, it documents changes that are actually taking place on the ground (and the fact that such a movie could be made was itself a major change in Russia, albeit short-lived). For Rancière, the film illustrates the fact that a true revolution is not “simply a change of government, of laws, of institutions” (50), but “a revolution of the forms of life, of the sensual universe, and of how to perceive it and act within it” (51). Thus “the essence of the human” is not located elsewhere than in the human community per se, and revolution becomes a matter of “ensuring that the essence of the community is already realized now in everyday activities” (53). For instance, Rancière doesn’t “simply view workers’ emancipation as the fact of fighting for a better future, but as the fact of already living a different present” (58).
Now, one may detect the stamp of a “workerist” or “autonomist” outlook in these statements, over-against a more directly political or syndicalist one. There is certainly a utopian tinge to it. But it always amazes me how writers invent utopias in response to actually-existing dystopic moments in history (Looking Backward, Herland, Men Like Gods, Ecotopia, etc.). That phenomenon doesn’t surprise me. What better time to reimagine everything than in moments when everything seems to be falling apart? While Rancière’s thinking harks back to Mai ’68, it may also suggest a way to survive climate catastrophe – via his definition of the aesthetic. Which is what made me think of Prasad’s post. She speaks in terms of “storytelling” and, as a journalist, is pretty clearly thinking of other genres and media artists use to address climate crisis as extensions of news stories. And maybe they are (certainly, the ongoing verse-chronicle on this blog is an example). But Prasad is considering cultural forms that are “more visceral” than a proper news story – more gut-level – more sensual, we might say. She mentions practitioners of several versions of what we think of as art: visual artists, graphic designers, performers, poets, and musicians. But she also mentions “coders” and “gadget nerds.” I am glad that she included these last two, which we usually think of as relating to technology rather than technique. What Rancière and like-minded theorists have in mind, I think, is not just the blurring between what is and isn’t art, but rather an expansion of how we think of art. It is an expansion forward, into avant-garde forms of expression that are coterminous with the altered everyday experiences of a community; but also backwards, to the notion of “arts” as skills; and outward, to encompass both in concrete form in the present moment. Perhaps hooking up a solar array for your neighborhood in the wake of a hurricane is your art-work. Or documenting the process of gathering and conserving water in a drought. Maybe it has to do with developing forms of permaculture that can survive climatic extremes and very high winds (and maybe producing some land art in the process). Could be you'll intervene in the language people around you are using to talk about the world around them. Perhaps your art-work is thinking up ways to relate all of these – to link the making of solar ovens to the making of poems – merging technology and technique in technē. These are perhaps weak examples, but if so, they only evince the weakness of my imagination; others will come up with cleverer ideas. It does seem to me that humans need to take a more expansive view of life and the activities of life, in which political activism, livelihood, the arts, and ways of everyday living are part of a whole. And this wider angle of view, because it encompasses so much more than a more compartmentalized focus, necessarily entails more possibilities, good and bad. There are more and more things that need connecting: “politics, economics, health, food, and culture,” and everything else in our life-world. None of this will come from the state – COPout-25 underlined that fact in wide-tipped magic marker. And the economy is controlled by old men who think they’re going to be dead by the time SHTF and who wish to continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed. They’re necessarily the problem. The only hope for survival is in what we now (somewhat ironically) refer to as "civil society." Rancière uses the generic term “the community” - this could mean all non-state, non-firm actors, but in English carries the connotation of the local, the sub-national scale. And because those of us in the global north are on the whole not as severely, immediately, and permanently slammed by climate chaos as those in the global south,* it seems to me we have a particular duty to try this silo-busting experiment in community-definition and -creation on ourselves, while we still have some latitude for action. ____________________________________________ * The most notable current exception is, of course, Australia, which is in the geographic south. For more on the meaning of "global south" and "global north" (as opposed to the geographical north and south), the Wikipedia article is a good place to start - including the maps. g’day, folks –
welcome to 2020! good news: jesus punched “reset” over- night & the world sprang back to normal – the rain- forests grew back, everything grows green in eastern australia, the perfect amount of moisture in soil, all the reservoirs filled to the brim for all, zambians, indians, chileans: plenty of water for all; cyclone spirals rewind, hurricanes cancel, the dead rise from floodwaters baptized, seasons arrive predictably (“spring: right on time!”); it’s safe to work out- doors in summer; houses and shops re- assemble, land- slides slide back up their hills, so nobody feels the need to block cars or set themselves alight: kids walk backwards to school from strike, nobody has to think about the future, to fret over what they in the past did to render everything frenetic, fatal, & fractal; everybody just lives their lives day to day, doesn’t worry a dram about abstractions like “the planet” or “us”; smalltalk about weather doesn’t end in pained silence – farmer jones, w/ his overalls & red tractor smiles and waves from his amber waves of grain; mom & dad reinhabit their boxy house w/ curlicue smoke arising from chimney, spiky ball of sun spiraling normally above, never getting too close, never drying up or letting loose. it is a normal year. it’s the now we always knew we deserved, so we just do what we have to do every day, just the same. it’s a happy new year. |
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |