The topic of climate change is not anything new. It’s been around for a while. Well if you consider the brief period of time we’ve been on the planet since the industrial revolution a while. That’s how long it’s taken us to make our defining mark. Yet really in the big scheme of things, in this case the history of the universe, this period of time could be referred to as a ‘blip’. Unfortunately its seems like a blip was all we needed for the biggest brains to make the biggest mistakes.
Activists at Bank of America headquarters in San Francisco, Nov 09 protesting B of A's funding of companies who participate in mountain top removal coal mining.
In fact not only is climate change not new, it seems like nowadays, climate change is everywhere. It’s been co-opted by every corporation, every ad agency, all the newspapers are writing about it and plenty of us are talking and blogging about it. All of us are living it. However most of all climate change has been co-opted by our governments who’s inadequate action on the issue threatens stability around the world and unless something is done sounds the death knell (and already has) for thousands of species including our own.
According to popular jargon you’re either a ‘climate denier’, or you’re a ‘climate activist’. Sometimes you’re ‘climate youth’ or ‘Nazi youth’. It doesn’t matter what label they give you because the outcome for us all will eventually be the same. The only difference being that it will come sooner and harder for some. By some this means the poor. What we tried to achieve in Copenhagen was some semblance of justice and balance. Instead the sorry conclusion reached there, which can only be termed a travesty of justice and a betrayal of citizens by their leaders, left the world to watch while the superpowers offered their blatant lies as pathetic truths.
The effects of climate change aren’t something exclusive to the people facing water shortages in the remote villages of the Himalaya or the citizens of the Solomon islands who will simply see their lives drown in rising waters. It’s not just something happening far way in the Antarctic ice sheet. Right here in California where I currently live we’re into our third year of drought. Here the central valley produces almost 8% of America’s fresh food. However, the valley which is being referred to as California’s dust bowl, is witnessing the complete collapse of whole agricultural communities and lives. The town of Mendota at it’s center has the highest unemployment rate in the state at a staggering 41%.
The cycle of change doesn’t end with the culmination of what was the greatest marketing plan ever that got a president elected to the whitehouse. Nor does it stop when we finish chanting the cleverly catchy slogan ‘Yes We Can’ or pin our pop-art screenprints and stickers of HOPE to our walls and car bumpers. Real change is not an idea that is fashionable and trendy for you to catch on to during a campaign because everyone else is doing it in your neighborhood. It’s not something you consume like the coffee that is your ‘ritual’ every morning. No. It has much more depth than that. The sort of change that is required requires a more active awareness and involvement. Because what has become obvious in our world is that when it comes down to it no rockstar icon will save us. No politician. No religious leader. Only ourselves helping each other.
Here where I live in the SF Bay Area a bastion of liberalism and eco consciousness, there is no shortage of NGOs or environmental advocacy groups that need support and who are all hard at work. These are the people that try and keep the system in balance so that all future generations are left a fair, balanced clean and natural world. In recent weeks I’ve spent time with theMobilization for Climate Justice West, the West Counties Toxics Coalition,Rainforest Action Network,350.org, and the Center for Biological Diversity. These groups are currently working on a variety of issues right here in the Bay Area one of the most important being trying to curb carbon pollution and urge senators to push for acts with legally binding commitments that will do so. Their campaigns aren’t designed by media whiz kids or high profile artists. They don’t state fancy fleeting slogans of high promise and little substance. In the world of activism and climate justice all must be cold hard fact Fought on meager budgets with no corporation funding and by people who have little to gain personally outside of the common good.
Activist sticker from the Rainforest Action Network and their campaign against mountain top removal coal mining.
In recent years I’ve been called a ‘hippy’ by some friends, whatever that means. I’ve also been called a ’spoilt capitalist’ by another who later apologized for that one. Most recently I was called an ‘anarchist’ by my liberal uncle a member of Ireland’s Green Party . A hippy loving spoilt capitalist anarchist. I was stumped. I got branded the altogether small minded title of anarchist after I expressed my belief that what needed to happen was a shift towards more community based oil free living as well as some sort of population control as a major step towards balance. So that’s what you think anarchy is? I’d like to think it’s common sense. But perhaps it’s just my idea of it. Einstein said : “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.’ If that’s the case I had them. At 15 years old (1988) I along with a few other teenagers raised some cash and had the town’s first bottle and can recycling bank installed. If that’s an anarchist then one was born that day. I spent my time liking school, reading National Geographic, riding my bike, playing basketball and dreaming of a life in the bigger world making visual documentaries. I got riled up a lot by Maggy Thatcher and Rainbow Warriors. I hadn’t lived in Northern California or read No Logo, yet.
Sometimes we end up in places wondering what has brought us here. I found myself asking this question as I pulled into the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland on a wet and foggy night in September. It struck me that it was probably the same question that millions of jews, gypsies, gays and members of the intelligentsia asked themselves when shipped here by the Nazi’s in the 40’s. The difference between their reasons and mine being that mine were my own.
I got an eerie feeling as the tyres of the car rumbled across the train tracks and into town. It was a Saturday night and as I passed the town square on route to a hotel I noticed crowds of young weekend revelers hanging in the bars. Just like anywhere else. Except in some regards this town isn’t. I found my hotel and crashed.
The story of Auschwitz Birkenau is known by all and I’m not here to rehash the facts only my own experience of a visit to what is now a Unesco World Heritage site with as many as 8000 visitors some days. What many don’t realize and which I didn’t is that Auschwitz was in fact 3 camps. It was expanded to facilitate the implementation of the Nazi genocidal policy of the ‘Final Solution’ which aimed to wipe out the entire jewish population of Europe. At Auschwitz I as I passed under the infamous slogan on the gate of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, ‘Work Frees’ I got my first hint of understanding the scope of how cruel and crushing this terrible lie had been.
As a walked around Auschwitz I, listening to my tour guide on my headphones recount just how systematic the place had been run by the Nazi’s I found myself staring at the worn patches in the stone floor. I was thinking of those people walking on these very same floors. The terribly evil Nazi officers and their helpless destitute victims. The tour guides microphone picked up the ambient noises around us and in my ears the sounds that stood out were the other visitors feet shuffling along the floor. When I closed my eyes those very same footsteps were of the individuals who died here , echoing from the past. When I looked out the window they were the very same windows but they were not part of a cage keeping me in.
We moved on to Auschwitz II and it was here that the scale of what happened and the cruel intent that was responsible for it began to bear down on me. This place was picked because of it’s convenient location on the railway line that shipped people in. Every factory needs an infrastructure . Apparently it seems even when your product is death.
Auschwitz Birkenau as it’s better known is 320 acres of what was once a mass killing machine exterminating 5000 people a day. The sheer scale of it when you are confronted with it in a visit like this is what is the most staggering. Most of it is in ruins but as far as the eye can see stand the chimneys of the sheds where up to 1000 prisoners were kept at a time. The sheds are cold brick buildings with rudimentary bunk beds that provided no comfort. Slogans stenciled on walls reminded prisoners to behave and that drinking water was strictly forbidden. Poland winters are notoriously cold. There was nothing about these huts that would protect you from it. That much was obvious.
What I couldn’t help thinking when I walked around this sad place is that really this wasn’t very long ago. We’re supposed to learn from our past but in the case of genocide and bullying I don’t think we have. Rwanda happened and was allowed to happen. The international community knew what was occuring and did nothing about it. Rwanda like many problems that are now arising in the developing world are occurring because of corrupt regimes but also because we as the first world have raped and pillaged these countries of their domestic raw materials and therefore wealth. All to support our own materialistic, selfish and non sustainable lifestyles. If Rwanda had been a country rich in oil it would have mattered to the US and her European cronies and they would have stepped in to do something. But there was no oil. As far as they were concerned there was nothing worth saving, not even human lives.
Besides growing up in a country that was torn apart by war (Ireland) I have been living in the US for 16 years and have witnessed the American reaction to the 911 atrocities. I’m still living there while the United States wages war in 2 countries and thousands of innocent civilians continue to die at it’s hands. We are now into the 8th year of the ‘war on terrorism’. Deep down this basic evil fact puts me at odds with myself and my own morals. I have like I’m sure so have many people, avoided it when it raises itself in my consciousness. I’m not sure I can continue to do so anymore. The holocaust has it’s deniers and unfortunately too there are many who fail to admit the atrocities today that are perpetrated in their name. I think the term is ‘collective denial’. Until the consequences of these actions come home to roost I guess this mental condition of denial will continue.
President Obama in April 2009 at the annual memorial to the Holocaust, said in reference to the lessons of this dark time in our history :”to recognize ourselves in each other; to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference in whatever forms they may take.”. The thing is these ‘forms’ sometimes aren’t necessarily just swastika touting skinheads or turban wearing, Kalashnikov waving Koran readers. Sometimes they wear suits, read the bible, and have massive military budgets beyond the GDP of many countries. This is a ‘form’. So I’d say Yes President Obama I recognize it in ourselves. The question is do you? This is the real lesson to be learned.
When in Dublin a visit for any photographer must include the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar but the current exhibition of Bangor photographer Simon Burch’s work on the peat bogs of Ireland had particular draw for me. I got there in the afternoon and the place was definitely busy and it was great to have to squeeze my way around the bookstore. An interest in photography alive and well in Ireland. Burch’s exhibition titled ‘Under a Grey Sky‘ looks at a delicate landscape that has become heavily industrialized due to the cutting of turf for fuel. It includes some beautiful muted landscapes and portraits of people from local communities. At a time when the environment and talk of saving our natural heritage is everywhere it’s a timely show and an important one. The peat bogs of Ireland are a unique landscape and it was good to see this element of our landscape being explored by a photographer.
Over at theNational Photographic Archive gallery which is a stone’s throw from the gallery of photography, there’s a great exhibit of 1950’s and 60’s photos by photographer Elinor Wiltshire. The show called “If you ever go to Dublin town’ depicts street scenes of the Dublin of the era. Scenes from everyday life, children playing, all Ireland football fans, beachgoers at Sandymount strand. She also shot scenes of evictions of tenants from York St to the new developments which later became notorious for their own social ills, the Ballymun flats. Some of my favorite shots were of the Monaghan poet Patrick Kavanagh at this home in Iniskeen. Kavanagh a friend of Wiltshire’s, although one of the great Irish poets is often neglected visually and you’d hardly ever see a picture of him anywhere, whereas pictures of Joyce, Yeats etc would be almost permanently imprinted on our brains. Wiltshire who shot with a Rollieflex brought to her work a sensibility which reminded me of the type of work that Cartier Bresson became famous for. She had a great ability to recognize the value in the observation of the ‘everyday’.The National Photographic archive is part of the National Library and contains 630,000 images relating to Ireland and it’s past including important historical events as the 1916 rising. The library is currently in the process of digitizing the entire collection(many glass plate negatives) in an effort to get it all online thereby facilitating public access to the collection.
Sticking with the National Library. There’s a fantastic exhibit of one of our greatest writers WB Yeats’ work and life on there. Now I never knew Yeats had an obsession with the occult, with getting married, that his wife was 20 years younger than him nor that Thoreau was one of his greatest influences. When I was in school he wasn’t my favorite but I have learned in my later years to have a deeper appreciation for his use of ‘flowery’ language which used not resonate with me. It’s a beautiful exhibit with the Verse and Vision room being my favorite where you can listen to renditions of some of his poetry being read by some well known Irish artists whilst images of nature appear on lightboxes. The online exhibit at the National Library site is notably good as well.
Last but not least over at the Sebastian Guinness gallery is ever controversial American born David LaChapelle’s exhibit titled ‘American Jesus’. Now Chapelle is one of those artists I suppose we all love or hate. And being as this show has a particular religious bent mixed with Chapelle’s trademark tendency to lay on the kitsch and the bling he’s probably not going to garner a huge audience in Catholic Ireland. You never know though. Stranger things HAVE happened in Catholic Ireland. Anyway Chapelle is I think always worth checking out whether you believe or not like journalist Gerry McCarthy when he described Chapelle’s work in last week’s Sunday Times Culture magazine as a”brand of kitsch” having “passed it’s sell-by date”.
The invite for Chapelle's Dublin show
Well with all the talk of cutting arts funding in Ireland and of cutting the artists tax exemption status we may be heading into miserable days for the cultural fabric of the country. Certainly when I went to a production of Frank McGuinness’s ‘Someone who’ll watch over me’ at the Garage theatre in Monaghan last month it would seem that most people couldn’t give a toss about the arts in their community. I think I counted oh about 18 people there. At 15 euros a pop it’s not cheap and I’ve been told ‘it’s the times that are in it’ meaning apparently nobody has any money. But on any given night out on the weekend the pubs are heaving. I’d say it’s less the times and more a case of what we choose to spend our money on. Anyway I’m not here too talk about the future of the arts in Ireland and how much we Irish are fond of the drink. We could write a book on either of those subjects. Just here the last few days in Dublin I managed to catch a couple of exhibits that fortunately would give one strong hope for the appreciation of the arts and it’s place within Irish culture. That said there’s no accounting for what the current administration will do to the arts when cuts that have been referred to as ’savage’ by a govt minister are announced in the December budget.
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