Kathleen Dean Moore's Blog, page 3

The World's Only Three-Minute Commencement Speech

Breaking all records for brevity, Kathleen gave a rousing three-minute commencement speech, when she accepted an Honorary Degree in Humane Letters from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry last weekend. Here is what she said: www.esf.edu/communications/view.asp?newsID=3503.

New Sculpture at Matthew Knight Arena

New Sculpture at the Matthew Knight Arena is High, Wide – and Deep

We get only a flickering glimpse of reality, Plato wrote two thousand years ago in a famous passage now called the Allegory of the Cave. The images we see are like the shadows of moving figures cast by a fire onto the back wall of a cave.

An interesting idea, for sure, but who would expect to find an evocation of that philosophy in the new Matthew Knight Basketball Arena at the University of Oregon? But here it is, a splendid new sculpture by world-renowned artist Janet Echelman. The name of the sculpture? "Allegory."

What you first see as you enter the northeast curve of the Arena are huge circular nets billowing overhead. Green, white, blue, they encircle space the way a seine encircles herring, the way a spiral galaxy encircles stars, the way the sweeping arms of a giant Douglas-fir tree gather the sky. But as you move through the hallway, the nets themselves seem to disappear, replaced by shadows of the nets thrown onto the wall. Then the glimpse of the shadows fades, and again, there are the nets themselves wafting toward the ceiling high above.

Sculptor Janet Echelman is a lively, smiling woman dressed all in black. She stands in the Arena hallway, studying the installation, punching numbers into her cell phone to communicate with the light engineer who controls the lights from his studio in Boston. "A sculpture should be thrilling to look at," she says. "But a lasting sculpture has to be more than that. It has to hint at some connections that we don't entirely understand."

True to her vision, there is no point of view from which an observer can see all of the sculpture at once. While the nets and knots are three-dimensional, what you see on the wall is as flat and devoid of color as the disks seen through a microscope. On the other hand, maybe the nets and knots are four dimensional, because they change color over time, as Duck fans walk through the Arena's hall, triggering sensors that alter the lights.

And what is that reality that we glimpse only dimly in Plato's flickering light? We can't know, Plato wrote. That is the necessary imperfection of human perception. But it's fun to speculate.

"People might think of the interconnectedness of the game," Janet muses. "The trajectory of the basketball weaves nets that connect the five players on the floor, who are knitted into patterns of family and fans." Alternatively, here in the great forests of Oregon -- suggested both in the pattern of the Arena's hardwood floors and in the upsweeping nets of the sculpture – observers may think of the interconnectedness of the ecosystems that sustain us, the great branching webs of life.

The weekend before Janet came to Eugene for the opening of "Allegory," she visited the ancient forests of the H. J. Andrews Research Forest in the headwaters of the McKenzie River. On ropes, she ascended a hundred feet and thirty feet up a five hundred year-old Douglas-fir tree. There, in low evening light cast through the tangled mist- and moss-draped boughs, she could see the shadows of the nets and knots of the forest ecosystem, folded and draped over the encircling hills.

Her hope is to return to the inspiration of the forest. But first, she is completing a design for a translucent building-sized sculpture to fly across a linear urban park in Boston. And she is designing a great flame-like net whose knots map the spread of radioactivity from the Fukushima explosion. In fact, her Boston studio is seemingly wall-papered with designs and commissions and ideas in progress.

"When developing an idea," Janet said, "I envision the ideal manifestation of the idea" – a method that would bring a smile of recognition to Plato's old marble face. "I try to imagine my goal as a reality, and then work backwards to figure out all the steps I need to make it so. We all have the potential to do that," she insists, "but it's a skill that takes practice."

These are words that UO's students and student-athletes can take to heart. It's not only a sculpture that is taking shape in the university's Arena, but the dreams and aspirations of generations of young people, who will envision an ideal and then work to make it real.

More about Janet Echelman's sculptures and artistic philosophy can be found at www.echelman.com.

People’s Climate March Rally 9/21/14

Kathleen's speech at the People's Climat March Rally:

This is a bad day for pipelines and export terminals and tankers and coal trains.

This is a bad day for the Koch Brothers, and Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil and anyone else who would trade the life-supporting systems of the Earth for obscene profits.

This is a bad day for universities, holding on to their last investments in fossil fuels, insisting on their right to profit from death and extinction -- even as their own scientists warn them, warn them that fossil fuels will carry us, smoking and stinking, to the end of life as we know it on this planet.

This is the last day for despair. It is the last day to say it’s too late, that there is nothing anyone can do. It is a day to awaken to the fact that we are not helpless at all, that we have the knowledge and the courage and the joyous communities it will take to make the great turning away from death and toward a reinvented life.

People’s Climate March Rally, Sept. 21, 2014

Kathleen's speech at the People's Climat March Rally:

This is a bad day for pipelines and export terminals and tankers and coal trains.

This is a bad day for the Koch Brothers, and Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil and anyone else who would trade the life-supporting systems of the Earth for obscene profits.

This is a bad day for universities, holding on to their last investments in fossil fuels, insisting on their right to profit from death and extinction -- even as their own scientists warn them, warn them that fossil fuels will carry us, smoking and stinking, to the end of life as we know it on this planet.

This is the last day for despair. It is the last day to say it’s too late, that there is nothing anyone can do. It is a day to awaken to the fact that we are not helpless at all, that we have the knowledge and the courage and the joyous communities it will take to make the great turning away from death and toward a reinvented life.

This is the last day for lies and excuses and delay. It is the last term in office for elected officials who will not or cannot protect the future. It is the last day that anyone can be silent about climate change.

And so, this is a great day for the hoofed and winged things. It’s a great day for small children of all species, a great day for ice and oceans, a great day for reliable rain.

This is a great day for justice, and the right of all beings to clean air and clean energy.

This is a great day for sanity and imagination. Imagine a world without wars for oil. Imagine a world without the din and dirt of internal combustion engines. Imagine democracy without the corrupting wealth of coal barons. Imagine a world powered, as plants are powered, by the sun.

Today is the day when everything changes.

In every struggle for justice, there is a turning point, a tipping point, when what was unimaginable becomes inevitable. It is the day when the people pour into the street to reclaim their futures, and the future of all the glorious lives on Earth. Life is not a commodity, to be bought and sold, wrecked and ransacked, for the profit of a few sullen and frightened men. The profusion of life is a sacred trust, a great and glorious gift, to be honored and protected, and passed along, intact and singing, to the next generations of all living things.

The Ethics of Adaptation to Global Warming

Check out Kathleen's ferocious essay "The Ethics of Adaptation to Global Warming" at http://www.humansandnature.org/what-does-earth-ask-of-us--question-9.php. "I want to call attention to the danger that the same moral failings that characterize climate change itself are being replicated and amplified in many of the plans to adapt to it—as if storm and extinction had taught us nothing about justice or reverence for life."

Occupy the Moral Ground

The Occupy Wall Street movements and climate action movements stand on the same moral ground and affirm the same moral principles: It's wrong to wreck the world. It's wrong to wreck the health and hopes of others. An economic system that forces the people to bear the risks of the recklessness of a few powerful profiteers, to assume the burdens of others' privilege, and to pay the real costs of destructive industries in the currency of their health and the hopes of their children -- that system is immoral. And when, to enrich a powerful few, that system threatens to disrupt forever the great planetary cycles that support all the lives on Earth? This is moral monstrosity on a cosmic scale.

A Call to Writers

As the true fury of global warming begins to kick in—forests flash to ashes, storms tear away coastal villages, cities swelter in record-breaking heat, drought singes the Southwest, the Arctic melts—we come face to face with the full meaning of the environmental emergency: If climate change continues unchecked, scientists tell us, the world’s life-support systems will be irretrievably damaged by the time our children reach middle-age.[1] The need for action is urgent and unprecedented.

We here issue a call to writers, who have been given the gift of powerful voices that can change the world. For the sake of all the plants and animals on the planet, for the sake of inter-generational justice, for the sake of the children, we call on writers to set aside their ordinary work and step up to do the work of the moment, which is to stop the reckless and profligate fossil fuel economy that is causing climate chaos.

A CALL TO WRITERS

As the true fury of global warming begins to kick in—forests flash to ashes, storms tear away coastal villages, cities swelter in record-breaking heat, drought singes the Southwest, the Arctic melts—we come face to face with the full meaning of the environmental emergency: If climate change continues unchecked, scientists tell us, the world’s life-support systems will be irretrievably damaged by the time our children reach middle-age.[1] The need for action is urgent and unprecedented.

We here issue a call to writers, who have been given the gift of powerful voices that can change the world. For the sake of all the plants and animals on the planet, for the sake of inter-generational justice, for the sake of the children, we call on writers to set aside their ordinary work and step up to do the work of the moment, which is to stop the reckless and profligate fossil fuel economy that is causing climate chaos.

That work may be outside the academy, in the streets, in the halls of politics and power, in the new street theaters of creative disruption, all aimed at stopping industry from continuing to make huge profits by bringing down the systems that sustain life on Earth. These activist efforts need the voices of writers, the genius of thought-leaders, the power of words and story.

But there is essential work to be done also in our roles as academics and writers, empowered by creative imagination, moral clarity, and the strength of true witness. Write as if your reader were dying, Annie Dillard advised. “What would you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” Now we must write as if the planet were dying. What would you say to a planet in a spasm of extinction?[2] What would you say to those who are paying the costs of climate change in the currency of death? Surely in a world dangerously slipping away, we need courageously and honestly to ask again the questions every author asks, Who is my audience—now, today, in this world? What is my purpose?

Some kinds of writing are morally impossible in a state of emergency: Anything written solely for tenure. Anything written solely for promotion. Any solipsistic project. Anything, in short, that isn’t the most significant use of a writer’s life and talents. Otherwise, how could it ever be forgiven by the ones who follow us, who will expect us finally to have escaped the narrow self-interest of our economy and our age?

Some kinds of writing will be essential. We here invite creative thought about new or renewed forms our writing can take. Perhaps some of these:

The drum-head pamphlet. Like Thomas Paine, writing on the head of a Revolutionary War drum, lay it out. Lay out the reasons why extractive cultures must change their ways. Lay out the reasons that inspire the activists. Lay out the reasons that shame the politicians. Lay out the reasons that are a template for decision-makers.

The “broken-hearted hallelujah.” Like Leonard Cohen, singing of loss and love, make clear the beauty of what we stand to lose or what we have already destroyed. Celebrate the microscopic sea-angels. Celebrate the children who live in the cold doorways and shanty camps. Celebrate the swamp at the end of the road. Leave no doubt of the magnitude of their value and the enormity of the crime, to let them pass away unnoticed. These are elegies, these are praise songs, these are love stories.

The witness. Like Cassandra howling at the gates of Troy, bear witness to what you know to be true. Tell the truths that have been bent by skilled advertising. Tell the truths that have been concealed by adroit regulations. Tell the truths that have been denied by fear or complacency. Go to the tar fields, go to the broken pipelines. Tell that story. Be the noisy gong and clanging cymbals, and be the love.

The narrative of the moral imagination. With stories and novels and poems, take the reader inside the minds and hearts of those who live the consequences of global warming. Who are they? How do they live? What consoles them? Powerful stories teach empathy, build the power to imagine oneself into another’s place, to feel others’ sorrow, and so take readers outside the self-absorption that allows the destruction to continue.

The radical imaginary. Re-imagine the world. Push out the boundaries of the human imagination, too long hog-tied by mass media, to create the open space where new ideas can flourish. Maybe it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism or fossil fuels or terminal selfishness. But this is the work that calls us—to imagine new life-ways into existence. Writers may not be able to save the old world, but they can help create the new one.

The indictment. Like Jefferson listing the repeated injuries and usurpations, let facts be submitted to a candid world. This is the literature of outrage. How did we come to embrace an economic system that would wreck the world? What iniquity allows it to continue?

The apologia. Finally this: Write to the future. Try to explain how we could allow the devastation of the world, how we could leave those who follow us only an impoverished, stripped, and dangerously unstable time. Ask their forgiveness. This is the literature of prayer. Is it possible to write on your knees, weeping?

[1]David Wake and Vance Vredenburg. “Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:08/12/08. Accessed 8/18/13. Among mammals, 22% are globally threatened or extinct.

[2] Anthony D. Barnosky and 500 scientists. “Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century: Information for Policy Makers.” Mahb.stanford.edu/consensus-statement.... Accessed 8/18/13.

Kathleen Dean Moore, co-editor Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, kmoore@oregonstate.edu

 Scott Slovic, editor, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment

 

If Your House Is On Fire

"If Your House is On Fire: Kathleen Dean Moore on the Moral Urgency of Climate Change" is an 8-page interview in the December 2012 issue of SUN magazine, soon to be available on newsstands. Excerpt: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/444/if_your_house_is_on_fire.

IF YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE

"If Your House is On Fire: Kathleen Dean Moore on the Moral Urgency of Climate Change" is an 8-page interview in the December 2012 issue of SUN magazine, soon to be available on newsstands. Excerpt: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/444/if_your_house_is_on_fire.