Scientist Fukuoka practices a system of farming he refers to as “natural farming.” In The One Straw Revolution, he describes the philosophy and techniques behind it and the impact of his natural farming methods. Although some of his practices are specific to Japan, the governing philosophy of his method has successfully been applied around the world.
news
Ethics and Biotechnology by Dyson, Anthony and Harris, John
Ethics and Biotechnology addresses the ethical dilemmas posed by the expanding field of biotechnology. The multi-disciplinary contributors are drawn from the fields of philosophy, agricultural economics, medicine, political theory, biology, embryology, social policy and theology.
Environmental Policy by Roberts, Jane
Environmental Policy discusses the opportunities and constraints that environmental systems place upon the operation of human systems. It suggests environmental policy is a potential way to modify the operation of human systems so that they function within environmental constraints.
Making ‘People-Friendly’ Towns: Improving the Public Environment in Towns and Cities by Tibbalds, Francis
Francis Tibbalds provides a new philosophical approach to the problem of urban environments and town planning, suggesting that places as a whole matter much more than the individual components that make up the urban environment such as buildings, roads and parks.
Directions to your Theater
How do I get to your theater using transit?
Internet driving directions have been available for over a decade now. MapQuest is a bit old school and Yahoo Maps picked it up a bit, but it seems Google Maps are everywhere now. They are in our browsers, in stand alone programs, embedded on everyone’s website and a feature on our phones. If you don’t have an iphone or android you might have a GPS instead or you might have all of these. In the car dominated roads of Los Angeles you might even be so old school as to have a Thomas Guide in the pocket behind your passenger seat.
So, if I can Google any address and get step by step directions with an estimation of transit time from any other location, print it out, text it to myself or email it my smart phone (if I didn’t look it up there to begin with) and plug it into my GPS to have a robot speak turn by turn directions to me and show me live traffic conditions, WHY do so many theaters give me such detailed directions on their website?
These detailed directions from the north, south, east or west are general and don’t take into account alternatives if traffic is bad or a road is under construction. They aren’t necessary. Maybe, if you have parking (who has ample parking?) you want me to know how to get into it, but I don’t need directions from Pasadena to your parking lot or to know that the neighborhood behind your theater is permitted for one block south of Melrose. You just need to tell me where to park if I drive.
What would be useful? Transit directions. There are over a dozen transit agencies in the area: Metro, Culver City Bus, the Big Blue Bus, Burbank Bus, Foothills Transit, Santa Clarita Transit, etc. and they operate local buses, rapid buses, commuter buses, subway, light rail and heavy rail. It’s confusing to try and get around on the buses. But with traffic, the fluid cost of gasoline, and the expense of parking, wouldn’t it be great to know how to get to your theater without a car? And how to get back home.
I’m not asking for you to give me full details, but maybe a list of the buses that come within a quarter mile or even a half a mile of your theater. Unless you’re tucked in the hills or back in a nieghborhood I can only imagine that there are buses passing by regularly and that you may be lucky enough to be close to a metro rail stop! I know for a fact the theaters on Santa Monica, that is to say Theater Row, get radio interference from the buses passing by.
Google does now offer walking and transit directions. Metro, the largest such agency in LA, is not on Google Transit yet (Burbank is though), but they are in talks to be up soon(ish?). That might solve a portion of this issue. And if you can find a bus that goes nearby you can get the walking instructions. Hopefully, with the passing of Measure R, we will see even more convenient and extensive transit options.
But, until we all know the bus system, the subway gets to Santa Monica and we can get bus by bus instructions for transit on Google or our tom tom, why not make it easy for me to get there? Maybe I’ll have to get there a little earlier and stay a little later to catch my desired bus. Maybe I’ll have a couple drinks from concessions cause I don’t have to worry about driving and I don’t have to pay for parking or the valet for the restaurant down the street. And maybe I’ll even stick around the area for a while and help with the local feeling by eating nearby in a walkable restaurant or kill some time in a local shop. Best of all I’ll arrive without any road rage and be more open and excited about the show.
The new Banksy?
I’m drawn to any news item that lurks in that Venn diagram space between art and activism, but I’m totally baffled as to why John Vidal of The Guardian is calling the mystery person who broke in an dshut down the Kingsnorth Power station yesterday – apparently cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions by 2% for four hours – “the new Banksy”. Does that make anyone with a pair of wire cutters an artist? This would, of course, open the door to the Michael Stone defence becoming widespread. Michael Stone is, as you will recall, the convicted paramilitary murderer who was arrested trying to burst into Stormont armed with a gun and pipe bombs to murder Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, but justified his act by claiming it was “performance art”. And, as several performance artists from Northern Ireland pointed out last year, such designation would not be a Good Thing.
Photo: CEOs from RSPB, WI, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, WWF,
Tearfund, Greenpeace and Ashok from the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition
get together at Kingsnorth to protest the building of a new coal power
station, Oct 6 2008. Thanks to Stop Climate Chaos Coaltion for the picture.
More…
With reference to the post below and the brickbats thrown at the Young Vic, here’s a month-old blog post from Robert Butler The Ashden Directory who have years of experience looking at the shortage of engagement of performing arts in environmental issues:
Six Reasons Why Theatres Don’t Touch Climate Change.
Number seven might now be a fear of publicly falling on their arses. Which is, of course, the worst reason of all not to do something.
On disasters…
Cornford & Cross’s current installation at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Lion and the Unicorn, created from 15 tons of locally-sourced coal as an exploration of topic of fuel, climate change and economic stability. Photo by Paul Ward. Until Jan 31 2009.
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In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Scott Brown takes a hilarious dig at Hollywood’s new obsession with environmental disaster movies.
Actually, no, it’s not that hilarious at all. It’s more just a dig, really, at the forthcoming slew of eco-conscious movies you’ll be seeing next year. There’s The Thaw (deadly parasite unleashed by melting icecaps), 2012 (eco-doom)Â and Strays (nuclear meltdown). Then there are the statuatory remakes. The Day The Earth Stood Still (this time around Klaatu has come to tell us off for wrecking the planet) and Creature From The Black Lagoon, in which the seas wreak vengence on us.Â
“The dopiness of so-called ecotainment – environmentally virtuous entertainment – rises in direct proportion to its message mongering,” says Scott. “Oh the hilarity!” he chuckles.
This default critical line on “ecotainment” (the neologism itself is a stinker, face it,) is interesting. The standard reaction is that the genre is a joke. Hilarity! My aching sides. Etc.
It’s entirely possible that these films will be stinkers. Hollywood blockbusters generally are. Probably unintentially funny at times too. But while right-wing Americans believe that Hollywood is trying to foist a liberal agenda on the world, these films are mammoth investments by hard-nosed producers, so it’s interesting that the disaster-movie juggernaut believes that it can profit successfully from exploiting what is presumably a growing public anxiety in this way.
But there is also an assumption on Scott Brown’s part that the very idea of making a film that contains an environmental message is funny.Â
Maybe it is.
Yesterday I posted an interview with David Lan on the main RSA Arts & Ecology site. David is a man with a reputation as one of the most remarkably creative and successful people in London theatre. As Artistic Director of the Young Vic his productions have been universally lauded.
Until last weekend. The reviews for Amazonia have been, and it’s no fun to admit this, pretty wretched. Lyn Gardner – a consistent champion of new work – was scathing. But her review echoed Scott Brown’s default position. “The preachiness makes you long to rush out and lop down a tree,” she says.
In the interview, Lan is still trying to comprehend what triggered such a hostile reaction. He’s one of the theatre’s most experienced figures – a virtuoso of different forms, and he didn’t see it coming, he says. Now he’s wondering, did they contextualise the play well enough? Did they create enough of those subtle cues that control the audience’s expectations? Or is it just very, very, very hard to make art that says meaningful things about the great invisible beast that is the environment? Now that a critical mass of work about ecology is starting to arrive, mabye it’s time to start soul-searching about whether it’s good enough yet.
You wonder too, whether the default critical sneer that greets any work that declares good intentions too loudly is also part of it. And whether that needs rethinking too. But that’s a delicate, possibly dangerous path to go down…
Gustav Metzger
The podcasts of the Nuclear Forum are now all online. There’s a wealth of material there. Particularly striking is the final contribution (at the end of the third file) from the artist Gustav Metzger. Touching on art, his obsession with the newspaper and on humanity’s relentless urge to self-destruction, it should probably be listened to as a whole – it’s a kind of prose poem as much as a statement – but here, meanwhile, is a brief extract (with a personal endorsement for The Guardian):
With the coming of the Hubble space telescope humanity has gained a ring side view of galaxies – which is Wagner without the intervals. As you know because you read the same papers as I and most likely the Guardian, it is in fact brilliant, it is outstanding, and one of the reasons I would like to go on living in this country rather than on the continent is for that paper and for many, many others. It really has standards. Â
There are restaurants where diners are placed next to glass tanks with sharks gliding along the glass walls. That is how we, thanks to Hubble, view or can view galaxies safely ensconced in our earthly habitat. We are told repeatedly that life on earth started as star fragments entering earth… Is it, then, that we are joined at the hips with the entire universe with galaxies engaged in that constant and endless creative destruction? The stars entered our blood stream ages and ages ago – still coursing through our veins? Have we internalised the universe? According to theory we are perpetually bombarded, penetrated indeed, by cosmic rays and so totally fusing with the cosmos with or against our will. We might as well accept, there is no choice except to run through permutations again and again testing, testing, testing. We do need to face stellar realities, understand that we are linked to the incomprehensible, destructive powers beyond us and ask are we affected, are we in irresistible chains of connections?
Nietzsche’s vision for the future of evolution of the human being peaked at the mountain, the mountain tops, that was “xxx†years ago, that is a figure in chronological time, but when we reflect on this in real time we are then faced with totally different perspectives. In the time since Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Nietzsche, 1883] humans have entered space flight and are exploring outer space. Computing power, as you know, doubles every eighteen months, time is so packed, our understanding of time is so complex so extraordinary and expanded in so many directions that it is understandable that we transpose Nietzsche’s simile to our accepting the burden of aligning ourselves to the stars and galaxies. For him, mountain peaks were the top, for us I suggest stars and galaxies are our kind of equivalent of what he was driving towards.Â
Let me now endeavour to bring this all back to earth, the earth of the Evening Standard, and of the Today programme. Humanity, I suggest, needs to enter the state attained by the aeroplane as it touches down at the end of the journey when the flaps on the wings emerge to hold back the plane’s advance. We need to uncover and restrain the human drive to the extreme. Intellectuals have a duty to tell the public that the game is up, that there will be no permanent life on earth. We need to search for the origins of destructive drives in human beings, emersion in contemplating the awesome, and indeed beautiful, imagery of galaxies as we can apprehend it through Hubble, may lead to cathartic resolutions.Â
Photo: 100 000 Newspapers. A Public-Active Installation by Gustav Metzger 2003, T1 2 Artspace, London, exhibition view.
Big thanks to Naomi Darlington for transcribing Gustav Metzger’s talk.
Digging for victory
Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates regional prototype garden #2: Lakewood, CA, 2006, owners: Foti Family, produced in collaboration with Millard Sheets Gallery for the exhibition Fair Exchange and Machine Project, Los Angeles
There’s a fascinating article by Berin Golonu on artist Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates and other similar initiatives online at Art Papers. Haeg famously believes in tearing up people’s front lawns to create something less dull and water-greedy and more productive from them. He created an intervention last year at the Tate’s Turbine Hall along these lines.
The greening of suburban American has become a major issue in the US, as Peter Head mentioned in this recent Arts and Ecology interview. Art Papers also points to the work of John Bela‘s collabration with the US Slow Food Nation on San Francisco’s wonderful Civic Center Victory Garden, which in turn drew inspiration from Amy Franceschini and the Futurefarmers organisation she founded. The article also namechecks NY architecture practice Work.ac and their ideas of the Public Farm.
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Golonu gnaws briefly over the but-is-it-still-art question:
Scholar
Victor Margolin considers this question in his catalog essay for the exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art.
“How do we think about art that moves from discourse to action, art whose intent is to produce a useful result,” he writes,
and by what criteria do we evaluate this work?… In the never-ending
debates on the difference between art and design, the distinction
usually comes down to the primacy of discourse in artistic practice….
But when artists want to achieve social results without identifying
themselves as designers, how should the critical community respond?
“Once artists enter a realm of action,” he continues, “it is difficult
to characterize their projects differently from those of other actors
such as landscape designers or even architects… the discursive has
spilled over into the practical, and the practical has become more
discursive…” Â
Victor Margolin considers this question in his catalog essay for the exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art.
“How do we think about art that moves from discourse to action, art whose intent is to produce a useful result,” he writes,
and by what criteria do we evaluate this work?… In the never-ending
debates on the difference between art and design, the distinction
usually comes down to the primacy of discourse in artistic practice….
But when artists want to achieve social results without identifying
themselves as designers, how should the critical community respond?
“Once artists enter a realm of action,” he continues, “it is difficult
to characterize their projects differently from those of other actors
such as landscape designers or even architects… the discursive has
spilled over into the practical, and the practical has become more
discursive…” Â
… but without getting anywhere much. The point isn’t whether it’s art or not, but the fact that it’s happening and as a movment appears to be reaching a kind of critical mass.
EDIT:Â
In addition to the above, Michaela Crimmin reminds me of Jeremy Deller’s work on allotments in Berlin, which fits into the same picture… and looking at David Barrie’s most recent blog post, there’s also the example of Dott07’s City Farming project in Middlesborough:
In the project, people grew food in vacant public places across the town, took cookery classes in neighbourhood centres and then, come the final harvest, cooked a ‘town meal’, in an event attended by over 8000 people and curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith.