Some people are arguing over whether or not we are in a civil war in the United States today. In a conversation with someone yesterday, we discussed whether we are already into WWIII: whether the environmental wars begun as backlash to the Green movement, has morphed into an all-out assault from fossil fuel hegemonies, from Russia to Texas to Silicon Valley, extracting life at blood price. I think we are both in a Civil War and fighting WWIII. It just doesn’t look like previous wars.

In 2007, Dr, Jim White, founder of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, where I am an Affiliate and I studied the relationships between geopolitical conflict zones and climate change. Our work was part of the “Weather Report”show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) in Boulder, Colorado, curated by Lucy Lippard. Our collaboration was written about in a feature story in the New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section, in which Jim and I mentioned that we had bonded over agreeing that we (the industrial West) were raping the world.

Doors can open up to a new world but they can also sometimes be a one-way trip. Sometimes that works. Other times it doesn’t.

In 1985, I embarked on an ill-fated but important project, developing an interior mural with residents of a shelter for abused children. It was ill-fated for several reasons. One was that I organized our imagery around my presumptuous understanding of Native American Medicine Wheels, an unfortunate claim to wisdom that was not mine to claim, but was ubiquitous at the time amongst maturing middle class ex-hippies.

When I taught drawing, I taught it as dance: center yourself from the base of your spine, breathe. Defocus your eyes and hold the tool you will use lightly in your hand. Let your perception come from your whole body and trust your eyes to honestly witness space.

“Sorrow,” Color xerox detail from lithograph 30”x24” 1974. 1966. Aviva Rahmani

In 2026, it seems to me that we need to answer several questions I suspect may be related, including:

1. What is America’s current relationship to Russia?

2. Why hasn’t civil disobedience been an adequate response to totalitarian regimes?

3. Can the future survive a narcissistic culture?

Safety is a basic need for all sentient beings. The trouble is that sometimes, in the human world, as much as in any other, one agent’s idea of safety impinges on another’s experience of safety, freedom or even survival. For example, watching birds at my bird feeder in a two-day blizzard. The biggest birds command the food I can uncover and drive off each other and smaller species. In desperation, the smaller birds wait patiently till they can opportunistically swoop in. But then they bully each other for dominance.

The global landscape we confront today includes many unprecedented challenges, such as climate change. Winter holidays are all about stories that teach. Celebrating the Judeo-Christian holidays that dominate this season address a Western, predominantly religious solution to harsh conditions. Do Chanukah, Christmas and celebrating the New Year teach us how to survival this world? Chanukah is about patient faith. Christmas is about generous love. The New Year is about having a fresh start. Those are aspirational values that require internal, spiritual growth but they aren’t necessarily directives to action: Faith that snatches victory from defeat, receiving a God coming to Earth to redeem sinners, the old yielding to the new. None of those are practical solutions to climate change.

In the story of Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s world is shattered by a tornado and she finds herself in a strange world with three strange male companions. They each have an agenda they will realize: home, heart, courage and a brain.

Meanwhile, our real world seems to be undergoing its own tornado of shattering events: not just of climate cycles and the availability of fresh clean water, but intransigent calamities scattered across the globe

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent announcement that she was planning to resign rather than be be this American presidential administration’s “battered wife.” hit a nerve. Domestic violence, resistance to patriarchal misogyny and the connection to ecocide have long steered the content of my career.

Today, Antonino La Vela reminded me that it is International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. His reminder jogged my thinking about this topic. I wrote back,

I mourn every past love.

I mourn snow so deep I might fall forever into softness.

I mourn what I never heard my parents say and what I never listened to them tell me.

I mourn each bird that flew into a window and broke its neck.

I mourn my youth, wasted, as usual.