Pushing Rocks
On Heroes and Fatal Flaws
"At the end of the 1980s, after I had already created decades of work about violence between people—not only rape but child abuse and domestic violence, violence between men, and animals victimized by people, always trying to understand the link between human behavior and environmental disaster—I heard a sociologist on the radio say, “It is amazing how much pain you can inflict if you don’t feel your own.”
Lumumba in Chongqing
A great deal has been written about Earth rights, environmental rights and increasingly, ecocide, from the point of view of politics, law and sociology. I will write about it as a practicing artist and as someone struggling with personal implications.
Department of Random Insight
I have always thought transparency is a good thing and that it's impossible to be truly generous without openness. The opposite of generosity is withholding. withholding in personal relationships is cruel sport. In relationship to the rest of nature, it is just profoundly short-sighted, even, stupid. This is our present challenge: environmentalists are being outgunned and outspent and outpowered by people who have no problem being transparent.
Land
Art has historically been cultural glue for communities under stress. As an ecoartist, I have struggled with the realities of environment danger, seeking where I might position myself with integrity. I decided to risk my entire life's work in the most dramatic act of ecoartivism I could imagine.
On painting as the Algebraic Spatial Choreography of a Globalized World;
I first met Thomas Erben in 2021, when the curator and historian Monika Fabijanska brought me into the "Ecofeminisms" show in his gallery https://www.thomaserben.com/. We stayed friends and I visited with Thomas Erben in his gallery, now showing Dona Nelsen's paintings, on a sunny, fair day, too warm for mid-November in the midst of a very problematic COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.
Ecoart and the Environmental War
I have long believed that ecoart is on the frontlines of a battle for the planet as we know it. Well, alongside phalanxes of environmental scientists, whole battalions of Indigenous peoples practicing Traditional Environmental Knowledge, and platoons of guerilla lawyers defending Earth rights and teenage climate activists.
Jewish Author Aviva Rahmani Uses Inherited Grief as a 'Trigger Point' for Healing and Change
Jewish Author Aviva Rahmani Uses Inherited Grief as a 'Trigger Point' for Healing and Change
In 'Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea,' Aviva takes readers from NYC to the Golan Heights, exploring how small actions at the right time can change the world.
~ Article by Howard Lovy, Jewish essayist
Children, Energy and Choice
I am really angry over two things others may find unrelated: the anti-abortion folks ruling gestapo tactics against American women, including the women who are collaborators in that cruel invasion on womens rights, and the people in the West who can afford to choose to bear children and do.
Totalitarianism and Art
A year ago, I wrote, “I fear sea-level rise and its impact on all coastal communities.
A far larger new worry is the worldwide resurrection of fascism, with its implications for global justice. The seduction of fairy-tale narratives of simple solutions is profound, powerful, and tenacious. Jane Austen’s world may not be so far from Margaret Atwood’s in The Handmaid’s Tale. Fascism and totalitarianism are the siblings of extractive patriarchies. I would defend the personal narrative I have recounted here as a reflection of ecofeminist resistance in many people’s lives to the abuse of power. Addictions, some forms of religion, and strongman politics have always offered tantalizing fairy tales of safety to the unhappy and defeated. Now is no different. I understand all too well.” p. 277-8 Divining Chaos
On Totalitarianism in the Anthropocene
I fear an inevitable chaos coming for this planet. Based on modeling projections, I know the relationships between sea level rise, fire regimes, habitat migration and human population densities may overwhelm the music of this planet I tried to capture in my vision for The Blued Trees Symphony. I anticipated my own fears when I wrote about totalitarianism in my book, launching June 28.