Pushing Rocks
Impunity Is A Terrible Thing
In time, human impunity does not stand. That is not the same as justice but history does confer judgements to challenge impunity.
J'accuse
This short essay will argue for a connection between ecocide and femicide, particularly of black and brown women, whose mortality from restricted access to reproductive rights is well-documented. I charge this mortality is a deliberate sexual crime to effect ecocide. Casting a blind eye to that connection is a fatal flaw in civil disobedience as resistance to fascism.
Aviva Rahmani Draws What We Inherit - Antonino La Vela
Her drawings reject nostalgia. They function as records — of exile, ecology, memory, and what remains after the flood. - Antonino La Vela.
Does the Sea Dream?
In this essay, I have tackled understanding something about what Japan might teach the USA now about survival…
In retaliation for global warming, the sea seems to be coming for coastal humanity. This is not because the sea is vindictive and malevolent. It is because the sea has always been in conversation with continental coastlines, giving and taking sediment to keep estuaries alive.
A Few Thoughts On Earth Day
The image preceding this short essay is of a man floating free in air, his body's vulnerability completely exposed. When I painted it, I thought, "this is what social change will require. Tolerating that scale of vulnerability from men."
Five years ago, David Orr wrote, "If today is a typical day in capitols around the world, the dismantling of even the flimsiest laws protecting air, water, lands, biota, climate, and health will proceed apace, but mostly out of sight.
Conversations at the Edge of the Brink
“Connecting Dots,” fresh water met salt water for the first time in 100 years at the Ghost Nets Site 1997. Photograph by Aviva Rahmani
Tomorrow, I will join island colleagues heading for the mainland for another protest against this administration.
The Loneliness of Absolute Power
In the development of my trigger point theory about systemic collapse, I began with two simple biogeographic ideas and extrapolated first to the restoration of natural habitat in Ghost Nets, and then to law and policy guidelines in Blued Trees. The first idea was articulated by E.O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur.
The Future Is Now
This is a seminal time for me at a seminal time in the world. My work is getting attention. The world is hurtling over a cliff at warp speed.
In any artwork, there is a focal point. In a flat image, it could be a dash of cadmium red paint. In a sculpture, it may be the torque that guides the eye through space. In a work of conceptual art, the focal point might be what is implied: that an idea has a visual presence in our brain. Activist and social practice art is easy: what is the functional change? As an ecoartivist, my focal point is just beyond my reach right now. It is in what I can't know, predict or anticipate.
Surviving a Failed State
Tonight will be the second session of the reading group I moderate for ecoartspace, “Fiction as Resistance,” I have requested of the group, that they find passages they care to share from Octavia Butler’s, “The Parable of the Sower.” The book has gotten a lot of recent attention for its prescience.