Leo Tolstoy's correspondence with Ghandi is credited with initiating the ideas behind civil disobedience. However, in his personal life, based on my readings of her extensive diaries, it seems he was so emotionally abusive to his wife Sofia, that on more than one occasion, she was driven to suicide attempts. Publicly, Tolstoy based his thinking on Christian theology, including sexual abstinence. Privately, he used that as a pretext to be withholding and judgemental even as he kept having sex with Sofia and getting her pregnant: 16 times.

Death and grief are inevitable aspects of life. Much art strives for a measure of immortality, if only as a statement about the ephemerality of all life. Now this administration seeks to censor the nations museums and control what is deemed worthy of immortality. Since we know Trump's taste is limited to covering everything in sight with gold leaf, this is not a good prognosis for our cultural future. However, it is a good opportunity to consider what is ephemeral and what death means.

This morning, I got a response to my recent post, "Impunity Is a Terrible Thing https://avivarahmani.substack.com/p/impunity-is-a-terrible-thing," asking me why I had left Gaza out of my discussion of the violent repercussions of governmental actions?

In time, human impunity does not stand. That is not the same as justice but history does confer judgements to challenge impunity.

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.

Her drawings reject nostalgia. They function as records — of exile, ecology, memory, and what remains after the flood. - Antonino La Vela.

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.

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.

“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.