Drought conditions across the globe are accelerating due to extraction technologies and climate change.

I will be in several shows and publications. In one way or another, they all are about ecocide. The causes of drought are the corruption that has led to unfettered climate change, The consequences of drought may be a cascade of failed states, Some people see that cascade as a lucrative opportunity to amass great fortune at great cost to others. That is how a narcissistic system works: destroy the other for selfish gain.

I think we underestimate the cost of living in oppressive circumstances as we age. I don’t just mean the costs of medical care or basic services under an authoritarian regime, but the spiritual labor of trying to go forward in life and stay focused on positivity, clarity and perseverance in the face of obstacles: threading the righteous needle of culture and humanity in the face of violence and cruelty.

The conclusions from my work on the new project, Tidal Flushing this week at Swale House on Governors island, thanks to the support of ecoartspace, has painted a grim picture of the scale of prevalence of climate change and the authoritarian-fascist dictatorships driving climate change has imposed on the Earth. I confess to periodic despair. But I seize on vision, which may be a form of hope without sentimentality. This residency has revealed a glimmer of light on vision for me.

My essays this month will be briefer than usual as I complete a residency at Swale House on Governors Island in New York City, for the new project, “Tidal Flushing.” This Sunday at 1: PM, I will host a casual live chat on the porch of Swale House about the project. It won’t be recorded. What I hope to discuss are some of the choices we face now that climate change is forcing upon us all. One of those choices is political but I have tried, in these essays, to stay focused on systemic implications rather than individual situations. Nonetheless, like many, events trigger big emotions: rage, terror, disappointment, and my reflex is to attach my feelings to individuals. But the reason I try to stick with systems, is that even though systems might seem more abstract, if we can correctly analyze systems, we can also correctly identify where and how to intervene and create cascades of change. That is at the heart of why I developed trigger point theory and have often referred to it in these essays.

Please join me 1: PM June 6 if you will be in NYC, for a porch chat about my new project, Tidal Flushing, which I will be developing as part of my residency at SWALE House on Governor’s Island, New York. There won’t be Zoom access for the conversation but I will report after the fact. My residency is at the invitation of Patricia Watts of ecoart space. In the next two weeks as I perform this residency, I will be making a decision about whether it’s prudent to sell my studio and wharf on Vinalhaven Island, Maine to aquaculture fishermen. The sale would require me to find another place to store my inventory and another way to continue my practice. The porch chat will be about all the ways climate change is forcing unmanageable adaption on many of us and how we can commemorate those adaptations without self-erasure or denial.

Sometimes life happens. In case you missed my weekly essay, life is the explanation. May 9, I fell asleep at my post at MAC Book Pro and spilled coffee over my entire system. It died a sputtering death. I had been writing another essay for this series so it might be considered a form of murder suicide. Many people have told me for a long time that I work too hard. I once asked the late great artist Carolee Schneemann whether she thought it was possible to be a serious artist but not a workaholic. She replied immediately, “no.”

I track demonstrations of civil disobedience, for example, currently at the Venice Biennale. Despite feelings of personal anguish, I try to deconstruct the relative success or failure of the tactics.

I feel conflicted about the current protests at the Venice Biennale. Altho I agree that the current leadership is committing genocide and must be held accountable, I don’t condemn every Israeli or think the solution is to eliminate the country.

A substantial aspect of my practice studies and creates maps. Recently, I have been looking at maps of global patterns of drought. This isn’t something I am hearing much about. These patterns are being dramatically exacerbated by climate change.

Earth Day 2026, is the official launch of Tidal Flushing. This new project is about how climate change is dramatically changing the Earth and how we might adapt to those changes. I have begun work on visualizing what that looks like. Preliminary sketches will be at Swale House on Governors Island, NYC, the first two weeks of June 2026, viewing by appointment. Over the next sixteen months, I will share my plan for 2027, when I will mark the divestiture and abandonment of my long-time coastal studio to the sea with a major hybrid public event.

In each of these essays, I have prefaced my text with an image from my own practice that epitomizes my thinking in some way. In this essay, I’ve attached a map of the worst-case scenario of our future, swallowed by the sea and losing control over habitats we have depended upon. I discussed this map with Dr. Jim White, with whom I’ve worked for almost twenty years, in a Zoom about my new project, Tidal Flushing.