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Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss

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Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss EXTRACTION ART ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS Preview of a Glorious Ruckus Michael Traynor Earth Day ❧ april 22, 2021 “Tap ‘er light.” Dedicated to the memory of Edwin Dobb. Michael Traynor, Senior Counsel at Cobalt LLP in Berkeley, California, is an honorary life trustee of Earthjustice and a member of its Council, a member of the Leadership Council of the Environmental Law Institute, an honorary life trustee of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, President Emeritus of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the Ameri- can Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He acknowledges with appreciation the many generous and helpful suggestions from friends and family. The views stated are personal. A compilation of references selected from the growing litera- ture accompanies this preview. Jetsonorama, I Am the Change, installation, photograph by Ben Knight Copyright © 2018 and 2021 by Michael Traynor. INTRODUCTION Layout and design by Samuel Pelts & Peter Koch. At this critical time of climate disruption and unsustainable extraction of natural For noncommercial purposes, you may copy, redistribute, resources, Peter Koch,¹ a printer, publisher and fine artist, has conceived of quote from, and adapt this preview and compilation pursuant Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss (www.extractionart.org).² He, and the late Ed- to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Inter- win Dobb,³ a writer and teacher of environmental stories, and a growing group national License (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons. of allies, launched this inspiring project in 2018. They created “a multi-layered, org/licenses/by/4.0/. cross-institutional, trans-border multimedia ruckus over the single most urgent planetary concern of our time—the social, cultural, and environmental costs of All images and illustrations Copyright © by the artists. unbridled globalized extractive industry, including the negative effects of climate change; the deterioration of land, water, and air; the devastation and displace- Second printing 2021 ment of poor, minority, and indigenous communities; and much else.”⁴ Leaders of the Extraction Art project and natives of Montana, Peter came The CODEX Foundation from Missoula and Edwin from Butte. While living in California, they main- 2205 Fourth Street tained strong Montana ties, as Peter still does. They set the stage for a constel- Berkeley, California 94710 lation of events in 2021 and enlisted confirmed participants from numerous and www.codexfoundation.org diverse museums and galleries, curators, artists, photographers, writers, librar- ies and rare book departments, organizations and publishers, and a team of 1 advisers. I learned of the project from Malcolm Margolin, author of the classic, The Ohlone Way, leader of the California Institute for Community, Art and Nature, and founder and president for forty years of Heyday, a nonprofit publisher on whose board I served.⁵ The project has published WORDS on the Edge, a portfolio of poems and lyrical texts addressing themes of nature and its irresponsible destruction, as well as a major compilation of contributions from artists and writers—the “MEGAZINE”— and will continue to publish periodic newsletters, documents/manifestos/images heralding a series of artistic, musical, and dramatic events and exhibitions.⁶ It is also completing arrangements for those events. Jane Hirshfield, poet, author, and participant, is preparing a forthcoming poetry reading at the San Francisco public library.⁷ It is human nature and a necessity to consume resources to survive. It is a human frailty and not a necessity to do so unsustainably. The extraction problem is not confined to mining fossil fuels or minerals from land and the deep sea. Unsustainable extraction occurs in many forms, for example, clear-cutting for- ests; overfishing oceans, rivers, and lakes; and over-drafting groundwater from aquifers. Unsustainable extraction in any form is attended by greed, lawlessness, Lawrence Gipe, Russian Drone Painting #1 (Mir, Siberia), 2018–19, oil on canvas, 72 by 96 inches treatment of the earth and its marvelously varied inhabitants as an externality, and a disregard for present and future generations. west Passage. Previously impassable or difficult terrain opens up—not to reveal In Butte, unsustainable extraction created the mammoth open pit known as a space of simple agreement, but instead to suggest new spaces of exploration, the Berkeley Pit, a mile wide, mile-and-a-half long, and third of a mile deep abyss imagination and concern. Climate change reveals such a passage, a space of where thousands of snow geese have perished after landing on its toxic lake. It environmental shifts and cultural complexity, of scientific study and political con- is a hellish legacy of the Anaconda copper mine. Ed Dobb told its story in his flict.”⁹ In addition to the focus of the Extraction Project, varied recent exhibitions, article, “Pennies from Hell.” programs, and commentaries demonstrate that art can help save the planet.¹⁰ That toxic abyss also symbolizes the deep hole that we and the fellow inhab- Combining their talents, vision, and aesthetic and ethical senses, artists itants of our planet will all be in if we don’t act now, with the crucial help of the can imaginatively and resolutely explore new spaces and forge alliances—when arts. Instead of plunging into the abyss, the arts can help us step away from the fitting and feasible—with scientists, lawyers, and other individuals and organi- edge and begin moving in a different direction. zations concerned about our planet and inspiring as well as inspired by emerging In her book, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, And Art in the young leaders.¹¹ Together, they can cross “the line where the pressure of duty Changing West, Lucy Lippard, author, curator, and project participant, writes: “Of leaves off and the challenge of excellence begins,” in the words of legal philoso- course art cannot change the world alone, but it is a working ally to those chal- pher Lon Fuller.¹² lenging power with unconventional solutions.”⁸ In their article, “Arts, Sciences Ten years ago, in Note to the Next Generation, I said, “Apocalyptic words were and Climate Change: Practices and Politics at the Threshold,” scholars Jennifer not effective to cause people preoccupied with various stresses to pay attention Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff, write that “Between sciences and arts, there are corre- to climate change and may have even fostered alienation, denial, and hostility.”¹³ spondences and passages to be detected, which may even come about through a As Elke Weber has recently written: “1) climate change does not elicit sufficient shared attention to issues and events—like the breaking up of the actual North- fear or dread; 2) motivating climate action through fear or guilt is a bad idea even 2 3 though it might sound like an effective approach; and 3) we need to help people recognize their personal experience of the concrete impacts of climate change on their lives, though this is easier said than done and may not work for everyone.”¹⁴ Incremental progress is hard enough to achieve on any front and is inadequate to meet the challenge of climate disruption. Despite advances on some fronts, for example, in California and with the Paris Agreement, there have been retrograde and hostile maneuvers on others, for example, the former Trump Administra- tion’s emphasis on unsustainable extraction, attacks on protection of endan- gered species, disregard for environmental laws, withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, rejection of science, denial of climate change, and appeal to base, negative partisanship and petromasculinity.¹⁵ There is plenty of damage to repair and plenty of cause to sound the alarm. We also need to find and use improved ways of communication that will engage people at a personal leval and move them to act positively. The Extraction Project holds the promise of fostering breakthrough changes in public opinion and public policy, including wider recognition of an enforce- able human right to a healthful environment.¹⁶ It is a singular component of a multi-pronged strategy of action that involves various disciplines. It augments significantly the historic and contemporary contributions of the arts to the envi- ronment and to meeting the challenges of climate change. WHY ARE THE ARTS NEEDED? Professional disciplines such as science, engineering, law, economics, public policy, and journalism are necessary but not sufficient to counter unsustainable extraction, environmental injustice, greed, and ignorance. They are not adequate alone to overcome the harm caused by “merchants of doubt,” “truth decay,” and insidious advertising.¹⁷ “The failure of widely accessible, compelling science to quiet persistent cultural controversy over the basic facts of climate change is the most spectacular science communication failure of our day,” as Dan Kahan, founder of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project, has critically observed.¹⁸ Science and the arts are closely related and can inspire each other. Indeed, the term “scientist” is a hybrid of “artist” and the Latin “scientia.”¹⁹ Both disci- plines require creativity, imagination, perseverance, and passion.²⁰ Physicist and Nobel Laureate Chen Ning Yang compared reducing “complicated phenomena to Charlotte Bird, Goodbye My Village, 2018, hand-dyed and commercial cotton, polyester organza, a few equations” to poetry as a “condensation of thought.” polyester thread, perle cotton thread; hand cut and fused applique, machine stitched, machine ²¹ quilted, hand emboroidered, 48 by 32 inches 4 5 Erika Osborne, The Chasm of Bingham, 2012, oil on linen, 48 by 90 inches Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and inventor.²² Alexander von Humboldt “in- ics.³³ Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Nobel Prize winner and the reputed “father of fluenced many of the greatest thinkers, artists and scientists of his day” through modern neuroscience,” also produced more than twenty-nine hundred drawings his discoveries, ideas, and drawings.²³ John James Audubon was a naturalist and that reveal the nervous system, many of which are reproduced in the recent book, artist.²⁴ Samuel F.
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