Here it is almost mid-May and it’s been a while since I’ve even done any art work at all. Mostly that’s been due to some work that needed doing, including sorting out the art room and emptying out a big storage room in the basement. It’s the sort of thing that many people do in the spring. In fact, my next stop today will be to a donation center.
I’ve been thinking about how to pursue some interests related to climate change in our chaotic world and it’s harder to thread these subjects around my art experiences than I thought originally it would be. I had hoped to fuse art with climate change into a book of some sort, but I find I need more space to collect my thoughts on the latter–for a book proposal I’m working on. Not everyone is as interested in this topic as I am so I won’t keep coming back to it here on this blog, which was–however–created to discuss surprises, anomalies, discontinuities and warning challenges. (The first posts in 2014 and 2015 do just this.) Instead, here’s a link to the brand new WordPress blog with one blog post–“Whale-watching and New Realism in Global Affairs” so far on it: https://wordpress.com/view/caroldumaine.com
If you visit my new blog, you’ll find that the first post is about….gray whales! “What do they have to do with climate change?” you might ask. That is, in fact, the point of this first blog post. We are seeing anomalies in the behavior and migrating patterns of these magnificent creatures and scientists who have studied them for many years don’t understand these anomalies. Imagine, the gray whale is a descendant of a whale that roamed the seas some 30 million years ago! If ever we’re going to see a signal of changes on our planet, it would probably be with a living creature with such an unimaginably long lineage. (There are many connections to art in all this line of thinking, some of which I’ve explored in previous blog posts; the main connection of interest to me is one of re-perceiving the world around us, in a way that overcomes “analytical” thinking that conditions us to see what we are prepared to see, and little else! Learning how to re-perceive our world may be central to the “security” of the human species going forward so, you see, that’s how I connect these disparate subjects.)
My interest in the gray whales was sparked nine years ago this week, when a gray whale was spotted in the Mediterranean Sea. Gray whales had not been spotted in the Atlantic Ocean, let alone the Mediterranean, up to that day in May 2010 for at least the last 300 years. Gray whales went extinct in the Atlantic for reasons still unknown sometime around 1800. No one was prepared to see a gray whale in this location, and it’s clear that they could barely believe their eyes. This was not really possible, said their minds, but their eyes said it was. This gray whale would have been from the North Pacific ocean most likely, so scientists wondered how and why it traveled to the Mediterranean. Scientists thought that perhaps gray whale populations had somehow reconstituted themselves in the Atlantic and no one had noticed it. However, almost a decade has gone by…and we still don’t know.
If this type of question interests you, please follow my new blog, “Rethinking Everything in the Anthropocene” at: https://wordpress.com/view/caroldumaine.com, where I also welcome your comments and suggestions.
Thank you.
Black Elephant Blog 