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DELETED WORDS: dandelion, beaver, heron, magpie, otter,
acorn, clover, ivy, sycamore, willow and blackberry.
ADDED WORDS: blog, MP3 player, voice mail, electronic
BlackBerry, and broadband.
These are the changes made in the latest
edition of the dictionary for schoolchildren published by Oxford University
Press.
The 10,000-word junior dictionary is aimed at readers around
the age of seven.
The replacements were made to reflect the frequency with
which the words would be used by children.
The rejection of the biological vocabulary for an electronic
vocabulary provides compelling evidence of how adults are fostering alienation between
children and the wondrous world of plants, rocks, critters, puddles, and twigs. Without words for the non-human realm of existence, children can’t conceptualize it. Without concepts,
they can’t become familiar with it. Without familiarity, they won’t respect and preserve the
dynamic forces that permit life to exist on this planet.
'Nature' words can never be obsolete. Human survival is utterly dependent upon plants and animals, water and air, soil and sun. Electronics are luxury items to enjoy after we attend to our non-human relationships. Let us retain these words before they die and require a miracle for their resurrection - if we live that long.
(This story was reported in the Canadian Press. December 10, 2008)
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 THIRTY BELOW: PROJECT
ECO RUN-WAY culminates in an exhibition that presents examples of how people
might use fewer resources to attain greater comfort despite frigid Wisconsin
temperatures and winds that howl across Madison’s four frozen lakes.
The ingenious creations of middle school children, college
students, faculty, and residents who dedicated themselves to this task were
presented in a lively parade through town, followed by a glittering
fashion-show at Edgewood College, the organizing institution. (We considered
holding this part of the event in a walk-in freezer so that the bundled
contestants wouldn’t suffer from heat exhaustion in the auditorium.) After
marching across intersecting runways with music blasting and live video feed
magnifying details and textures of their out(er)fits, each contestant
demonstrated how they satisfied three criteria for determining the merits of
clothing in the 21st century:
WARM: Functional was judged by Professor Majid Sarmadi from
UW Madison
HOT: Ecological was judged by Karen Hitchcock Marketing and
Communications Manager for Madison Environmental Group, Inc. and EnAct
COOL: Fashionable was judged by Linda Weintraub, curator of
this project and author Avant-Guardians: Textlets for Art and Ecology
The clothing will be exhibited at the DeRicci Gallery,
Edgewood College from January 11 – 30, 2009. I collaborated closely with Tracy
Dietzl, Gallery Director.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
by Linda Weintraub
Humanity’s first efforts to make clothing occurred more than
100,000 years ago in the cold climates of northern Europe and Asia.
Neanderthals survived several ice ages because they learned to stay warm and
dry by wrapping themselves in the thick, furry hides from hairy mammoths,
bears, deer, musk oxen, and other mammals. This discovery initiated the process
of designing and fabricating clothing. While humans have been investing their
ingenuity in improving clothing for tens of thousands of years, we still have
not perfected the products. “Thirty-Below: Project Eco Run-Way” challenged
students, faculty, and community members to make the needed improvements.
Clothing remains an area for creative exploration to this
day because the functions it is being asked to serve have increased over time.
Neanderthals likely strove to fulfill a single criterion – UTILITY. If the
clothing repelled water, insulated heat, blocked wind, allowed for movement,
was light, durable, and smelled good it satisfied its wearers.
As civilization progressed, people discovered the expressive
and formal potential of the materials out of which clothing is made. Delighting
their sensibilities was added to utility as criteria for clothing. Such delight
was achieved by arranging hue, shininess, smoothness, pliability of fibers and
furs. In this manner STYLE was introduced. Creating new aesthetic combinations
has been stimulating the human imagination ever since. Style allows clothing to
convey tribal, national, religious, and professional characteristics. In
addition, it provides opportunities to express such personal information as
gender, age, marital status, wealth, social status, sophistication,
individuality, and so forth.
Recently, ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT was added to the definition
of “good” clothing. Thus, in addition to function and style, the merits of
clothing depend upon whether a garment is produced, worn, and discarded
according to the principles of sustainability. Environmental mandates oblige us
to also seek answers to the following questions:
Are the resources used to make the clothes endangered?
Do they originate locally?
Are they sustainably grown or harvested?
Are they polluting during manufacture?
Are they adaptable for re-use?
Can they be disassembled to facilitate recycling?
Are they packaged in an extravagant manner?
How are the workers who participated in their
manufacture treated?
Tracy Dietzl, Director of the DeRicci Gallery, deserves to
be acknowledged for her efforts on behalf of this project. She was responsible
for recruiting participants, raising funds, publicity, scheduling, staging, and
contributing the excitement and good will that this project generated.
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 I was reminded of a uniquely
contemporary this form of hysteria last week. I was told that a bat flew into a
room where a group of college students were sleeping. The bat did not exhibit
signs of illness. The bat did not bite anyone. It did not land on anyone. It
did defecate on anyone. But the mere proximity of their sons and daughters to a
‘wild’ critter sent the parents into paroxysms of panic. This fly-by proximity
was considered threatening enough to warrant rabies shots! It gave me a new appreciation for the word "batty" which means, afflicted with irrationality and mental unsoundness!
As a population, it is the outposts of human accomplishment
that are as comfortable and comforting as home. Sophisticated technologies, constructed
landscapes, contrived substances, virtualized realities, nano operations, genetic
manipulations, and cosmic explorations confirm the wondrous expansion of human
capabilities. These indicators of human ingenuity are more likely to elicit “Ho
hum” than “Wow!”. They are quickly
absorbed into the cozy routines of daily experience.
Meanwhile, the archaic and elemental
components of life on Earth have assumed the towering dimensions of alien
unknowns. Water, sunshine, microbial
activity, wildlife, soil, fire are either confined or concealed. While these elements were once worshipped as sacred,
today they are often reviled as fearsome. Bottled water, sun-block lotions,
anti-bacterial soaps are three examples of the arsenals of products designed to
quell such fear and loathing.
In examining the life decisions and
emotional traumas of people I know, it is clear that they are more terrorized
by the life-sustaining components of Earth’s ecosystems than they are by the
threat of terrorist attacks. They still
fly in airplanes. They still travel on subways. But they do not run barefoot in
a field, swim in a pond, welcome snakes into the garden, feed dead matter to an
ailing tree, or burn soil to refresh it.
There is an alternative to defensive
fortifications and offensive strategies of suppression. Familiarity is a
reliable means to expand our arena of homey comfort to include the bounty of
non-human and non-living opportunities for delight and strategies for survival on
Earth.
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Among its myriad duties, water
sustains trees for decades and even centuries. Last week, I would have rejoiced
that the forest surrounding my home celebrates this fact. This week, however, I
lament that my forest is offering testimony that water also obliterates trees.
An ice storm ravaged the woods last week. Each crash was fully anticipated. It
was the sudden, sharp, piercing CRACK that preceded the crash that startled. It
was the suspended silence that followed that terrified. Birds stopped
twittering. Squirrels froze in their tracks. Breathing, swallowing, blinking
halted as we waited for this ominous premonition to fulfill itself. Seconds
ticked. Then the inevitable CRASH announced the fate of another towering tree.
By the end of the storm tree carcasses lay strewn in disarray, as pitiful as
beached whales, blocking the driveway, choking the stream, crushing our canoe,
demolishing the terraces. One damaged survivor, a grand old oak, is leaning on
the roof above my head as I write. The tonnage of embodied BTUs, along with
fencing materials, and the potential to harvest lumber, wood chips, and logs is
now written into the script that defines my responsibilities. I’m trying to
convince myself that the storm did not devastate my property; it gifted me a treasure
trove of valuable resources.
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 Ducks are selected for bright yellow bath time toys. Swans contribute
their elegant forms to crystal and brocade. However, It was not until Old Glory
arrived on our homestead with his harem of adoring hens that I understood why turkeys
are chosen to describe dysfunctional cars, and why going ‘cold turkey’ describes
extreme discomfort. In five months he
has morphed from a waddling ball of white fluff to a compelling metaphor for
human greed, ineptitude, vanity, and arrogance. No exaggeration is required. Old
glory has demonstrated why turkeys are useful to writers of farce. His cocky
strut, self-congratulatory gobble, and baroque plumage make him the uncontested
czar of the barnyard. Old Glory wakes me every morning by pecking on the glass
pane of the door next to my bed. He sleeps under the open sky even as ice accumulates
on his back and icicles hang from his wings. He not only follows on my heels as
I go about my chores, he enjoys a daily hug. Wrapping my arms around his plump
chest I am inches from the Baroque spectacle that his head affords. These four
inches are my daily dose of topographical and chromatic wonderment. No one passes Old Glory by. We salute his
ungainly magnificence, and affirm the diversity that offers ‘cute’ ducklings, ‘elegant’
swans, and ‘sumptuous, ostentatious, extravagant’ turkeys.
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The cozy confinement imposed by the snow mounting on top of
the remains of last week's spectacular ice storm has created a pause in my
schedule. It has provided time to craft a timely holiday greeting. I tried to
confine my thoughts to the silent beauty of the snowstorm, the roaring fire in
my wood stove, the aromatic chrysanthemum tea I am sipping, and the
fresh-plucked goose that is ready for the oven. But my disobedient thoughts are
demanding attention to less fortunate folks who, at this same moment, are confronting
various forms of distress. But as soon as I allowed them this freedom, they
proceeded to rush toward the countless forms of non-human life that are in need
of care, comfort, and healing. Thus, I would like to repeat a phrase that still
resounds at gatherings of well-wishers the world over, but it may have never
resonated with such urgency:
“To Life!”
These two words proclaim a deep and abiding reverence
for life - not only human life. May we also send heartfelt wishes to microbes and plants and animals, and also the water, air, earth, and sun that enable life on this planet to
exist in all its wondrous diversity.
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Late afternoon I boarded a plane for
Wisconsin, travelling west from New York. The blanket of clouds that obliterated
the Earth created a precise horizon line that bi-furcated the evening sky. My
window seat provided an unsettling view of a perpetually setting sun, seemingly
suspended in its course.
I pay attention to sunsets most clear days
of the year, even excusing myself from a meeting if a sunset promises to be
especially glorious. I rush home to bask in the sun’s descent among familiar old
oak trees that occupy the foreground, and the majestic Catskill Mountains in
the distance. Each transition from through dusk from day to night is accompanied
by a unique orchestration of chirps, clucks, gusts, breezes, cooling temperatures,
ebbing humidity, and clouds aglow with selections from the color spectrum refracted
from above and reflected from below.
The steady-state condition of the airplane
interior reinforced the eerie quality of the sunset beyond the airplane window.
Despite the passage of time, this sun
remained poised in a scene that was planar, unwavering, and silent. It was otherworldly,
alien to the vibrant multi-sensual experiences of sunsets at home. Then I recalled
seeing such views of suspension and isolation before. They prevail in art. Unearthly
qualities characterize traditional landscape paintings, drawings, prints, and
photographs. Such renderings of landscapes abound with mistaken impressions!
University students enrolled in 2-d and 3-d
studio art classes were anticipating my arrival. I was invited to tell them
about radical experiments in contemporary art that were inspired by environmental
concerns. Watching sunsets in two divergent settings catapulted this theme into
an exciting, if controversial, arena. I reached for the journal that contained
my lecture notes, found some blank sheets of paper, and started again. This is
what I wrote:
The
physical world, as it is delineated in most standard art curricula and depicted
in many conventional art works, contradicts the physical world as it is defined
and studied by ecologists. Artists who have long been dead are still honored
for their deceptive modes of presentation. These misleading communications are
entrenched in academic curricula, affirmed by common language, and ratified by
popular consensus. The emerging science
of ecology has shown that representational art is not representational of the
physical environment. It is representational of conventions of deceit, acceptance
of distortion, and willing compliance with fiction. Restructuring all these
arenas may be the fundamental requirement for achieving culture-wide environmental
reform on a scale that matches current environmental challenges.
For
example, misleading impressions are reinforced by courses that presume to teach
2-d art forms despite the fact that nothing can exist in the physical world if
it only has two dimensions. Height and width are always accompanied by depth. ‘Flat’
actually means that one of these dimensions is substantially smaller than the
other two. Volume is a fact of existence. It is inherent in sheets of paper,
surfaces of ponds, and computer screens.
Likewise,
lines which play such a prominent role in art instruction and art production do
not exist in the physical world. A line is an abstraction invented by humans to
simplify the task of rendering forms. Even a line of ink has physical
substance, just like the trunk of a tree, a strand of hair, and a water hose.
Furthermore, utilizing lines to delineate shape is bogus since, in the physical
world, lines don't enclose space - edges do, and edges are components of
volumes.
While
it is true that every ‘thing’ in the physical world has volume, even 3-d art
courses perpetuate a deceptive premise. They infer that identifying all three
of an object’s dimensions suffices to describe it. It ignores the fact that
objects are continually being bombarded by environmental conditions that
trigger expansions, contractions, erosions, rusting, melting, dissipating,
tumbling, absorption, and countless additional forms of alteration. Everything
that occupies space also transforms through time. On Earth, perpetual permutation
applies to location, size, shape, substance, complexity, responsiveness,
vulnerability, and so forth. Responsiveness of the object and the intensity of
the influence determine if these changes transpire quickly, as when an
avalanche tumbles, or slowly, as when bedrock erodes.
Another
fallacy perpetuated in conventional college curricula is the deceptive notion
that art is made to endure. Art instruction often includes introducing students
to archival mediums that resist change, and storage protocols that emulate museum
settings by isolating artworks from fluctuating humidity and temperature,
sunlight, fungus, bacteria, mice, and human tampering. The underlying message conveyed
by these protocols is that art is exempt from participating in the dynamic systems
that account for life on Earth. These systems are bad for art. Artists are at
liberty to opt out of responsible engagement.
In
all these ways the hallowed traditions of art and art education suppress the
unique and all-powerful forces that comprise the drama of life on Earth. Today’s
vanguard artists are reversing this legacy by inventing ways to confirm the dynamic
complexity of eco-systems. They are undertaking respectful partnerships with Earth
forces and substances to establish sustainable paradigms for maintaining human
populations. Some artists may choose to design
eco life styles, eco value systems, eco standards
of conduct. They may invent strategies for crisis management and aversion. Others
may construct eco models of work based on crafting, collaborating, reusing, and
sharing. Still others may introduce new forms of delight, celebration, prayer,
and exchange.
I
glance, once more, out the airplane window. Night has settled in. Uniform blackness
extends as far as the eye can see. I perceive my reflection on the glass and think
of the scale of perception-shifting that is sufficient to sustain life on Earth.
Environmental reform requires a total revamp of the way humans 'see' the world
around us. Artists can help lay to rest the old habits of separating dimensions
of height, width, and depth. They can make all components
of the physical environment contingent on context. They can help visualize
that context as a system that is perpetually and unpredictably evolving.
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