April 18, 2007 at 6:25 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Appropriation, The Future, Global, Pollution, Time, Atmosphere, Survival, Science, Michael Alstad, Livestock
New work made for New Climates
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“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
– Albert Einstein
According to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), cows, pigs, sheep and poultry are among the world’s greatest environmental threats and contribute a staggering 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions—considerably more than transport, which emits 13%. The report, entitled “Livestock’s long shadow,” says the meat industry is degrading land, contributing to the greenhouse effect, polluting water resources, and destroying biodiversity. Livestock use 30% of the earth’s land surface and pastures for cattle use 70% of deforested areas in the Amazon. Massive deforestation is expected as meat consumption is expected to double by 2050 as the populations from emerging countries embrace an unhealthy “western diet” based on meat products and fast food.
Curiously, the environmental threat caused by the meat industry has been mostly absent from the ongoing dialogue about climate change. Even the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth failed to address the livestock industry’s impact on global climate change.
In the video Methane, I combined footage of factory farms found on the web using the search tool in Flickr, YouTube, and various blogs, with an animation from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre Scientific Visualisation Studio. The animation depicts the breakup of the Ayles Ice Shelf in Canada’s Ellesmere Island on August 13, 2005. More than 90% of the ice cap has been lost. The piece shown in the animation is equivalent in size to approximately 11,000 football fields. The Canadian Arctic is experiencing the highest degree of climate change on the planet.
– Michael Alstad
Have we overlooked one of the largest factors in global climate change? Methane is an eye-opening and devastating portrait of the livestock industry as a main producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Our contribution to a destabilizing climate does not stop at the toxins being dispensed into the water and air, but includes the animal products we farm and consume. Alstad emphasizes a circuit between the unnatural living environments of stockyards, ensuing environmental damage, and the Arctic ecosystems that are impacted. Though the footage is shocking, the real cause for alarm—and motivation for immediate action—lies in the causal relationship that is exposed. Why has this link been so often ignored or concealed? What other aspects of the debate have been deliberately left in the dark?
March 29, 2007 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Art, The Future, Travel, Geography, Narrative, Global, Time, Fiction, Mary Mattingly, Survival, Nomadism, Plate Tectonics, Feedback Loop
New work made for New Climates
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Pangaea Ultima follows a field reporter on a tour across newly demarcated P.U. as she describes the recent environmental and cultural changes. Through its present exhibition, P.U. casts an illusory glance at a yesterworld, with mechanical trees reminding us of the once natural forests. In Pangaea Ultima, self-replicating viruses run rampant and harnessing every possible energy source is a necessary livelihood. The reporter laments, accepts, and explains. Nobody had suspected the impending doom.
Narrated by Sarah Wilmer.
– Mary Mattingly
Pangaea Ultima presents a vision of a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future in which nomadic survivors navigate barren, inhospitable terrains. “When the public finally took notice, it was 43 years ago,” begins the voiceover narration. With this displacement into an imaginary yet eerily plausible future, long after rainforests were transformed into deserts, Pangaea Ultima continues the critique of humanity’s exacerbating role in global climate change, but deepens and complicates it by extending it into the domain of fantasy. An ambiguous sense of time and place productively hinders attempts to fix Pangaea Ultima in relation to present day causalities: are we seeing centuries, or merely months, into the future? Is this our destiny, or simply an otherworldly reminder of what could happen to our civilization? As viewers, we are asked to fill in the temporal gap between today and the indefinite moment at which the video takes place.
Through her video, Mary Mattingly discusses seismic shifts on a continental scale, but they are as much shifts in understanding as invented plate tectonics. The moment she imagines—the coalescence of Earth’s continents into a reconstituted Pangaea—contains a metaphoric resonance, suggesting a time when, as a species, we will shift our awareness of climate change and unite in an effort to survive. This return to Pangaea—a zero-point geological equilibrium before continental drift—and the return to a society of tribal nomadism, is also evocative of the structure of a feedback loop, a fundamental unit of networked technologies and a dimension of our global ecosystem. A property of such self-perpetuating systems is the capacity for adaptation; in Pangaea Ultima, humans have found a way to inhabit a hostile and unstable climate, one that existed before in geologic pre-history and will, ultimately, reoccur. As the nomads construct paradoxically ramshackle and futuristic dwellings, we are reminded of a cyclical narrative theme: Creation and destruction are inextricably interconnected, endlessly reenacted.
