Tag Archives: climate justice

Labour of Care

The problem on the unsinkable Titanic was not zero lifeboats. For sure, there were not enough of them; after all, the Titanic had been certified as unsinkable, thus why waste money and space on lifeboats?

Yet the real problems were: unequal access to those lifeboats that were on board; lack of training for how to lower those lifeboats safely into the sea; lack of training for how to cope with the panic of a disaster while trying to organize an emergency evacuation; lack of proper supplies stored within the lifeboats, together with the lack of trained crew to manage the boats, the supplies and the survivors, under extreme stress.

Let’s call all of the above: Lifeboat Justice. Now comes shock doctrine & disaster capitalism expert Naomi Klein with salient comments on what justice means within the context of a climate emergency, as relayed from a recent interview. Archival images added by DP.

 

 

 

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DP takeaway:

Lifeboat Justice will emerge from the struggle for Climate Justice within the emergency, as it deepens and unfolds.

 

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How Long?

Now comes Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, speaking at the Youth4Climate Conference Milan. The image links to a video, as relayed from Democracy Now.

The video also includes Greta Thunberg’s “Blah, Blah, Blah” speech, misleading as a transcript, but very clear and powerful via the video.

Neither Nakate nor Thunberg (nor the thousands of youth climate activists who later marched in the streets) are fooled by the feckless slogans and cynical accounting games presently masquerading as climate policy.

A few days after her speech and not far from Milan, Italy’s Genoa province experienced close to three feet of rain within 24 hours; a new European record, whatever that means.

How long shall the land mourn?

 

 

 

 


Of Silence and the Flood

This week, we turn to an interview on Democracy Now: the voice of George Monbiot, who articulates a number of uncomfortable issues not addressed by the media storm surrounding hurricane Harvey’s itinerary over the past week.

Images are from 36.5, a “duration performance with the sea” conceived by Sarah Cameron Sunde.

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From Sunde’s project website, we relay the following:

36.5 / a durational performance with the sea is a time-based project spanning seven years and six continents: New York-based artist Sarah Cameron Sunde stands in a tidal area for a full cycle, usually 12-13 hours, as water engulfs her body and then reveals it again. The public is invited to participate by joining Sarah in the water and by marking the passing hours from the shore. The project began in 2013 as a response to Hurricane Sandy’s impact on New York City and the parallel that Sunde saw in the the struggle for an artist to survive on a daily basis and the struggle of humanity to survive in the face of sea-level rise. The project was developed in Maine, Mexico and San Francisco 2013-2014, and launched on a global scale in The Netherlands in 2015. The fifth iteration was recently completed in Bangladesh. The performance is filmed from multiple perspectives and then translated into a multi-channel video installation that can communicate with a wider audience. 

Plans are underway for future iterations in New Zealand, Brazil, and Senegal, and working towards a large-scale iteration in New York City with an anticipated date of August 2020. 36.5 acknowledges the temporary nature of all things and considers our contemporary relationship to water, as individuals, in community, and as a civilization.