Tag Archives: digital image

BE CLEAR for Greta Thunberg

Our House Is On Fire, Time To Panic

BE CLEAR — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS print honoring Greta Thunberg

On 20 August 2018, after the heat waves and wildfires during Sweden’s hottest summer in 262 years, Greta Thunberg, who had just started ninth grade, decided not to attend school until the 2018 Swedish general election on 9 September. Her demands were that the Swedish government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement. She protested by sitting outside the Riksdag every day for three weeks during school hours with the sign “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (school strike for the climate). Her strike began attracting public attention after a Swedish climate activist with a wide social media following posted Thunberg’s photo and an English language video about her on his accounts. After the general elections, Thunberg continued to strike only on Fridays, quickly gaining worldwide attention. She inspired school students across the globe to take part in student strikes.
Adapted from Wikipedia

There are a lot of interesting things I could write about Greta Thunberg and her amazing ability to communicate and mobilize. One thing worth noting is that she “has a diagnosis” (her words)—what used to be called “Asperger’s Syndrome” and is now called “high-functioning autism spectrum disorder” (ASD). Another thing is that she was directly influenced by the strike actions of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school shooting survivors/activists in Parkland Florida. (See my works for Emma Gonzalez here and here.) This reminds me of a point Rebecca Solnit makes in her writing: how you cannot know the extended effects of your righteous actions, so you must always have hope, be active, and believe in your own power, even if you cannot know the eventual results of your actions.

Right now, though, I want mostly to amplify her own words. Please read this text of Thunberg’s speech to English MPs in April 2019 from The Guardian.

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.

I know many of you don’t want to listen to us—you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science.

Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?

In the year 2030 I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us.

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.

Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.

Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity—or climate justice—clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. In fact, the emissions are still rising.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere. And the basic problem is that basically nothing is being done to halt—or even slow—climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.

The UK is, however, very special. Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt, but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.

Since 1990 the UK has achieved a 37% reduction of its territorial CO2 emissions, according to the Global Carbon Project. And that does sound very impressive. But these numbers do not include emissions from aviation, shipping and those associated with imports and exports. If these numbers are included the reduction is around 10% since 1990—or an an average of 0.4% a year, according to Tyndall Manchester.

And the main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies, but rather a 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations. And switching from one disastrous energy source to a slightly less disastrous one will of course result in a lowering of emissions.

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero—and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of “stopping” emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business as usual. The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels—for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine—is beyond absurd.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve? We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases. We should no longer only ask: “Have we got enough money to go through with this?” but also: “Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?” That should and must become the centre of our new currency.

Many people say that we don’t have any solutions to the climate crisis. And they are right. Because how could we? How do you “solve” the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you “solve” a war? How do you “solve” going to the moon for the first time? How do you “solve” inventing new inventions?

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

“So, exactly how do we solve that?” you ask us—the schoolchildren striking for the climate.

And we say: “No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we may not have quite figured out yet.”

Then you say: “That’s not an answer!”

So we say: “We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis—and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.”

“That’s still not an answer,” you say.

Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about.

We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand.

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

I hope my microphone was on. I hope you could all hear me.

Links

Here are some resources you can use to learn more about Greta Thunberg.

https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/

https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/pajdyg/greta-thunberg-by-harley-weir-intereview?fbclid=IwAR07Ww-7s5CzmsRX4iP7GmzVfraZgh-03O96Wd8FuTl1ay9gVphmUTawyx

I couldn’t get this to link correctly so try pasting it into your browser:   nytimes.com/2019/02/18/climate/greta-thunburg.html?

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fgretathunbergsweden%2Fvideos%2F645581262534214%2F&show_text=0&width=560″ width=”560″ height=”315″ style=”border:none;overflow:hidden” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” allowFullScreen=”true”

https://time.com/collection-post/5584902/greta-thunberg-next-generation-leaders/?utm_medium=socialflowtw&utm_campaign=time&utm_source=twitter.com&xid=time_socialflow_twitter&fbclid=IwAR18NUwfwg_tcqlcfkJdnFG9sXZLq6Ebi0p2tQEfu0OP7LxzSa7RduG-IZs

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-greta-thunberg-hope-contagious-climate?

https://daserste.ndr.de/annewill/videos/Interview-mit-Greta-Thunberg-Ich-bin-Realistin-Ich-sehe-Fakten,interviewthunberg100.html?fbclid=IwAR3s3SDw-7yXcu6RXEhc8hB4zxN_Q6sh_–hbe_67KPbbbw6SI0SA6djcNY

Stay Strong (for Blasey and Hill)

Stay Strong — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS print honoring Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill

It took me a long time to figure out what to write, and to write it. Writing is hard. I package all my prints with stories on the back. “It’s not a test,” I tell people…

This is an artwork about two strong women who faced similar tests, 27 years apart. Their stories challenge the stature of powerful men and highlight the costs of privilege. The social forces moving into and radiating out from the moments depicted in this work are so complex, far reaching, and unfinished, that I scarcely know where to start writing about them here. To write the unravelling of the racial component alone could fill an encyclopedia. To simply repeat the narrative that is available to anyone with an internet connection would be tedious, and I don’t have the heart for it. So I’ve decided to crop in, to focus on these people and mostly on the message.

When I read about Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford I was astonished and discouraged by the terrible price they paid for telling the truth. In a nutshell, they became exiles. They receive huge outpourings of support, but still they are targeted by haters in the most outrageous ways. To anyone who is interested in the fundamentals of tragedy—this is it, right here. Here is the individual called to doomed moral action against huge, crushing, and unfair forces—forces that used to be called the gods. Irony rains down from above. Behold the hero who succeeds within failure, by staying strong. Where is the success? As Rebecca Solnit argues compellingly, we cannot know the far-reaching results of moral actions. Sometimes the goal we think we are acting toward—for example, stopping a Supreme Court nominee—is smaller and less important than an actual felicitous outcome. And as in Biblical tragedies, it may take more than one generation to reach the promised land. We can’t know for sure while we are acting. That is why we need to keep acting according to just principles and support each other in our struggles, in the ways we can and know how to do. It takes time.

Our heroes do not accomplish the work, they embody the message. A message is one of the more powerful things that can motivate groups of people with shared values—or at least significantly overlapping values—to work together. Not many of us can withstand the pressures that Hill and Blasey gracefully withstood, but many of us can work together so that fewer of us will have to. After Anita Hill faced her test, more women than ever before ran for political office, and many of them won. I’m pretty sure that’s not what she had in mind when she was testifying. But I count that as a victory.

The protests in front of the Supreme Court building during the Blasey hearings were not really about the nominee. I went there thinking about the nominee and how he should be held to a higher standard. But I soon realized that we were not there for him. We were there for each other—for the other women there—and especially for those there who were moved to say “me too” (both women and men)—those who had experienced sexual assault and the shame and pain of telling their stories. When I was there I saw a woman alone—she was not saying “me too” when prompted—but she did hang her head weeping when she heard the speaker say, “you don’t have to say it if you’re not ready.” I was alone too. I touched her shoulder to comfort her, but I’m not sure I should have done that. This also is a scene from classic tragedies: the chorus of weeping women.

DESIGN NOTES
The aqua color comes from the suit that Anita Hill wore during her testimony (this source photo [sixth frame in slide show] credit Greg Gibson/AP). In the photo of Dr Blasey that this print is based on (credit WiMcNamee/AP), she is centered under an elaborate wall clock with radiating lines outside its face. I was struck by the image’s similarity to Byzantine mosaics I’ve seen representing saints: the hand raised in benediction, the halo behind the head. I think of the clock circle in this print as a representation of the female power of persistent strength that both Professor Hill and Dr Blasey share. And indeed, Hill spoke in support of Blasey before the hearing, in a sense bestowing her benediction on the new witness. In this print she does this through time, as her 1991 self. It was a design problem to put the two figures in relation, and the clock circle was the key to this. Clocks represent time (obviously) and the key message used to fight sexual harassment in particular institutions right now is “time’s up.” Time’s up … it’s time … it’s about time.

Here are some interesting things I found while researching these stories. I only scratched the surface:

From “A Love Letter to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford” by me too. (https://metoomvmt.org/a-love-letter-to-dr-christine-blasey-ford/)

“… Our generation has found in you what those before us found in Professor Anita Hill:
a heroism based not on greed, ego, violence, and self-serving nationalism but truth, vulnerability, and the courage to sacrifice one’s own safety for the greater good. When you stood there in front of us, Dr. Ford, we found a heroism we could not only believe in, but become.

Then you began testifying. You remained steady, brilliant, and brave.
You answered every question carefully, thoroughly, honestly.
When you didn’t know, you said “I don’t know,” and you let that stand.
When you said “indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter,” our spines straightened and we remembered that while our stories
are different, our battle is the same.

We are at war with that kind of laughter.
As we inched closer and closer to our televisions, the hurt versions of ourselves we’d tucked away peeked out of their boxes to watch a hero speak for them. We reminded ourselves, each other, and you—to breathe.
Our love went out to you from every inch of the globe and somehow, all that energy connected. That day, we became freshly united.

Dr. Ford, the result of your testimony runs deeper and wider than who sits on that court seat.

You showed a world of discounted people what courage looks like. You showed us that survival is ongoing and that the journey, while fraught, is also essential. You reminded us that we are neither powerless nor alone because we have the truth—and we have each other.

Your sacrifice was not made in vain.
Like you did, we will continue to show up for ourselves and each other.
We will bring all of ourselves—our pain, fear, and anger—and we will stand in front of power and we will tell the truth. Even if we shake: we will tell our stories….”

Jane Mayer writes, in New Yorker November 1, 2017, talking about Anita Hill’s story and the Harvey Weinstein sexual-harassment scandal, and comparing it to Trump’s ineffectual accusers (even after the “grab them by the pussy” recording surfaced). “Sexual harassment is about power, not sex, and it has taken women of extraordinary power to overcome the disadvantage that most accusers face. As Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Women, put it in an e-mail to me, ‘Power belongs only to the celebrities these days. If only Trump had harassed Angelina Jolie . . .’”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/anita-hill-on-weinstein-trump-and-a-watershed-moment-for-sexual-harassment-accusations

Any search will bring you video of Dr Blasey’s testimony. Here is a link to her written testimony:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2018_09_26_Written_Testimony_of_Dr_Christine_Blasey_Ford.pdf&page=5
Here is a link to Hill’s 1991 testimony on c-span: https://www.c-span.org/video/?22097-1/clarence-thomas-confirmation-hearing

Here is a brilliant summary looking back on Hill’s testimony by Liza Mundy in Politico, September 23, 2018. The link: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/23/rewatched-anita-hill-testimony-kavanaugh-metoo-220526
And a quote: “If there is one note of hope in the whole mess, it is this: Much as Hill’s reputation was smeared in 1991, there are women, and men, who would argue today that she is an exemplar. For me, she is up there with Rosa Parks: courageous, staunch, calm, not to be moved. Rewatching the hearings is like rereading Anna Karenina and realizing, once more, how brilliant it is—and for different reasons than you perceived the first time. She was there to prophesy, articulating patterns of behavior that much of the rest of the country would take decades to pinpoint and understand.”

take power, for Nancy Pelosi

take power #FemalePowerProject print for Nancy Pelosi
take power — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS print honoring Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Patricia Pelosi, born March 26, 1940, to a political family in Baltimore, is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Representing four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, CA, she is the highest-ranking elected woman in United States history. Pelosi is second in the presidential line of succession, immediately after the vice president. She returns to the post after having served in it previously from January 4, 2007–January 3, 2011, when she was the first woman to hold the post.

I decided to make a perSISTERS print for Nancy Pelosi because of the suggestion of a young man I met in one of my Female Power Project booths at a street market in DC. He had previously worked for Pelosi and admired her. He also told me about the “people don’t give you power, you take it” comment, which I found sited in numerous places. Pelosi is, and has been for a while, the most powerful and effective woman in  American politics. Her story, and peoples’ stories about her, are a telling distillation of America’s ideas about female power. It isn’t rocket science; it isn’t subtle at all. Americans hate and distrust powerful women. According to a 2010 paper by Yale researchers sited by Peter Beinart in the April 2018 issue of The Atlantic, when presented with the same description, both men and women reacted negatively to an ambitious, power-seeking leader with a woman’s name, while the same description attached to a man’s name elicited support. 

Beinart goes on to write, “As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe ‘that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness.’ But ‘these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality.’ In fact, ‘the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness.’”

Pelosi is so powerful and effective because she is able to get a group of people (Democrats in the House of Representatives) to work together to pass legislation. She does this by figuring out how to appeal to their interests, give them what they want and need professionally, and convince them to vote a certain way according to her strategy.  

She is often targeted by the right wing and others, but she knows this is because she is effective. Being vilified does not hurt her feelings. “Be thick-skinned if you are going to take power” is the message BEHIND the message “Take Power.” And the message IN FRONT is: to raise up powerful women we need to admire, respect, and support women who are thick-skinned. We must check ourselves when we find we are reacting negatively to powerful women. We don’t have to interpret their effectiveness as selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness. We all need to work on this.

DESIGN NOTE

In the original photographs by Gage Skidmore (I created a composite of two from the same shoot), the pantsuit Pelosi wears is orange. I changed the color to fuchsia in my interpretation because Pelosi got a good bit of attention for the fuchsia dress she wore in her speaker swearing-in ceremony on January 3, 2019. There is a lot to say about how the clothes of powerful women are treated in the press. I don’t think it is sexist to talk about clothes because I believe that a garment always means something. I think that Pelosi believes this too, and uses dress in her toolbox of power. For example, when I was zoomed in, working on the photo of Pelosi, I saw that she was wearing a woven fabric watch band with a rainbow gradient. She was representing her LGBTQ constituents, the people whose needs she has championed, and who have elected her again and again. 

Pelosi’s image based on photographs by Gage Skidmore which I found here.

Read more about Pelosi on Wikipedia, and at these links: 

New York Times Magazine article by Robert Draper

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/

http://time.com/5388347/nancy-pelosi-democrats-feminism/