After the Fires and the Floods

How will we weather climate change?

A page of Gustav Dore’s illustrations for “Don Quixote”

Every culture has a notion of justice. The coincidence of Donald Trump's inauguration and Martin Luther King's Day, days after devastating fires in LA might be a good time to consider juatice in what it means to choose to listen to inconvenient truths or enforce silence on witnesses in the name of the status quo. Justice is an evolutionary process that requires both witnessing and listening. Fires and floods are bearing witness to us all.

The status quo across much of the world right now, is one of continuous extraction to the point of collapse. Power seems uninterested in listening to warnings of consequences. Listening to fire and flood requires profound changes to the status quo.

The problem about change is often about reconciling assumptions about fairness to accomplish common good. How do we adjudicate who gets what? Who has standing in a court of law? Whose witness is credible? In theInternational Criminal Court, a plaintiff must go through many layers amassing evidence and of adjudication to verify any claim to truth and consequences. Today, we confront many faces of ecocide and the perpetrators who have brought us to an unprecedented scale of natural events in human history, events such as the uncontrollable recent fires in California and floods that have washed away entire coastlines.

There is also the court of public opinion. Public opinion can influence court verdicts as people experience new extremes and begin looking for accountability. However, the court of public opinion requires ordinary people to credit extraordinary information and learn.

A legitimate complaint from the far right I credit, that is still being adjudicated in the court of public opinion, is the oppressive contempt of an elite intellectual class for those who haven't learned the same lessons. That is a matter relevant to what we are going to do about climate change.

If an intellectual class has contempt for what it hears from those considered less educated that judgementalism can make it impossible to absorb the science behind climate change, despite the apocalyptic nature of the effects. Judgements imply shaming and shaming closes the door to having an open mind that could learn something new. We know learning cannot happen in the silence of oppression, delusions or intimidation, all characteristics of oligarchies of any kind and symptoms of fear. Learning requires listening to another idea, another point of view, another person, even, another source of life, no matter how alien it may be, no matter how profoundly it challenges the status quo, with a spirit of generosity.

We need to get past the dance between judgements on both sides if our species is going survive the coming years. We need to learn something new together, that would allow adaptive change to the consequences of ecocide.

Before leaving office, President Biden warned Americans about the rise of oligarchy, which apparently promptly inspired a spike in googling the word "oligarchy." Using the term oligarchy broke the silence of what many fear about the incoming presidential administration. People listened enough to hear a new word. The impact on climate change of "drill baby drill," under an oligarchy could be even more catastrophic than what we're already seen.

If humans have one redeeming feature, in common with many other species, it is an instinctive curiosity and the desire to learn. Learning is self-protective. It allows intelligent adaptation to change. The spike of genuine curiosity about a new word could help people connect climate change and oligarchies.

So I googled oligarchy myself, to learn what others might be learning and came across this quote from George Bernard Shaw:

"I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish."

Shaw seems to have implied that art is at the top of the intellectual oligarchy. Art reveals the invisible. So if that desire for general good is to run through the various forms of artmaking, as the point of leverage to inspire curiosity and learning is in the category of general good because it permits adaptation, how might art reveal what is invisible to the common good? How might art bear generous witness to pique curiosity to learn, adapt and grow into the most perilous change humans have ever encountered, climate change? The greatest art bears honest witness. Art's witnessing can even reveal solutions to intractable problems.

I recently emptied a storage space of things that dated all the way back to my childhood. An unearthed treasure was a special edition of "Don Quixote", with illustrations by Gustav Dore inherited from my mother. In Cervantes' story, Don Quixote is possessed by various delusions as he sets out to right wrongs and live up to a spurious notion of archaic chivalry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalry. He is accompanied on his quest by a long-suffering servant, Sancho Panza, whom he promises the reward of a governorship. Together they suffer many painful and humiliating adventures occasioned by Don Quixotes' misplaced idealism. Yet Sancho Panza never deserts him or gives up on the promise of his reward.

Don Quixote is graced by hope and patience albeit he accomplishes nothing. One might even argue he is a man possessed by a narcissistic ego. And yet, the novel has survived because it witnesses our human need to hope for change, even if it is delusional hope. The persistence of the anti-hero who believes in a righteous cause, no matter how misguided, stirs our own willingness to exert ourselves for a higher, more romantic cause.

The Sancho Panzas of the world have their own hopes. Panza wants his reward for faithfulness. Was Cervantes' Panza exercising what Herbert Marcuse called, "Repressive Tolerance"?

Embedded in the novel is another anecdote, of a man so obsessed with jealous delusions, that in a perversion of curiosity, he enlists his best friend to seduce his wife and test her fidelity. Curiosity kills the cat in this case and in the end, they all die. In fact, Cervantes entire book has been assessed as a mediation on death: death of delusions and ultimately personal mortality. Cervantes' art was in how deeply he plumbed the depths of delusion, finding a thread of curiosity in tragicomedy for millions of readers to search their own hearts about death, delusion and aspiration.

Recently, I began moderating a Reading Group for CliFi with ecoartspace. Our first novel is the Parable of The Sower, which has recently received much attention for its prescience over the current fires and Butler's preparatory research.

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Unlike Cervantes' Don Quixote, the young, black female heroine of this novel, sees all too clearly what is happening to her world and witnesses the entire ghastly denouement to a small band of followers. The redemptions here are in her insights into the relationship between religion and change, that the notion of God is a reality of change. In Butler's book, the enemy of reason isn't the tattered remnants of feudal chivalry but late-stage capitalism late-stage capitalism that ends in imperialism, oligarchies' close cousin.

Significantly, neither book affords a significant role for any judicial system. In both books, rule is by vigilantes. The worst political nightmare ahead is a failed state, as is seen in other countries after the fall of oligarchies. A failed state has no room for justice.

I have often told 2 stories I will repeat now. One is from Wengari Maathi, of a great forest fire and all the large animals that fled: lions, tigers and elephants, as one tiny hummingbird flew back into the fire with one drop of water. When the big animals mocked her, she replied, "it is all I can do."

The second story was from a research paper that was given to my former husband and I, as a marriage gift, on the culture of the Senoi peoples of Malaysia. peoples of Malaysia, representing a culture entirely based on dream control. In the paper, a family breakfast scene was described in which a child tremulously describes a nightmare of falling. The parents reply by admonishing the child that this is the best possible dream, and the child must, "fall all the way to the bottom and bring back something for the tribe." Subsequent anthropological research couldn't confirm any such practice. It was apparently a romantic notion of how conflicts might be resolved by a willingness to face deep emotions about painful truths. Subsequent research on the Senoi, did confirm however, as Freud proposed, that dreams are a bridge to their spiritual practices and beliefs. The story stuck in my mind all these years because I have always been convinced that the depth of willingness to confront trauma, is a measure of how solidly the confrontation with reality will being resolution to any challenge. It is arguably the position Sigmund Freud advocated for that has since permeated ted so much thinking, that divesting the unconscious of repression releases primordial healing capacities. If we believe that, then oligarchy must be resisted at every turn. That faith in deep knowledge of the self is the basis for the value of insight therapy. and has inspired millions of self-help franchises. It may be time to bring insight therapy to the politics of climate change.

In 1973, I performed, "Physical Education," a ritual of water sacrifice in California intended to demonstrate how we learn to waste water. In 2024, I shot a video of what remained of an historic storm that left seaweed all around my coastal studio. Now we are witnessing the fires. We have made little progress in basic mindfulness about environmental mortality since 1973. I feel angry about the decades of disinformation that have drowned out the witnessing we needed to hear.

I stand with others particularly other artists who don't intend to tolerate silencing, who do want the common good. There are more of us than you might think.

I have previously written about how I see us living in a narcissistic culture. Psychoanalysis tells us there is healthy narcissism, amour-propre and then there is narcissism that can only experience self-regard. I see normal people trying to function in a world that promotes ecocide to uphold unhealthy narcissism. As in any pathologically narcissistic system, power trumps empathy and obviates justice. The narcissist eschews the self-knowledge epitomized in modern terms as psychoanalysis. Life in a narcissistic world system becomes a war against empathy and the environment to maintain the status quo. We are all trained to participate in that war. Narcissism cannot tolerate the voices of reality, especially the pain others might feel, such as the faithful Sancho Panzas of the world, or the witnessing of fires and floods.

The most powerful tool to enforce repression and maintain a status quo is the simplest: repressing dissent. As many of us nervously wait for oligarchic fascism to sweep across America, banning books and critical thinking, let alone, depth perception, leaving behind the detritus from storms of hatred and exclusion that may dwell in dark recesses of our unconscious, it may be useful to consider the dynamics of silencing, the one that insists on a good face on matters, no matter how devastating reality may be or how much hate may live under the surface.

When I wrote, "Divining Chaos; The Autobiography of An Idea," I described the trajectory of my life from surviving trauma, to observing how art could enhance natural healing, to developing trigger point theory, a theory of change that could heal ecosystem degradation. I believe my insights came from my willingness to go into the darkest places to find light. As I wrote in my book, I found six rules for implementing my theory, one of which is that data from every possible source, including art and dreams, must be layered to find new knowledge. That is an argument for crediting witnessing. But that kind of probing is impossible under any repressive regime that silences credible witnessing. If hate uses free speech to bully others into silence, then the repercussion of that silencing is part of what must become transparent. Silence is incompatible with the voices of witnessing.

It happens that in the past week, I've witnessed or experienced more than my fair share of cancelling truth or burying it in disinformation and gaslighting, all forms of hateful repression. This is not, by far, only an American phenomenon. Across the globe, every time a child is molested and told not to complain, every time a protestor is beaten, every time a wolf is slaughtered out of fear that one member of a flock of sheep might be sacrificed, every time a tree is cut down for a better view, we are denying a reality, whether about the persistence of trauma or the importance of top predators in ecosystems.

Blued Trees had a simple strategy. I layered our belief in the standing of art with a wider view of common good. Next month I will co-moderate a panel on art and justice with Gale Elston for the Annual College Art Association conference: “Law in Art and Art in Law: Charting a New Course for Society”. I hope to hear more witnessing about how art can provide new strategies for justice from my colleagues that day. I hope to expand my own thinking about how art can bear witness.

In the pre-climate change era, many Indigenous people knew how to listen to and even befriend both fire and flood, to live with it to clear space for biodiversity and enrich soil. In a hysterical quest by those in control now, to monetize and extract every last drop of the world's wealth, we have reached a point where there will be nothing left, not water, not wildlife, not food for humans and finally not even land. All wildfire affects soil. The fires scorching the Earth now are burning so hot that they can destroy the very structure of soil at the bottom of the food web. The recent fires create newer challenges to recovery. It is daunting to wonder if we have created such impossible environmental conditions, as the world teeters toward the ultimate hegemonic extractive hell, that we must question whether balances is still possible.

Ecofeminist artists have recognized the need to reconcile compassion and caretaking with our modern world for decades. I am proud to have been an early adapter to that point of view. But I have witnessed little impact on the cultural status quo. And now, we are hurtling into oligarchic systems that can only lead to more repressive silence and ecocide.

The problem isn't only the silencing and repression of witnesses or even curiosity. It is the refusal to listen. Or if they listen, their own silent refusal to respond. Life surges towards freedom and justice. But it requires change.

The term managed retreat had been commonly used to refer to orderly displacement. But that was an inadequate strategy. There can be no managed retreat from what silence has delivered. Los Angeles is the proof. But so was Katrina and Sandy. Witnessing alone will not cure the problem. Oligarchy will surely make it worse.

We seem to be entering a time of natural nightmares. We don't yet know where we will find bottom or even a drop of water from the raging seas to quench the fires. We face relentless flames fanned by climate change and oligarchic systems. The flames of hatred Octavia Butler predicted, and Martin Luther King sought to quench are evoked by repression and injustice. They may still engulf us if we continue to see no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.

Now, more than ever, our biome needs curiosity. I put some faith in the common curiosity to learn and the willingness to want the common good. We may need to fly and fall into the truth of the monstrousness we have adapted ourselves to live with, to listen to fire and floods.