Here are the writings and paintings that made up my exhibit, “Gaia Songs: Seeking Equilibrium.” The exhibit included my essay, “Earth is a Person” and my article “Building Climate Stability” and six paintings with Artist’s Statements. The Artist Statements include two paragraphs for each painting about how they relate to the conference “The Uses and Abuses of Power in Alternative Spiritualities.”
Each Artist Statement for each of the paintings describes the content in the painting that pertains to ecosystem regeneration, and how it relates to the article “Building Climate Stability.”
Red sky at dawn, Sailors be warned.
Gaia, our distressed, desertified Earth lies between a hot, muddy sea and a red dawn.
Why is the sea so muddy? Because we have torn up rivers, diverted them and sluiced them directly to the sea. Sediment which used to settle on the land and feed the riverbank and delta biomes is now shunted directly into the oceans. The life on riverbanks and in streams and has the capacity to clean the water. We must restore the beautiful meanders and riverbanks to clarify our rivers lakes and seas.
What are those funny lines on the hills? Linear Miyawaki forest networks, built to restore the small water cycle and the soil biomes and the forests. Many Small Water Cycles create the Biotic Pumps around the Earth. The Biotic Pump evapotranspiration creates the rivers of rain in the sky when high in the clouds vapor condenses to rain creating a vacuum. This vacuum moves moist air from the ocean across entire continents, like Atlantic Ocean vapor moving across the Amazonian rainforest in South America. If we give them a chance, the trees and Small Water Cycles and Biotic Pumps can rebuild climate stability.
I find hope here.
Carbon fuel companies abuse power knowingly deceiving customers and governments. They take large government subsidies and collect inflated prices for their products, using supply restriction techniques to manipulate the market and drive prices up. Governments fail to regulate, colluding with corruption. Externalities are deception. Markets collude by allowing ethical failures of corporate decision making without consequence. Citizens are excluded from information or oversight of this abuse of power. Our alternative spirituality, extreme materialism and closed-door negotiations, has enabled the sixth extinction episode of life on Earth.
Climate stability can be rebuilt by protecting the plant world on Earth. Only the plants have the simultaneous capacities for evapotranspiration and photosynthesis that can adequately cool Earth and lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide level.
Komo-rebi or World from the Point of View of a Leaf
A leaf connects the sky and soil. It flutters and casts beautiful shadows. The gently moving air and moving shadows bring peace to our contemplation. Komo-rebi is the beautiful, dappled light that falls through leaves, giving us beauty. It is important in Shinto Forest bathing. It brings joy as a glimpse or a memory giving pause, nourishing the soul.
Leaf! A miraculous leaf! A leaf can both evapotranspire and photosynthesize at the same time! When it evapotranspires it cools the place by 540 calories of heat per gram of water evaporated.
I am amazed! A tree’s soil mycorrhizal network brings water from a very large soil volume to the very large surface area of the leaves, facilitating evapotranspiration. While both the sea and the forests are evaporating to cool the Earth, the forests have a larger volume underground and a larger surface area in the leaves than the ocean surface. Forest evaporation is advantaged over ocean evaporation. Please protect our forests.
A leaf has stoma, breathing holes. The leaves inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, opposite to animals who inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants assemble carbon dioxide into carbon chains, sugars. The oxygen goes back into the air. That’s photosynthesis! Animal life and plant life must be in balance. Too many animals, not enough plants, bring an imbalance between oxygen and carbon dioxide. We need more big forests to rebalance the atmosphere.
Leaf stoma take in particulates and clean the air. They exhale special particulates and bacteria (pseudomonas) that are specifically good at precipitating rain drops at the tops of the clouds. When vapor condenses to rain, a thousand liters of vapor become one liter of rain. The resulting vacuum creates the Biotic Pump making rivers of rain across continents and all Earth.
Celebrate the leaf and all its amazing physiology does!
I find hope here.
Carbon fuel companies abuse power knowingly deceiving customers and governments. They take large government subsidies and collect inflated prices for their products, using supply restriction techniques to manipulate the market and drive prices up. Governments fail to regulate, colluding with corruption. Externalities are deception. Markets collude by allowing ethical failures of corporate decision making without consequence. Citizens are excluded from information or oversight of this abuse of power. Our alternative spirituality, extreme materialism and closed-door negotiations, has enabled the sixth extinction episode of life on Earth.
Climate stability can be rebuilt by protecting the plant world on Earth. Only the plants have the simultaneous capacities for evapotranspiration and photosynthesis that can adequately cool Earth and lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide level.
Methane Exploding from the Tundra and Lakes Burning
This is so terrifying. I can barely speak about it. I can barely put paint to canvas.
I whisper. I paint only a faint wash because the threat is so vast and frightening and unspeakable.
We are not speaking of it, but we must. If we do not speak of it, we will never solve the problem.
Heat is our biggest problem now. Earth has warmed so much, the tundra has melted, allowing vast ancient deposits of methane to ooze through earth and water. Large craters, 50 meters across, are appearing in the tundra, where methane has exploded. In 2013, Natalya Schakova, scientist at University of Alaska held a press conference stating that the risk of methane escaping from the tundra was increasingly likely and very, very dangerous. She cried. Methane is a Green House Gas. Only 2% of methane is in the atmosphere. If the atmospheric methane is increased by some part of the underground store, the effects will be vast and devastating. Her press conference was ten years ago. Why did we fail to respond? We must acknowledge the seriousness of this threat and find a healthy response to build climate stability.
If we respond to this challenge, I will find hope here too.
Please watch the PBS NOVA program on Methane.
Carbon fuel companies abuse power knowingly deceiving customers and governments. They take large government subsidies and collect inflated prices for their products, using supply restriction techniques to manipulate the market and drive prices up. Governments fail to regulate, colluding with corruption. Externalities are deception. Markets collude by allowing ethical failures of corporate decision making without consequence. Citizens are excluded from information or oversight of this abuse of power. Our alternative spirituality, extreme materialism and closed-door negotiations, has enabled the sixth extinction episode of life on Earth.
Climate stability can be rebuilt by protecting the plant world on Earth. Only the plants have the simultaneous capacities for evapotranspiration and photosynthesis that can adequately cool Earth and lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide level.
Map of the Devastation of the Amazonian Rainforest
Because of enormous clear cutting in northeast Amazonian rain forest, rainfall has decreased by 20% in the south and east of the rainforest. The RED on the map shows where there is drought, desiccation, wildfire, savannah and desertification. Those places were recently rain forest.
In the top of the big red area are two green ovals. Those are lands managed by the indigenous peoples of the area. The Amazonian indigenous peoples are replanting trees where the trees have been clearcut or burned. In 2022, they planted a million trees. In 2023, they plan to plant three million trees to restore rain forest, the Biotic Pump and rivers of rain. Ten million trees in 2024.
Trees make rain. Trees evapotranspire vast amounts of water. At the top of the clouds, rain condenses around particulates the trees emit, bringing rain in the local Small Water Cycle. Many Small Water Cycles build the Biotic Pump. When the vapor condenses, a thousand liters of vapor become one liter of rain. The resulting vacuum creates rivers of rain across the sky and across the continents and the globe. That is the Biotic Pump. The Amazonian Rainforest Biotic Pump builds rivers of rain in the sky that contribute to climate stability around the world, in Africa, North America, Antarctica and even the Himalayas.
We must protect the Amazonian Rainforest. Without it, the global climate and weather system will collapse. If the Amazon becomes the Sahara, we are cooked.
This map shows how close we are to losing that rainforest, the lungs of the world. Please act to protect the Amazonian rainforest.
The indigenous planters, the Guajajara tribe and others give me hope.
Carbon fuel companies abuse power knowingly deceiving customers and governments. They take large government subsidies and collect inflated prices for their products, using supply restriction techniques to manipulate the market and drive prices up. Governments fail to regulate, colluding with corruption. Externalities are deception. Markets collude by allowing ethical failures of corporate decision making without consequence. Citizens are excluded from information or oversight of this abuse of power. Our alternative spirituality, extreme materialism and closed-door negotiations, has enabled the sixth extinction episode of life on Earth.
Climate stability can be rebuilt by protecting the plant world on Earth. Only the plants have the simultaneous capacities for evapotranspiration and photosynthesis that can adequately cool Earth and lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide level.
The Cold Blob
She looks like she’s wondering, “How did I wind up here? What am I doing here?”
The icy melt coming off Greenland has slowed the Atlantic Gulf Stream, dispersing it into confused eddies and meanders. Normally at this spot, the waters of the Gulf Stream would be evaporating, becoming hyper-salinated, sinking deep and continuing the deep ocean circulation south and into the Pacific, continuously looping throughout the entire ocean system. By interrupting the currents at one point, this cold blob resulting from Greenland’s glacier melting, has interrupted all ocean currents, surface and deep across the entire Earth. There are new reports that there is a similar change occurring off Antarctica. The changes in sea currents bring new warmth to previously cold places, increasing the melting of Antarctica and of the Arctic. These collapses are linked, interacting and exacerbating the failing of our climate.
We must cool the Earth to slow the melting. Trees cool. Protecting trees is critical to cooling Earth and preserving life on Earth.
The Rainforest Protectors give me hope. Anytime a tree is Protected, I find hope.
GreenCambridge is planting trees in Cambridge and Biodiversity for a Livable Climate is planting Miyawaki forests in Cambridge and beyond. These Roots-in-the-Ground programs give me real hope. International forest preservation programs give me real hope too.
Carbon fuel companies abuse power knowingly deceiving customers and governments. They take large government subsidies and collect inflated prices for their products, using supply restriction techniques to manipulate the market and drive prices up. Governments fail to regulate, colluding with corruption. Externalities are deception. Markets collude by allowing ethical failures of corporate decision making without consequence. Citizens are excluded from information or oversight of this abuse of power. Our alternative spirituality, extreme materialism and closed-door negotiations, has enabled the sixth extinction episode of life on Earth.
Climate stability can be rebuilt by protecting the plant world on Earth. Only the plants have the simultaneous capacities for evapotranspiration and photosynthesis that can adequately cool Earth and lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide level.
Rewild. Replant. Plants everywhere.
Rewild. Protect Forests. Vegetation must be a sacred healing wrap on all the Earth, restoring the soil biome and the sky biome. Trees and all plants link the soil biome to the sky biome and keep a healthy climate balance. Photosynthesis pulls carbon dioxide from the air and builds sugars to feed trees and the soil biome, near and far. This healthy carbon sequestration has minimal cost, uses no energy from our grid, generates no pollution. As the sugars are built and distributed, the remaining oxygen is released to the sky. As photosynthesis occurs, the leaves are simultaneously evapotranspiring and cooling the locale.
Protecting habitat includes leaving the leaves on the ground. Leaves mulch and compost. Leaves are habitat for ground dwelling species, particularly beneficial insects. Please stop tidying and exposing bare earth. Bare earth oxidizes, soil life dies and the carbon moves to the atmosphere. Please plant native species to build the biome. Exotic species do not.
Please protect the soil biome and the species who live in the leaves.
We need urban forests to reverse the urban heat island effect. We need large forests to help cool the over-heated earth. From Giant Sequoias to little ferns, all the plants help to cool Earth and move carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil biome. Healthy soil builds climate stability. Sea plants sequester carbon and release oxygen. We must protect and support plant life in all Earth’s habitats, sea and land.
I find hope in tree planting and protection, in the establishment of sanctuaries on sea and land protecting native habitat. Thank you for considering these problems with me.
I find hope in your reading this. Thank you.
Carbon fuel companies abuse power knowingly deceiving customers and governments. They take large government subsidies and collect inflated prices for their products, using supply restriction techniques to manipulate the market and drive prices up. Governments fail to regulate, colluding with corruption. Externalities are deception. Markets collude by allowing ethical failures of corporate decision making without consequence. Citizens are excluded from information or oversight of this abuse of power. Our alternative spirituality, extreme materialism and closed-door negotiations, has enabled the sixth extinction episode of life on Earth.
Climate stability can be rebuilt by protecting the plant world on Earth. Only the plants have the simultaneous capacities for evapotranspiration and photosynthesis that can adequately cool Earth and lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide level.