Wednesday, November 4, 2015

[Yasmin_discussions] art science and field stations

yasminers

Newton and Helen Harrison send us this interest idea for an art
science project to be led
by artists where they argue that with global warming

The proposal noted that with a two-to-three-meter ocean rise the dyke
system and the bays would very likely be overwhelmed, and a giant
estuarial
lagoon would form over the next hundred years, reaching Sacramento.
Who was going to take responsibility for assisting a viable ecosystem
to form?

the Harrisons http://theharrisonstudio.net/ have forty years
experience in work in art and environment in the broadest sense -they
are currently working with a field station, Sagehen
http://sagehen-video.blogspot.com/2013/12/harrisons-break-ground-on-50-year-art.html
with an art work which Sagehen environmental artists on the
vegetation manipulation for their 50-year artwork.

Here is an example of artists developing scientific research in a
science lab setting

roger malina


The Bays at San Francisco become a 400,000-acre Estuarial Lagoon when
the Oceans rise about 3 meters.

Late in 2012 or early in 2013 we were approached by Laura Rogers, who
said she was the curator for a show called the Blue Line, which was
the brainchild
of an extremely ambitious person who intentionally is not named. The
idea was for local and international artists to make proposals for
indoor
and outdoor sites along the San Francisco harbor; a great boat race
was planned and they thought that they could capitalize on all the
excitement
around the race to gain attention for the exhibition. We asked if
there was any money for the project, and the answer was no; we asked
how they expected
to get support, and were told that there was a very intense belief
that once the work was produced support would come. We said okay and
did
a quick proposal, some text and a few images drawn from our earlier
Sacramento Meditations.

The proposal noted that with a two-to-three-meter ocean rise the dyke
system and the bays would very likely be overwhelmed, and a giant
estuarial
lagoon would form over the next hundred years, reaching Sacramento.
Who was going to take responsibility for assisting a viable ecosystem
to form?
We made arguments against leaving such a vast occurrence to chance.
And we made additional arguments as to why we should be permitted —
indeed,
encouraged, and certainly well funded — to form a scientific team to
help birth this estuarial lagoon. We expressed the need for
paleobotanical
research — that is, if you go down to the Eemian, perhaps a couple of
hundred feet down, you come to a time when the temperatures were
higher, the
waters were warmer, and part of the Central Valley was an inland sea.
We saw the Eemian as a teacher, much as we saw other such lagoons far
south
along the coast as teachers. Paleo-botanical research would reveal
what lived the when both the temperature and sea level were much
higher.
It was delightful to be forming these thoughts and images, which fit
in well with our work in the Sagehen watershed, as the Sierra Nevada
would be
supplying fresh water to the lagoon, making it estuarial in nature.

As part of our research we had a lot of fun doing a mini review of the
field. For instance, in his book What is Life published in 1944, the
physicist
Schrodinger addresses the question of how entropy can work in
ecosystems so differently than it does when it is applied to the laws
of thermal dynamics.
Most recently, diverse researchers add marvelously to ecological
thinking by reframing the first three laws of thermodynamics in
ecological
terms. We particularly like the metaphor when describing lowering
entropy as expelling entropy from a system, and we also like the
invention of the
term exergy, which means the raising of available energy in a system.
However big-systems thinking was oddly absent from the ecological
analysis.
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