Rethinking Climate and Extinction Crises

Capturing people’s attention about the #climate and #extinction crises is a challenge. Causes mostly move slowly, without the flashy drama that can focus our minds in the midst of 24-hour news cycles and social media distractions. The Netflix film Don’t Look Up cleverly captures humans’ inability to come together to counter such a common existential threat. To change this, we must develop a “slow memory” that can help us care about and act on slow change. Help to fight against extinction when you shop and #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife

Humans can learn to develop a ‘slow memory’ to understand the slow-moving but real threat of #animal #extinction. Fight back against extinction, be #Vegan 🍉🍎🧄🥦 and #BoycottPalmOil 🌴🩸💀🙊🧐⛔️ #Boycott4Wildlife in the supermarket @palmoildetect palmoildetectives.com/2023/11/…

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Written by Jenny Wüstenberg, Associate Professor, Twentieth Century History, Nottingham Trent University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans reckon with catastrophes by remembering them collectively and individually. If climate change is the main threat, it deserves as much attention as our grandparents and great-grandparents mustered to survive the threat of the second world war. Today, most of us actively recall and work against the things that led to that conflict – fascism, discrimination, hatred, economic deprivation – and we have coined the phrase “never again” to encapsulate the idea that remembering the past entails taking responsibility for the future.

A century ago, a French sociologist named Maurice Halbwachs, one of the founding fathers of memory studies, argued that collective memory offers a framework to make sense of the past, enabling a group to negotiate what it stands for. We tend to think of history in terms of specific dates, events and people, and so public commemoration mostly represents these in anniversaries, in plaques showing where “stuff happened”, or in statues. This is “fast memory”, an easily accessible repertoire of rituals of remembrance. Modern states – democratic and authoritarian alike – have whole departments devoted to fast-memory management.

The problem with climate change is that it does not lend itself easily to fast memory: it is not caused by a clear set of definable events or actors, and responsibility for it lies with many different people, communities and economic, social and colonial processes – many of them in the distant past. It can also not be overcome through either the heroic actions of a few or short-term concerted effort.

In order for policy making and mass behaviour to change, the threat of climate change and species extinction has to become impossible to ignore. For this to happen, we need to develop an emotional, rather than merely intellectual, relationship with the planet and its future inhabitants. How can we understand “never again” in relation to human-made environmental devastation?

Slow memory: The present has been shaped by gradual change

Slow memory – a concept I have developed in collaboration with colleagues as part of an EU-funded project – would mean creating space and time in our fast-paced lives to recognise that the present (and future) is shaped by gradual and creeping transformations, like the decline in bee populations or the disappearance of the rainforest.
Insect numbers are down across much of the world, but they rarely make headline news. tony mills / shutterstock

Slow memory means decentring humans from the stories we tell about our past and allowing other species to feature in them. This is what activists in Brighton are now doing annually on November 30 when they gather to mourn lost species in a kind of funeral rite, creating what they describe as “a space for exploring stories about extinctions, that also acknowledge and pay proper attention to the related human experiences of injustice or oppression.”

Thankfully, we do not have to start from scratch to create slow memory: as Joanne Garde-Hansen and colleagues have shown in their work on flood memories, communities that have experienced environmental change have long developed ways of remembering, though these have often been forgotten or ignored. Such practices have left traces in community archives and family storytelling, and finding them requires us to “slow down” and rethink what, who and which source matters.

Listening to older people or marginalised communities and learning about their responses to change is a good place to begin. This “slowed down” course of action in the face of danger may seem strangely devoid of predictable outcomes, but clearly our ever-accelerating drive for fast solutions has been part of the problem so far.

How to develop a slow memory

Another avenue to develop “slow memory” is to use familiar techniques of commemoration to call attention to a slow-moving threat. The most impressive effort of this kind is Eden Portland, a proposal to turn a former mine into a memorial space, as well as build an epic above-ground monument, to remember the species we have lost and help evoke an emotional response.

The memorial will be built on a cliff on the Isle of Portland in southern England, in a Unesco World Heritage region known as the Jurassic coast due to the rich variety of fossils found there. These fossils are nature’s way of commemorating past inhabitants of our planet, but the traces in the rock have not been recognised by humans as a call to action.

At Eden Portland, enormous sculptures of the white rhino, the Yangze dolphin and other extinct animals will give the victims of poaching and habitat destruction a face and make “fast memory” work to remember slow devastation.

Conventional commemoration – the monument – will thus be used to foster the emotional bonds between human and non-human species that are indispensable to persuading our politics to act now – before it is too late. What we need is myriad small and large projects of this kind of “slow memory” to evoke a fundamental shift in consciousness about climate change.

Here are some other ways you can help by using your wallet as a weapon and joining the #Boycott4Wildlife

What is greenwashing?

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Greenwashing Tactic #4: Fake Labels

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The Counterpunch: Consumer Solutions To Fight Extinction

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The world of street art is a vibrant, ever-evolving canvas that reflects the thoughts, ideas, and aesthetics of diverse cultures around the globe. Among this profusion of creativity, one subject stands out and continues to inspire artists across borders and continents – the cat.

This feline-inspired street art phenomenon is far-reaching, with each corner of the world lending its own unique perspective to the representation of cats in public art. In the bustling cities of Japan, for example, where the cat is considered a symbol of good luck, you might spot murals depicting ‘Maneki-neko’ or the ‘beckoning cat’, a common Japanese talisman believed to bring fortune and prosperity.

Across the Atlantic, in the urban landscapes of New York or Los Angeles, artists portray cats as emblems of the city’s spirit – independent, resourceful, and resilient. These murals often depict cats prowling rooftops or lounging lazily in the sun-drenched corners of the city, much like their human counterparts.

The styles in this collection range from super realistic to bold and colorful. Each piece tells its own story, celebrating how much people love cats. This collection is full of surprises and purr-sonality!

1.

About: House turned into a giant cardboard box with a cat

2.

About: The Giant Kitten

3.

About: The Red Cat Mural: A Street Art Piece by LeHo Artwork in Taipei

4.

About: They made a statue to honor a stray cat that used to sit in this position and watch the passers by

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About: Street (cat) Art by SWIFTMANTIS in Papaioea, New Zealand (4 photos)

6.

About: Street Art by DALeast – In Paris, France

7.

About: Cat! – Street art by Näutil in Réthoville, France (9 photos)

8.

Photo by Strangefruit Street Art.
About: Pelle Svanslös mural by Charlie Granberg in Uppsala, Sweden.

9.

About: Summer and Winter by Braga Last One in southern France (6 photos and video)

10.

About: 6 pics: Lynx Cat – Made of plastic waste by BORDALO II in Lisboa, Portugal

11.

About: Street Art in Valparaíso, Chile

12.

About: Cat by Stamatis Laskos in Naousa, Imathia, Greece

13.

About: Cat Mural by Dan Leo (+ 4 more animals)

14.

About: Meow meow (5 photos)

15.

About: Cat In A Box – By Vladi in Hong Kong

16.

About: A feast for the eyes with the enchanting cat mural by artist Uriginal in Barcelona (4 photos)

17.

About: Sleeping Painted Cat by Jack Lack in Grenoble, France

18.

About: Black Cat mural by 3MK in Ptolemaida, Greece

19.

About: Cute Star Cat by Sagie in Jönköping, Sweden

20.

About: Cat waiting for mouse – 11 Paste Ups by LIZ ART BERLIN

21.

About: ‘Rustle in Feilding’ – Cat mural by SWIFTMANTIS at Manawatū Street Art Festival in Manawatu-Wanganui, New Zealand

23.

About: Meet Olive, she’s a Christchurch city stray cat and she’s in need of a home! Mural by SWIFTMANTIS in New Zealand

24.

About: Cat in London by Neon Artist David Speeduk

25.

About: Cat Lover by Spray Lover in Lisbon, Portugal (4 photos)

26.

About: Cat mural by LexusOne in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

27.

About: We will meet again in another life when we are both cats

28.

About: The natural movement of this cat sculpture is amazing

29.

About: All Cats Are Beautiful (Dirty Van Art)

30.

About: There was some racist rubbish here but I covered it up with this picture of a cat

31.

About: Cat – Street Art by JPS

32.

About: Sleeping kitten 2 by WA in Lima, Peru

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About: Big ginger kitten escaping from the side of the building

34.

About: 1312 Hello Kitty

35.

youtube.com/watch?v=bHBH-nUJGx…

About: Street Artist N.M in Flensburg, Germany

36.

About: Happy Cats! – In Kyiv, Ukraine

37.

About: Unknown artist and location

38.

About: Snow Cats climbing trees

39.

About: Cat lights in Zelenogradsk, Russia

40.

About: This is in Germany, made to honor all homeless cats (3 pics)

41.

42.

43.

About: #caturstones on #caturday

44.

About: The Cat Trace (Caturday #69)

45.

About: Street Art by 0331C – A Collection

46.

About: 6 Photos of Street Art by Banksy in Gaza, Palestine: “People only look at pictures of kittens”

Which cat is your favorite? Should we do more blog posts with street art of cats?

STREET ART UTOPIA

2024-04-07 19:51:25

wordpress

The Giant Kitten

Street Artist Oriol Arumi

By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain.

Oriol Arumí (Vic, 31 October 1972) is a Catalan painter and muralist living in the city of Lleida. His work is technically straddling between figurative and abstract art, and thematically between reality and fantasy. This gives him a wide range of possibilities that allows him to do completely what he likes at any given time: “I always have in mind painters as varied as Johannes Vermeer, Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt and Joan Miró, not to mention of sketchers like Hergé or Moebius ”.

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instagram.com/p/CErm2yrirAg/

Street Art Festival on Instagram: "EDICIÓ ESPECIAL TSAF ‘20 📢 L’artista ens explica el que ha fet aquest any a la quarta edició del Street Art de Torrefarrera.👏🏻👏🏻 ... En aquesta ocasió en explica que ha utilitzat la tècnica que es diu “Trompe-l’oei

115 likes, 8 comments - streetartfestivalpw on September 3, 2020: "EDICIÓ ESPECIAL TSAF ‘20 📢 L’artista ens explica el que ha fet aquest any a la quarta edició del Street Art de Torrefarrera.👏🏻👏🏻 ...

^Instagram

Hello friends!

I am Eden, I am #NewHere, and I like making things grow.

My particular interests include #TreePruning (think: fruit orchards, but also espaliers and bonsai when I'm feeling particularly spicy), figuring out how to grow a #Garden on a plot that is almost 100 % sand and gets little to no rain in the summer months, #BuildingSoil, and collecting interesting vegetable varieties (bonus points if they are black/purple or variegated).

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