Fringes

jellyfish

lavender

one

swell

a whole evening dress

of

fringe

Glow & Algae/Coral balancing

Reading about Malcolm McCulloch's work with the Great Barrier Reef. Glow helps measure fresh water discharge and barium levels:

"The team was able to detect an influx of fresh water by looking for fluorescence in samples of coral – if it glowed under ultra-violet light that indicated the presence of fresh water."

What materials would support corals against fertilizer-induced algae blooms? Are algae blooms akin to environmental cancers? The reef is often discussed as a human body, limited and propped up by parallel discourses of health and productivity. Links with farming techniques and chemicals matter--and if algae is a wonder product of the future (algae farms, algae fuel, algae everywhere), how do we grieve for that which our humanalgae future displaces?

Language of excess and proliferation, of good helpers turning against the coral body, frames Ross Cunning's research:

"The single-celled algae living inside corals are usually the key to coral success, providing the energy needed to build massive reef frameworks. However, when temperatures become too warm, these algae are expelled from corals during episodes of coral 'bleaching' that can lead to widespread death of corals. Until now, it was thought that corals with more algal symbionts would be more tolerant of bleaching because they had 'more symbionts to lose.' The new study shows that the opposite is true."

Meanwhile, coral bodies act against human cancers: "Coral reef species (e.g., algae, sponges, soft corals, sea slugs) have already been used in the development of anti-cancer and anti-tumor drugs, painkillers, and anti-inflammatory agents."

The Nature Conservancy hosts videos from specific human-coral cancer collaborators.

No conclusions. Thinking about Marilyn Arsem's Ocean's Rising, about the difficulty of freezing salt water, about what I could carry into the reef that would help, given how my presence there is mostly harmful.

Involvement

Crocheted Future:  Coral Reefs

 "Sea Sick" Independent Weekly, August 2012

Billions of years ago, Venus’ atmosphere was much like Earth’s but a runaway greenhouse effect boiled her oceans dry, leaving the planet’s surface waterless and its sky burning hot, thick with clouds of sulfuric acid. Sounds a little like July!

Although Venus is closer to the Sun than our Earth, this summer has felt dispiritingly Venusian: searing heat and suffocating humidity accompanied by smog alerts announcing critical levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen and sulfur oxides. Raging wildfires have charred Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Severe drought has shriveled crops throughout the U.S.’s breadbasket—the most expansive drought in more than a half-century.  And in a course of a month, the entirety of Greenland's massive ice sheet has turned to slush—the worst in 123 years.

While our planetary sister’s fate was sealed by its proximity to a growing sun—it is unlikely that Venusians aided in their planets demise as it appears that Earthlings are doing—but we can still learn something from our orbital sibling. Particularly, how changing oceans can radically transform the habitability of a planet. On Earth, coral reefs—the canary in the coalmine—have become the site for debates about the future of our planet and what can be said about that future.

In the July 13^th New York Times, Roger Bradbury wrote an op-ed titled “A World Without Coral Reefs.” About the planet’s reefs he wrote, they are “Zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory of collapse within a human generation.” Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are “unstoppable and irreversible forces” that have worked to destroy reefs. Know as “bleaching,” corals expel their symbiotic algae when stressed by the environment. Bleaching events have become global phenomena, and in some instances are so severe that corals cannot recover.

Coral are the largest biological structures on Earth. As “foundation species,” they literally create habitats for a phenomenal diversity of marine species. They provide nearly half a trillion dollars a year in resources and services, and reefs relied upon by over 500 million people for food, coastal protection and livelihoods. The effect of their collapse will not be insignificant.

But as troubling as this catastrophe is, Bradbury is equally concerned that environmentalists, scientists and government agencies are unwilling to accept that there “is no hope in saving the global coral reef ecosystem.” Hope, he argues, has enabled us to misallocate resources by wishing for a future that will never come to past, while people around the globe are already suffering from ailing coral ecosystems.

Is hope an unsustainable luxury?

In 2005, sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim created the Crochet Coral Reef Project. Responding to the plight of the Great Barrier Reef, they collaborated to create artwork that would provoke communities to ask: What can we do about dying coral reefs?  Through yarns, the sisters pulled loops through loops, wrapping and knotting, building out a fibrous reef: woolly polyps stitched to other polyps in large fabricated colonies. Like the Great Barrier Reef, this knotted entanglement harbors loopy sea lilies, curlicue sponges, crenelated sea slugs, fringed anemones and hooked starfish. The project has succeeded in generating involvement.

Starting in Los Angeles, the crocheted reefs have now grown to include satellites across the U.S., and to Japan, Australia, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, South Africa and Latvia. Working in a traditionally feminine handicraft, these artists have built beautiful objects that examine the troubled future of coral reefs through meaningful and sustained collaboration.“Toxic Reef” is one such example: “The point of the Toxic Reef is to focus attention on our daily consumption of plastic and how much of it we discard” much of which goes into oceans. The material for this reef is "yarn" made from cutting up used plastic shopping bags—which mimic jellyfish and are often ingested by turtles—as a synthetic analogue to the delicate fiber forms. The plasticized effect looks slick, as if it were glistening in slime—a foreshortened horizon of oceans to come.

Instead of giving up on sick and dying corals, as Roger Bradbury proposes, the Crochet Coral Reef project stitches through ecological disaster, neither denying desperate conditions nor proposing cataclysm, but rather mobilizing creative action at local and global scales. The future these projects are helping to create is in the form of a question: How do we remain responsible in the face of potential disaster?

I am not optimistic that corals will survive another fifty years. But, call me a prisoner of hope; it seems to me that humble hope—hope without denial—is necessary in refining our sense of responsibility as we confront the possibility of catastrophe. When we press close to these problems, even in woolly ways, we encounter our indebtedness to other organisms through our shared life on Earth.  Corals remind us that bodies are dynamically formed in relation to their habitats and other cohabitants. Like corals, the relationships that make us up in the flesh constitute our debt, our responsibility; through our shared emergence we owe each another.

But here is the snag. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are acidifying the oceans, inhibiting the growth of coral skeletons and weakening the calcium-carbonate bones of reefs worldwide. In the Caribbean, high water temperatures and disease outbreaks have already killed 80 percent of the region’s coral, reducing reefs to ruin. The relationships that make coralcoral are now unmaking coral, are killing them. If coral teaches us about the reciprocal nature of life, then how do we stay obligated to environments—many of which we made unlivable—that now sicken us?

I don’t know how to answer these questions, but it seems to me that the Wertheim sisters’ crocheted coral reef gets us started. Their project instructs us on the role perception has in the constellated processes of coral decline. From the creative experience of crocheting a furbelowed coral to gestating satellite reefs around the world, being inside the problem is the condition of problem solving. These crocheters stitch into the crisis in an effort to materialize both our culpability and our responsibility to coral ecosystems. They are not solving the problem of coral collapse, but they are fabricating alternate ways to understand our relationship with these ailing systems.

   It may be that in half a century oceans will look Precambrian, as Roger Bradbury predicts, with jellyfish and algae colonizing all warm, oxygen-deprived waters. Perhaps Earth will follow Venus, becoming uninhabitable due to a rampaging greenhouse effect.  Or maybe, we will rebuild reefs, terraforming damaged habitats or constructing alternate homes for the ocean’s refuges. Whatever the conditions of our future, we remain obligate partners with oceans. Even at the end of oceans. 

Medusabot

Mesoglea becoming mechanical.

Oceanic robotics (What would Freud say about this oceanic?). 

Fluible motions made hydraulic? 

Undulating pulse of unpulsed matter.

Oceanic engines.

Visiting the Great Barrier Reef

Next week I leave for Australia to visit my dad. We'll be going to Cairns to see the Great Barrier Reef. I have learned a lot about how the reef is managed for humans in the course of booking reservations, etc. Jellyfish are the biggest controversy, with the economic benefits of tourism in the area producing research projects like the Marine Stinger Advisory Group, Louise Goggin's work on Irukandji Jellyfish, and Irukandji syndrome in northern Western Australia: an emerging health problem. So dad and I will go swimming with jellies. I'll let you know how we go!

Chemical Resilience

Toxic sex

        Issuing a sex panic over the last several years, National Geographic published a spate of articles with titles such as “Female Fish Develop ‘Testes’ in Gulf Dead Zone,” “Sex-Changing Chemicals Found in Potomac River,” “Mercury Poisoning Makes Birds Act Homosexual,” “Animals’ Sexual Changes Linked to Waste, Chemicals,” that connect pollution to the undermining of sexual differences. The issues in these write-ups are serious, but the titles sound like science fiction accounts of gonadal “deformities” and sex mutations that are more sensational than sincere.

         It’s true that organisms are responding to changes in their environments. Polar bears, alligators, frogs, mollusks, fish and birds: hormone-altering pollutants have affected more than 200 animal species around the world. The Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE), and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, (IUPAC), based in North Carolina, have been diligently investigating the impact of endocrine active substances, which are known to alter reproduction in organisms. The new SCOPE-IUPAC report says endocrine disruption can be expected in all animals in which hormones initiate physical change, including humans.

        Other instances of “unnatural” sexes have appeared in low-oxygen zones in the Gulf of Mexico, where female Atlantic croaker fish are developing testes instead of ovaries. The masculine females are not known to fertilize other female eggs. However in the Potomac River, chemicals from industrial and residential sources have caused male bass to produce eggs that can be fertilized by their former gender mates. At worst, changes in the reproductive cycle of fish can decimate populations, but as these bass teach us, perhaps other futures are possible.

         I wonder how we can continue to develop proactive politics about toxic substances and their effects on vulnerable people and animals without appealing to society’s basest fears about sexual disruption. Can we engender environmental responsibility without invoking anxiety that our most intimate reproductive environments have been infiltrated by an industrial world?

        Fear of impending gender perversions is simply queer-fear and fails to address the broader consequences of pollution. The headline “Kermit to Kermette” is lurid, but while the herbicide Atrazine causes hermaphroditism in frogs, exposure to carcinogens, neurotoxins, asthmagens and mutagens affects all of us; it is the reality of our everyday lives. The possibility of cancer, diabetes, immune system breakdown and heart disease are a few of the bodily crises that we all face. These more common diseases, many of which are environmentally induced, are killing people and other animals in alarmingly high numbers. This ought to be our rallying call rather than a cri de cœur—a cry from the heart—about degenerate sexes.

Is there a way to re-evaluate ecological resilience—such as the sex-changing response—and meet the future organisms that we are all becoming? This is not an easy question, and probably has no single answer, but it is a crucial place to begin.

        Watching the planet slide into catastrophe is traumatic. Deniers of climate change and environmental destruction are merely reacting—however negligently—to the effects of crisis. How do any of us cope with shock? Denial is no more or less dangerous than proclaiming Armageddon. I am not suggesting that we encourage denial, but we have to understand the force of this fear. It isn’t so much that disaster awaits us, but rather that we are already living in ruination. Eden is dirty. Industrialism has released its progeny through the garden gates. Things can get worse, and probably will, but life for earthlings is already dire.

        We may think of nature as self-evident, but it is not. The wilderness and the natural are historically constructed notions. Since the Victorians, these wild places have been imagined as locations of health and moral uplift against the perversions of urban environments. For example: John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, advocated that the industrialized cities of the east were “polluted” by non-European immigrants, making necessary “clean” spaces for white Americans. It is also no surprise that by the late nineteenth century women were entering the industrial labor force in urban centers—gender was also becoming polluted. However noble the conservation of wilderness might be, our collective investment in the natural—as a pure place—has also helped to stabilize American values of rugged individualism, masculinity, independence, and moral virtue.

        As I think through toxic natures, I am reminded that many animals change sex on their own accord. Some marine fishes can change their sex when necessary. For example, a school of clownfish—the colorful lead character in Finding Nemo, 2003—is organized around a female; she is the hierarch. 

When she dies, one of the males changes his sex and takes her place.  And while I was on the coast last week I saw limpets clinging to the rocky shores. Similar to the clownfish, these little snail-like creatures develop as males, but after a couple of years they change sex to become females. Sex change is not so extraordinary.

        Life histories about gender-swapping bring to mind an interesting, if also troubling, article by Christine Johnson. A transgender author and administrator of the website www.transhealth.com, Johnson correlates the presence of DDT in the environment and the increase in transsexual populations. Johnson relies on the research of Dr. Gunter Dorner who advanced Rachel Carson’s original point that DDT continues to alter human reproductive systems. Now, I don’t for one second believe that a single environmental factor could explain transsexuality; the assertion is ridiculous. But it does open the realization that bodies are lively and practical responses to environments and changing ecosystems. For Johnson, transsexuality is not a willful act or purely biological or psychological, but an adaptive response, an alteration of the “natural order” of things.  

       Instead of toxic sex change as a sinister force that threatens all life, it might be about reinvention, as well as about political and economic systems that affect everyone, including animals. As Bailey Kier, an environmental scholar, has proposed, the transsexual fish of the Potomac “might just be the ‘fittest’ in the dance of life and death.” Rather than denying environmental disaster or reveling in the coming apocalypse, I feel that we must embrace the wounds of the world, see their beauty, as we work toward environmental safeguards.

       As someone who is coping with the life-threatening consequences of cancer and an autoimmune disorder, I prefer to think of myself as living with rather than being a victim of illness. We are all in chimeric borderlands where new forms of life are emerging. We are vulnerable to one another; our bodies are open to the planet. Perhaps Eden needed to be destroyed in order for us to truly care for the planet.

Medusa's Gaze

Medusa
Sylvia Plath (an excerpt)


You house your unnerving head--God-ball,
Lens of mercies,

Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
Pushing by like hearts
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair.