(from email correspondence 10/5/08)
Hello Nova and Bonnie,
I just reread my proposal I wrote for you when I applied to the Berwick. The intentions have not shifted, but the approach I am thinking of now is flavored with a tiny bit more wisdom and perspective based on my experience in Omaha at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
The kernel of curiosity that fueled the initial project on Cape Cod and that has now translated itself into this newer project I am developing with you is still the same. Rather than narrowing down to anything specific, let me articulate some questions that have remained the starting points and loyal partners throughout this project: What is weather? What does weather mean/how is it understood in this day-and-age of human-induced climate change (yes, I am convinced this is not some cyclical oddity, but the result of our own doing). How is the meaning of weather contextualized in an urban environment? How does one measure weather in a city?
Countries with the highest per-capita use of energy also happen to have the highest concentration of urban population. In the USA, nearly 80 percent of the population lives in/or near an urban center. While weather happens everywhere, it is experienced differently in a city. It begins with the way weather is being reported to urban dwellers. Weather reporting is focused completely on the human species, the car and how snow, rain, or wind will impact the daily commute. For someone who has spend the last 2 years observing seasonal changes in nature by recording air temperatures, the arrival of certain bird species and noticing the ocean's winter current eroding the beach, I am struck by this very different approach in understanding and contextualizing weather changes in an environment. Aside from the occasional snowstorm that causes havoc on the roadway, weather seems to retreat into the background in an urban environment. The urban infrastructure creates another difficulty in recording actual weather data as buildings can influence the temperature, pressure and wind conditions from one block to the next, creating a phenomenon called Urban Heat Islands (UHI). A series of mini-weather phenomena happening in different parts of the city can accumulate and distort the weather pattern over a city significantly - causing precipitation or smog that further affects the way we experience weather in a city.
And yet, I wonder, if weather remains this illusive element within the city, in which most of us live, how does the reality of Climate Change actually affect us? How do we as urban dwellers form an understanding of it? Does the very nature of Urbana create an artificial barrier between feeling the real effects of climate change, allowing it to remain an abstract phenomenon one watches on a DVD? Or will it become a much more sobering reality in our own backyard the way it already has on Cape Cod.
Addressing the question of weather and how it is understood in the context of recent development in Climate Change is an entirely different experience on Cape Cod. Here, the attitude towards the changing environment is flavored by much more sobriety, brought about by hundreds, even thousands of years of constant changes. Looking at aerial maps of the last 200 years of Cape Cod, you can quickly see how drastic and quickly erosion patterns and movements constantly sculpt the edges of the land. However, when you spend some time with any of the locals who live there year-round, they will not only point out to you that things have always changed, but that these recent changes are different. Beach erosion is more aggressive than ever. Seals are washing ashore with bacterial diseases associated with warmer waters for which they have not build immunity towards. Never-before-seen migratory birds are appearing. Temperatures are warmer than usual. The kind of changes only a person who has seen this land through season after season would notice.
If these things are happening on Cape Cod, they must also be happening in Boston. But where does one go to notice these things? Where does one go to record and try to understand the subtle changes in weather which are part of a larger shift in climate?
