Are Mother Nature's 15 Minutes Really Over?

I was aghast to encounter this snippet in a thought-provoking "Art in America" article about environmentally conscious artist Mary Miss, who has striven for decades to challenge viewers to look beyond the landscape or landmark they think they see at first glance.

The NSF is the National Science Foundation.

The grant for Miss’s “Broadway” hub was the first artist-initiated project to be supported by the NSF. The award suggests how far afield scientists feel they need to reach at a time when public interest in environmental issues (and many forms of biological research) is diminishing at an alarming rate.

This prompts questions. Chief among them is whether it's true. Is there really declining interest in environmental issues? This is an art publication we're talking about, and the next several sentences are indeed filled with left-wing rage against the conservative machine.

And if so, is this blowback from the blink of an eye that English-language media has granted to climate warming, greenhouse gases, ocean acidification, the Plastics Problem, and myriad other exigencies that no one seems interested in any longer? Have people really experienced a surfeit of frequently toothless headlines, links, and TV spots about the descent into ecocide?

Say it ain't so. Or say it is. It really makes no difference to most people, I suppose.

But the following excerpt from the concluding paragraph comforted me, for some reason:

As with any kind of activist art, the difficulty is engaging the unconvinced—or, even harder, the uninterested. Miss, who approaches that challenge armed above all with an unerring formal sense, says she favors informing over advocating. Like most worthy art, her projects make viewers both more alert and more self-conscious. During a lecture at the IMA, she referred to the famous Borges parable of a map the size of the territory it charts; FLOW, she noted, is similarly a point-by-point, real-size mapping of a water system. She also cited something said to her by one of her scientific collaborators: “All property is riverfront property—the river starts at your front door.”

Of Whale Sharks And Oilmen

Grrlscientist has a worthwhile post at scienceblogs.com on Whale Sharks and how they're faring as BP tries its damnedest to replace the Gulf of Mexico's seawater with crude oil.

In addition to the near-miraculous (100 Whale Sharks feeding en masse in what might be a relatively -- and our standards are pretty low at this point -- untainted area) and the heart-wrenching (three of them swimming right in the thick of the spill), there's this thought-provoking detail from a piece by Ben Raines of the Press-Register:

"Our worst fears are realized. They are not avoiding the spill area," said Eric Hoffmayer, the University of Southern Mississippi scientist who found the large aggregation last week. "Those animals are going to succumb. Taking mouthfuls of oil is not good. It is not the toxicity that will kill them. It's that oil is going to be sticking to their gills and everything else."

Whale sharks, the largest fish on earth, feed by filtering plankton and tiny fish from the water through sieve-like mechanisms in their mouths.

"Based on all the information I'm getting, they are doing the normal things regardless of the oil. The idea that sharks have these evolved senses that will protect them -- well, they haven't evolved to detect oil," Hoffmayer said.

Now, I got inadvertently doused with gasoline pretty good by an attendant at a Stuckey's gas station outside Denver, Colorado once. And given that unpleasant episode, I'd never really contemplated the notion that any creature could be anything but acutely aware of being immersed in something like crude oil or its byproducts. But that could be the case here.

The Only Sure Bet Is Devastation

I can appreciate nihilistic humor as much as the next fellow. But it's certainly grating to see that bookmakers at Paddy Power are taking bets on which sea creature will be driven to extinction first in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The odds-on-favorite was the Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle at 4/5 when I checked today, followed by the Bluefin Tuna at 6/4, then the Leatherback Sea Turtle and the Brown Pelican at 8/1 each.

Hat tip: Richard Black's Earth Watch blog, which added:

I wondered, though, whether species extinctions are a suitable subject for gambling. Isn't inviting people to estimate the relative odds of two species taking the dodo trail in the pursuit of cash just a bit - well - tasteless?

[Paddy Power's] Mr Robertson countered with the opposite notion. It's actually a positive thing for conservation, he said, because punters whose knowledge of the natural world extends to horses and greyhounds might discover a bit more in the process of trying to beat the odds.

Worst Of All Possible Times For BP Spill

This article in "The New York Times" piles more bad news on what we're seeing playing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico.

Spring is mating and spawning season for almost everything in the gulf: Fill a jar with plankton from the local waters in the spring and it will typically contain the larvae of 80 species. All the eggs and hatchlings are surface dwellers, with almost no ability to swim away from the slick.