decolonization, Native American art, Uncategorized

“Grounded in Clay” in the Press [update, January 2024]

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Several major reviews of GiC appeared in 2023 after the show opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in July. This include:

All of these may be behind paywalls, for which I apologize.

Anyone interested in this important exhibition should take a look at SAR’s Ground in Clay page as well as the Vilcek Foundation’s GIC section, which includes links to audio clips of the curators’ comments on each pot.

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ORIGINAL AUGUST 22, 2022 POST

After the opening of SAR’s long-awaited exhibition, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, at the end of July, regional and national reviews have begun to appear. The response has been remarkably positive, exceeding even our expectations. Perhaps the most exuberant appeared in Forbes (August 26, 2022) in an article by Chadd Scott largely focused on this year’s Santa Fe Indian Market. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

“The Museum for Indian Arts and Culture premiers a groundbreaking exhibition of Pueblo pottery, “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery.” On view through May 29, 2023 before heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Grounded in Clay” features over 100 historic and contemporary works in clay offering a visionary understanding of Pueblo pots as vessels of community-based knowledge and personal experience. The exhibition shifts traditional curation models, combining individual voices from Native communities where pots have been made and used for millennia into a uniquely Indigenous group narrative . . . .”

“Most of the items seen in Grounded in Clay come from the nearby School for Advanced Research, which houses the premier collection of Pueblo pottery anywhere in the world. It’s something of a secret as SAR’s work has largely occurred out of the public eye until now . . . Consider this an unmissable experience when visiting Santa Fe. A more powerful combination of art and spirituality may not exist anywhere in the world.“

Other illustrated articles on the exhibition:

“Breaking the Mold,” New Mexico Magazine, August 2022 
 “A Community of Clay” Native American Art Magazine, issue 39“
Community Focus” Art & Antiques, Summer 2022
“60 Curators, 1 Show,” Associated Press, 6 August 2022

GIC’s catalog will be available for purchase on Amazon.com in early September.

decolonization, Native American art

SAR’s “Grounded in Clay” Set to Launch on July 31, 2022

After years of preparation, SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) will open its first-ever major museum exhibition, “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery,” at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts + Culture on July 31.

The exhibition, which is entirely curated by Pueblo people, will begin a national tour next summer, opening at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a satellite exhibition at the offices of the Vilcek Foundation, the exhibition’s principal sponsor. The show will then travel to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the St. Louis Art Museum. A documentary film about the exhibition is expected to be broadcast on New Mexico PBS in late summer. The exhibition’s catalog is now on sale at Amazon.com and the publisher’s website.

A website documenting the history and significance of this exhibition is accessible here. We expect that additional information, photographs, and video interviews will be added to the site in the coming weeks.

A short video interview of me by the UK’s Independent TV introduces the IARC’s collection and its spiritual significance to Pueblo people.

Lots to report in the coming weeks!

Uncategorized

Paul Farmer & SAR

Dr. Paul Farmer, humanitarian, physician, and anthropologist, died in his sleep on February 21 in Butaro, Rwanda, reportedly of a heart attack.  He was 62.

Eulogies are pouring in from around the world in recognition of Farmer’s tireless efforts to treat  patients in some of the world’s poorest nations—places where medical facilities were scarce and poorly equipped.

Paul Farmer at the School for Advanced Research, 2006. Photo Credit: Katrina Lasko

At the School for Advanced Research, we remember Paul Farmer especially for his participation in a 2006 seminar that he co-chaired, “Global Health in the Time of Violence,” the results of which were published by SAR Press under the same title.  Also in 2006, SAR awarded Farmer the J.I. Staley Prize for his book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (University of California Press, 2004). 

SAR wishes to convey its deepest sympathies to Dr. Farmer’s wife and children as well as the many patients and committed doctors he served in Haiti, Rwanda, Russia, Peru, and elsewhere.

A sample of obituaries from the media:

The New York Times

Bill Gates in The Atlantic

PBS NewsHour

Partners in Health

Covid-19, Human futures, pre-dawn ruminations, Uncategorized

A view of the pandemic from the City of Holy Faith

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New Mexico and Covid-19 are only now becoming acquainted. (The state had about 50 confirmed cases as I began this post on March 20.) Yet the impact on everyday life has been astonishing, beyond anything I could have imagined. This is partly because our governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, got out in front of the disease in a way that the federal government failed to do: schools, shopping centers, bars, and government offices closed earlier than in most other states, with hotels and restaurants on limited service if they remain open at all. In common with virtually all non-profit cultural institutions, the School for Advanced Research closed to the public on March 15, much of its staff working from home. The rest of us are spread out over the developed part of our 15-acre campus and keeping our distance with one another. I won’t be surprised if Santa Fe, and perhaps rest of the state, is soon in total lock-down.

What follows are some vignettes of the Plague Days.

A visitor from a Covid-19 hot zone. This must happen a lot now. A friend calls on short notice. He’s driving from one of the metropolitan centers experiencing a high rate of infection, headed to the Midwest. He’d like to get together for a drink. Ordinarily, you would agree to this instantly. You would welcome the opportunity to see a friend after years of separation. But the pandemic provokes other emotions. Hesitation. Wariness. Guilt. Then strategizing: where to meet so as to minimize risk. You agree to the meeting. Your friend bumps elbows in lieu of a handshake; he’s hip to the situation. You sit the required six feet apart. It’s good to share stories of family and work. Still, there’s a lingering sense of doubt and failure: failure to maintain stringent social isolation, and doubt that you have fully honored your commitment to your own safety and those who depend on you.

They didn’t get the memo. I decided that I needed access to a bicycle to survive—physically and mentally—the personal distancing that’s likely to continue for months. Riding as an antidote to cabin fever. Against the odds, I found a bike shop that was open. The pleasant, mostly twenty-something staff seemed completely oblivious to the Last Days look of the streets and surrounding stores, all closed up. Four young men with the requisite gimme caps and tats huddled close together in the repair shop corner of the store, peering at an exotic mountain bike on a stand. The young man in sales showed me a couple of basic hybrids. In the middle of the sales pitch, an older man, probably in his mid-70s and, by the look of him, the store’s owner, breaks into the conversation. He stands inches away from me, and I’m thinking, “WTF? Doesn’t this guy know that he’s in the cross-hairs of the epidemic? Doesn’t he care about his employees, who are cheerfully clueless about the situation?” But rather than explore those questions at such close range, I pay for a bike as fast as possible and load it into the car. Then grab the hand sanitizer.

Life calculus. The opening salvo of a debate certain to intensify was fired in today’s Wall Street Journal (March 23, 2020) under the headline “As Economic Toll Mounts, Nation Ponders the Trade-Offs: The cost of confronting the pandemic is millions of jobs and trillions in wealth lost to save potentially millions of lives.” What this means is that officials in Washington are starting to weigh the cost of saving lives through social separation against the damage this is doing to the economy. The calculus, in other words, is whether losing hundreds of thousands of lives (disproportionately the lives of seniors) is worth the national sacrifice associated with essentially shutting down the economy for months.

In a tweet released today, the president said (and I presume the all-caps format is his): “AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!” The scenario implied by this is that after a fortnight the restaurants and bars and shopping malls will reopen . . . and Devil take the hindmost.

A more plausible and, to some, marginally more palatable scenario goes like this: When roughly fifty percent (or some higher or lower number) of the American population has been afflicted by the virus and survived, presumably conferring immunity, the decision is made to put those people back to work, get the planes back in the air, and hope that the medical system can deal with the continuing flood of seriously ill victims.

This will present a moral dilemma for organizations such as SAR: Do we open our doors again at the risk of the health of a non-trivial percentage of our staff and members? SAR can probably weather a longer shutdown than many other non-profits, but at some point the more precariously positioned organizations will have to schedule their fundraisers, classes, performances, lectures, or whatever else their mission requires even if there is a significant risk to the public.

This is the kind of scenario that keeps me awake at night.

 

Cultural appropriation, heritage protection, Intellectual property

Update, cultural appropriation

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Southwest Airlines, “New Mexico One,” Albany International Airport, August 2017.  Photograph by Michael F. Brown
 

A couple of interesting things are happening on the cultural appropriate front. The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque has just opened an exhibition on the appropriation of the Zia sun symbol by New Mexico state government and eventually by scores of businesses, tattoo artists, etc. The symbol is of considerable religious significance to the people of Zia and probably other Pueblo peoples as well. The Santa Fe New Mexican story on the exhibition provides additional information.  (BTW, as I explain in Who Owns Native Culture, p. 91, the use of the Zia sun symbol by Southwest Airlines was approved and supported by Zia Pueblo.)

On a completely different front, it’s worthy of note that the Supreme Court has accepted for review a new case focused on whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office may refuse trademark protection for brands whose language is lewd or vulgar.  The case concerns the USPTO’s decision to deny trademark protection to a line of clothing called FUCT.  The case is interesting because it potentially revisits, at least by implication, a 2017 Supreme Court decision overturning a longstanding prohibition on trademarks that are “disparaging.”  This category includes the marks of organizations such as Washington DC’s football team. 

I expressed my dismay at the 2017 decision here. The court allowed disparaging marks primarily on free-speech grounds even though patents and trademarks are government licenses whose function is primarily commercial rather than political. Admittedly, I’m not a legal scholar or a constitutional expert, but common sense suggests that the government should not be in the business of endorsing and protecting obviously offensive brands that insult minorities, women, etc. Companies remain free to embrace hurtful images and slogans as much as they like; the issue is whether the commercial value (if indeed there is any) of these brands is eligible for protection by the federal government.

Ayahuasca, Cultural appropriation, cultural heritage, Ethnobotanical reflections, Indigenous Amazonian peoples: Social issues

Ayahuasca tourism in Perú: A tale of violence and indigenous resistance

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Herlinda Agustín, Amazonian healer. Source: Wikimedia. Author: Heather Greer. Date: 2010. Creative Commons License. https://vimeo.com/44332301

I’m grateful to Abou Farman (New School University) for sending me information on a recent tragedy in Amazonian Peru that took place not far from the major city of Pucallpa.  On April 19, 2018, a Canadian tourist murdered a prominent Shipibo elder and healer, Olivia Arévalo Lomas, by shooting her in cold blood in her village. Individuals soon captured the perpetrator, Sebastian Woodroffe, 41, executed him, and buried his body in the forest.  The story made its way into the international press, although many aspects of the murder, including the killers’ motive, remain unclear.   Peruvian authorities subsequently arrested two men said to be primarily responsible for Woodroffe’s execution.

World interest in the killings has waned as these events recede into the distance, but Shipibo and Conibo people themselves continue to express concern about what some are calling “spiritual extractivism” associated with ayahuasca tourism. A document issued by the Shipibo Conibo Center of New York puts the situation this way:

People come to the Amazon to heal themselves of the culturally specific ailments of industrialized, individualistic societies – from addiction to depression to sexual, military and other forms of trauma to eating disorders and diseases and illnesses that have found no real cure in the halls of Western medicine. Then they get to leave but they leave behind traces of their ailments, trails of inequality, frustration, violence, and sometimes legal cases.

In August, a hundred Shipibo, Conibo, and Xetebo healers met to discuss these questions and organize a union of traditional healers along the lines of similar organizations in parts of Africa.  They issued a declaration that, among other things, states their intention to “investigate the development of a mechanism by which foreigners taking advantage of indigenous medicine, healing and spiritual labour might be able to contribute to the cultural and political empowerment of Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo Peoples and their path towards self-determination.”  The complete declaration and related information can be accessed here. 

These events are a sobering reminder that engagement of Indigenous peoples with external market forces—even those associated with the spiritual marketplace—can lead to unforeseen consequences, some positive, others negative.  It is imperative that seekers from the Global North assess the impact of their spiritual quest and do what they can to mitigate its potentially damaging effects.

Information on Icaros, a widely shown and reviewed feature film about ayahuasca healing in Peru, for which Abou Farman has a writing credit.

Cultural appropriation, cultural heritage, heritage protection, indigenous sovereignty, Intellectual property

Patently Sovereign

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cult_ownership_logo

Nearly twenty years ago, when I first pitched a writing project focused on emerging disputes over the intellectual property (IP) of Indigenous peoples, my favorite editor’s reaction was that the topic was too specialized and, frankly, too boring to sustain a compelling book.  Eventually I was able to convince her otherwise, and her editorial ministrations helped to shape a work whose longevity has surprised both of us.  Not that it hasn’t evoked its share of criticism, but that is to be expected when dealing with a highly charged and complex topic.

Fifteen years after publication of Who Owns Native Culture?, debates over strategies to protect the intangible heritage of Native Americans and other Indigenous communities have produced few durable solutions, an assessment shared by an influential Native American attorney to whom I spoke recently.  The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) continues to fiddle around with efforts to draft a global instrument that would offer protections to traditional knowledge, but its progress must be measured on a geological time scale.

The news isn’t all bad.  Contemporary concern about cultural appropriation has at least drawn broader public attention to the ethics of cultural borrowing or theft (take your pick), even if some of the activist discourse threatens to trivialize what’s at stake for Indigenous peoples.  Creative research initiatives such as the now completed IPinCH project and Kim Christen Withey’s “In Transition” efforts give me hope that real progress is possible.

A recent and entirely unexpected development that turns the Indigenous IP issue on its head is usually referred to as the “sovereign immunity” question.  As the journalist Adam Davidson explains in a wonderfully succinct New Yorker piece published in 2017, a revision of patent law passed by the U.S. Congress in 2012 made it much easier for corporations to challenge patents held by others, potentially leading to aallergann explosion of expensive litigation.  Exempt from the law are sovereign entities—typically nation-states but also federally recognized Indian nations.  A creative patent attorney in Texas came up with the idea of helping corporations transfer their patents to sovereign Indian tribes as a way to minimize patent scrutiny.  The first transfer took place between the pharmaceutical company Allergan and the St. Regis Mohawks.  In exchange for the transfer, the Mohawks agreed to lease rights to patents associated with the best-selling drug Restasis back to Allergan for $15 million a year.

It will come as no surprise that this clever ploy has sparked its own wave of litigation. As I write, the issue is far from settled.  In October 2017 Sen. Claire McCaskill announced that she had drafted a bill that would invalidate patent transfers to Indian nations, a move that the Mohawks denounced as “hypocritical.”  So far, the courts haven’t been sympathetic to Allergan’s strategy.

Anyone as sympathetic to Native American causes as I am will be tempted to celebrate the Mohawks’ strategic use of their sovereign status to generate badly needed revenue for their community.  And there is a delicious irony in Native Americans benefiting, perhaps for the first time, from an intellectual property regime that has long allowed the appropriation and exploitation of their traditional knowledge by powerful outsiders.  Yet from a social justice standpoint this use of sovereignty is flawed at best, since its goal, at least from Allergan’s perspective, is to delay generic versions of Restasis from becoming available to patients, presumably at a lower cost.

Chief Justice Earl Warren once declared, “In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.”  In this case, the ethical sea is notably unsettled and murky.

acoustic anthropology, Chavín de Huántar, cultural heritage, South American prehistory

The Sound of Prehistory

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SAR scholars have pursued many unusual research projects over the decades, but one of the more memorable of recent years was that of Miriam Kolar (Weatherhead Resident Scholar, 2016-2017). Kolar, who received her doctorate from Stanford, is a prominent practitioner of the emerging specialty of archaeoacoustics, which brings together acoustic science and archaeology in an effort to understand how sound was used in used in prehistoric times to coordinate collective activity and, in some cases, to inspire awe during religious rituals.

Chavín de Huántar
Chavín de Huántar. Source: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Kolar’s work while at SAR focused mainly on one of the most mysterious and important archaeological sites of South America, Chavín de Huántar, located in the high Andes of central Peru. Chavín’s cultural influence was at its peak between about 900 BCE and 200 BCE. Rather than the capital of an empire in a conventional sense, Chavín seems to have been most important as a site of ritual pilgrimage whose cultural influence extended for hundreds of kilometers beyond the limits of the community itself. Kolar’s acoustic research and on-site experimentation suggest that “the ceremonial complex would have been wielded as a multi-sensory venue, a place where convincing experiential manipulations impressed visitors, whose proven connection with the Chavín ‘cult’ would bolster their home status.”

Kolar and two colleagues have recently published an open-access article in Heritage Science entitled “The Huánuco Pampa acoustical field survey: An efficient, comparative archaeoacoustical method for studying sonic communication dynamics.”  This study focuses on the acoustic properties of a different archaeological site, Huánuco Pampa, a major Inca-period administrative center.  Based on their highly technical study of the site’s principal platform, they conclude, among other things, that the platform served “as a tool for multi-directional communication, as well as to facilitate messaging about elite presence and imperial identity through the projection of sonic-visual displays.”

A short video of Miriam Kolar describing her SAR project is available here.

[This has been cross-posted to the School for Advanced Research scholar blog.]

acoustic anthropology, Modernity, pre-dawn ruminations

Sound Thinking

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Too_loud!Perhaps because in recent years I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with Steven Feld, a senior scholar at SAR, questions related to sound have been on my mind of late.  Steve is noted for many things, but his work on cross-cultural acoustics is widely regarded as inspiringly innovative. It’s also true that as I crossed into my mid-60s I experienced a degree of hearing loss —”consistent with your age,” as an audiologist told me, which was cold comfort.  That has led me both to regret some of the wall-of-sound rock concerts I attended in the early 1970s and to be much more protective of my hearing than I was in the past.  For anyone who cares a great deal about music, the prospect of losing the ability to fully enjoy it is troubling.  As I noted in this blog several years ago, the improvisational genius of jazz is something that inspires my writing as an anthropologist, even if the connection is loose rather than direct.

Making_Movies_Live_June_8_2017.jpg
Making Movies – https://www.facebook.com/mkngmvs/photos.  CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

So it was with some disappointment that I found myself forced to abandon a recent outdoor performance in Santa Fe by a terrific Kansas City-based Latino band, Making Movies, The group’s music can be described as an amplified, hybridized mélange of Latin American traditions.  As the band explains in their website, the latest Making Movies album is “a bold mix of sounds: psychedelia, experimental rock, son cubano, cumbia and various rhythms descended from Yoruba music.”  Aside from their formidable musical chops, the band members have been outspoken in their public support of DACA immigrants.

When Making Music started to perform on June 2, there was a crowd of perhaps a hundred, and the vibe was classic summer Santa Fe: cheerful, relaxed, ready to dance.  But the sound!  The amplified roar was beyond ear-splitting, beyond F16-taxiing-for-takeoff intensity.  Most of the crowd seemed unperturbed, but I had to retreat— first to a distance of about 50 yards, then 100.  At that distance, and behind rather than in front of the band’s PA system, the audio volume seemed about right. Conversations after the event suggested that I wasn’t the only person driven away by the unnecessary intensity of the amplification.

I had a similar experience a couple of years ago at a Dwight Yokum concert held at the Santa Fe Opera.  (Okay, Yokum’s music isn’t my scene, but it was a fundraiser to which I was invited by a friend.). I had neglected to bring ear protection, and my wife and I were reduced to wadding bits of kleenex in our ears in self-defense.  After twenty minutes our host was ready to evacuate, and we followed suit.  From the parking lot of the Opera—which, by the way, has excellent acoustics with modest amplification—the volume was about right. The sonic assault seemed to have no effect on most of the audience, some of whom were two-stepping in front of the massive PA speakers as we sprinted for the exit.

What’s going on here?  A little poking around on the web suggests that I’m not the first to wonder why performances have routinely become so loud that they make the sound of nearby jack-hammers seem almost meditative by comparison.  Edward Tufte, known for his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and related works, moderates a thoughtful exchange of views about this issue on his website.  He and others refer to a 2003 article by Lewis Segal published  in the L.A. Times that complains about the sheer acoustic brutality of many concerts. (See also this.). A 2016 article in the Daily Telegraph reported that thirty people walked out of a UB40 concert because the volume affected their heart rhythms and caused one person’s ear to bleed. Yet most of the concert-goers had no complaint about the sound level.

Various explanations for this phenomenon have been floated:  (1) The increase in ambient noise levels almost everywhere, which habituates people to high levels of background noise, at some cost to public health; (2) the ubiquity of in-ear headphones, which is causing premature hearing loss in the nation’s youth, in turn suggesting that performances must be louder to register on an audience; (3) performances are getting louder because performers want to “turn their amps up to 11,” which isn’t a theory as much as an anecdotal inference; and (4) the possibility that the sheer physicality or somatic impact of ultra-loud music is what draws people to concerts.

I’m inclined to view the situation as “overdetermined,” to use a word favored by theory geeks.  Urban Americans are now so habituated to high levels of ambient noise and ubiquitous digital music that concerts must achieve higher levels of volume to justify the price of admission.  I wonder, too, whether part of the draw is a desire for embodied catharsis, which is hard to find in a society where people work ever-longer hours for ever-smaller salaries.  From that perspective, the physical impact of ultra-loud concerts—ringing ears and the like—is a feature rather than a bug.  It’s also true that concert-goers have little control over audio levels at the events they attend.  Their only options, once they’ve gained admission, are to insert ear protection or head for the door.

Later this summer I’m traveling to a place where the only protection I’ll need is insect repellent and sunscreen: the Boundary Waters wilderness of Minnesota, which is blissfully out of cell phone range and where the dominant sounds are the splash of paddles on water and the haunting call of loons.  The BWCA lies just to the east of Voyageurs National Park, which has been voted one of the ten quietest places in the United States.  I look forward to giving my ears a rest.

Climate change, Existential risk, Human futures

Climate Change, Skepticism, Scale

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Kolbert_Lensic_1June2018
Writer Elizabeth Kolbert interviewed on stage by Michael F. Brown (left) and Terry Sullivan, NM state director of The Nature Conservancy. Photo by Garret Vreeland.

[This post is mirrored on the SAR Scholar Program blog.]

On June 1, 2018, the School for Advanced Research and The Nature Conservancy of New Mexico hosted New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert at Santa Fe’s Lensic Performing Arts Center.  The event drew a capacity crowd of more than 700.  Kolbert presented a 30-minute talk that was followed by an on-stage Q&A by Terry Sullivan, director of The Nature Conservancy NM, and SAR president Michael Brown. This event, the title of which was “The Fate of the Earth,” was presented under the auspices of SAR’s annual President’s Lecture.

Kolbert’s work for the New Yorker has covered a diverse array of topics, but in recent years she has become known especially for her work on species extinction and global climate change.  She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for The Six Extinction: An Unnatural History.

Although her talk discussed the astonishing rate at which species are disappearing in most parts of the world—a rate many scientists feel is comparable to five other mass extinction events dating as far back as 450 million years—many of the questions posed by her interviewers and members of the audience (via social media) turned on the matter of climate change. New Mexico and much of the Southwest are experiencing extreme drought conditions this year, as well as unusually high temperatures.

Air photo of Ute Park fire, NE New Mexico, June 2018. Photo Credit: U.S. Forest Service

During Kolbert’s visit, the Ute Park fire in northeastern New Mexico was expanding to 37,000 acres.  As of this writing, it has still not been completely contained.  An avid hiker, Kolbert’s plans were partially curtailed when the U.S. Forest Service closed some of the most popular hiking trails around Santa Fe because of the extreme fire risk.  In short, climate change was on the minds of everyone in the hall because it had a local salience that surpassed that of species extinction.

A question voiced several times during the event was why the American public is so divided on policies related to climate change.  Among the most frequently cited explanations for this troubling hostility or indifference: mistrust of educated elites; the rise of anti-scientism; the cynical manipulation of public opinion by politicians and business interests who stand to lose if the U.S. frees itself from dependence on fossil fuels; and fear of the massive social changes required to reduce our carbon footprint.  All of these factors play a role, yet they don’t seem entirely persuasive.  Are there deeper reasons for public indifference?

An important distinction to make is between contemporary climate change and explanations of its ultimate cause.  Evidence that the climate is changing is far more visible to the public than are the factors that drive it.  This is especially true in coastal areas ranging from south Florida and Louisiana to Alaska. Boston and New York City aren’t far behind.  Insurance companies are already figuring this into their risk algorithms and premiums, as is the U.S. military.  True, we still have to endure the nattering of televised halfwits who don’t understand the difference between climate and weather, prompting them to point to the latest record low temperature as proof that global warming is a myth.  On balance, however, people who are attuned to land and water—farmers, civil engineers, Arctic hunters, ski resort owners, and the like—are unlikely to dispute the reality of climate change.

As for causes, skeptics in this part of the world point out that cyclical drought has a long history in the Southwest and has been blamed for the apparent collapse of the Chaco Culture.  Looking farther back, ice ages reshaped much of the planet long before humans were in a position to register a significant impact on earth’s atmosphere.  By that logic, giving up our gas-guzzlers and coal-fired power plants is futile.  Of course, for that argument to carry weight one is obliged to ignore the cumulative impact of adding 2.4 million pounds of CO2 emissions to earth’s atmosphere every second.

Which brings us to the issue of scale—that is, how to imbue people with a sense of planetary duty when their individual contribution to the problem verges on the microscopic, especially when the processes involved extend beyond a human lifetime or more.  Would it truly make a difference to the earth if I skipped an annual vacation flight to Cancún?  Why should I acquiesce to the closing of my local coal-fired power plant when it means that I and other members of my community will lose our jobs and be reduced to penury while moralizing elites charge their Teslas with energy produced by wind or sunlight?  This is the tragedy of the commons on a planetary scale.

How to solve this problem is perhaps the greatest anthropological challenge of our time. A ray of hope emerged in a case mentioned by Elizabeth Kolbert toward the end of a panel discussion at SAR the morning after her lecture, an event that featured two scientists and a representative from Jemez Pueblo.  Kolbert briefly mentioned the Danish island of Samsø, which over the course of a decade voluntarily turned itself into a net-zero community.  This success story is easy to discount.  The island’s population is less than 4,000; islanders benefit from abundant and cheap wind power; Denmark is a wealthy country.  Yet in a case like this we can see a bridge between the individual and the collective. Solving the problem of scale may require thousands and ultimately millions of Samsø-like projects until a sense of a global commons can be created and embraced.  Whether this can happen fast enough to make a difference remains an open question

This site offers information about the book UPRIVER (Harvard UP, 2014), other books by Michael F. Brown, issues related to Amazonian peoples, events at the School for Advanced Research–Santa Fe, and occasional meditations on anthropology and human social life in general.