Re Eco Art / Esthetics of Sustainability / Topfer Cultural Politics / Silko ---Laurie

It's exciting to see these readings in print, as I’ve worked on verbal maps in some of this territory. The Cartesian split is a large geography underlying much of where we’ve gone awry in our relationship with the planet. So often in our culture we simply don’t touch the earth anymore, we think and talk instead of touch. She, or she/he is the largest maternal/parental context we have, and there is a reciprocal relationship with her. How would we survive as children if we didn’t touch our parents? And if one is a parent, one comes to know that as parents we are affirmed by the touch of our children. When we don’t touch earth, our relationship with her is broken.

I’m not quite sure how Silko’s sensibilities fit in here, but I think they do. Perhaps “the land telling the stories” is another way of saying the same thing as that the earth affirms us when we actually reach out and touch her. Once I worked with a wonderful fellow who’d been a chaplain for schizophrenics for much of his professional career, with whom our conversations---those of us in the program--- ranged over a wide spectrum. We somehow came to the subject of being in love with earth as if with a person. I’ve come to know this one-on-one love with Sandia Mountain. And when I had to wait a month to become the “owner” of the land I’m now stewarding behind the mountain, it came to me that the meaning of the wait was like that of a bride, because the moment of taking her was going to be a marriage. She was worth a long wait if that’s what it took.

The other thing I was so glad to see in the Lipton,Watts / Kurt / Topfer writings is the expressed recognition that esthetics and beauty are essentail in forging a new perspective on the environment. As part of the solar and renewable energy community, I’ve been amazed at the lack of attention to esthetics in RE installations (the color and sparkle of photovoltaics can be celebrated or ignored, as one simple example). The colors, textures, visual and kinetic attributes of RE devices as well as how they’re sited in a landscape are often utterly unexplored, in stark contrast to how thoroughly the technology has been developed and perfected.

Renewable energy installations can put us so palpably in touch with the elements. I’ve been monkeying with solar fountains for several years and can offer this example: With a solar fountain, if you put your shadow on the PV that runs the fountain pump----the pumps stops working. So there’s a kinetic relationship between sun and shadow, motion and pause that we create with our body. If we have esthetic objects in our homes that provide this kind of sensual information about what the sun is doing today, or water, or the wind, we touch the earth in a way that’s not available otherwise. It’s like making love with a mountain away from her, or knowing the wind by a kite string tied to your belt.

A question: What does “ratio” mean as used in the first sentence on pg 240 of the Kurt article?Am not familiar with the word used as it is here.