Though it has left Washington DC, I am pleased to announce that the Earth Matters exhibition will be opening on Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22., 2014. If you are in the Los Angeles area, don’t miss this landmark exhibition!
For more information on the Fowler Museum go to: http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/
Ladies and Gentleman,
It is with some regret but with a a great sense of accomplishment that I announce the end of the Earth Matters exhibition. And with the closing of this monumental exhibition at the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art, so goes the Earth Matters blog. We are glad to have been able to bring to light so many of the issues that touch our lives and our earth. There is more to be done, and we have no delusions about how much. Consequently, we hope that this mission will be carried on by all those people who saw the exhibition and followed our blog. Many thanks to all of you.
If you are in the Los Angeles area, the Earth Matters exhibition will be traveling to the Fowler Museum and is scheduled to open on Earth Day of this year.
Onward!!!!!
Pende Masquerade at LufushiPhotograph by Leon de Sousbeghe 1957
EEPA 1999-100042
Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives
National Museum of African Art
Smithsonian Institution
Leon de Sousberghe, a Belgian ethnologist and Jesuit, took this photograph of a Pende Giwoyo and two Tundu masks used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Tundu masks represent Pende ideas of the anti-aesthetic and were intended to encourage social obedience. Giwoyo masks, by contrast, are among the most longstanding types of masks still used by Pende performers and are used to usher the spirits of the deceased out of villages. Giwoyo thus always performs in the transitional area between a community and the surrounding wilderness — a zone considered to tie the land of the living with that of the dead. For many Pende, the seemingly endless underground has served as a powerful metaphor for spiritual realms. The Pende mask shown here, of which there is a related example in the Earth Matters exhibition, displays the connectedness of the underground to the living world. Worn like a cap on the top of the head, the mask evokes a face and body floating horizontally above its dancer. The mask is designed to suggest a corpse wrapped in its funerary shroud, the alternating black and white stripes suggesting the journey between the land of the living and the underground.
When it comes to the environment, we probably hear more horror stories than we do success stories. Quite understandable, of course, as with all there is left to do heal our environment we don’t want to give the impression that we can rest on our laurels. On the other hand, too much pessimism is not any more helpful. So, if were to now mention the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, you might not be sure which direction this post is going.
Of course, the Fukushima nuclear breach was an utter disaster. However, in its wake, Japan as taken many of their nuclear plants offline. Consequently, the island nation’s need to cut down on electricity demands has become crucial. This is where necessity breeds invention, as relayed by a recent article in the New York Times, which tells of new experiments in submerging supercomputers. What does that mean, exactly? Well, apparently, the supercomputers that crunch the mountains of data we all climb tend to overheat, requiring, sometimes, millions of dollars in electricity to run air conditioners. That cost is high for the companies paying it, the waste is bad for the environment, and, for Japan, too high a demand for electricity. To cut the demands of supercomputers, Tokyo Institute of Technology has successfully submerged such a computer in mineral oil, dramatically reducing the need for air conditioning. Now, you would not expect it to be healthy for a computer to be submerged in liquid, but because the liquids that this laboratory and others are testing do not conduct electricity, there is no risk of short circuiting the computers. There may, however, be other side-effects, but those have not been revealed. For the moment, the submerging of supercomputers to reduce demands for toxic coolants and large amounts of electricity seems to be a promising endeavor.
Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
Satoshi Matsuoka, the project leader, with the Tokyo Institute of Technology supercomputer that is cooled with mineral oil rather than air conditioning.
Does anyone know of any other such environmental success stories or promising prospects?
Please share by leaving a comment!
Ladies and Gentleman, the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, have officially begun!
Of course, the olympics in Sochi have not started without a bit of scandal. For weeks, even months, we have been hearing mostly about the anti-gay stance of the Russian leadership and for days we have been hearing comic-horror stories about the accommodations in Sochi, as well as nightmare tales of cyber-insecurity. I am a little surprised, however, that it was only today that I heard about the environmental damage that the Sochi olympics have been born out of. According to an article published just three days ago on, of all places, Yahoo’s sports page, the filling in of valuable marshlands, destruction and obstruction of other habitats, deforestation, and rampant unregulated dumping have done considerable damage in the less visible parts of Sochi, those parts being where much wildlife and many humans live. Another article sums it up more bluntly, stating in its opening line that “The enormous infrastructure upgrade for the Winter Games has had a major impact on the environment. Some say the region may never recover from the damage that has been done.”
A view of Olympic Park in December. Dump sites for construction debris litter hills in and around Sochi, Russia. Other such damage has been well documented. Mikhail Mordasov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Taken from the New York Times
To tell you the truth, I live in Eastern Europe for seven years and the rag tag, unregulated, almost maniacal construction effort that was undertaken to prepare Russia for the olympics does not surprise me, personally, but as long as this construction must have been going on, I am surprised that I cannot find articles on the environmental impacts that are more than a couple weeks old. Then again, with recent reports of the arrests of several ecologists, for such offenses as swearing in public, perhaps it is not strange that we have hard so little so late.
Clearly, Russia has done much to construct and safeguard an image of itself as eco-friendly. And Image is everything, I suppose, especially since one of the criterion for choosing the location of the olympics is “the cit(y) needs to maintain a highly positive media exposure to carry the games.” Another criterion is described as “the tangible effects of hosting the Olympic games may not prove beneficial if the bid committees do not exercise proper judgment in developing the city to host the Olympics.” But in these respects, Russia does not carry the sole blame. Surely, plans and strategies for developing the cities that host the games are reviewed by the committees that make the final decision. Everybody involved has an image to protect, and hopefully, as the environmental damage in Sochi is assessed, the organizers of the olympics will take more caution in the future to ensure that the winter olympics are healthy and sustainable.
Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Reda Amer in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane University. The followers of this blog may have noticed that, in recent months, a number of our posts have addressed issues specific to the Gulf of Mexico and the coastal south of the United States. Followers may also recall much earlier posts that talked about the use of Landsat satellite images and the collaboration between the National Museum of African Art, the National Air and Space Museum, and our non-Smithsonian partners at NASA. In an interesting twist, Dr. Amer brings these factors together to reveal how satellite images are now being used to detect plumes and concentrations of run-off into the Gulf of Mexico. Truly, the technology is remarkable and hopefully paves the way for cleaning up and improving the health of our environment.
Thermal Remote Sensing Analysis for Submarine Groundwater Discharge Plumes along the Gulf Coast
Dr. Reda Amer, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118
Fresh groundwater flowing through the inland aquifers and discharge into the Gulf of Mexico. Groundwater discharge into Gulf water occurs as a slow diffusive flow but can be concentrated at fractures zones. Shallow groundwater aquifers contain high concentration of dissolved inorganic nitrogen, soluble phosphate, and fecal bacteria from the agricultural and human activities. Exiting of this groundwater into Gulf water can result in changes in water salinity and decreased oxygen content; which known as eutrophication. This process impacts fragile coastal ecosystems (e.g. estuaries, coral reefs, fish kills, and shifts in the dominant flora).
Because of the different thermal signatures between groundwater and ocean water, remote sensing thermal infrared images are useful to trace groundwater outflow and can identify the location of concentrated discharge along the Gulf coast. The images employed in this study are from the Earth Explorer database provided by the USGS taken during Landsat missions between September and November of 1999. Landsat is a multispectral satellite mission, and the thermal band provides 60 m resolution. The attached figure exemplifies using thermal infrared imagery to identify groundwater discharge plumes into the Gulf water southeast Louisiana.
The Landsat thermal infrared image was processed using ENVI software where the pixels digital numbers were converted into temperature in Kelvin. The image shows that the lowest temperature is about 300 K and indicated by blue colors, and the highest is 329 K indicated by red colors. At lower latitudes groundwater is generally has cooler signature than the ocean water. The anomalously cooler plumes are indicated as yellow colors within pale-red and red color of Gulf water. The salinity data from Shiller and Mao (1999) was used to validate the results of thermal image analysis. Comparison of salinity (green points) and thermal signatures revealed that there are several zones where lower salinity values correspond to lower temperature values, specifically at the salinity values 20.2 psu and 16.2 psu (indicated with blue circles). The results show that thermal infrared remote sensing imagery can be used as a time and cost-effective tool for identifying submarine groundwater discharge plumes.
Image: Landsat Thermal Infrared images of the Gulf coast along southeastern Louisiana. Blue colors indicate low temperature, red colors indicate high temperature. Salinity data from Shiller and Mao (1999) represented by green points. The blue circles indicate a correlation between lower temperatures and lower salinity.
Members of the Ogboni Society near Onitsha, Nigeria
Photograph by Simon Ottenberg 1959-60
EEPA 2000-007-0973783/1959-1960
Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives
National Museum of African Art
Smithsonian Institution
Renowned anthropologist, Dr Simon Ottenberg, took this photograph in the Afikpo region of southeastern Nigeria during his 1959-1960 research. The original caption says, “The Ogboni Society coming from a meeting at Onitsha, the city on the Niger River, during a trip to visit Richard and Helen Henderson, conducting research in the old town at Onitsha. These were Igbo members of Ogboni, which is primarily a Yoruba society.”
The Ogboni society, also known as Oshugbo in the Egba and Ijebu areas of southwestern Nigeria, is an association of accomplished elders in parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. Members perform a range of religious and political practices, including meting justice for crimes and disputes, installing and deposing kings, and overseeing burial rites. Ogboni members recognize the underground as a spiritual force that unites humankind and witnesses all wrongdoings. Ile, the deity or omniscient spiritual force of the underground, is central to Ogboni beliefs, art, and practices.
The Earth Matters exhibition includes both insignia of office and figures from the meeting house of a Yoruba Ogboni (or Oshugbo) society. These edan (staffs or insignia of office) and onile (society figures) demonstrate the importance of concepts of the earth to Ogboni. In the ease with which their motifs can be identified, the figurative pair of copper alloy edan suggest the knowable world: male/female, old/young… and yet beneath each figure is a non-descript iron shaft. Made from an ore of the earth, these shafts allude to things we cannot know: the unknowable world of the divine and the underground. Likewise, the terracotta onile figures are made of a material of the earth that alludes to the power and knowledge beyond mere mortal comprehension.
Wherever you are on the globe, chances you have contended with some extreme weather this year – for example the extreme cold that has shut down several American cities. While some of the shutdowns may be dramatic overreactions, it is certainly colder than usual and that inconveniences many of us in all sorts of ways. In the big scheme of things, however, the inconveniences are pretty small and there are probably very few people who, at least at this stage, give the weather that much attention.
Yet, while human beings may find he weather to be, overall, benign, there are far more susceptible creatures on the planet. Take for example this article on the monarch butterfly that was recently posted by the New York TImes. Now, I cannot claim to be an expert on butterflies, but I was surprised to read that monarchs are, in fact, migratory, traveling from Canada and the US to a relatively small stretch of mountainous forest each year. Not only do the butterflies need to reach these mountains, they need to do so at a very particular time of year, or else their populations inevitably crash, and that time consists of a mere 40 day stretch. Last year, the article relays, “unusual springtime cold in Texas delayed the butterflies’ northward migration, causing them to arrive late in areas where they would normally have bred weeks earlier”. In 2012,”months of near-record heat sapped [the butterflies’] endurance and skewed their migratory patterns in ways that limited their ability to reproduce. Still, there is another problem.
As we are informed, the obstacles to the monarch’s migration would be less of an issue if their population was larger. However, due to the loss of habitat in both Mexico and the US, their population has been steadily declining and the survival of the species is now dependent on a much smaller, and therefore more vulnerable, number of individuals. Of course, this brings us full circle as the loss of habitat, that being plants and trees, is a major contributor to the climate problem. So, here we have yet another example of the interconnectedness of the earths ecosystems, which begs the question of what impact the loss of the butterflies might have, other than the loss of one of nature’s greatest spectacles.
Although the new year recently passed, it was not so long ago that assessments of 2013 will stop rolling in anytime soon. This is especially true where science is concerned since the results take time to assemble and analyze. Consequently, one of the lists just recently released is a government list of extreme weather events for 2013, which came with a well illustrated map.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/extremes/201313.gif
Chances are, that even without this summative list, that most readers heard of an extreme weather event in the news or experienced it themselves because these events occurred around the world: Drought in the American West, the typhoon in the Philippines, extreme heat in Australia, extreme cold in the U.K., heavy rains in China and Russia, and the shrinking of arctic glaciers.
In another but by no means unrelated article, a separate report predicts that extreme El Nino events are expected to double from once every 20 years to once every 10 years. Now, of course weather predictions are never fully accurate and are most of the time concerned with expectations and tendencies rather than predictions. But the research in this case seems extensive, with 20 separate climate models utilized in the findings and producing, we must assume, fairly consistent results.
What is the main culprit of these weather anomalies? Well, both much of the scientific community and the political left are inclined to say that global warming is responsible for the extreme fluctuations in weather that we have ben observing. Yet, because weather is not an exact science, proving these links hasn’t been easy, and that is one reason what we are left with so many skeptics. In the case of the El Nino effects, however, good evidence is arising for the connection between it and global warming. As the article explains in common language, the El Nino effects are produced when “a pool of warm water that normally resides in the western Pacific expands to the eastern equatorial Pacific, bringing with it increased atmospheric convection and rainfall.” The reason that these effects do not frequently occur is because barriers of cold water generally keeps the expansion in check. Logically, then, it follows that as water temperatures rise and these barriers of cold water disappear, that the El Nino effects are likely to increase in frequency – which is about as simply as I have ever heard it explained.
As 2014 has now gotten well underway, I expect that we will continue to see anomalies in the weather such as these. And at the very least, I hope that more clear and convincing evidence such as this will turn the skeptics in the world around and harness their “renewable energy” for the effective action needed to combat climate change.
This week’s guest post comes from Marco Cianfanelli, a South African artist who, in addition to participating in the Earth Matters exhibition in Washington DC, is internationally recognized. Cianfanelli is an artist who examines the universal within the personal and, as the great T.S. Eliot once said of great writers, writes both himself and his time.
Back down to Earth
by Marco Cianfanelli
Maquette: The sum of us [The sum of us (2009) realised at 4.44 x 3.47 x 11.4 meters; mild steel: Forum Homini, Cradle of Humankind]
I am always slightly puzzled when asked to give my opinion on a matter, as one of the significant reasons I became an artist is the very privilege it affords me in blurring and manipulating elements of intellect, science, knowledge, emotion & gesture in a way that is based on, but not confined to, logic or fact but in a way that makes perfect sense to me.
Is it feasible to personify the whole of humanity, as one single being, a being with particular traits and a complex yet distinct personality? Could these traits and this personality be better understood by observing the condition of the earth, how humanity exists on it, in it, with it? In this sense, our perception of the earth’s state(s) would not be a judgement of humanity but rather a reflection of it. Be it good or bad, it is what it is.
If you believe in evolution, you have to consider that we, alongside everything around us, are evolving with every passing second. Evolution is not an event it is a process. With regard to our place on earth, how are we evolving or how will we evolve in the future? Is it possible that we can be active, rather than passive in the process of our evolution and if so, will the nature in which we cohabit the earth be something we value?
Regarding evolution, Vredefort to Sterkfontein, is a work that I produced as a response to the immense significance and connectedness of the two regions of Vredefort, the site of the largest verified asteroid impact crater, and Sterkfontein, a site of significant Hominid findings, which lies within the “Cradle of Humankind”. The work is both a scientific analysis and a family portrait of sorts or a musing on the subject of genetics, created by morphing and interpolating three silhouette portraits of my mother, myself and my father, to create the seven profiles in the work. Geographic coordinates of the region between Vredefort and Sterkfontein, recorded at 20-meter intervals, were gathered to create a digital three-dimensional topographical portion of this region. This data was used to create the third dimension of the seven forms and was amplified to varying degrees on each of the seven portraits, enhancing the effect of a wave or tide, representing the immense impact that rippled the earth’s surface well beyond the region of Sterkfontein.
Could an event so dramatic and in some ways, so violent that it made the earth’s surface twist and distort like water, be intrinsic to the evolution and formation of humanity, could our dawn have been catalyzed by such a cataclysmic event? It became apparent to me that the intended “family portrait” was actually something broader and spoke to me of humanity’s connectedness.
Earth Matters 
