A silver-haired masseuse in Berkeley told me: when you feel overwhelmed, lie flat on the earth.
I lie down.
The burden slips through my bone, muscle, skin -- down into the floor.
Delivered.
Where?
We ask earth to hold us. We call nature Mother.
We exaggerate what mothers will tolerate.
<br>
[[Instructions]]
<h4>Dark Snow</h4>
"Dark snow" is being recorded from the Himalayas to the Arctic as increasing amounts of dust from bare soil, soot from fires and ultra-fine particles of "black carbon" from industry and diesel engines are being whipped up and deposited sometimes thousands of miles away.
The result, say scientists, is a significant dimming of the brightness of the world's snow and icefields, leading to a longer melt season, which in turn creates feedback where more solar heat is absorbed and the melting accelerates.
source: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/05/dark-snow-speeding-glacier-melting-rising-sea-levels"><em>The Guardian</em></a>
source: <a href="http://darksnow.org/author/jason/">Dark Snow website</a>
<br>
[[Norway's Two Minds]]
[[Anatomy]]
[[RestOration 2]]
[[Nestlé sells the people's water back to them]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low</h4>
According to Danish glaciologist Jason Box, who heads the Dark Snow project to measure the effect of dust and other darkening agents on Greenland's ice sheet, Arctic ice sheet reflectivity has been at a near record low for much of 2014. Even a minor decrease in the brightness of the ice sheet can double the average yearly rate of ice loss, seen from 1992 to 2010.
source: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/05/dark-snow-speeding-glacier-melting-rising-sea-levels"><em>The Guardian</em></a>
source: <a href="http://darksnow.org/author/jason/">Dark Snow website</a>
<br>
[[Transformers]]
[[After the ice age]]
[[Dark Snow]]
[[Forest Fires]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Forest Fires</h4>
According to Kaitlin Keegan, a researcher at Dartmouth College in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, the record melting in 2012 of Greenland's northeastern ice-sheet was largely a result of forest fires in Siberia and the US.
source: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/05/dark-snow-speeding-glacier-melting-rising-sea-levels"><em>The Guardian</em></a>
source: <a href="http://darksnow.org/author/jason/">Dark Snow website</a>
<br>
[[Bergen: Global Warming and Human Rights]]
[[West "Charity" Dumping E-Waste in India, China]]
[[RestOration 3]]
[[Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Improved</h4>
this cleaning
fluid is poison
made full of forms of care
greedy dipping
our rags into
disaster like
burst stars
<br>
[[Bergen: Global Warming and Human Rights]]
[[Wages Against Housework]]
[[Not Growth, But Care]]
[[Transformers]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>After the ice age</h4>
now is room void enough
for a poem
to illumine my ear to a glass sunshadow swimming and shimmering
in on the white walls
framing the port-hole
open to the cedar-
time memory
gone forests cut
down and reseeded
before this world
upends a late ice age
us weird snow wanderers with mouthfuls of air poems
mouthfuls of air homes
dank and sapphire fiery
lit domes
<br>
[[Norwegian Kitchen Remodel]]
[["Gaia is a tough bitch"]]
[[Returns of Summers]]
[[Sunset]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Transformers</h4>
who
am I now winged
lungs
become oil
liquid blood mine
traffic
benzenes and sulfur
I am dinosaur breath
and forest
wet iron leaf and bone breathing still
circulating the Gulf
the Caspian Sea’s
wing of the pelican
I am black and sticky
seeking from
earth
a fast heaven
<br>
[[Improved]]
[[Boom Times in Silicon Valley]]
[[Woman Walks Paris Marathon with 20kg of water on her head]]
[[Bergen: Global Warming and Human Rights]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]
<h4>Boom Times in Silicon Valley</h4>
Boom times in Silicon Valley call for hard work, and hard work — at least in technology land — means that coders, engineers and venture capitalists are turning to liquid meals with names like Schmoylent, Soylent, Schmilk and People Chow.
The protein-packed products that come in powder form are inexpensive and quick and easy to make — just shake with water, or in the case of Schmilk, milk.
While athletes and dieters have been drinking their dinner for years, Silicon Valley’s workers are now increasingly chugging their meals, too, so they can more quickly get back to their computer work.
Demand for some of the powdered drinks is so high that some engineers report being put on waiting lists of one to six months to receive their first orders.
On a recent Saturday evening in his Ikea-furnished apartment in San Francisco’s Haight neighborhood, Pulak “Potluck” Mittal, a 23-year-old software engineer, hosted a dinner party for half a dozen techie friends. On the menu were pad thai noodles and a side dish of Soylent.
source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/technology/in-busy-silicon-valley-protein-powder-is-in-demand.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1"><em>New York Times</em></a>
<br>
[[RestOration 3]]
[[Poetry]]
[[What the Pond Said]]
[[California Drought: Stealing Water]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Bergen: Global Warming and Human Rights</h4>
18 October 2012: The Bergen Symposium adopted the Bergen Message, which is that the interaction between climate change, sustainable development and human rights should be studied more closely. It calls for the actual impact on the life and rights of people to be brought to the forefront.
Source: <a href="http://www.baltcica.org/casestudies/bergen.html">BaltCICA</a>, EU-funded commission that evaluates climate change "Impacts, Costs and Adaptation" in the Baltic Sea region.
<br>
[[Sunset]]
[[Indian Drought Despite Monsoon]]
[[Norway's Two Minds]]
[[California Drought: Stealing Water]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>"Gaia is a tough bitch"</h4>
Jussi Parikka: "Some of the more naïve hypotheses of the self-regulating planet over the past century have always implicitly imagined the planet as something made for us: the underlying belief being that whatever we do to it, the planet will restore a suitable balance for us humans. If the planet is a self-regulating system, it does not necessarily mean that the time-scale is at all adjusted for the human species—-Lynn Margulis already reminded us that “Gaia is a tough bitch” who works happily without any humans around."
source: "Media Archaeology Out of Nature: An Interview with Jussi Parikka" in <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/media-archaeology-out-of-nature-an-interview-with-jussi-parikka/"><em>e-flux journal</em></a>.
<br>
[[Forest Fires]]
[[Returns of Summers]]
[[Improved]]
[[Google limiting access to Agbogbloshie information?]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Norwegian Kitchen Remodel</h4>
Norwegians are fixing up their kitchens like never before. Armed with purchasing power and a strong willingness to invest in their homes, Norwegians are spending huge amounts on high-quality kitchen cabinets, ultra-modern and expensive appliances and fancy countertops.
“The market is setting new records, with an overall increase of 10 percent for the first half of this year,” Bjørn Erik Øye, trend analyst at Prognosis Center, told newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN). “If it continues like this, there will be around 1.5 million kitchen cabinets sold in Norway this year.” That’s a lot, he notes, in a country of just 5 million people.
source: <a href="http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/10/03/norway-tops-in-kitchen-remodeling/"><em>Norwegian News in English</em></a>
<br>
[[Housekeeper's lament]]
[[Nonhuman Intelligence]]
[[Dark Snow]]
[[Tea (and) Time]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]
<h4>Poetry</h4>
written in a
wreath wild nut
brown inhabiting stone
case timed frigate frigid fret
music stone undo to burnish
and brandish soup dish and
weird welt upswinging tuned
and roundabout kindling
swerve in hightide to
swing swells upon
that spindle
<br>
[[Not Growth, But Care]]
[[Boom Times in Silicon Valley]]
[[Woman Walks Paris Marathon with 20kg of water on her head]]
[[Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]
<h4>Cat</h4>
the world is fat
a beautiful fat
zero for nomads
<br>
[[Indian Drought Despite Monsoon]]
[[Woman Walks Paris Marathon with 20kg of water on her head]]
[[Poetry]]
[[Housework is not work]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Sunset</h4>
the sun is always setting
on owls
roosts soaring
reams of data
collected
measure the death
of the sun
measure of music and day
where pollen is lit
under the cherry tree
in blossom
follow one mote with eyes
and grab at the particle as it passes
everyone
has seen it happening
all full of the clustering
and phenomenal
<br>
[[Voss, artisanal water]]
[[Unearthed]]
[[Junk Dealers Had It Good]]
[[Not Growth, But Care]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Possessable</h4>
The harnessing of fossil fuel seemed, for a couple of centuries at least, to have freed large parts of humanity from being in constant dialog with nature, having to adjust its plans, ambitions and schedules to natural fluctuations and topographies. Coal and oil, precisely because they were fossilized, seemed entirely possessable forms of energy. They did not behave independently like wind, or water, or, for that matter, workers.
source: Naomi Klein, <em>This Changes Everything</em>, p. 174.
<br>
[[After the ice age]]
[[Voss, artisanal water]]
[[Junk Dealers Had It Good]]
[[Poetry]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Anatomy</h4>
we have always lived here
in this strange snow
once
we were winged
zooplankton
and dinosaur
hulking home
keeps burning
us to ash
who is it who grows again
out of stars
difficult to attend to our fragile breath
with care
for each one wisps away
like a infants baby
who grows old and slips back into earth
I live in the river
burning
mouth full
of air and hungry crocodile teeth
<br>
[[California Drought: Stealing Water]]
[[Boom Times in Silicon Valley]]
[[Returns of Summers]]
[[Dark Snow]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Wages Against Housework</h4>
Housework was transformed into a natural attribute rather than being recognized as work because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage.
Sylvia Federici, "Wages Against Housework," 1975.
<br>
[[Fern and Spore]]
[[Forest Fires]]
[["Gaia is a tough bitch"]]
[[Improved]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] Most people visualize “unpaid care work” as work done, primarily by women, to care for family members: cooking, cleaning, and shopping, as well as care of children, the sick, and the elderly (Elson, 2000). It is important to note, however, that some categories of unpaid work, including growing food for own consumption and [[gathering water->Woman Walks Paris Marathon with 20kg of water on her head]], are categorized as productive activities according to the latest revision of the international System of National Accounts (SNA) These activities deserve special attention because they should, in principle, be included in measures of Gross Domestic Product, but are poorly measured by most surveys.
—Nancy Folbre
“Measuring Care: Gender, Empowerment, and the Care Economy”
<em>Journal of Human Development</em>
Vol. 7, No. 2, July 2006
<br>
[[Alicia's Grandmother]]
[[What the Pond Said]]
[[Fern and Spore]]
[[Junk Dealers Had It Good]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Woman Walks Paris Marathon with 20kg of water on her head</h4>
In the middle of 54,000 runners at the Paris Marathon, Siabatou Sanneh stood out. Carrying a 20kg water container on her head and wearing her race number 64173 on top of a multi-coloured traditional dress, Siabatou wanted to make a statement.
By walking the marathon with a plastic barrel of water on her head, Siabatou is hoping to send a message to the leaders at the 7th World Water Forum – which runs until 17 April in Daegu-Gyeongbuk, South Korea. Her statement is simple: she does not want to be drinking water from wells any more.
"I want them to help us dig bore holes, a sustainable water source, but not only more holes, I want more sustainable ones too. That's all we need. I don't want my children to be collecting water from dirty wells when they are older," she said.
source: <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/paris-marathon-gambian-mother-captivates-crowds-by-walking-20kg-water-container-head-1496271"><em>International Business Times</em></a>
<br>
[[Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low]]
[[Nestlé sells the people's water back to them]]
[[Cat]]
[[Nonhuman Intelligence]]
<h4>Fern and Spore</h4>
this arc’d frond
mounts respiration’s
wild reprise
<br>
[[Housework is not work]]
[[Indian Drought Despite Monsoon]]
[[Improved]]
[[Nonhuman Intelligence]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Alicia's Grandmother</h4>
A: She collected everything from garage sales. She loved nothing better than to find something beautiful in the trash. Her house was sort of regal. She would make total sense today as a bicycling, DIY, trash diving
K: upcycler
A: republican.
K: [laughing] I didn't see that coming.
A: She was an environmentalist fighting for bike lanes. Her house smelled very good to me. Kalfarlien has that, it's "special house" thing. It's always there, always melancholic. You can measure yourself emotionally against it.
<br>
[[Wages Against Housework]]
[[California Drought: Stealing Water]]
[[West "Charity" Dumping E-Waste in India, China]]
[["Gaia is a tough bitch"]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>California Drought: Stealing Water</h4>
“Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley.
source: <a href="http://www.feelguide.com/2015/03/22/r-i-p-california-1850-2016-what-well-lose-and-learn-from-the-worlds-first-major-water-collapse">Feel Guide website</a>
The tension between California farm interests and the state’s urban water users ratcheted up Tuesday, as a consortium of mostly urban water districts filed a complaint alleging Delta farmers are stealing water.
The group of 27 agencies, including the massive Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta put water quality at risk by diverting more water than they have a right to. The consortium, called the State Water Contractors, made the filing with the State Water Resources Control Board.
source: <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article24683440.html#storylink=cpy"><em>The Sacramento Bee</em> newspaper</a>
<br>
[[Nestlé sells the people's water back to them]]
[[Voss, artisanal water]]
[[RestOration 3]]
[[Norway's Two Minds]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Voss, artisanal water</h4>
My son and I walked by a tower of Voss water stacked in our grocery store.
"I've been there," he said, pointing to the iconic bottle. We had just returned from living 10 months in Norway. We took the train from Bergen to Voss to ski.
"Yes," I said.
We paused.
"I wonder how much petroleum it took to ship those bottles of Voss water all the way here?"
We talked about the long plane ride between Bergen and Portland, Oregon.
Voss artisanal water ships to fifty countries around the world, including Australia. Voss is 10,004 miles/16,100 kilometers from Sydney.
As with other luxury waters (Fiji?!), the distribution method eventually destroys the product.
source: <a href="https://www.vosswater.com/index.php/company/">Voss Water Website</a>
<br>
[[Housekeeper's lament]]
[[Boom Times in Silicon Valley]]
[[Anatomy]]
[[What the Pond Said]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] Edvard, the 60-ish Swede who owns Kalfarlien 18 with his brother, made a large pot of tea for us when we artists visited him at his home.
A young man in the kitchen -- a music student from Spain? -- picked out notes on a guitar. Next to him on a chair, sheetmusic for Brahms' Sonata #2. Above him, peeling white paint dangled from the wood moulding.
Edvard filled the big-bellied brown teapot with boiling water, and the water heated the ceramic a good long time. Then Edvard lifted the kettle lid and poured the water in to be reheated. He boiled it again. It seemed to me it took forever. He trapped herbal tea leaves in a mesh ball and poured the water again into the big-bellied pot.
When I make tea, I swish boiling water into a metal pot for three seconds. I don't witness it. I'm not there.
But in this kitchen, with this man, I saw. What I saw was time.
Time for water to slip itself between paint and wood. Time for pages of Brahms to rest before working again. Time to warm the ceramic belly against the Bergen chill.
Hospitality measured out one pot of steeped water at a time.
This is a ritual of gratefulness.
<br>
[[Housekeeper's lament]]
[[Unearthed]]
[[Possessable]]
[[Alicia's Grandmother]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Modern Narcissus</h4>
We think about Narcissus, but we almost never think of the pond that made him who he is. Without the pool, Narcissus would be just another aloof good looking guy.
But that pond.
It's what lets Narcissus become himself.
When we say people post too much on social media, we say they are narcissistic.
Freud pathologized narcissism, but that was before everybody had personal reflective pool machines in our pockets.
<br>
[[What the Pond Said]]
[[Dark Snow]]
[[RestOration 1]]
[[Bergen: Global Warming and Human Rights]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>What the Pond Said</h4>
What if, when we thought about Narcissus, we turned our attention to the pond? To the screens and machines we cherish, sleep with, tell all our secrets?
Snap a selfie in front of the e-waste sculpture and post it to Twitter. Hashtag it #ELO2015 #RestOration.
In the Tweet, <strong>acknowledge your companion</strong>. What is the make or name of your cell phone? For how long have you been together? How many times daily do you touch?
Reel your mind back to your cast off "old" phone. It's not disloyal to think of it. Where does it live now?
Does it dawdle in a drawer at your home? Or does it await stripping in Agbogbloshie, where it will be split open to disgorge its precious metals, then burned?
<br>
[[RestOration 2]]
[[West "Charity" Dumping E-Waste in India, China]]
[[Norway's Two Minds]]
[[Unearthed]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Drought to Plague India Despite Onset of Monsoon Season</h4>
A killer heat wave left almost 2,000 people dead in India ahead of the annual monsoon season, but that kind of extreme heat isn't expected during the season which just got underway.
As the monsoon advances northward, there will be some relief, but there is still the threat for more extreme heat in central and northern India over the next week or two until the monsoon arrives, AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Jason Nicholls said.
"It is pretty typical for India to get hot in advance of the monsoon," he said.
Drought, however, will be a problem across much of India into Pakistan this summer.
source: <a href="http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/monsoon-season-forecast-drought-deadly-heat-india/48467023">Accuweather website</a>
<br>
[[Anatomy]]
[[Nestlé sells the people's water back to them]]
[[Radioactive e-waste water in Fukushima's ocean]]
[[Junk Dealers Had It Good]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>West "Charity" Dumping E-Waste in India, China</h4>
“A huge amount of used electrical items and equipment are entering India and China from different developed countries. Those items are free from all type of associated duties as they are meant for charity purposes. But as they are all used items they soon add up to our e-waste,” said Sadhan K Ghosh, a professor of mechanical engineering department in Jadavpur University and president of the International Society of Waste Management’s Kolkata chapter.
A report of the United Nations predicted that by 2020, e-waste from old computers would jump by 400% on 2007 levels in China and by 500% in India. Additionally, e-waste from discarded mobile phones would be about seven times higher than 2007 levels in China and in India 18 times higher by 2020.
source: <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/kolkata/west-dumping-e-waste-in-india-and-china/article1-1302494.aspx"><em>Hindustan Times</em></a>
<br>
[[Google limiting access to Agbogbloshie information?]]
[[Sunset]]
[[Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low]]
[[Possessable]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Nestlé sells the people's water back to them</h4>
A coalition of environmental activists and Native Americans say that Nestlé is draining California aquifers in the Central Valley, from Sacramento alone taking 80 million gallons annually. They say Nestlé then sells the people's water back to them at great profit under many dozen brand names.
The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought.
“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water in the State of California have severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,” according to the coalition.
source: <a href="http://www.mintpressnews.com/nestle-continues-stealing-worlds-water-during-drought/203544/">Mint Press News website</a>
<br>
[[After the ice age]]
[[Voss, artisanal water]]
[[Alicia's Grandmother]]
[[Boom Times in Silicon Valley]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>RestOration 3</h4>
Caught inside and
open to
what chances by
it is strange to be here
where I once knew every
smell and creak
yet spring is coming fast
while winter disappears
the snow
the smells of repetition
are untangling
open
don’t go
my love and
farewell
new mornings break
alert with escapade
calling
a place to sleep
to prepare foods by cooking time
here and there, a daughter a son
<br>
[[Wages Against Housework]]
[[Poetry]]
[[Radioactive e-waste water in Fukushima's ocean]]
[[Indian Drought Despite Monsoon]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>RestOration 2</h4>
to stave off the scare of our nomadic
setting spells in structure
called home
there was only never return
all things venture
off
unknowing the to-come
we house ghosts
heart-haunted
the cozy place
is also a shipwreck
and the sun shines brightly
look out in sun gathering
windows grey clouds
billow all change
alteration is our nation
together gathering
goodbye
yes to goodbye
its our only
hello
calls out and greets
the ways of the wind
that wind up Fløyen
water flows under
everything and we are water-
bodies who float (air, wood floor)
flow and dove tails
ride gales
outside
<br>
[[RestOration 3]]
[[Dark Snow]]
[[Forest Fires]]
[[West "Charity" Dumping E-Waste in India, China]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>RestOration 1</h4>
dark sleeps in
form what wakes
us
into losses to
come home
to
each house is a nomad
forging dust-rich
histories
forages forth into
the new feed
house breathes
house wanderer
in wrecks
hold time
hold bodies
birth of love’s fullness-loss
inside
<br>
[[RestOration 2]]
[[Modern Narcissus]]
[[Tea (and) Time]]
[[Norwegian Kitchen Remodel]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Dissertation on cleaning or the housekeeper's lament</h4>
drawn out to its heavy air
step around a dry needlerug floor
step soft
sweet blooms
pinefumes
round trunkmass and
the rough tune of bark’s
touch encounter brown skin
woody air/song
tender aquifer hush flowing up
root system waterway and bole’s ten thousand thousand gallons
gush up to fly off
bud needle and cone
molecule order’s mute mutinous din
I’m tumultuous hauling my innerwaters by foot
crunching last summer’s hot scales circling the cedar
<br>
[[Worms, humans breaking down e-waste]]
[[Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low]]
[[Norwegian Kitchen Remodel]]
[[Housework is not work]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]
RestOration is a hypertext poem about a villa in Bergen, an e-waste dump in Ghana, and what takes us from here to there.
Alicia Cohen wrote the poems. I, Kathi Inman Berens, wrote the prose or culled it. I designed the concept and hypertext.
We <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/seeing-ourselves-through-technology-jill-walker-rettberg/?K=9781137476647">"see ourselves through technology"</a>, don't we?
This e-waste sculpture is a pool in which you see yourself.
To hear Echo, touch the audio player on the <a href="http://berens.org/kib/RestOration/site/hypertext.html">Hypertext page of our Kalfarlien 18 documentation site</a>.
Toggle between listening and reading if you like.
<br>
[[Kalfarlien to Agbogbloshie]]
<h4>Norway's Two Minds</h4>
Norway has identified protection from the consequences of global warming as a human right. But petroleum is its primary source of wealth.
A poor country for centuries before oil was drilled in its North Sea territories in the early 1960s, Norway is a socialist country with a high quality of life for ordinary people.
But petroleum funds its generous social programs.
"Climatically, Bergen has a very exposed position," reports BaltCICA, an EU-funded commission that evaluates climate change "Impacts, Costs and Adaptation" in the Baltic Sea region.
"The Bergen population is used to continuous as well as heavy downpour, strong wind, river flooding, landslides and high waves. With future climate changes, these challenges are predicted to intensify, and in addition, Bergen will have to cope with en estimated sea level rise of about 1 meter over the next 100 years."
Bergen is at the forefront of climate change adaptation policy and implementation.
Source: <a href="http://www.baltcica.org/casestudies/bergen.html">BaltCICA</a>
<br>
[[Worms, humans breaking down e-waste]]
[[Google limiting access to Agbogbloshie information?]]
[[Fern and Spore]]
[[Housekeeper's lament]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]
<h4>Kalfarlien to Agbogbloshie</h4>
One billion new cell phones are put into production each year.
Where do the "old" phones go?
The U.N. estimates that 50 tons of e-waste are illegally shipped from the developed north to places like Agbogbloshie in Ghana and Gulyu in China. Gulyu, the smaller of the two, employs nearly 60,000 people.
Workers melt precious metals and other valuable elements out of computers, and incinerate the rest.
Animals grazing the dumps have gaping wounds you could fit your hands into. The workers? They are mostly children.
Kalfarlien 18, a genteel square villa on Bergen's mountain Fløien, seems far from that.
Is it?
Patches of peeling paint, a sagging beam, faded wallpaper: these record Kalfarlien's successful disinterest in the lust for novelty.
In 1997, the average life of a computer was six years. Today, it's two.
Kalfarlien 18 doesn't become "obsolete." Decay is a mark of its wisdom.
source: <a href=“http://www.bitrotproject.com/”>The Bit Rot Project</a>
<br>
[[RestOration 1]]
[[Modern Narcissus]]"For me," says Jussi Parikka, "the philosophical question of nonhuman intelligence is one that we can address through media history: the various phases in which cultural techniques shift from humans to machines, and in which complex feedback loops and informational patterns redefine notions of intelligence.
"Alien intelligence also comes in many forms and has arrived many times already in the form of everything from bacteria to technological constructions."
source: Interview with Jussi Parikka in <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/media-archaeology-out-of-nature-an-interview-with-jussi-parikka/"><em>e-flux journal</em>.
<br>
[[Fern and Spore]]
[[Worms, humans breaking down e-waste]]
[[Radioactive e-waste water in Fukushima's ocean]]
[[Anatomy]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] The unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in a struggle.
--Silvia Federici, "Wages Against Housework" (1975).
<br>
[["Gaia is a tough bitch"]]
[[Norwegian Kitchen Remodel]]
[[Alicia's Grandmother]]
[[RestOration 2]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Unearthed</h4>
poetic transport delivers us
to the airy bats
redo Range Rovers as ash wings
become first songs’
echolocation
soundway’s corrupt sweet dipping and soaring to
birdsong city seek overstorey waterfilled
<br>
[[West "Charity" Dumping E-Waste in India, China]]
[[Norwegian Kitchen Remodel]]
[[Indian Drought Despite Monsoon]]
[[Norway's Two Minds]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]
<h4>Returns of summers</h4>
early summer sun is eternal
return’s glistening pool
party late summer’s hot death
everyone expects alone together
and the hollow feeling
of being
on the volcano
<br>
[[Indian Drought Despite Monsoon]]
[[After the ice age]]
[[Voss, artisanal water]]
[[Worms, humans breaking down e-waste]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Worms, humans breaking down e-waste</h4>
"No longer do worms and enzymes carry out the natural cycle of life and death, producing biochemical energy and fertilizing the land. Now men and women are forced to take apart inorganic carcasses and generate money for their survival and for other men’s profit."
source: <a href=“http://www.bitrotproject.com/”>The Bit Rot Project</a>
<br>
[[Housework is not work]]
[[Tea (and) Time]]
[[Woman Walks Paris Marathon with 20kg of water on her head]]
[[Ice Reflectivity: a Record Low]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Google limiting access to Agbogbloshie information?</h4>
Valentino Bellini is a freelance photographer who traveled to e-waste dumps throughout the global south.
His stark images of young men and children working in what looks like toxic infernos can be found at <a href="http://www.bitrotproject.com/">Bit Rot Project</a>.
I had a strange experience accessing Bit Rot Project on Google Chrome.
I read it one day. Next day, the same link returns "This webpage is not available. err_name_not_resolved."
I checked my history to make sure I'd typed it right. I had.
On my next click, I was able to access a different page using the same photographs and reporting, the Bit Rot Project Tumblr.
But then a few hours later, clicking the identical link returned: "Tumblr Rate Limit Exceeded" -- an error message that means Tumblr thinks I've accessed the page too many times.
How many was too many? Twice.
Working on this hypertext, I sent myself many iterative files via gmail. The incidence of my use of the word "Agbogbloshie" went from zero to maybe fifty in the space of a few hours.
I read incendiary things. Google didn't censor anything I accessed regarding Black Lives Matters, for example.
Black Lives Matter won't change the way Google does business. Disgust about Agbogbloshie might.
I now save my files on jump drives.
<br>
[[Improved]]
[[Junk Dealers Had It Good]]
[[Cat]]
[[Not Growth, But Care]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>"Radioactive e-waste water poured into Fukushima's ocean"</h4>
In the e-waste territories, 300 tons of radioactive water is poured into Fukushima’s ocean every day. These lands in decay have been ravaged by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) to extract oil and gas from shale. "There is no breaking [no slowing down] in the dangers of today’s capitalistic model. Through the network, the dominant machine of economic rationale is accelerating the rhythm of destruction of the biosphere," says Valenino Bellini, the activist and freelance photographer who has traveled to many e-waste dumps in the global south.
He adds, "when will it stop?"
source: <a href=“http://www.bitrotproject.com/”>The Bit Rot Project</a>
writers: Giorgio Griziotti and Gianluca Giannelli
translator: Laura De Francesco
<br>
[[Voss, artisanal water]]
[[Nestlé sells the people's water back to them]]
[[Anatomy]]
[[Returns of Summers]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]] <h4>Junk Dealers Had it Good</h4>
"It is hard not to remember the role of the junk dealer of the city during the industrial age, or to not recognize the figure of the metal digger, usually looking for copper, going trough waste containers in the contemporary post industrial cities. Those two figures are the product of a different setting of the capitalistic system on a historic and quality level. Hard to leave out in this category are those who selected urban solid waste, working in the open-air dumpsters of western cities during the industrial era." --Valenino Bellini and writers at Bit Rot Project.
source: <a href=“http://www.bitrotproject.com/”>The Bit Rot Project</a>
writers: Giorgio Griziotti and Gianluca Giannelli
translator: Laura De Francesco
<br>
[[Cat]]
[[Bergen: Global Warming and Human Rights]]
[[Wages Against Housework]]
[[Transformers]]
<br>
[[Restart->Silver Haired Woman]]