Erik Foss worked seven nights a week, splitting his time between shifts at a few bars in the city, as well as getting his
While bartending paid the bills, Erik was really in New York City to be an artist. Whenever he had time he painted, made collages and drew pictures of all the feelings that he had to absorb night after night while working at bars. Often, he heard a lot of pain and anger, especially with the pressure of the change happening. People were hiding out inside the many underground bars around the city, where the darkly lit spaces protected them from the burning sunshine that was destroying the environment everywhere on earth. They brought troubles with them to to the underground bars, and often Erik was the only person around that would hear some of the stories.
They told Erik about family and friends who got sick from the change, unable to tolerate the rising temperatures, a lot of people were developing heat illnesses. If they were young, it was easier to fight off the intensity of the fever and the constant feeling of thirst and being dizzy. If they were old, death was common.
Beyond the illnesses Erik would hear about, there was always the usual complications of living life. Lost jobs. Lost lovers. Lost dreams. For centuries bartenders had been listening to the stories of heart break and hard times, and Erik often felt like a sponge for all the pain that floated around the city and a magnet for it to land at on a bar stool in front of him.
Erik had a way of turning things onto a more upbeat funny side and with a rock 'n roll style, he'd make the most depressing person forget about the troubles and have a good time. A few special cocktails helped pick up the mood and Erik would just take the pain away with him and put some of it into his artwork when it got overwhelming. Furious strokes of paint to canvas emotionally healed him, and he'd then offer some of the results back to customers for sale.
They'd buy back their own pain sometimes, and hang it up on a wall in their home.
Haiはい。is my transmedia journey. Cut 'n paste "Haiはい。" into Google to find pieces of this story,
-Lisa
*Photo of Erik Foss by Supreme Mangement.
*Artwork by Erik Foss.
Today I’m joining 8,000+ bloggers from 144 countries, reaching 11 million viewers to chime in one a single important global issue of climate change for Blog Action Day, and want to share with the world why this topic is personal for me.
While green living is popular, fashionable and trendy right now (hurray!), I’ve actually spent a lot of my own life being
green and supporting a variety of environmental movements, writing about environmental issues and absolutely loving nature to the point of clapping when I see an ocean wave crashing against the shore, marveling when the sunlight hits against green leaves and makes an almost translucent effect, and crying when an eco-disaster destroys part of the world, from the Exxon Valdez oil spill to the icebergs melting and killing the habitat of polar bears.
Here are some of the very personal reasons why I’m in love with nature and deeply, emotionally concerned about the impact of climate change on the environment.
Reason #1: I Lived In A Tent
When
I was a baby, back in 1967, my parents found themselves suddenly homeless. Dad
was a musician and had a great gig for a time working for an orchestra in
Maine. When the contract came to an end, he didn’t have another gig lined up,
and couldn’t afford the house they were renting.
We lived near the fisherman docks on the coast at this time, and Dad loved hanging out with the boat builders. One of his friends offered a patch of land in a boat yard that we could camp in for the summer, and Dad jumped on it – moving the three of us into a tent on the property. My Mom had never camped before in her life and was terrified of snakes. The mosquitoes were insane and apparently I
was covered in
bites. We ate amazingly well, as everyday the fishermen gave us lobster –
because at that time they couldn’t sell it on the market for some reason. I
don’t remember it really (I was about 1 years old) but family members still
talk to me about it, and my parents tell me these stories of how we lived off
the land and got help from the community that summer. To this day I am in love
with sleeping outside in a tent. I’m so happy being snuggled up, in the
outdoors, in the woods or on a beach somewhere, where beautiful nature is all
around.
If the climate changes, will the memories my family has of the coast of Maine just be memories? Will the coast of Maine be flooded and those fishermen's villages destroyed? Climate change, I take it personally!
Reason #2: My Grandfather Taught Me To Respect Nature
Often in the summers as a child, my family would join my grandparents in visiting the Adirondacks. Grandpa was
researching and writing a book about the great Adirondack explorer and surveyor Verplanck Colvin, and we’d join
my grandparents on adventures through the woods “bushwhacking” to find long forgotten survey marks left by
Colvin in the deepest woods. We also climbed the high peaks of the Adirondacks to find Colvin’s survey markers,
and at the tops of these incredible mountains were often endless rocks that you had to scramble up to get to the
peak. On these rocks grew lichen. As kids, we paid little attention to where we stepped and often trampled across
the lichen. We would also rip up some of it from its precious place clinging to the rocks, because we were curious
about it. Grandpa scolded us often and told us the story of the lichen plants that were thousands of years old, and
may have lived on the rocks since the time of the dinosaurs. His story made us think, and we then made a game
of trying not to step on the lichen. Grandpa also taught us repetitively the “carry it in carry out” philosophy for every
time we entered the woods. He spent most of his life as a Boy Scout Troop leader and brought many children into
the woods for camping trips and environmental educational excursions. To this day, now in his late nineties, he
looks over pictures of the Adirondack mountains that Colvin surveyed, and shows people his book. To this day, I
think about lichen, and still utter the phrase “carry it in, carry it out!”
Maybe if we all uttered the simple catchy phrase "carry it
in, carry it out" we could make a difference toward
climate change?
Reason #3: I Was A Reporter Covering Environmental Issues
For a number of years I had the best job of my life – working as a small town newspaper reporter in upstate New York. As a reporter, I covered everything for the community from cop reports to school board meetings to wacky stories, such as a woman who had a giant puffball growing in her garden that looked like a face. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. The rural area I was covering for news had many environmentally sensitive issues impacting it, with New York City pressing itself further north there were many land development concerns and the area was filled with fragile eco-systems that were under threat. I was an eye to all of these issues. I wrote a series of articles about the Wallkill River in upstate New York, and explored all the environmental threats from farming, to industrial waste to general pollution that threatened this river. For this I won an award, and got the attention of then Governor Mario Cuomo who cited it as an example in one of his speeches. I didn’t have to cover environmental issues to the extent that I chose to, but I made it my focus because of my love of the natural world.
There
are many, many, more deeply personal reasons why I love the environment, but
the above are three of my own reasons why I feel strongly about the issue we are
all facing of climate change. I’m sure that the 8,000+ bloggers writing posts
today also have intensely personal associations with the natural world, and I’m
interested in reading some of the other posts that people share for Blog Action
Day. Many people are going to write about the upcoming gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference and maybe if those world leaders give some contemplation of personal memories they have because of experiences in the natural world, they will care a lot more about climate change and do a lot more to make it stop happening.
I’m also interested in your personal stories about climate change here on Vox.com, so please join in today and register your blog at www.blogactionday.org
Concerned about climate change,
-Lisa
*The above images were found on Flickr and credit goes to:
Polar Bear:
Greenz4u’s
http://www.flickr.com/photos/80079525@N00/
Coast of Maine:
Ken Lund http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/
Freeduh2’s Photo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26862761@N03/
100,000 people would be selected to live in each hidden city.
The number was decided based on space in the cities, but also because those in charge liked the round number.
100,000 was a milestone number for many things at the time. Web site pages celebrated when traffic hit 100,000 views. The introduction of Google Wave was only given to 100,000 lucky first testers. Prize money was often set at 100,000.
For such an important decision, the selectors may have sat around and calculated all kinds of variables and equations. They did put consideration to staffing of the hidden cities, and how many people in key roles would be needed, and when the jobs were added up the number came very close to 100,000 for each hidden city's population. The selectors rounded up to 100,000, and the number had the feeling of being a lottery card. For the 100,000 people saved in each hidden city, millions would be left out to face the change, and likely die.
Among the 100,000 people selected, everyone would have a pre-determined role, based on the skill they brought to the hidden city. Some of the roles included:
- Builders
- Architects
- Engineers
- Botanists
- Breeders
- Teachers
- Hydroponic farmers
- Nutritionists
- Digital archivists
- Computer programmers
About 500 roles were planned for the inhabitants of the hidden cities, and the selection process set out to recruit people for the roles. The selectors observed people who they thought would have the needed skills, from afar, for several years. Often someone would appear to have the necessary skills to fill a role, but personality traits would interfer and pollute allowing them as a choice.
During the selection process, candidates were secretly put to the test -- with challenges being pushed on them to see how they would perform. In some cases pressure was put on them with unexpected tax audits that forced a candidate to face bureaucracy and the threat of financial issues. Those who tackled the tax audit challenge by remaining calm and addressing the issue passed this test, but many cracked under the pressure and displayed anger and excessive emotion. The selectors wanted those who could remain calm and level headed under any situation.
In the hidden cities there would be many stressful challenges. All of the 100,000 residents would have to have the peace of mind to face daily hurdles.
Thank you for following my transmedia journey -- to find more of the story, cut 'n paste the tag Haiはい。into Google,
-Lisa
*Flickr photo by Enrico Weber: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skintype/
