In his article Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! Global Warming and Ideology Timothy Morton questions the dicothomy between nature and nurture. He says that this divide is not possible to make, and neither can we divide between human and animal. 

“When you think about ecology, your world becomes much larger and therefore more groundless. Yet it also becomes much more intimate. We've got others—rather, they have us—literally under our skin.” (Timothy Morton)

We share 98% DNA with chimps and 35% with daffodils. We have arms and legs like lobsters and cells, just like the amoebae. Darwin actually proved that distinguishing one species from another is strictly impossible. Humans as well as animals are ecological coexistences; strange strangers, as Morton calls them.

“I can't in good faith use the word animal anymore, and “nonhumans” won't work either—we are strange strangers too.” (Timothy Morton)

How does this breaking down the borders between nature and nurture affect our discussion about climate change? Where does this melting together of human and animal leaves us in the question of climate change? How can we talk about human-made or nature-caused catastrophes? How can we say, that we humans have to save nature? Does this free us from our responsibility? Or does it force us to take another approach in the questions about climate change?

“The more we know about strange strangers, the stranger they become. Are they alive? What is life? Are they intelligent? What is intelligence? Are they people? Are we people?” (Timothy Morton)

For other articles about the merging of nature and nurture see "It's Development, Stupid!" or: How to Modernize Modernization by Bruno Latour and Learning to accept re-created climates by Mike Hulme. And for the theme of humans and animals see From animal to information by Ranine Randerson.
 

“Water is in constant motion. It flows through boundaries, above and below ground, and surges as ice melts or in heavy rainfall. This inconstant resource can only be shared fairly if we collectively and individually know our responsibilities in the water-cycle and how to read and respond to the conditions around them.” (Tse-Hui Teh)

Tse-Hui Teh says, that in the future we will be connected with the whole world through technologies that makes us aware of our use of water. We will get to know, when it is indefensible to take a long shower because the water is to be used to float dried-up fields on the other side of the planet, and when it is perfectly on to use lots of water. Even though I don’t believe that this is so with water, because it is connected to the place where it is, I find it interesting to think about how we, through the awareness about natural resources and conditions we can get from new technologies, can break down borders and connect the world in a way, that makes us more united and maybe brings a bigger responsibility to each individual.
 

Read her article: RE: URGENT - You in the Water-cycle

Saskia Sassen writes in her essay When Territory and Time Seap out of the Old Cages how the geographics and power structures are being changed with global warming. We move from a centralized and centripetal national-structure towards a structure that cuts across national-global dichotomies and creates a planetary geography and power structure. This is a structure of localized practices and globalized networks.

“they can span the globe in the form of trans-local geographies connecting multiple, often thick, sub-national spaces - institutional, territorial, subjective.” (Saskia Sassen)

Read her article and engage in the important discussion about how borders and power structures are changing.

'FUTURE BRIDGE' BY ARTIST: HILARY KOOB-SASSEN

 

Artist Andrea Polli records the sound of the poles melting and shares the soundscapes with scientists and the public believing that the sounds will make the effects of climate change more of an urgent and present problem in peoples minds. She believes that the direct communication can create empathy within people and make them understand the necessity of acting fast. People need to get an intimate experience with the poles and the melting ice to understand the complexity of climate change.

“In conclusion, because of the complexity of the information and the misinformation in mainstream media, there is a need for more direct public communication of weather and climate science.   Sound offers a way for scientists to bring their messages directly to the public, by speaking to the public through recordings, web and radio transmissions and by collaborating on audification and sonification of scientific data.  Listeners often respond to sound with emotion and empathy for the scientists’ messages.” (Polli).

Is the problem that the climate change problems crosses borders, that perceivable
changes happen to far away from our social lives, that we don’t see, hear or feel them? And can art projects such as Polli’s help people move closer to and realize the seriousness of climate change?

Read Andrea Polli's article: Listening to the Poles.
 

In this poetic essay Kerstin Ergenzinger, artist at RETHINK, focuses on the act of questioning itself, which she sees as a political act itself. Thus (or in this sense) the resulting state of mind, an awareness, is also the essential of the struggle with climate change. Triggering Disquietude condenses views on borders, on perception and the relationship of man and place. It transgresses from English to German and loops asking the same questions at its beginning and its end but in different languages showing how these questions are transnational and translingual. The essay is a border motion in itself.
“Let us give ourselves over to this border motion, let us take different pathways, sensuous pathways and keep up the useless focus not blinded by efficiency and functionality.” 

Read her article Triggering Disquietude and get inspired to ask more questions and hopefully to act on these questions.

Her interactive, mountain-like landscape of an installation, STUDY FOR LONGING / SEEING (2008), can be experienced at RETHINK the Implicit at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art





 

“The glaciers, once remote and immobile, are now at our door. And the multitudes of disadvantaged are becoming actors on a global stage. Neither the glaciers nor these multitudes can be kept in that putative no-man’s land that powerful shapers of this economy thought they could rely on.” (Sassen)

Saskia Sassen’s picture of the old leaking cages refers to the nation-state structures that are slowly coming apart, creating a no man’s land of wars, violence, inequality and global warming. These conditions have been here for a long time, but now When Territory and Time Seap out of the Old Cages they are being revealed. It is becoming clear which devastating landscape these old structures of nation-state and capitalism are built on, Sassen argues. The old cages are no longer sufficient for our current situation, and problems like climate change break down borders and create a new kind of no man’s land. These new interzones are a fertile soil from which new assemblages emerge-- assemblages which are neither national nor global. They cross across the dichotomy of national vs. global but are localized practices with globalized networks. They are building blocks for planetary negotiations and discussions between different cultures.

Read Saskia Sassen’s essay When Territory and Time Seap out of the Old Cages and share your opinion. Can these new assemblages create new geographies and new power structures, breaking down our cases of nation-states and/or democracy?
 

“Against all odds, the forthcoming climate negotiations may well be Africa’s long-awaited chance to catapult itself toward a thriving, low-carbon future. Most importantly, the talks will present Africans with a unique opportunity to take control of their future.” (Sokona)

Dr. Youba Sokona, Executive Secretary of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS), sees the negotiations at COP15 as a possibility for Africa to break through and make sure, that Africa will be promised adequate financial resources, effective technology transfer and assistance as well as capacity-building, so they can build a future of low-carbon infrastructure and sustainable life styles.

As Sokona says, is it for Africa not possible to cut down their co2 emissions, since their share of the problem is already so extremely small. The only way Africa can contribute to a greener future is by making sure their development will be of as sustainable and co2 neutral as possible.

The industrialized countries must now finally settle their climate debt to Africa by fully acknowledging their historical responsibility, and therefore provide sufficient resources to enable Africa to build a developing, carbon-low society build on new technologies and renewable energy. Just as the industrialized countries must pay back by helping Africa to adapt to the inescapable changes they are already facing, says Sokona.

“Let us also hope that this time, when the music stops, Africa will not be left standing. Under a fair and equitable post-2012 regime, there should be enough chairs for everyone—including Africa.” (Sokona)

In Dr. Youba Sokona’s article, The post-2012 regime talks could well be Africa’s lucky break, you can read how he thinks Africa can possibly secure them self a better and greener future, and which role, he thinks, the industrialized countries should undertake in this development.

The climate changes seem to have the potential to break down borders between north and south, between developed and developing countries. But how do we, across borders, decide who has the responsibility and the obligation to help out whom? How do we politically, economically and ethically share the cake, or should we call it the lack of cake? Who owes whom a piece? How can we make sure that nobody gets to clean up after the party for others? And most important, how can we make sure, that everybody, independent of the borders they live within, will be able to party (however a much more moderate party than we have seen the last 25 years in the western world) in the post-2012 regime?

Janine Randerson is a New Zealand artist exhibiting at RETHINK with her artwork Cascade, which was partly developed at DMU in Denmark.

“Cascade shifts between spheres often kept apart: scientific visualisations, gathered on my creative fieldwork at DMU (the National Environmental Research Institute) in Denmark and the quotidian work of YouTubers, who document local environmental changes from the ground.”

Here in her article, From animal to information, Randerson tells about her artwork and about her experiences working in the borderland of art and science and how it was to work in collaboration with environmental scientists.

Read about how the border zone between human and non-human is constantly renegotiated when animals ‘observe’ climate change with cameras on their backs! Read about the connection between tourist videos and scientific data! Read about ‘immutable mobiles’ and ‘trophic mismatch’, which appears as cascades of change harming the migrating animals and the entire ecosystem caused by minimal changes of temperature effecting tiny changes in one chain of our fragile ecosystem?
 

We all know that the cause and effect of climate change doesn’t limit itself within the national borders, and that dealing with climate change has to happen on a global scale. But when discussing how we should cross the borders and whether the crossing or the dissolving of borders is always a positive thing, the debate gets much more complex. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen describes it, the crossing of borders is not only something to aim for when dealing with climate changes, it is additionally the main cause of the very same change of climate. Eriksen explains in his article Living in an overheated world how the connectedness of people and the massive crossing of borders by people as well as consumer goods, labor force, politics, art, etc. speeds up the world and cause a heating up and a burnout of the Earth’s inhabitants as well as the entire atmosphere.

“The mounting concerns over climate change fit perfectly into the dominant scripts for this world, a world run amok, a ”world on fire’”.

The world is highly connected and borders are broken down in many assets of life-– this is modernity, he writes. This is what we have been aiming for, for so many years.

But do we, as Eriksen suggests, need to slow down and stop crossing all these borders in order to cool down our environment and ourselves? Can we fight climate by tightening borders in the sense of physical borders, disciplinary borders, trade and production borders, and political borders? Or do we need to loosen up and support a more free flow across all borders in order to cool down the planet and ourselves again? Should our world become more localized and is this the end of the globalized world, which we have praised for so many years? Or is it possible to make a globalized humanity that doesn’t overheat our atmosphere and our health with all these cross border connections?
 

“Like soundscape field recording, data sonification presents a rich area for blurring the disciplinary boundaries between art and science.” (Polli)

Andra Polli is one of the pioneering, environmentalist artists crossing the border between science and art. She describes here in her article Listening to the Poles how she has worked together with scientists making soundscape recordings from the ice of the Antarctic. The soundscapes have not only been used as material for public concerts, but are also used by the scientists as a tool for gathering environment data. Polli describes how this kind of art produces a mutual interchange of knowledge and inspiration so that both artists and scientists benefit from the collaboration. “The soundscape is a part of the whole system of an environment and the interdisciplinary practice of soundwalking provides an alternative pathway for understanding that system.”

But can art really cross the borders between art and science? And what good does the artist do the scientist? Can artistic material eventually be used as scientific data—or would that reduce the importance of our environment? In what way does an artist have a different perspective on complex matters as climate change? And how can this broaden the scientist’s horizon and make him/her come to new realizations?

Please join the discussion of whether or not and how the borders between art and science can be broken down.
 

Welcome to the debate forum for rethinking and discussing the role borders or not-borders in the age of climate change. It is my hope to establish and moderate a discussion that covers a broad variety of perspectives on the subject of borders. The debate forum is still only in its initial phase but more content will soon be added.

The question of climate change and the way we deal with it will in many ways move or dissolve borders-- not only the physical and national borders, but also borders between different sciences, between art, science, and technology, between economies, between cultures and societies, between ideologies etc. But it does not only break down borders, it is simultaneously constructing new ones. How should we cope with borders and cross-bordering in the future?

The discussions’ point of departure will be the various articles soon to be published here on the site, but however the discussion will be open to all aspects related to the subject of borders that could be of interest to you readers and debaters.