The Power of the Powerless and the Environmental Impact of Artificial Intelligence ( AI )

I just finished the post production of my 2024 AGLSP conference presentation "The Power of the Powerless and the Environmental Impact of A.I." into a TV show. And it's online! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG8SAfw3Mz8

Spread the word. Peace, Lynette www.LynetteYetter.com

Eiko at TBA, Saturday night

Reading the text of trees, Eiko strokes the burnt ancient wood sculpted by time and flames, yet still rooted in the earth into which it will rot.

Eiko runs to greet her projected image flying red on a hillside. Fusing into a double-story Eiko bow strung with red fibers of woman’s lives. Landscape, live Eiko, video Eiko, one, while sound of rushing river rapids echoes in the vast warehouse hall. We are carried on, submerged in, the sound of water, of our mother’s womb water rushing blood pulsing eternally, as Eiko completes the woman bow of white and red and sky and hill that launches us ever onward in the tumbling life/death continuum eternal.

Eiko climbs the feet, legs, torso, chest of a man, her feet walk his height while her head and shoulders remain planted on solid flat floor. 

Eiko drapes over strong man’s back as he belly down slides on the floor, reminiscent of Eiko & Koma in a scene of LAND.

Eiko talks to us. Stands and speaks. The microphone invisible. Eventually I notice it—hung small at the end of a cord disguised by its proximity to a pillar. Eiko’s stories of loss, of recent death of choreographer friend, of death of mother, her words and full frontal presence confront my own layers of mourning. We are separate yet one, one with our deceased, one with our mourning.

Silence. Percussive rhythm of running feet in hightop sneakers on warehouse floor. Round and round the young man runs, circumambulating the interior walls, orbiting around us audience on the platform benches. Are we the sacred object whom he circumambulates? Eiko runs, her sandaled feet a different tone, a different rhythm, to the running young man. Eiko runs all out. Her 67 years of whatever pains our bodies endure over the years, her years ignored as she runs. Runs with the drive of our animal selves running. Fight or flight. This running, this fleeing is also a power. It is the soundtrack. It is the beating pulse, the heartbeat. Heartbeat of running feet. Heartbeat sound as human aerobic hearts beat ever faster, unheard by us, the seated audience, our hearts beating with the beating of shod feet on concrete. Feet shod not in cushy running shoes, but shod for other ways of moving, slower ways of moving. Yet the feet run and run and run beating rhythms with our very hearts enthralled.

Eiko runs to the exit door, flings it open and is out in the cold wet night, dark industrial asphalt. She screams, wails in mourning. The sound, the mourning, the emotion, was too big to be contained in the industrial warehouse. It needed the great outdoors as its stage.

Flowers. Huge bouquet of hydrangeas and other branches of flowers blooming in autumnal Portland gardens. Wrapped in huge newsprint wrapper, clasped in Eiko’s arms like a dead child she’s unwilling to let go of. Grasping the flowers as the paper falls. The bouquet rearranges in chaos, clutched to her heart in loss. Grief is not tidy. It is not floral wreaths on tripod stands around a polished box. Mourning grows wild from the earth, no matter how we tend it to our desires, mourning scatters even as it gathers.

All goes black.

Lights come back up. Eiko and her two collaborators stand evenly spaced, facing audience, who bursts into sustained applause. 

Eiko walks to center microphone and speaks energetic voice of appreciation, so different than her mournful voice of grief telling the stories of death and loss. Now she is thanking us all for coming to the festival; she hopes we have been enjoying ourselves. My mournful self is shocked with the sudden emotional shift, like being a passenger in a car driven by an expert racecar driver shifting emotional gears to skillfully maneuver a sharp steep curve and take a new direction.

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

Full Moon Falls from the Sky

Standing together in the living room looking out the window

Wind blowing hard from the west everything flipping around thrashing in the gale

Dust rises from the asphalt road as high as the telephone wires

Dust so thick I can not see through it

The road is unusable, too dangerous, no visibility

High in the sky the full moon shines in the northwest

Suddenly it falls in an arc to the west

Then it reappears back in its northwest high sky position

only to fall again

in rapid moonset

How can this be?

At this latitude the moon is never that far north.

Has the Earth tilted on her axis?

Speeded up her rotation?

Maybe that is causing the high winds.

No.

The winds are coming from the west.

If her rotation speeded up the winds would be coming from the east.

Maybe the moon has shifted her orbit and is speeding around the earth?

No.

Then she would show her phases as she set in the west of the night sky.

She stays full round bright.

How does the moon pop back into her position high in the northwest sky as the west wind whips the trees in fury and clouds the road with impenetrable dust?

I don’t know.

I have no explanation.

Just like the woman who the news says shot her brother dead on Friday and shot her aunt and grandmother, too. Doctors counted nine bullets in grandmother’s pelvis.

Like the full moon falling from the sky, I have no story to explain why.

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

A poem a day--Day 1--Grey Whale Die Off

At this solstice time I vow to write a poem a day for a solar year and post them here as I can.
(Although, when I decide to submit certain poems to literary journals, I'll delete them first from this blog.) Today I begin with the first poem of the cycle.

Grey Whale Die Off

Mamakocha ocean vomited 

160 Grey Whale corpses 

onto West Coast beaches so far this year.

The federal government is running out of space to bury the decomposing behemoths.

Scientist claim to have no idea why they are dying.

One Port Townsend couple with beach-front property “adopts” a whale corpse. It’s educational to watch it decompose. (Are we watching the species decompose?) The whale’s starved belly holds only bits of plastic and lots of eel grass, neither of which is part of their normal arctic diet. Desperation food that does not nourish whales.

A whale expert postpones alarm. First, he questions, “Is there any relationship to climate change? Does this link to any factors that might affect other species as well?”

Questions that reveal cluelessness about our interconnection on this blue-green planet rolling through the universe whose super-novad stars constitute our bodies. Our whale bodies. Our human bodies. The sea womb of life on this planet, the seawater red in our veins.

Our star dust bodies course seawater blood, yet we forgot the name of our Mother. 

Some stardust-seawater bodies called “human” manipulate decomposed dinosaurs into plastic, pollution, burning belches from factory stacks, car, truck, train, ship exhaust.

Forgetting “All Our Relations” some stardust-seawater bodies mass-produce deforested chemical pumped cows’ farts heating the globe.

Global heating climate crisis in this cauldron of planetary soup that is cooking us all.

Will someone please turn off the stove?

In the Salish Sea Native Americans sing and drum to killer whale Orca cousins and their still-born babies, slipping them a ceremonial salmon, hoping to stave off whale extinction.

Extinction Rebellion dances and sings a street closed in front of City Hall in Portland, Oregon.

We the people declare a climate emergency now now now.

 About this poem 

Inspired by personal experience and the following news reports:

https://nypost.com/2019/06/21/the-west-coast-is-running-out-of-space-to-put-dead-whales/

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/733955563/got-space-for-a-dead-whale

https://nypost.com/2019/04/05/federal-officials-support-native-tribes-push-for-only-whale-hunt-in-us/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/25/orca-starving-washington-feed-salmon-lummi-native-american

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/06/climate-change-protest-blocks-street-in-downtown-portland.html

https://nypost.com/2019/04/05/federal-officials-support-native-tribes-push-for-only-whale-hunt-in-us/

Lynette plays Marimba in concert 3/11 in Portland, Oregon

Put on your dancing shoes and come enjoy our upbeat music celebrating the joy of life! I'm playing marimba and singing in the group Marimba Masikati. We'll play a set near the end of an all-day free concert of six marimba bands. 11:30-3:30, Portland Foursquare Church, 2830 NE Flanders St, Portland, Oregon 97232. Hope to see you there!

https://www.facebook.com/events/1827469100862188/

Lynette plays panpipes and sings with Mary Rose's Beyond Little Boxes 3/26 in PDX

In honor of Women's History Month, we put together the program "Working Women Sing! Unsung Heroines of the Western World." Edu-tainment to touch your soul and make you think. Come hear us and sing along at 2 pm Sunday, March 26th at the Hollywood Library, 4040 NE Tillamook, Portland, Oregon.

Songs by and/or about women of the Americas in Spanish, English and Quechua (the language of the Inka). Songwriters featured are: Violetta Parra, Holly Near, Malvena Reynolds, Bev Grant, Libby Roderick, myself, and others.

In this concert I play panpipes and sing. Singer songwriter Mary Rose and I have been rehearsing together for months, learning each other's songs. It is a great honor to perform with Mary Rose, who I consider a National Living Treasure. Her trio "Beyond Little Boxes" will back us up as well as perform some of their repertoire of Malvena Reynolds protest songs. Jim Cook plays stand up bass and sings. Mark Loring (of the famous folk music Loring family), plays mandolin. Singer Jane Keefer, a longtime collaborator of Mary Rose's, will join us in song.

I hope you will pass the word to your friends in Portland, and best of all, I hope you can come and sing along.
Peace!

Why is the Beach Covered with Dead Birds?

On the Winter Solstice I went to the Oregon Coast, only to find it covered with hundreds of dead birds. Their fresh corpses lay scattered along that morning’s hightide mark on Gearhart Beach.

I was alarmed.

The birds’ feathers were barely ruffled, like dead birds in a still-life painting. Scavengers avoided them. Except one seagull who took a single peck, then left to wash out his beak in the sea, shaking his head No! No! No!

What killed this huge flock of birds all at once? Was it mass starvation? Not enough food in the changing ocean currents of melting ice caps? Too weak to continue flying in the extreme winds of changed global climate? Like feathered rain they dropped into the sea, which regurgitated them onto the sand.

I was alarmed.

So, I consulted the oracle of news, Google, expecting to find an article addressing this alarming event. But I found none. Instead I found “Dead birds on beaches no cause for alarm.” It was the headline of a 1992 print article Google had chosen to scan and digitize online, with the added commentary, “No related articles.” But what about December 21, 2014, 22 years after that alarming article?

I searched some more and learned that for the past couple of decades, or more, volunteers have been walking beaches, and compiling mountains of reports of dead birds. Some of these groups are: Bay Keeper in San Francisco, Coast Watch in Oregon, and Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) in Washington state.

How connected are these groups? It seems pretty scattered. COASST has a blog where it mentions being connected to none of the above, but only to Beach Watch in San Francisco (not to be confused with the afore mentioned Bay Keeper), BeachCOMBERS in Monterey, California, and the British Columbia Beached Bird Survey. And what about the December 24th News Lincoln County article about the bird corpse apocalypse? It calls for citizens to carry cameras and take pictures of the dead birds washed ashore from the global-climate-changed acidic seas, and email the photos to biologist Douglas Cottam of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. I wouldn’t know what to do if I received hundreds and thousands of photos of dead birds in my email inbox. Poor Mr. Cottam.

It sounds like a lot of us are worried and trying to do something, and our efforts are scattered.

Meanwhile, big business and their politician puppets keep on delaying coming to any meaningful agreement to cut greenhouse-causing emissions, as seen in the recent Lima Climate Summit. And all of us alarmed at the bird corpses washing in with each high tide, which are ignored by the media. So many different groups and people trying to do good, yet scattered. Not yet united.

Divide and conquer is a time-tested method of social control. The reports are divided and not looked at as a whole. While dead common murres and cassin’s auklets wash up repeatedly on the North Coast of Oregon, in San Francisco the self-described “novice birder” who heads the environmental organization Bay Keeper claimed in a 2011 article that common murre nesting populations are “On the Comeback Trail” on the tiny rocky Farallon islands outside of the Golden Gate (where over 47,000 metal barrels of nuclear waste rust where they were dumped on the sea bottom 300 feet below in the 1950s-1970s). Yuck. Would you want to raise your babies in a place like that?

Then there’s the tactic of turning a blind eye to the true culprits — multi-national corporations. COASST, despite all its good work, hides neoliberal military-industrial complex culpability by not including effects of global warming as a “human” factor in its cataloging the massive deaths of birds. It turns a blind eye to actions by the military industrial complex, unless it is something visible that obviously killed a bird, such as an oil spill or physical objects. Lack of food and extreme weather because of ocean currents shifted with the melting of the ice caps because of human actions and policies are ignored as causes of the massive die-offs. Those die-offs are labeled “natural.”

So, it seems that earnest volunteers braving all kinds of weather to walk the beaches counting bird corpses on the West Coast of the United States are having their findings stymied by being divided geographically, organizationally, and/or categorically. The truth is being hidden through divide and conquer. I wrote to COASST, suggesting they coordinate with more groups, such as the ones mentioned above. Their response did not arrive in time to quote in this article.

As far as I can tell, there is no one looking at the big picture.

According to Google, rarely does this ongoing massacre of birds get reported in the media.

One exception was in 2012 when the Press flocked to the Japanese dock that washed up on an Oregon beach after it broke off in the “new normal” extreme weather of a tsunami, which also triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. Those reporters and camera operators couldn’t ignore the hundreds of dead birds all around them. One article mentioned the Japanese dock and bird corpses and blamed pelicans. It was not looked at in context of continuing shorebird die-offs.

Die-offs of meres and auklets have become so commonplace that COASST seabird program coordinator Dolliver described it as sporting event:

“Both species have different life histories but are constantly in competition for the top dead bird of each year. They drive a lot of baseline patterns we see every year because they are the top players . . . “

I am alarmed.

Auklets eat krill in the sea. Krill that are often no longer there from changing ocean temperatures and increased acidity. The birds are divers and swimmers, not strong flyers, and get swept to their deaths by bigger and stronger storms. Meanwhile corporations profit from disaster “relief.” Profit is the legally mandated mission for corporations. Empathizing with our sister and brother creatures here on Gaia and preventing disasters before they occur is not included in an accountant’s “bottom line.”

Since the news didn’t mention the hundreds of dead birds I saw, I emailed Phillip Johnson, president of Oregon Shores Coast Watch. He forwarded my question to the group and volunteers responded that they had counted hundreds of dead Cassin’s Auklets last Sunday, the same day I visited the beach. It was just the latest in a long series of corporate mass murders. Here I quote directly from our email conversation:

“I put out the word to our Clatsop County mile adopters, and sure enough, I heard from a number of them that they had seen large numbers of beached birds after the last storm.  I was right–most of them are Casssin’s auklets.  One response noted 30 dead birds in the space of a quarter-mile, and noted:

Cassin’s Auklets – They have been washing up dead on the beaches for several months but in larger numbers after the most recent storm.  Bad year for the seabirds – no food in the ocean.

 Another read:

There are hundreds of dead birds on the northern beaches.  They’re auklets.

And a third, from a CoastWatcher who is also a volunteer at the Wildlife Center of the North Coast and participates in CoastWatch’s beached bird survey:

The majority of the dead birds are auklets; especially the little cassin’s auklet. There are also dead common murres.

So, what I speculated yesterday is pretty much right–the ‘wreck’ of Cassin’s auklets continues . . . “

None of this was mentioned in the mainstream news. Big business owns the major media outlets. What else are “they” not telling us?

The day I visited the Coast and mourned at the sandy tombs of these gentle beings was the Winter Solstice. Longest night of the year. The return of the sun. Of the light.

When will our long night of global corporate greed and killing finally fade away into the light?

I am alarmed, yet I have hope.

First published as "Why is the Beach Covered with Dead Birds?" on blogcritics

Vote NO on 86 (Oregon); A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Do you want banks to run Oregon, to say what Oregonians can and can't do? Do you want banks to force us to raise taxes, eliminate social services and sell our state resources (such as our public school system of free K-12 education and State Parks) to the highest bidder, and give that money to banks? Sound unbelievable? It has already happened in countries around the world whose governments did what Measure 86 is proposing -- accept loans from banks. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund call raising taxes, eliminating social services and selling state resources "Structural Adjustments," conditions they place on money they loan to governments. I saw it happen in 2003 in Bolivia, where it led to bloodshed in the streets of La Paz.

Measure 86 is proposing that the government of Oregon change its constitution to allow it to go into debt to banks. Incurring debt is a way to hold a government and a people hostage to the desires of big business, the Banks. If you want a lot more details about how banks have been doing this, you can read the New York Times Bestseller Shock Doctrine by journalist Naomi Klein.

In the meanwhile,

VOTE NO ON 86