Articles by Kit Stolz

She discusses her new environmentally themed show

This spring a small-but-innovative dance company in Southern California called TRIP Dance Theatre premiered a production about what poet Gary Snyder calls "the war against nature." The dance was called "Poisoning the Well."

Using delicate, Asian-flavored music, played live, the dancers first appeared carrying water and gathering around a well. Slowly the audience could watch the grace and beauty of these dancers, four of them women, literally turned upside down by human desperation, greed, and the raw flow of our "effluent society," including elegantly simplified depictions of "red tides," the vast gyres of plastics in the oceans, and "drunken" trees.

The dance was both gorgeous and upsetting, but required very few words words. To better understand, and to introduce TRIP Dance Theatre to a wider audience, I asked company founder and choreographer Monica Favand Campagna to talk about her work:

Nuclear power is too risky

This past weekend the Ojai Poetry Festival featured the great American poet Gary Snyder, who read to a large crowd of listeners mostly from work written this century, especially his 2004 book of haibun called Danger on Peaks. (Haibun, we learned, is a mix of prose and haiku: Japanese professor Nobuyaki Yuasa has described it as having a relationship "like that between the moon and the earth: each makes the other more beautiful.")

Snyder read poems linking the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001 by the Taliban to the destruction of the Twin Towers, among others, as well as an indelible new poem called "No Shadow." He concluded with his classic "For All," the conclusion to which was recited by all the poets and the crowd.

He then went away from poetry for one moment to warn of a recent trend toward nuclear energy.

"Some people who should know better," he said, mentioning Stewart Brand, were calling for the construction of new nuclear power plants to hold down carbon emissions. Snyder objected vociferously, arguing that climate change would not destroy life on earth, though it might make things difficult for humans for a few hundred years. He specifically went after famous British scientist James Lovelock, the man who first formulated the concept of Gaia, for saying nuclear waste is overly feared as a pollutant.

No more canaries in coal mines, please

While on a book tour recently, Bill McKibben made an interesting point in an appearance in Santa Barbara. McKibben -- a former New Yorker writer who wrote his first book on climate change back in 1989 -- told the crowd that to expect the Sierra Club and traditional conservationists to take on global warming with "the grammar of wildness" that John Muir drew from his life in the Yosemite Valley back in the 1860s was impractical and unfair.

He suggested that "we're all looking for the next metaphor" for global warming.

Yesterday Southwestern reporter John Fleck posted a good example of why: a list of stories published in recent months employing the "canary in a coal mine" metaphor. Many of these stories were terrific, including the very first one, from Corie Brown at the L.A. Times.

But it's clear: the canary metaphor is exhausted, perhaps dead. We need a new one. Suggestions, anyone?

Will it be adaptation, mitigation … or neither?

Despite a lot of talk, this nation has done little to restrain global warming, either in terms of mitigating carbon emissions or adapting to the climate changes that will come.

Some nations around the world -- wealthy nations such as Australia and the Netherlands -- are beginning to adapt, while poorer nations -- such as Malawi and India -- can't afford to.

In a superb piece of reporting last month in The New York Times, four writers reported on "the climate divide," elegantly laying out the issue. Andrew Revkin followed up this week with a look at an ensuing dispute over what to do about it -- a debate between rich and poor nations at the U.N. Revkin quietly watches the delegates debate over cheesecake with raspberry sauce. It's an emblematic image, and a must read.