The protests by environmental activists at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico last week ran the full gamut of street theatre: signs, costumes, body painting, effigies, nudity–you name it.  The image that caught eye, however, was obviously static and even inanimate.

Greenpeace has positioned replicas of some of the world’s iconic sculptures and architectural monuments to suggest one of the sure consequences of global warming: the rising sea levels that could conceivably submerge coastal cities.  Obviously, some creative license has been taken, as no one outside of a bad B-movie studio is going to suggest that the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro is likely to get wet–its base is 2300 feet above sea level.  But in any case, we’re all in this together, right?

Well, yes, actually.  These iconic images provide a shorthand for relaying messages and activating emotional attachments within a global civil society.  Cancun is not known for its public monuments, so this display is one way of bringing the world to Cancun.  It would persuade few to point out that the buildings in the background might be flooded someday, but the Sidney Opera House would be a loss that might touch those who care about culture.  Seeing the several icons sharing a common fate of being reclaimed by the sea suggests that national interests should be united by global warming.  More important, the scene suggests a common public interest, represented by a shared public culture known in part by its visual symbols.  Left to themselves, they symbols are shown to be defenseless against the predictable consequences of unregulated exploitation of another common resource: the global ecosystem.

We get that, I think, and we were supposed to get it.  But there is something else in the picture that also bears comment.  Here I refer to the somewhat shabby tone of the tableau.  Amidst the tropical ocean and gleaming beachfront resorts, the figures look out of place, off-kilter, as if they had been discarded.  Instead of consolidating their symbolic powers, they have been diminished, as if hollow effigies deserving only fire sale prices.  Instead of rightly adorning world cities, they could be in backlot storage for a Hollywood studio.  “Where did you put the icons, Eddie?”  “Those things?  I got ’em out in back, in the containment pool.  Why?  You get an offer for that junk?”

And what would you pay for a damaged icon?

The collapse of the roof of the Minneapolis Metrodome got a lot of press yesterday, even though it wasn’t the first time that snow has caused the roof to deflate (yes, that’s the term that is used).  No one was hurt, the scheduled football game has been moved to Detroit, and the structure would have had little use anyway, so what’s the fuss?  Obviously, the damage is one measure of the impact of Saturday’s snowstorm, and, as with the Greenpeace protest, another signature building became a symbol of how society cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring nature.

What interests me, however, is how this photograph, like the one above, captures a sense of shabbiness.  Actually, the Metrodome is never far from vernacular life, as even on its best days it looked like a Marshmallow that one might see around a Minnesota campfire.  (That lack of elevation is one of the things I love about Minnesota.)  Even so, the deflated stadium looks like a cheap backyard pool or hot tub poorly protected against yet another winter.  Or, if compared with the Minneapolis skyline in the background, like some decrepit structure in an old industrial park, say, where the pork by-products used to be processed.

Rather than assume this shared mood is accidental, perhaps one might consider how the photographers have captured something important about public culture.  Monuments to civilization are not self-sustaining, and engineering marvels need to be well-designed and well-maintained in respect to environmental challenges, and even then can fail.  Civilization itself is something that is not automatically sustainable, and modern societies create particularly complex equations that may include only a thin barrier between progress and catastrophe.  It doesn’t take long at all for any modern building, city, or society to look rundown, past its best days, trapped now into cycles of decline.   All that is needed is enough denial or inattention.  Against those tendencies, these photographs suggest how close the present can be to a future of decline.

Photographs by Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press and Carlos Gonzalez/Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Not long after the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978, a friend remarked casually, “That’s why we shouldn’t have space colonies.”  This was not the typical connection made at the time, and he spoke primarily as a critic of NASA’s “manned” space program, but it spoke volumes about the tendencies that had driven the unfortunates to their deaths: fleeing the center to create an enclaved community, the strange cult proved to be all too American after all.

The story came to mind again when I saw this photograph from the European Space Agency.

He’s Italian, not American, and he’s all alone, not part of a group, and he’s working for an organization of highly trained professionals, not an authoritarian dictatorship, so what’s the point of the comparison?  Well, take a look.  The astronaut lies confined to his space suit, almost immersed in it, and moving, seeing, and even breathing now seem barely possible because of the equipment that allows him to live at all.  His head is framed by two portals: the round window behind him to the outside of the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft, and the one in the foreground through which we peer into the dim interior with its cluttered material and garish lighting.  This is an image of confinement, and also of the long term consequences of confinement while being hurled, centrifugally, into space.  We see him both as he is now in the test space, and as his successors might become after many years of exploration far removed from Earth.  Grown into machines that both sustain and entomb them, cut off from all the interaction and change of social life outside the bubble, left to the growing madness induced by the repetitive immobility of the colony, anything becomes possible while the prospects of remaining human become ever more dim.

Thus, an image from the modernist dream of advancing humanity to the stars has a dystopian hue.  Instead of touching the heavens, space travel looks decidedly claustrophobic.  It looks, one might say, like the past.

This image of a body cast from Pompeii has some obvious affinities with the one above, and also a few notable differences.  Again we see a single body immobilized, now with its head caught in a last effort to breathe and perhaps to see the cause of its destruction.  The body is framed by its rectangular enclosure of glass, which is mirrored by the framed figures in the background, and so we see it between two portals, one to the interior space and another to the society that had surrounded it.  The most important differences are that the trappings of modern civilization are here replaced with the decor of antiquity, and spectatorship has been changed from looking through a single aperture to several tourists also on display.  Here the past has been excavated, but only to be entombed again.  This is not Pompeii as it was then, a lively resort town, but the post-catastrophe ruin that silently cautions any civilization living on the edge of sustainability.

Not to put to fine a point upon it, but whether one looks to the future or the past, there is reason to see disaster as a real possibility–and one that exists not because of some unforeseen factor, but precisely because of who we are and how our society is organized.  Affluent Romans went to Pompeii to get away from the cares of the city–nothing wrong with that, but they couldn’t escape nature’s fury.  Space colonies are imagined as distant projections of our best selves, when they could become hellholes only likely to end well as monuments to isolation.  Neither are real options, but the tendencies they represent are constantly evident in contemporary decision-making.

The challenge today is not to stretch toward a distant future, no more than it is to merely stare at a long-dead past.  Far more difficult is the task of taking the present seriously, and to see the present as belonging to everyone rather than those able to move into enclaves of privilege.  Indeed, unless there is a significant re-orientation in public policy toward the concerns of a common present, the future will already be like the past: entombed by catastrophe.

Photographs by Sergei Remezov/Reuters and Roberto Salomone/AFP/Getty Images.

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