Abstract
As the devastating impacts of anthropocentric behaviors have emerged in the Anthropocene, the specter of globalized “ecocide” has also emerged, requiring creative policy solutions. The Blued Trees project was an experiment in modeling how art might forestall ecocide by legally redefining public (economic) good to reconcile with common (benefit to a community) good. This continental-scale work of interdisciplinary art was copyrighted in 2015, requiring courts to recognize an emergent overlap between copyright ownership, eminent domain law, and new forms of art. My intention was to create a transdisciplinary, art-based model for sustainable relationships with other species and across demographics, which could be scaled in the court system for policy implications. My premises were that transdisciplinary thinking—work that dissolves disciplinary boundaries—can best preserve habitat integrity in these complex, uncertain times, and that laws are the building blocks of policy. The Blued Trees Symphony was conceived as sonified biogeographic sculpture in five movements based on the eighteenth-century sonata form, with the musical structure narrating a contest between Earth rights and accountability for ecocide. The legal theory was litigated in a mock trial produced with the fellowship program A Blade of Grass in 2018. The work, which brings together art, music, and performance with law, ecological science, and dynamic systems theory, continues as a work in progress in that some of its elements, such as trees and ecosystems, the score, and the vital need to stop ecocide, remain alive and very much in play today.
Highlights
Climate change resulting from unchecked fossil fuel use, exacerbated by habitat fragmentation, overpopulation, and sprawl, prompted me to develop The Blued Trees Symphony (2015–present)
In 2015, at the invitation of private landowners, I began installing a series of one-thirdmile-long musical measures in forested corridors where natural gas pipelines or pipeline expansion projects were proposed
Each measure included at least ten tree-notes conceptualized in G major, a key that musicians a Aviva Rahmani is a pioneering leader of ecoart who exhibits and publishes internationally, modeling solutions to ecocide
Summary
Climate change resulting from unchecked fossil fuel use, exacerbated by habitat fragmentation, overpopulation, and sprawl, prompted me to develop The Blued Trees Symphony (2015–present). The Blued Trees Symphony experiments with the “in-between” space of rules from a range of disciplines, including law, music, art, and science in both content and form This project applied “trigger point theory,” my original approach to ecological restoration, premised on the principle that small points for intervention can affect the biogeographic health of large landscapes, in ways akin to what others have called the “butterfly effect” (Hilborn 2004; Rahmani 2012). The main difference between Higgins’s theory of ecocide and the theory advanced to protect The Blued Trees Symphony was the Figure 9: The mock trial held at the Cardozo School of Law, with Supreme Court justice Judge April Newbauer presiding. Our submission for copyright protection included the map of the Overture, a photograph of tree-notes, and the original melodic score (see figure 1) This is an expansive conception of musical composition, which includes other species—in this case, trees—as performers, acoustic collaborators in an ecologically inclusive world. The implications of the synesthetic formalism of Blued Trees and The Blued Trees Symphony are relevant to environmental justice (figure 16)
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