Tibet is the High Ground

Series Title: Tibet is the High Ground (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, The Force Majeure)

Timeframe: 1991 to 2012

Exhibitions:

Late in 2005, we were contacted by people who were putting together an exhibition called The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama. We were told that many well-known artists would be in the show, and they wanted to include Tibet Is the High Ground. We argued that we wished to do the work over again, as we had been reading recent research of glaciologists and climatologists from China, India, and the UK in relation to the Tibetan Plateau, and the original proposal was no longer sufficiently relevant.

The research papers pointed out with varying degrees of urgency that the glaciers were retreating due to global warming. They predicted that temperatures on the plateau would rise as much as five degrees Celsius (maybe more) and that as snowpack and ice retreated, the rainfall in the region might stay the same or increase but surely be more intermittent. Therefore the seven great rivers that flowed from the Tibetan Plateau were likely to suffer flood during the heavy rains and drought during the dry seasons. With the disappearance of snowmelt and ice melt which supplied waters slowly and steadily into these rivers flood and drought and the suffering of many was a logical outcome.

Our new proposal was complex: Paleobotanical, hydrological, and bioregional research needed to be done to reveal species ensembles from the region—from its paleohistory, and likely from areas at lower elevation—that over time would do well in those places where the glaciers had withdrawn. The question posed was whether species ensembles could be discovered that were biodiverse, were extremely drought tolerant, and that held water in the ground such that the earth would become a sponge (as it has done in many other places under similar conditions).

Such a sponge would release water slowly, mirroring in some measure the snowpack and glacial melt that originally provided a constant flow of water to these great rivers. We understood that a water-holding landscape would have to be a mosaic, created where the hydrology indicated: Rainfall, topsoil depth, and groundwater needed to be at appropriate levels. We understood that for many parts of the Plateau where soils were thin, the sponge effect would not work.

So we produced a new text panel to go with the old imagery. The curators looked at the text panel in relation to the images and made an aesthetic decision to eliminate it, leaving the original images virtually incomprehensible (but nice looking). They believed that the image should carry all the information necessary for understanding—with the possible exception of a title. We had long believed that our images could not hold all the information we wanted to convey, and therefore they needed text. The curators (whom we found obdurate to say the least, and very narrow-minded), refused to put the text panel back. We then asked for funding to produce a new image; this image had the new text embedded in it, giving the curators no option other than removing the whole work, which they were not authorized to do.

The new text has undergone various transformations, most recently becoming a triptych of three images of Tibet; one focused on the rivers, another focused on glaciation, and a third that addresses transformation. Doing the big numbers in the third panel was a lot of fun; it turned out that what we proposed would take (by very rough calculations) several trillion dollars. But several trillion, spent over 50 years to rehabilitate several million square kilometers, seemed to us a very modest cost, given that it would reduce the likelihood of wars between the countries competing for waters coming down from the plateau, improve food production, and sequester water and carbon in meaningful quantities. Given that the leadership of the United States had spent more than two trillion in just a decade on two hugely destructive wars of very dubious necessity, using mostly monies that came from the taxes on fewer than 300 million people, we thought that several trillion spent over 50 years for the well-being of more than a billion people should hardly be noticeable, even to a somewhat reluctant world economy. Unfortunately, it does not appear that state capitalism, the ecological apparatus in the science community, and the one-person one-vote democratic community can collaborate to get much done along the lines of what we proposed. If any country could work at the required scale, however, it would be China.