Dorothy Ries Faison

Earth in Crisis: What You Can Do

Two-sided oil painting on recovered Dibond panel hanging as billboard on voie de la Vallée/route du Buisson D25, the major road through Siorac-en-Périgord in Dordogne

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“The variety and scale of the challenges facing nature and society in the 21st century can seem overwhelming. That’s part of why we suggest focusing efforts at the community level. The community no is likely the most accessible and fruitful site for intervention.” —Richard Heinberg

After the review and assessment of our community’s needs this is the first billboard of ACTION outside my studio on a busy two-lane road.

Siorac en Périgord has, as a Region and City, already focused on food waste, eating local, and buying local. Based on a distillation of what one can do now and what can be broadly communicated, I have painted the first of a series of billboard paintings with two sides. The focus is on creating biodiverse habitats and reducing plastic waste with an inset view of the Dordogne River and the fact that one cigarette butt pollutes 500 liters of water. Finally, the focus is on a healthy future for our children and their children.
©
2024
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Kurofune and the Ghosts of Kalo Past

69 x 51 in, 175 x 130 cm
watercolor, charcoal, water-soluble crayons on paper
2024

Revisiting the changes in the 19th century that led to the de-localization and colonialization of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the forced opening of Japan to coal-refueling trade ships. Now, we need the resilience and healthy climate that sustainable methods of land use can preserve.

“In most communities, there are already organizations promoting local food, public transportation, renewable energy, and other issues related to sustainability and resilience. Policy makers should work not only with these organizations but also with the public in general to educate and involve community members in these kinds of projects, to further long-term goals.” -Richard Heinberg, Think Resilience Course, excerpt from the “Resilience in Major Sectors” lesson.
©
2024
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Contradistinction (but prayers are important)

Watercolor, water-soluble crayon, charcoal, collage, bronze powder on wove paper
66 x 59 in, 168 x 150 cm
2023

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“Building community resilience ultimately has to come to grips with the infrastructure that enables any community to function. This lesson looks at food, water, energy, and money systems, and how these can be made more resilient. If any one of these essentials goes haywire, a community loses its support capacity very quickly.” 
– Richard Heinberg

Once focused on sustainable community solutions, doors need to open to climate refugees.
©
2023
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Nature-based Montessori resilience education

Watercolor, charcoal, and water soluble crayon on wove paper
22 x 30 in (56 x 76 cm)
2023

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Community resilience starts with education fostering cooperation, life skills, psychological strength while developing insight into social and ecological systems’ Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute

The self-directed, hands-on supportive learning system first developed by Maria Montessori here expanded to cover natural systems and developing resilience.
©
2023
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

How big a boat do you really need?

watercolor and water soluble crayon on paper
22 x 30 in 56 x 76 cm
2023

"Resilience and sustainability require Justice … A truly resilient community must foster equity and democracy, as well as ecological renewal.”

"300 individuals ENJOY as great a share of the world’s wealth as the poorest half of humanity (four BILLION people)" –Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute

Recent events in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Oceans drive home this gross and immoral inequity that has worsened as more and more wealth has flowed to the very few.
©
2023
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Concepts I should know: brittle disasters

watercolor and water soluble crayon on found unlucky lottery ticket

6 x 4 inches - 15 x 10 cm

2023

The reliance on global supply chains has created a brittle, less resilient economy, particularly in island nations. Disruptions from climate (floods, hurricanes, heat waves …), political instability (wars, revolutions), and health (covid-19) cause major disruptions to centralized distribution that is reliant on cargo ships that significantly contribute to global climate change and acidification. Shortages in the food supply cause not just hardship but can lead to starvation.

“A more local and therefore more resilient economy is one in which people feel they have more of a stake in production and distribution as well as consumption; one in which they have more knowledge of where their goods come from and what happens to them at the end of their lifecycle.” Richard Heinberg —Think Resilience from the Post Carbon Institute

When land investment is driven by short-term profit (single-family housing, shopping malls, warehouses, and golf courses), nature conservation and local farms are not valued. Instead, the land becomes brittle as forests are removed, changing local climates and causing desertification.

These paintings are on lottery tickets discarded when they are discovered to be … unlucky. The concept of the lottery is where our problems (economic, climate, personal) will all be erased the moment we get lucky and win a random contest heavily weighted against the individual. We cannot solve our climate crisis by hoping for a miracle, either.
©
2023
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Lawnboats and the globalization of lawns

Watercolor and water soluble pencil on found folded unlucky lottery card
8 x 5.8 in - 20 x 15 cm
2023

The allegorical lawnboat trade reconstructs the history of the Hawaiian sandalwood trade: trading lawns for sandalwood. An endemic species for a non-consumable alien plant.

This undermined the resilience of the population by forcing farmers and fishers to collect sandalwood, which led to starvation and death. The planting of lawns over the next 200 years has been an ecological disaster, resilience just one of many. The moon is a comment on the absurdity of planting golf course lawns.

The painting is on a folded and weathered unlucky lottery card found on a daily walk to my studio in Southwest France. Tossed cards are the unlucky ones. Probabilities make millions of these tickets unlucky. Ironically this card is for supporting the "patrimoine" of France.
©
2023
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Lawnboats at Le Port

Altered French school poster: watercolor, water-soluble crayons and ink on an educational poster (Ogé-Hachette, Bonmati & Michel)
55 x 59 in 140 x 150 cm
2023

This vintage school poster has been altered through paint to focus on the exploitation of an aesthetic monoculture --the lawn-- in lieu of forests, biodiversity habitats and food production. Not trivial, lawns are the largest "crop" in the US. Specialization reduces resilience to internal and external shocks, climate being just one. Lawns are polluters and are wastelands for biodiversity.
©
2023
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

Water Catchment

Unlucky card: Resilience

watercolor & pencil on a found street detritus lottery card

6x4 inches

2022

Three-fourths of the forests in France are in held through private ownership. In light of the pressure from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is great pressure on these private landowners to harvest these forests for wood pellets and firewood. Sustainable yes, but the impact on biodiversity and habitat is immense. Carbon is returned to the atmosphere and a forest can take decades to reach the level of sequestration it had before the harvesting.

The goal in acquiring this forest is to create and promote a biodiversity refuge, one small parcel at a time. Planting native trees and fruits will expand the diversity, food and habitat for insects, birds and wildlife. Water catchment provides a critical resource for the plantings and a pond for wildlife on the side of the hill where no natural spring or source of water currently exists. This simple structure is emblematic of the building of resilience.

“Where resilience is process-oriented and, in ways, value-neutral, sustainability forces us to confront deep questions and uncomfortable potential futures.”

“Courage brings us back to the first foundation, People, because it is the people of the community who will build resilience—and they are the ones who need courage for all the pieces of resilience building…”.
©
2022
  • Dorothy Ries Faison

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