The Music of the Trees: The Blued Trees Symphony and Opera as Environmental Research and Legal Activism

Rahmani A.

This paper presents the term Ecoartivism, for a novel nature-based strategy to address ecocide. Ecoartivism evolved from my ecoart practice, which sought pragmatic answers to chaotic environmental conditions. I advocate for how Ecoartivism draws from many influences to embrace a more intuitive but sustainable relationship between art, science, and law based on our values. I will track how my practice began layering basic aesthetic skills with science to restore degraded ecosystems, (Ghost Nets and Blue Rocks 1990-2005); inspired an original premise, trigger point theory, that small points of deliberate intervention can effect systemic change; and led to an Ecoartivist symphony and then an opera, (Blued Trees (2015 - present). My thinking has felt informed by Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK) and what some Indigenous communities term reciprocity, the idea that humans must live with mutual respect and as part of an inclusive vision of nature. Blued Trees developed a novel legal theory about ownership and what we choose to value. That redefinition led to Ecoartivism as a nature-based solution to sustainability. GPS located sentinel trees were identified as tree-notes in an aerial "score" composed of 1/3-mile increments across North America in forested corridors where natural gas pipeline installations were proposed. In a 2018 mock trial an injunction was handed down in favor of protecting the Blued Trees project on the basis of standing (a legal term establishing formal rights for due consideration in a court trial). I will explain how trigger point theory could support legal standing for Earth rights and ecosystem resilience. Blued Trees continues as an opera-in-progress to expand and deepen arguments for making ecocide accountable with serious penalties at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. This discussion will illustrate how ecoartivist strategies may support habitat contiguity, inspire and drive novel nature-based solutions to ecocide, deepening partnerships with scientists who can test and build on provocative insight.

Rahmani A.

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.