I Didn’t Know – Visual Summary
I Didn’t Know is a multimedia project designed to educate the general public about the connection between war, militarism, and the environmental polycrisis – climate change especially. Before I went down a rabbithole asking questions about the Department of Defense’s climate plan, I didn’t know just how much petroleum the US military consumes in a year or how much carbon emissions it releases. I still don’t know because the US rabidly fought to keep all military carbon emissions out of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
Once I started digging around, I realized that I could not just keep this information to myself or wait to write an academic paper that nobody reads. Sharing a link on my social media feeds was not enough. I needed more people to start learning about this with me because the stakes are so high. We cannot continue to subject the rest of the world to military occupation and genocide. We cannot let our government respond to climate change at home with its Gaza-tested boomerang instead of addressing the root causes. We must take responsibility now, for those who come after us.
I decided that I needed to jump into the timeline of people outside my silo. I needed to at least try to get beyond the noise of marketing and bot armies. Perhaps people will be a little more curious, might take a little time to explore, if they knew that I valued them enough to send along a little piece of myself in the mail. ANYTHING is worth a try because self-immolation CANNOT be the only way to commit my life energy. So I came up with a design and got to work carving linoleum blocks, inking them up, and layering them on blank postcards.
I started collecting resources to share with people in a variety of formats to meet a variety of learning styles. The more I dug, the more I found. I started building a page on my website to organize the sources to the best of my ability. I attached a QR code leading to the website to the postcards and created a short code: bit.ly/i-didnt-know
I collected 50 addresses from people I knew who care about the impact of war and militarism on climate change via social media and some lists I’m on. I printed exactly 100 postcards and hand-numbered each of them. I purchased postcard stamps and put them on half of the postcards. I ordered stickers with the design and short code. I packed 50 envelopes with 2 postcards – one to keep and a stamped one to send – and a sticker. I also wrote a couple letters because some of those postcards were going to friends who I haven’t seen in years. I made a TikTok ad for the project and shared it on IG as a reel. And then I put it all in the mail.
Watch a video of my artist statement here
I have 100 stickers left (as of 12/6). Would you like one? I will send you a sticker if you have a conversation with a friend about something you learned from consuming some of the resources collected in this project. You don’t have to become an expert! Just having a solid framework is enough. You could also make your own slide show or video based on something you learned. Get wild. Send me an email at PEBheather [at] proton.me with a few sentences about that conversation. I will respond to the first 100 people. If you feel comfortable, you can respond with a mailing address for me to send a sticker. Anywhere you get mail is fine. I’ll take this post down once I hit 100. Please be patient with me. I look forward to hearing from you!
Comments
2 responses to “IDK Project Post”
Dear Heather,
I’m with VFP, quit teaching at MIT 40 years ago to work full time on peace and justice. Only loosely connected with VFPs CCMP.
Just a quibble. The full portion of the federal budget going to the military is closer to 1.5 trillion according to John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review: https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/
Since I’m writing and you seem totally cool, FWIW, I’ve been working mostly full time on climate the last 12 years and would urge you to include support for Direct Climate Cooling in your climate work. Sadly, most climate activists oppose it and are the biggest obstacle to needed research. We are briefing CCMP on 3/19. I don’t see how we can change society fast enough to reduce and remove emissions without some short term interventions: https://www.healthyplanetaction.org/
Hi Jim, nice to meet you and thank you for the update on that number (although its nauseating). I’ll at that article to my list and update my blog where I can. I understand the urge to seek out technological solutions that intervene into the natural equilibrium-seeking processes of the planet, but I am not interested in protecting the status quo of extraction and exploitation for a ruling class that will happily see surplus population killed off. My view is that we need to change our worldview, interrogate the kind of futures we want, let go of our expectation of perpetual growth, and figure out how to deny the oligarchs the future they feel entitled to. Perpetuating the status quo relationships only further denies the agency of future generations. The whole reason we are in this predicament (besides greed) is because people with power refuse to account for externalities, and when they declare a state of crisis they are able to include the suspension of human rights, democracy, and the future livability on the planet. The problem is not a technological one. It is a relational one and a political one. If the climate cools by one degree with a trillion dollar investment in taxpayer-funded technology, what stops the oligarchs from consuming even more energy (which is what happens now because of the relationship…green energy added to the grid is just even more that they absolutely will consume, especially by data centers that are multiplying all over the world faster than communities can have a say if they want it or not). I’m not helping the wealth hoarders extract even more wealth.