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!
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