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Of all of the components of Earth Gallery One, Manatee
Alert may be the most significant. this is because Manatee Alert carried
the efforts of advocacy and awareness to the next level and modeled a
conservation program that dealt directly with the conservation issues of
the West Indian Manatee. Furthermore it did so from a "culture of
conservation" stand point and not from a mandate to be enforced by
authority.
The key to the success of Manatee Alert was the implementation of a new
mechanism by which a dimension of conservation is added to the cultural
fabric of the critical populations linked directly to the problem.
That breakthrough was and is of great significance today twenty years
later for several reasons, amongst them are:
- The fact that initiatives that ran parallel to Manatee Alert and
that today still pursue advocacy, awareness and official mandate to
enforce their conservation measures, have failed to deliver a culture of
conservation and have all but lost the genuine interest of the people.
- The costs related to conservation by force grow exponentially with
the human population growth, the further decline of the environment and
many other factors. Sadly, the survival of the entities in charge of the
conservation measures are─ obliged
to focus on their own survival and actual conservation of the species,
remains marginal by their own standards and no where near by the
standards set by Manatee Alert two decades ago.
- The Manatee Alert model clearly demonstrated that people can embrace
conservation initiatives wholeheartedly if they are given the tools, the
direction, the encouragement and the recognition for their efforts
through communal celebration and pageantry. the results obtained by the
model remain unsurpassed to this date.
- Last, and perhaps the most important reason is that we (humanity) in
the 21st century have entered an era outlined by an undeniable worldwide
climate of crisis and opportunity for either transformation or gradual
collapse. the trouble is that transformation is expensive and collapse
inevitable without a delivery mechanism for cultural transformation. The
Manatee Alert model tested the worthiness of the mechanism and the
effects of cultural transformation at a fraction of the cost of other
initiatives, making thereby the process accessible to all of the nations
of the world.
It was difficult to categorize Manatee Alert as a work of
art back then in 1987 when I launched the project. To have said then, that
the project was a "four-dimensional work of
performance art" would have sounded as ludicrous as it possibly sounds to
you now.
Yet the reconciliation between art and
life, requires a seamlessness between them that cannot be expressed any
other way. The reason is that life is a four-dimensional event which also
explains why the reconciliation was not possible before. The extra
dimension was needed just as it was needed by physics to make the
dynamical world of particle physics work.
Manatee Alert is a complex project that I
do not entirely understand myself, in fact, I spent from 1992 to 1999
reviewing the data just so I could be sure that the model and the central
ideas could be replicated and adapted to other initiatives. |
