Art Basel, Nature, and the Wealth of Nations, by gimleteye

This week, the world’s art glitterati, their dealers and posses will descend on Miami for Art Basel’s winter edition, where “an exclusive selection of more than 200 leading art galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa will exhibit 20th and 21st century artworks by over 2,000 artists.”

Half a world away, thousands of government officials and NGO’s are discussing the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. The disequilibrium has never been more dramatic between the stuffed economic elite and the world's rising, hungry aspirants.

Reverse the missions and the result would be better. Lock the world’s wealthiest, represented by Art Basel, on an island in the Pacific and task them with concrete measures to stop carbon emissions and put the world’s government bureaucrats to debate the merits of an art exhibition: we couldn’t do worse.

At Art Basel, where Netjets is a sponsor, man, nature and the environment will be a theme hung on the walls or incorporated within site specific installations, but it is unlikely that any will focus on the 3 million acre disaster unfolding in America’s Everglades, whose edges once bled right to the shore of downtown Miami but have been chased by suburban sprawl to geographic boundaries fixed by politics.

This week, the National Park Service is celebrating the 60th anniversary of Everglades National Park. It is a muted celebration.

By fiat, the Bush White House recently excised the Everglades from the list of endangered UN World Heritage sites. Only last week, the St. Pete Times reported that Richard Harvey, long-time official with the US Environmental Protection Agency in the Everglades restoration project, was removed for political reasons.

Of 347 Christmas ornaments created by artists whose designs represent America’s national parks, memorials, historic sites and monuments, displayed on the tree in the Blue Room, the White House website features the Everglades, where from historic norm the official bird count has plummeted 95 percent.

The US dollar is cheaper than dirt. That has nothing to do with birds, except to the extent that both the withering of the dollar and disappearance of moral resolve to fix the environment predict hard times ahead for the United States economy. Some say, not to worry. A cheap dollar increases investment and stimulates jobs.

The Russians already own much of Sunny Isles, just to the north of the teeming art fair. One condo’s occupants and visitors in January could summon a quorum of the Duma.

But it’s another bear on the corner that has official Miami in night sweats: the region is the epicenter of crashing housing markets. The political origins of the housing boom, and subsequent collapse of world credit markets, was right here—where Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, was propelled to nearly a decade of service for whatever could stimulate more building and construction.

Jeb was convinced, and nearly every policy initiative buttressed his predetermined conviction, that protecting the environment depends on a strong economy.

It is a family virtue, expressed along the same lines by President Bush in the New York Times today, on the meeting in Bali and the intransigence of the United States: “Our guiding principle is clear: we must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.”

Local elected officials serve the development industry. Just last week, they approved more incursions of growth toward the Everglades, the subject of a $20 billion ecosystem restoration effort in which all parties are failing. County department heads, last week, also voted to approve county zoning changes that will lead to two new nuclear reactors at the edge of Biscayne National Park, despite any evidence at all that sufficient water exists to cool them.

It is hard to assess which is more overwhelming: the plan to draw 90 millions of gallons per day to cool new nuclear reactors in a region suffering from the combined effects of chronic drought and suburban sprawl, or the carbon footprint of private jets and yachts descending for Art Basel in relation to the urgent entreaties from Bali, halfway around the world.

In their limos from Miami International or Opalacka Airport, the Netjet grandees of Art Basel Miami Beach are going to speed past the natural history of South Florida as they may have sped past it in their own homelands and home states, on their way to buy art that causes, for at least some, a moment to pause and to reflect, what a wonderful world it is.

The industrialized nations may not always be so rich to afford climate change, but for the time being, it is a wonderful world.