CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — For Lee Schnaiberg in Montreal, global warming is no laughing matter, although the Canadian artist has a good sense of humor and the odd Yiddish phrase to make a point. I chatted with him the other day via email when he had just returned home from from his ”daily indulgence” — a small bagel shop he goes to pretty much every morning for a cup of coffee and to revisit the local park where his great-grandfather sold watches at the turn of the 20th century after getting of the boat from Europe in Montreal.
If climate change is on his mind these days, it’s because he’s an artist with a sensitive mind and compassion for the future of the human species. I asked him what makes him tick.
“I’m a hundred percent an artist, and I play with a few different mediums, film and sculpture, among them, and since 1993 possible global warming impact events have been a major part of my work,” Schnaiberg told San Diego Jewish World. “After I made a series of experimental documentaries about climate change, I got tired of saying the same thing over and over and then spent 15 years here in Canada doing what I called ‘EcoCaital sculptures.’ These were time-based, kinetic, site-specific or virtual sculptures that all used capital as the main medium.”
Schnaiberg told me he had a Taiwan connection, too.
“I have a friend in Kaohshiung named Chi Kung whose father used to be the city mayor and who later started an electric scooter company,” he said. “I imported electric scooters to Canada via his company, and that’s how I met his daughter online.”
I asked Schnaiberg, who is in his late-40s, if he had a climate obsession.
“Climate obsession! I figure it’s like this,” he said. “Our species’ evolution has been linked to climate change over the past two million years, with at least 20 major climate regime changes and I feel we’re primed now for an evolution. If we make it, we will come out of it with food systems, shelter systems, and social systems that are for the betterment of us all, and a lighter, more benign relationship with our Earthly Mother. So for me, as an artist, it’s the most amazing opportunity and the best time –albeit scariest, too – to be alive and be agents for change.”
Schnaiberg told me an important event in his life was when he attended a Grateful Dead concert in New York in 1988, when he was 20, and the show at Madison Square Garden was called a “Rainforest Benefit” — when not many people were thinking about saving the rainforests yet.
”That rainforest concert really drove it home for me,” Schnaiberg said. “And you know, my Grateful Dead ‘ deadhead ‘ family’ was full of inspiring and open-minded Jewish folks like me, male and female, and that show really opened my eyes. And it led for me to a list of Jewish heroes whether they were Abbie or Noam or other Jewish iconoclasts. As a Jew, I always respected Spinoza, and thought he was what we should be: Unafraid to speak the truth.
Schnaiberg’s name also has some magic to it, he told me, saying that ”with a name like Schnaiberg, it’s hard to not be obsessed about climate change. I’ve always been attracted to mountains of snow, in Yiddish that would be a ‘schnai berg,’ and my Hebrew name is Nachum, who in our tradition was a prophet who said the waters will leave the seas and go up on the mountains. So I feel my life has been following something intrinsic to my genes.”
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Bloom is a freelance writer based in Taiwan and an inveterate web surfer and email correspondent. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter-writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence. (city and country for those outside the U.S.)