Deeper Listening | May 2026

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Neil Zusman. Deeper Listening | May 2026: Parade — slowed observational study. (10:39) HD video; 4K master available on request.

Neil Zusman. Out Walking | May 2026: Parade — realtime source. (3:44) HD video; 4K master available on request.

Out Walking | May 2026: Parade.

5 minutes read time.

I made these May images while walking from town toward Cass Park, carrying my iPhone like a field notebook in my back pocket. The shots are in chronological order, assembled live as I moved — almost like editing in the camera before any editing began.

Some things I found because they were signs. Some were flowers, raindrops, animals, clouds, painted lines, arrows, a cat sleeping in sunlight, a dead bird, an empty discarded drawer, a painting of birds, and the sky opening again and again. Sometimes I had time to stop down and frame the shot. Sometimes I reached for the camera as fast as I could.

At Bool’s, a signboard offered one of those miraculous messages I seem to find while walking:

“When you read a book you acquire knowledge.
When you look at a flower,
Your imagination grows wild.”

I think of Out Walking as the source walk — the path as it happened. Dandelions near and far became a kind of orchestra. Birdsong, wind, clouds, animals, and passersby entered the work without needing to be explained. The Ithaca Festival parade appeared. A Volvo ballet passed through. Deer looked back at us. A robin found a worm. A family of geese moved through late spring sunlight. My dog Chloe appeared, and Stiller and her brother moved near the lake, doing the Tai-Chi form.

In May 2019, ConocoPhillips settled a lawsuit with homeowners in northwestern Oklahoma City who alleged that oil and gas pollution had damaged their soil and water so severely that no trees or flowers would grow. 🌼

A month of dandelions, then, is not only pastoral. It is also evidence of what remains possible.

The walk unfolded as a quiet essay, often without words. I sign my name at the end with golden triangles.

Walking has gradually become part of the methodology of this archive.

Not escape.
Not retreat.
A form of listening

The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west.
Henry David Thoreau. Walking. As published in Atlantic Monthly, 1862.

EPA / Lee Zeldin

EPA frames May as a month of lawful correction, practical standards, consumer savings, infrastructure growth, and health-oriented water protection. The agency presents deregulation not as abandonment, but as a way to make environmental policy more workable, affordable, and legally durable.

Emphasis

Following the law and defending agency authority
Permitting flexibility for power, data centers, and manufacturing
Delaying vehicle standards in the name of consumer choice
PFAS action framed as practical, science-based protection
Refrigerant-rule cuts framed as grocery and business cost relief

Key rhetoric

“Follow the law”
“Consumer choice”
“Unnecessary impediments”
“Gold-standard science”
“Lowering costs”

Foregrounded

Cost savings, statutory authority, implementation timelines, industrial flexibility, water-system compliance, and the claim that regulatory relief can coexist with environmental protection.

Minimized or absent

Climate pollution as a cumulative public-health burden, the consequences of delaying emissions standards, the legal vulnerability of climate rollbacks, and the public cost of weakening federal environmental oversight.

Guardian / Dharna Noor

Noor frames May through public consequences: youth plaintiffs asking courts to halt climate rollbacks, climate policy as an affordability issue, weather-data cuts as a risk to forecasting, and hurricane-season preparedness as a test of weakened federal capacity.

Emphasis

Youth climate litigation
Rights to life, liberty, religion, and a livable climate
Climate policy as cost-of-living policy
Weather and climate data as public infrastructure
Extreme-weather preparedness under staffing and data cuts

Key rhetoric

Halt
Warn
Degrade
Expose
Reckon

Foregrounded

The lived and legal consequences of policy rollback: health risks, climate instability, court challenges, data loss, forecast reliability, and the burden shifted onto young people and vulnerable communities.

Minimized or absent

The administrative language of “flexibility” and “savings” is treated less as neutral governance and more as a claim that must be tested against climate science, public health, and institutional capacity.

The deeper contrast

EPA presents May as a month of repair: correcting prior rules, restoring choice, lowering costs, and making standards legally durable. The Guardian frames the same public-policy moment as one of exposure: young people in court, climate costs entering household economics, and public safety systems weakened just as heat, storms, and pollution risks intensify.