"Animal Insurrection," Michelle Waters’ series of paintings at the Presidio’s Thoreau Center http://www.thoreau.org/gallery.html , reminds us that art can, even in the apres-moi-la-Deluge decadence of the late Bush Regime, aspire to arouse the social conscience and foster a sense of ecological urgency. Waters, a sometime wildlife rehabilitator, clearly identifies with the animal victims of human expansionism and dominion/dominionism. Her paintings are adamantly pissed off about human arrogance and stupidity —especially about our tendency to foul our nest while careering about in hulking vehicles— and yet mordantly funny, too, indulging her love of the absurd sharpened by her moral imagination into "environmental surrealism," or, Hieronymus Bosch meets Edward Abbey.

Bosch, the 15th century allegorist whom contemporary audiences tend to see simply as the visionary champ of all time, would certainly understand and appreciate Waters’ moral intent, so alien to today’s largely innocuous formalist Art Lite. Waters, like Bosch, reverts to the tradition of medieval folk art: animals hunt their hunters in an eternal Feast-of-Fools reversal of the natural order — animals, of course, just as in cartoons from Disney to "Maus," standing for the denizens of the human pecking order, and exacting/enjoying retribution. In medieval eschatology (The Vision of Tundale, Dante, Bosch), the punishment fits the crime, and grim poetic justice prevails: the lustful are tormented by snakes, toads and other vermin, for example (don’t you just hate that?). In Waters’ The Right to Arm Bears a Papa Bear shows off his bareskin rug and glass-eyed trophy mounts (like saints’ heads on chargers) to an admiring Mama and Baby. In What’s for Dinner, animals prepare to feast on roast man-beast. In Global Warming, polar bears sugar the engine of a Hummer. In Habitat Restoration, animals demolish an overpass.

But Waters’ animals are without malice, impartial agents of justice, rather, neither demonic nor angelic. No humans are harmed in the making of Waters’ pictures (given those few exceptions already cited), just their absurd symbols of power: Hummers, transmission lines, overpasses, billboards, Bobbing Bird oil pumps. The bears, mountain lions, seals, vultures, walruses, woodpeckers, and caribou doing the dismantling are workmanlike both in their use of human tools (jackhammers, axes, explosives) and in their workaday attitudes and postures. They’re restoring the balance of nature; it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Perhaps the absence of humans is accountable on other grounds: resources have vanished and they’ve just moved on, like our local Ohlone Indians; that’s the benign interpretation, anyway. In The Un-Development Agency the billboards being dismantled by the animals seem less threatening than the exhortations on the signs: "Monster Homes…Where All the Neighbors Are Like You!" We suspect that the suburbanites were vanquished less by maddened animals than by monster mortgages and monster commutes. In Land of the Free, gas-masked animals stare us down before a landscape of oil rigs, fires, and sharklike rockets; in this dystopic version of Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdoms, reflecting today’s interconnected "flat world (to quote Tom Friedman)," all homelands are insecure if any one is.

If American consumers are still capable of wising up, it will be because of the "cultural resistance to ecocide" of Waters and others telling us that Mother Earth is tired of cleaning up after us. When the Durangos run aground, the Tahoes aredrowned, and the Expeditions and Foresters utterly lost (full disclosure: I drive a teeny tiny girlie man SUV), we may repent our sin of gluttony (gula, in Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins). If we’re smart we may be able to strike a better balance, a win-win-deal, with Gaia in all her manifestations.