An excerpt from my interview session with Ken Williams.
peace,d

Brilliant!
d

Click HERE

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, a world without money. A close friend sent this along to me, if you're an online junky and have the time it's worth checking out.
peace,
d
_______________
Friday, June 22nd
3 PM - 6.30 PM

Worldchat 7080 / Intercultural Dialogue

The Future of Money
Generation 7080 (De Balie, Amsterdam) organises an ongoing intercultural
dialogue and connects the cultural elite through simultaneous digital
and live debates. Together with Platform 21 and Wyspa Art Centre
(Poland) the theme The Future of Money will be discussed. With a view to
a forthcoming collaboration with Ottawa, we look forward to welcoming
many of you at this Friday's session. Simply log in and join the
discussion.

Money has ruled our lives for centuries and its reign is not in decline.
Or is it? Will money continue to dominate our dreams and careers in the
future or can we imagine a world without it? Would that world be a more
loving, caring, peaceful place or would it end in a war of all against
all and throw us all back to the Stone Age?

Join the online and live discussion! Listen to experts and artists from
around the world, and share your thoughts with them and us. Platform 21:
Anthony White (artist), Douglas Grobbe (director of ABN-AMRO) , Bernard
Lietaer (designer of the euro currency) , Karim Benammar (philosopher),
Henk van Arkel (of Social Trade Organisation), Mukoma Ngugi (Poet) ,
Doug Henwood (journalist) , live music by DJ Sjam. Wyspa: Performance
by Hiwa K. Performance by Honorata Martin, Initial presentation of the
book "Alternative Economies Alternative Societies" by Oliver Ressler ,
music with visualisation by Bartosz H_12 Hervy.

To join the chat session from elsewhere, email worldchat@balie.nl.
Log in at www.debalie.nl/chat to join in.
For more information see www.worldchat7080.com.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Location: Unknown

Here we go again, another personal process of battling with time. Time is quite obviously pervasive and in being pervasive it has a tendancy to be inescapable. However, how you choose to react to time is a whole other question. One of my goals of this project was to slow down. To make a feeble attempt at getting outside of the timeframe the operates throughout much of the western world. I can tell you, so far, although I have tried to break free, I have for the most part failed. The western view of time is built into me and everything that I’m trying to accomplish out here on the road. It’s a beautiful ideal to exist out of time, but it’s pretty damn near impossible when the rest of the world, all your human relations still exist according to the clock.

Living with my Blackfoot family for the past six months has definitely taugh me a lot about my relationship to time, and how I’m sucked into rhythms and movements that are a somewhat forced and unnatural construction. I’ve hopped into trucks to go get gas, only to find myself hours later in strange new places taking the time to listen to beautiful stories. My guides have taken me outside the realm of time, but I’m still stuck. I can’t shake the sense of urgency, the sense of having places to go and things to get done. I wish I could feel like an infinite being, but instead I feel surrounded by limitations where if you don’t get it down now, you’ve somehow failed.

This idea of failure is ridiculous since if you even just glace beyond the realm of hours and seconds you quickly come to realize that everything happens in it’s own time. Everything happens in it’s own time, this to say, not according to our attempted control over time.

I’ve seen beyond the hours and seconds, yet am unable to break away from my own self-created time limitations. Consciously I realize that all of this, hurry up, go, go, go, is a total farsical nightmare, and what’s worse is I would argue it’s having a detrimental impact on our environment, our personal well-being, our children, our entire reality.

What’s the point in trying to go so fast? I would say it’s all about competition and ego. Competition not only between human beings trying to out-progress each other, but competition between nations, everyone racing to extract resources before they’re all gone, everyone racing towards weaponization of space, everyone racing towards some unattainable endgame that doesn’t even exist.

I can’t help but think back to the turtle and the hare. I wear a turtle around my neck, a dear friend gave it to me, it’s supposed to be a symbol of longevity. The universe is said to rest on the back of a turtle. These days it reminds me to take it slow, and it carries the lesson that only in taking it slow will longevity be realized.

Still, it’s easier said than done. The pressure of ‘reality’ is oh so powerful. For me it relates to the bigger, yet insignificant picture of me being a filmmaker. I want to succeed and I don’t want people to perceive my process as crazy, although maybe it’s already too late for that. But in any case, in wanting to succeed I’m wanting to conform, and in wanting to conform I’m losing the very essence of what I’m looking for. A separate reality. I’ve had glimpses into this reality so I know it’s there, under the surface, but to get deeper into it I have to continue to let go. As do all of us.

There is another way to live, I just haven’t found it yet. But I will.

peace,
d

Just saw this film last night. It's a great one, put it at the top of your list!
peace,
d

Vicious cycles... that's what I was wanting to write about.

So we don't want to destroy the environment anymore. Good idea. The problem lies in political will, right? We need politicians who are going to stand up and fight for what's right, politicians who will fight for protection of the environment. We need politicians who are going to stand up to industry, pollution, and do what's right.

I would argue that good politicians are hard to come by, and that's what makes them good politicians. And in the end unfortunately politicians are voted in by the people, and people are able to survive in this world through benefits provided by jobs, good ol' fashioned hard work provided by industry. We need jobs to feed our families, and we need jobs to buy more 'stuff' provided by industry, and therefore we need politicians who will make sure we have jobs, stuff, and an industrial complex. Environmental protection = good idea. Job loss, and no more 'stuff'= bad idea.

So it's all interconnected. And I know the solution lies somewhere in the greening of our economy and jobs built around sustainable practices. But, we still get into trouble when you look at the basic fact that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and stuff to keep our current reality afloat. All of this energy and stuff is based on resource extraction, transportation and a standard of living far beyond the planets capability.

How does your standard of living measure up? Click Here For Your Ecological Footprint

peace,
d

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I had a bazillion things to blog about, and now, my mind is utterly blank. I wonder why it is that I do all my best writing late at night. I think it has something to do with the collective unconscious and/or metaphysical silences.

My conversations with Brennan have definitely triggered various thought processes regarding human optimism in a better world versus holding on for dear life as our current world goes to hell. To be honest I'd rather be optimistic but am cursed by a mind that is unable to stop breaking things down. Someone says lets all plant trees, and I think of the fact that while planting trees is a great idea, what about the amazon rainforest's being cut down to grow soy.

I was out on the Peigan Reservation a while back and a friend started picking up garbage laying in a field. I started laughing, not because I don't believe in picking up trash, but because meanwhile there are people all over the reserve tossing garbage out car windows. If you want to affect change I told her, start a campaign to change local ideas surrounding garbage, otherwise, it's like doing the dishes in a house slated for demolition. Is that bleak? I dunno... but it goes back to trees and the idea of planting them. Sure we can plant trees, but who is really willing to plant a tree, where did the tree come from, who pays for the tree, how is it transported, what about infrastructure, and try telling a beggar in Bombay he needs to plant a tree, he has other things to worry about. Meanwhile as we're out doing good, planting trees, trying to mimic mother nature, they're still cutting down the amazon rain forest at an alarming rate, destroying a wealth of biological diversity for monoculture. This wealth of biological diversity can't be replaced by a tree planted by man.

I want to be clear, I'm not trying to diss the idea of planting trees, I do still think it's a good idea to pick up garbage and plant trees. It's just an example of how my mind works, I'm just having a hard time maintaining my optimism.

But does that mean give up on good ideas and good intentions.. NOOOO WAY!! Fight for the idealistic right to plant a tree and make change! Fight for consciousness and awareness! Fight for a better world! Fight against idiocy and environmental destruction! Fight, fight, fight!!! And if you still have ideals and optimistic views of the world, protect them with your life, don't back down to realism... Bah.. realism..

Change is the only constant, change is coming, it will be us who determine what our future becomes. The planet is a reflection of it's organisms. The planet mirrors our actions and if we change our actions, I think we can change our planet. Anything is possible... although maybe not probable ;-)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I think the real answers lay in stopping.. just stopping most of what we're doing. Mother Nature will then take care of the rest. How do we stop, that's the million dollar question.

peace,
d

Some excerpts from a conversation I've been having with filmmaker Brennan Wauters who is currently out in BC. We're talking about some future collaboration, but I also thought the inbetween content may be found interesting to readers. k peace, d
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(Brennan)
If you are in Edmonton, I highly suggest you meet the folks from Technocracy Inc. They have what I think so far is the best possible idea for solving the problem you are examining in your film. The solution is somehow related to making human exchange rely upon the use of units of energy as currency. So you trade in calories, of Kilowatts, or BTU or some other form of tangible energy unit. It’s a long and complex story that few people are currently able to wrap their mind around, but from all my research and imagined scenarios, there’s a solution to our conflict with nature and ourselves wrapped up in looking at pure “energy”.
_______
(DG)
when it comes to my global optimism, currently I feel it's more about getting out while you still can, not so sure I feel there's a way out of this mess, but in saying that, I trust that the mess is all part of a larger process, there's always an upside to down, just maybe not for most of humanity. yikes.. gloomy ;-)

No but seriously, I think this is what my film may end up being about.. not trying to change the course of humanity, but instead acknowledging where it is we're headed and the bigger why of it all. (atleast that's where I am now)
_______
(Brennan)
(I just read an article that states that the bees are disappearing, perhaps, by combination of cell phone transmitters and pesticides). The dramatic reduction in bee populations is alarming. It’s a very good indicator – the canary in a coal mine as it were.

Global Optimism. That’s a big one. After many years of feeling that there is no solution, I’m convinced that there are solutions. Many. Just to give you an indication, I’ll start with the largest: Afforestation. That’s right. Plant trees. I’m hoping to start a global project where everyone on the planet plants a tree. That’s what? 7 Billion more trees? We have to control industry. We have to change our tax system. We have to change our “monetary” or exchange system. We have to get rid of the fools at the top who think they can control so much all at once. The Federal Reserve in the US is a serious culprit of development. One solution is to dissolve the Federal Reserve in the US. The World Bank must be held accountable. Universal Health Care is essential. Agrarian subsidization is essential. So too is Urban Agriculture. The critical mass of people required to cultivate large amounts of food on minimal land masses is only possible with large human inputs. This is where the argument about population breaks down somewhat. This is where things become complex.

There have been three studies conducted to calculate the amount of useable energy created by the planet from a year’s worth of solar energy (transformed to a usable form via photosynthesis). The natural carrying capacity of the Earth is about 2 Billion people at present. There are many factors involved in this calculation. For example, the moment you pave more roads, your energy conversion coefficient is reduced. So development as we know it now must be redirected to projects that create energy for human consumption. At this moment in time, humanity can’t really afford to invest any effort into luxury items and/or consumer items that offer only token symbolism at best (Diamonds are a great example of this). Cuba is the global example of what I’m talking about. Garden Forests, low level entrepreneurship, etc. If you get a chance, please see the film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Oil Peak. Along with all of these changes, military aggression must stop. That’s a no-brainer. Military action is simply too destructive, too expensive, too energy wasteful. The key to all of these solutions is energy. Have you seen The End of Suburbia? Have you seen The Venus Project? Climate Change and energy use go hand-in-hand.

I think we have to confront all of this with a sense that humanity can overcome the catastrophe that is pending. The upside of down is going to be more positive than the disasters that we are creating in so many ways. I think in gaining a sense of the solutions, and the vast number of them, we can establish the collective mindset we require to overcome the hurdle we’ve created for ourselves.

I think you need to collaborate with us, and with other people we manage to bring into the fold over the course of your journey. In that way, you’ll be doing more than just observing this moment in history. Your path might have a changing influence. It’s kind of the theory of relativity to some degree.

I forgot to mention one other thing: WATER. It’s a big one. A dreaded one. As you head south, try and keep your attention on this issue. Water and Waste—really, I mean sewage, waste, garbage, etc. There are so many solutions. We simply have to forgive ourselves of our collective past and concentrate on the solutions. I feel, as we point our attention to the small solutions, we will someday look up and see the results of a greater system of creation than the sum of its parts. Do you know what I mean? If nature itself behaves in cascading ways, so too can our involvement in nature bring about a cascading effect. This is where our possibilities may reside.

_______
(DG)
I like the optimism. It's a well needed dose. I spend the duration of many interviews talking to people about how the paths of economy and environment are intersecting.. and how we're in DEEP trouble as a result. So simple ideas of planting trees, urban ag, tax shifting (all things I agree with strongly) are soo very welcome! Maybe I should be taking a break from the doom and gloom and interview you, hehe.

I still remain somewhat feeling that it's about getting out.. since if you really think about it.. stopping what you're doing, can be one of the best examples anyone can set. I think about this regularly.. stopping filmmaking and just stopping... building a greenhouse, getting off the grid, and living a VERY frugal lifestyle (which I think may be my next doc, by the by) leading by example. It's pretty easy to talk about reform or radical ideas while working to fight change, but, if you think about it, the work itself consumes energy and takes you away from planting trees and/or growing food to add to the global energy base. You know what I'm saying? It's about slowing down, including us. Walking the walk, instead of talking the talk.. or somehow finding a TRUE balance of both.

I also agree that there's a cascading affect and we can affect change, the issue is infrastructure. So many lives at present are built around a system that is about resource extraction and development. For example in the North, historically subsistence hunters.. now a large number of the Inuvialuit & Gwich'in are in favour of Mackenzie Gas Project development that will destroy vast swaths the land on which they've survived for generations. Why... Jobs. This is where the paradigm shift needs to occur, we need to move from spending our time working towards resource/environmental destruction, and head towards taking back our time, and taking back our planet! But tell that to any 9-5er (maybe including yourself)... we all gotta pay the bills yo. And there's the problem, human energy input, and for what?

These thoughts lead to paradigm shifts in perspective, which unfortunately I see very few of us willing to accept. Our reality is far too comfortable. And this leads me to doubt and pessimism, although I have no doubt that I'll spend my last days, going down fighting.

peace,
d

Finally leaving.
For real this time.
I'm the one who's going, going, gone.
Out of this place.
Heading south.
It hasn't all lined up.
But then, maybe it has.
I've captured footage.
I've captured interviews.
I've captured experiences.
Or, maybe it's captured me somehow.
I'm stuck here.
And although my body may leave.
I think parts of my spirit will remain.
It's that oh so familiar pain.
Of leaving.
Of saying goodbye.
Or, Kiitaatamaasin.
I'll see you soon.

This has been a big place for me.

peace,
d

Trumpeter (1996)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Where Women Become Bears and Children Speak to Birds
By: Molly Yoneko Matteson

Trumpeter

"It is not down in any map; true places never are." Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

We pick blackberries from the head-high shrubs arcing toward the trail. My fifteen-month old daughter, whose spoken vocabulary consists of "dog," "bird," "owl," and "book", learned to identify blackberry bushes on our first outing a few days ago and now she makes an eager squeak when the plump, glossy berries loom into view. Today I want to just walk, to get a little further on this path I recently discovered in the hills near our house. A ridge sprouting a line of white oaks entices me onward. But summer insists that we stop.

As we lean into the shrub, my legs buttress the baby on either side to keep her from plummeting head first into the jungle of thorns. We weave our arms around the clawed boughs and pince midnight-colored fruits from their perches. We work silently in the hot, still afternoon, our lips and tongues turning violet, and I am nearly faint with happiness. For a few moments, I imagine we are a mother bear and her cub, this hill our home and the valley beyond a wilderness. I pretend I am teaching her how to forage, how to find her way along this golden slope.

When we turn around, I am once again a thirty-one year old woman living on the outskirts of an urban area inhabited by 300,000 people. I am three thousand miles from my childhood home, to which I fly once a year for a visit. We get our food from the store. The paths we take most days are paved with asphalt or concrete.

We are not wild creatures. We do not live in wilderness. But Summer, for a few more years, will know that we do.

In his book, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, Frederick Turner asserts that the story of the European conquest of wilderness throughout the world is fundamentally about the substitution of history for myth as a way of understanding life. Throughout nearly the entire course of human existence, people believed that the Earth is a living being, that time moves in circular pathways, and life is ultimately a mystery that cannot be fathomed. Magic and monsters were real. Every place and every thing was wild because people themselves were not separate from the wilderness.

In the Western worldview, however, which originated in the movement away from hunting/gathering lifestyles to agriculture, the locus of things sacred and mysterious moved to a singular God, residing in a far-removed heaven. The view of the Earth and all other nonhuman inhabitants as soul-less things - what Morris Berman calls the "disenchantment" of the world - was cemented with the triumph of rationalism and science in Western epistemology. Whereas people of oral traditions had seen themselves wrapped in an infinite spiral of time, in which past and future were not so very different from the present, Western culture adopted the historic vision, in which time was linear and nonrepeating. With the rise of technology and the promise of science to make all things known, the march of time also became a march toward "progress," that radiant destiny where life would be devoid of struggle.

I consider the pictures we hold in our minds, of the places we inhabit, travel to, or dream of visiting. My daughter presently dwells in a world that is pure magic, but so normal, there is no mystery in it. A flock of geese sweep out from the horizon, then swirl away, gone completely. She is old enough to remember birds when she sees them, but I do not think she wonders yet where they come from or where they go. They are simply there. Her "mental map," as geographer Yi Fu Tuan calls it, her conception of the landscape she dwells in, would be nothing any cartographer could recognize. It would be a rhythm, like slow ripples on a river, and she would be the passenger on a tight little boat floating with the current. At one time I was the boat itself, but no longer. Now, I am usually the captain, but that is changing, too. In this vision of her world, her daddy, her home, her toys, our dog, would be on the boat with her, and flashing through the sky or leaping occasionally out of the water would be moments of brilliance and tragedy, such things as blackberries and a drop of bitter medicine.

The landscape of a child is one marked by stories. In my memory, the Vermont farm where I spent most of my summer vacations is an enormous anthology, filled mostly with my own adventures, but also containing the stories my father told me about his boyhood, and the quirks and disasters of ancestors. A maple tree is no simple organism, but the graceful matriarch on which Dad hung three swings, one for each of his daughters. A brook running through brushy woods was the dwelling of a benevolent witch who befriended two orphans, otherwise known in life as Mollie, Ruthie, and Carol.

Not every place was wild to us. Certainly the forest was more mysterious and exciting than our backyard in town, but no piece of the world lacked potential for magic. It seems to me that this mythical view must be organic, as natural to the human mind as speech and symbolic thought. To a young child, fairies and the bogeyman under the bed are not fancies of the imagination - though they might say so to an adult, in order to please and sound mature. In my bedroom, where I slept alone, a tall, black monster with menacing, outstretched arms stood in the corner. I cowered from him, though he never came closer. I think sometimes that he hasn't left me, but has just disguised himself as angst, self-doubt and indecision. It might be nice to have him back, so that in the morning I could have the relief of seeing him gone, and the bedroom corner lit by sunshine.

Stephen Trimble and Gary Paul Nabhan wonder in The Geography of Childhood what will happen to the children of today, when so many are exposed only to human-made objects, experience only human-dominated landscapes. Instead of cataloging the songs of different birds, they memorize the sounds of different automatic weapons, as one child in south-central Los Angeles reported he could do following the 1992 riots. Jared Diamond discusses the intimate knowledge New Guinea forest dwellers have of their environment. Children learn to distinguish numerous snake species at an early age, so they know which ones they can eat and which ones are poisonous. Most American children would flunk a snake species quiz, but would ace an exam on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Frederick Turner contends that it was the Western view of wilderness that not only impelled European conquest of other peoples and land - it is what allowed it. Just as a person must envision a house before they build it, so the Western mind had to envision a world it was meant to explore, claim and improve before it would take steps to do so. The myth-believers, those whom some call "indigenous" peoples, did not invent the technology and social organization to domineer and develop because their worldview did not allow it. There have been critics of the "aboriginal myth" (myth here meaning a "lie" instead of a story structured by mystery and the unknown) who take umbrage at the notion that American Indians, or other "primitive" peoples were somehow altruistic in their ecological restraint. This seems not likely to have been the case, as humans have had significant detrimental effects on animal, and probably plant, populations for millenia. The earliest human arrivals on the shores of New Guinea, 40,000 years ago, were able to severely alter the native biota, wielding only stone tools, according to Jared Diamond. Two species of large wallabies and a group of rhinocerous-like marsupials are among those animals known only through the fossil record. They went extinct thousands of years ago.

In North America, many researchers have suggested that Indian hunters either facilitated or precipitated the extinction of large Pleistocene mammals such as wooly mammoths. Even before the acquisition of guns, tribes may have suppressed specific populations of prey species, such as bison and bighorn sheep.

Still, the extermination of species by Homo sapiens has no equal to that of the last few centuries, particularly the last two hundred years. While not necessarily living in balance with nature, in the idealized sense, people who lived and believed in a mythical Cosmos were not driven to eliminate wilderness. It was not their goal to exterminate whole species to serve their own interests, as the Western rancher did to the wolf. To the Koyukon Indians, for example, as described by anthropologist Richard Nelson, humans and nature are engaged in a relationship structured by specific rules of conduct and a code of mutual respect. "All creatures, no matter how small and inconspicuous, carry the luminescence of power," he says. To violate these rules would not be a matter of being simply impolite, or even inviting retribution upon the violator and his family. To take without giving back, to pass by without noticing, would be to challenge the laws of the universe itself and to abandon one's own soul.

The Western mind was freed to approach the world as a raider because it was an outsider. By placing God in heaven, Western peoples (by which I mean, those holding the views of Western civilization, not ethnic Europeans alone) did not have to concern themselves with the revenge that might be taken against them by the wounded spirits of trees, bears, buffalo or whales. To them, that idea was laughable.

Out of the disintegration of ecosystems and the discontent of society that has been the legacy of this centuries' long trend away from an "enchanted" world, has come the stirrings of awareness that something was left behind. In North America, the 20th century wilderness movement grew out of the places, not surprisingly, where bits of wildness still remained to be experienced. Like a melody heard momentarily when a door in a hall swings open, the rhythm of the wild was entrancing and hauntingly familiar to those people lucky, and open, enough to have caught a snatch of it. The idea of wilderness, to anyone who has grasped it, is really not an "idea" at all but a stirring in the belly, a releasing of the heart. A wild place grabs the soul because the spirit of one senses it in the other, and they are pulled together like two streams in a valley. If both still flow strong and full enough, they may meet at a confluence where women become bears and children speak to birds.

There is danger, then, in perpetuating the sterility and utilitarian mindset of the Western historical-scientific approach when those wishing to preserve and recover wilderness employ predominantly rational, scientific, and quantitative arguments. For example, maps have been key tools in the effort to preserve wilderness areas around the United States. On maps are displayed the lines dividing wilderness and not-wilderness. In the debate over how much wilderness should be allowed to remain, groups squabble over these lines, where they should be, how big an area should they encompass. Lines may become a means of keeping out thought and the opportunity to enlighten, as much as a boundary on the land. When we are arguing about lines instead of showing what wildness means to our souls, we have already lost.

Similarly, the drumbeat of biodiversity is being pounded out today. This species will disappear, that one is becoming rare. The maps are pulled out to display more lines - for proposed corridors, for possible refuges. Wilderness is lost and becomes a confusion of numbers and lines and circles.

I have been trained as a biologist, and am training to become a geographer. I am quite thoroughly in love with the power of science and reasoned thinking to tell me about the world. The thought of species tumbling into extinction around the globe makes me desperate and I know that the efforts of those who ask and demand that places be set aside will be crucial to slowing the chain reaction. Still, I believe that the change in mind that we are hoping for is more radical, and more simple, than we can imagine. I look at my daughter and think that I see the mind of a young girl from a thousand, from ten thousand years ago. She does not have to be taught to laugh at a dog flinging a stick into the air, or to stare in silent wonder at a pair of owls weaving a gyre against the dying light of the day. It is there, the wild still in her recognizes it in the world. She is no wilderness "snob," a plastic cup is as interesting as an acorn, but nothing catches her attention like the dash and flutter of an animal. No fruit has been smashed and gulped with quite the gusto of berries picked by her hands under a loitering afternoon sun.

In speaking for the wild, I want to put the maps away, at least for a while. The charts, graphs, reports - I will stow them someplace, where I can find them again, but for the moment, I want to remember the stories. I will speak for the little stream that was to me a wild river, taking me down in a flatboat to my frontier home. I will explain the way the willow tree branches hung to the ground on the tree in our backyard and how we became a family of birds when my sisters and I stepped inside the space formed by the leaves and limbs.

I once lived in a place where magic was normal, and I want to say that in wild places is our best - our only - hope for preserving the source of that wonder and engagement. We cannot go back to the lives of the hunter/gatherers, but neither can we continue in this estrangement from the home of the spirits. A god in heaven is too far away. I don't pretend to know how we will live when we try to re-enter the world of myth. I only hold on to the hope that to bring back wilderness means to live as a wild being, and this will only happen as I re-discover the wild places in my heart. A child and sweet berries on the tongue are as good compasses as I have found.

Copyright retained by author(s)

You know, I’m so tired of being angry. I’m mad as hell. But it’s like the low-lying stress that fills my filmmaking process. The stress, doubt and uncertainty that exists just below the radar, that’s also the place of my anger.

But if I’m honest with myself I can clearly see that I’m angry. And I have to let it go. I have to find compassion and understanding, but most of all I have to find acceptance. I have to accept that our world is very much headed towards calamity, but that’s just the way things have to go sometimes. We can’t control the nature of change, but we can always trust that nature will change.

What am I angry about?

I’m angry that Alberta Ranchers have to fight to protect wild fescue grasses from oil and gas development. I’m angry that people are still arguing in support of the MacKenzie Gas Pipeline, when the environmental consequences would be catastrophic. I’m angry the Southern Rockies are being littered with roadways and power lines to enable gas wells. I’m angry because everything is so damn confusing, as we exist in a paradox. I’m angry I have to drive to make this film. I’m angry because we’ve all arrived at a place with no easy answers, a place where we’re all dependent upon cheap fossil fuels for our food, shelter, jobs, and material junk. I’m angry Steven Harper is in Germany arguing for ‘intensity-based’ environmental targets that would allow pollution to increase alongside our industrial growth. I’m angry because I feel so alone in my concerns, I feel like everyone else is just la-dee-da, it’s all going to be ok. I’m angry I feel this way when maybe there is hope that I can’t see. I feel most media is built up of sound bites and reasonable solutions, solutions that aren’t even close to being enough. I’m angry we all argue for being reasonable while our entire paradigm is the epitome of unreasonable actions and choices. Be reasonable and god forbid don’t challenge the status quo, don’t challenge everything we’ve built, don’t challenge our flawed genius! I’m angry because the lower and middle class, as throughout history, will likely be the ones who take the coming hit the hardest. I’m angry because ignorance is bliss and bliss is what I honestly want. I’m angry that I always feel I sound so alarmist, even while people are nodding their heads in agreement. I’m angry because I think we may just be F%$*ED and I care about this world and the people in it. I’m angry because it would be so much easier not to give a shit and maybe that’s why so many people don’t. I’m angry because I think we are going to have to let go one way or another and make some VERY significant changes. And, I’m angry at the fact that while I may talk a good talk, I’m holding on as tightly as anyone.

There… whew… got that off my chest. Feeling better now, seriously, what a relief.

Going to gather some interview content now.

peace,
d
Images taken while out with Mike Judd surveying the destruction in the Gladstone Valley left by drunken ATV riding lunatics after the May long weekend. Something else that just makes me angry ;-)

Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.
- Ramana Maharshi