Well here we are a week after Obama took California and then the country, and only time will tell whether he will be able to deliver on his promises – the bigger the ship the slower it turns. Immediately though there is strength and momentum in the knowledge that there will soon be someone as our Commander in Chief who is at least trying to right the path we are on as a country and a world.
Congratulations, we have made it to the starting line. Now the real work begins. Today a friend said to me, the power for the most significant change exists within each one of us. If we hang onto this momentum – we may just have the makings for a perfect storm of change in these next 4 years.
Over a month after the festival has wrapped and I finally got around to looking up the short film Scott Hamilton-Kennedy recommended called The Story of Stuff. A totally depressing but great piece articulating the ridiculousness of everything we are chasing after – and the impact of that chase.
Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes) has traveled the world capturing the impact we are having on our physical environment in images that have the power to communicate the vastness of it all. They chronicle the life-cycle of the products we use every day – mining the land for oil and metals, driving slave-like conditions in manufacturing facilities, prepping new cars lined up as far as the eye can see to be shipped out for sale, constructing a web of highways and interstates in our major cities throughout theworld, and then eventually throwing everything away.
PHOTO CREDIT: EDWARD BURTYNSKY
Burtynsky has done a lot of work with mines and quarries – sites where we are essentially raping the land for our own purposes. Every mine has waste-product – tailings, or rivers, of melted unused metals that are in the rock but are not the desired end product.
Imagine tailings like this near Bristol Bay Alaska on the proposed site of the world’s 2nd largest open pit copper mine as captured in the doc Red Gold.
PHOTO CREDIT: FELT SOUL MEDIA
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see that an environment this fragile will not survive the impact of a mine. Not to mention that the proposed site is at the headwaters of the two most prolific salmon producing rivers in the world.
You never know where the inspiration to make a change will come from; sometimes it just takes one last image or perspective to give you the courage to make a jump. For me it was realizing that my life was on the same type of ridiculous cycle – chasing the wrong dream and slowly knocking down all that really mattered to me in the process. Change does not come easy but it is in our hands here for the taking if we so chose – if there ever was a time it is now.
-Leah
