My writings - and those of others.
Artists and Water
I’m looking forward to attending the WaterDocs Festival in Toronto next week. One person heavily involved in the film festival before her death was Marjorie Sharpe who was also the founder of the Toronto Community Foundation. The arts organization that I headed up for in the 1980’s was the Foundation’s first grant recipient and it was a privilege to connect with her every year - and wonderful to learn only now of her passion for water and the need to care for it.
Thomas Berry stressed the need for all disciplines and organizations to converge in the great work of telling the new story. The young founder of Unify noted in a presentation at the 2018 Parliament of World Religions that film is the Shakespeare of our day in terms of impact -and his own film on water attests to this, Music is a natural too - and I look forward to coming performances of Missa Gaia.
But I was especially moved by Bill McKibben’s article last fall about the role of two young poets. One watches ice turn to water. Another sees her home go under water. The UN reports give access to real rather than alternative facts. But we human beings need stories to bring the truth home in a way that encourages us to change. It was Shelley who told us that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". See how the poets help McKibben bring reality to this very important message.
You can see the full article here which also contains this video:
Out of Fashion
Fashion appears to be killing us. Fast Company tells us several really disturbing things about its effects.
Think you are helping by sending your old clothes to Goodwill? In California alone, the company spends seven million on dumping them.
In Vasteras, a town in Sweden, a power plant relies on unsold H&M products as a fuel source.
Every piece of unsold clothing has relied upon materials to make and package them and fuel to transport them. Now destroying them takes additional resources that are destroying us.
Clothing companies are making 53 million tons of clothes. Much of it ends up in landfill or in oceans; much of it includes plastics.
The writer of the article notes that some companies are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Nevertheless 100 billion pieces of new clothing for the seven billion humans on the planet in 2015 and that number has doubled in 15 years. The 80-20 rule also applies. We wear 20% of what we have 80% of the time.
The journalist’s solution is to buy better quality and more expensive and fewer clothes. But she doesn’t deal with the reality that those of us in the West have far more clothes than we need already - or that our identity is tied so closely to what we wear. Other kinds of beauty are all around us. We’re not the most important species on the planet and the most clothes or the most luxurious clothes will never change that.
A recent documentary of CBC’s The Passionate Eye documents the real cost of cheap fashion to those who produce it ad you can watch it here. The effects of the use of water is particularly sobering and the devastation of the environment is heart-breaking. The telling moment is when some of the young women who promote fast fashion on their websites saw this for themselves, they changed their attitude. Telling the full story to the consumers is our greatest challenge.
An important anniversary
50 years ago an iconic picture from space gave us a real sense of the planet when the image Earth Rising was taken by one of the Astronats. The wonderful writer Bill McKibben has reflected on this recently in the Huffington Post and also outlined how the world has changed.
The image brought a sense of hope then., he says. It was the inspiration for the first Earth Day. The Silent Spring had been published. The Grand Canyon had been saved. Here’s what McKibben quotes Margaret Mead saying about that era:
“Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space,”
There was a brief period when the idea of limits to growth had traction - but McKibben notes that it didn’t last and quotes Margaret Thatcher’s contrasting “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families.” Decades later this is an all too common prevailing view where we live off the earth instead of on it. In watching a show on Netflix recently, I was disheartened to hear a cosmologist join the voices of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaires who looked forward to space travel so that we can “colonize” some other planet. That’s madness. Read the full article from the link above. The scientists warn us - but it may have to be the poets that move us:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.Maya Angelou
There is no one but us.