A simple documentary premiere, in a small town north of Vancouver, WA, on the Columbia, a town called Kalama, near Longview, where millions of stripped logs from the Pacific Northwest’s forests are stacked 20 stories high, waiting for markets (sic) in Asia to be turned into lumber and cardboard and stuffing and paper and snot sheets for the U S of A.
Amazing disconnect, how unsustainable and horrific Capitalism is as it plays out, guts communities – both that of Consumopithecus Sapiens and the natural world – while people will argue over some village square tree about to be cut down for the new mini-strip mall.
A two-hour drive south from Seattle, so for me, very close to my current home, in Vancouver, and going to it after a hard day’s work with clients just off the Portland, Oregon, streets, some still on, out of prison, in addiction recovery programs, you know, the lowly, low-paid social worker, hell, I thought heading north would seem like a no brainer for me to at least get something out of it – me, a nobody, who has been fighting against the polluters, the ecosystems killers, the cultural genocide soldiers, since I was 15 years old, fresh from Paris, France, and into the Sonora of Santa Catalina, saguaros, and Tucson, where Edward Abbey got drunk and the Center for Biological Diversity cried into existence.
So, a writer of my ilk likes to know the naming of places story behind white man’s towns and cities, where there is one continuous mirror affect in this land of places whites have conquered by their sheer Walmart glee. Kalama, hmm, one story it was named after a Hawaiian who settled there, John Kalama. Then, another one, typical of U S of A, is the General gets to name Indigenous things, this General J.W. Sprague, of the Northern Pacific Railroad, put the town’s name in 1871 as the Indian word for “pretty maiden,” calama. Finally, an earlier version, 1811, puts this guy Gabriel Franchere talking of this village at the mouth of the Kalama River, called Thlakalamah.
So, this east coast Jewish boy, Josh Fox, came to town with his new fresh-from-the-white-movie-festival-Sundance documentary (sic)/anti-documentary, as a way to rally the people of Kalama (all white, all retired, more or less, excluding the activists from Portland) to keep fighting against a methanol refiner for fracked gas coming from Oh Canada’s Earth Genocide fields in Alberta. Lots of Beatles and Dylan songs, with the director Fox strumming the banjo and his sidekick Gabriel Mayers playing guitar and in the film singing one incredible song in a New York Subway, really, the highlight of the movie, in three minutes.
That is the back story for me, wherever I go, in so-called “Indian Country,” how a town which is paved over with pathetic buildings and more cars than inhabitants will quickly forget how the original people existing in peace and on their people’s spirits’ river have been pushed off their sacred land through the will of the Iron Horse Galloping, Coal Spewing, Toxin Brewing, Gun Toting, Disease Spreading, Cement Setting White Peoples.
The irony is those townies now living in Kalama, some with 4,000 square foot homes, on a hill, overlooking the river, all those eagles and great blue herons aloft at sunset, with outbuildings for 40-foot RVs and 10 meter long pontoon boats, lovely rose lined gardens, humming bird feeders and VW beetle sized barbecue sets, they are worried about another Iron Horse Crashing into/on top of/over their town: the oil and gas industry, those thugs we all love to hate but depend on for those jet trips to Vegas and weeks in the woods with our Air Streams.
So, while I come unglued/unhinged around faux greenies like Fox, Michael Mann, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibbeon and 350 dot “organized non-profit fascism” (350.org) — though Fox’s work looking at the fracking industry which was good and should have been a wake up call for complete revolution against EVERYTHING capitalism, EVERYTHING — I understand that some of the people, as in 90 percent of the people in the U S of A, can be uninformed or misinformed 99 percent of the time.
A silly “here and there and everywhere” movie Mr. Fox produced this time – he’s dancing, all these selfie shots, all this crying and how the world is coming to an end thanks to CO2 – and then all these (the two-thirds of the flick’s themes and length) stories of hope and triumphant fighting in those developing or Third World or Uncivilized places – well, I came to feel early on as if I have seen this documentary style before and before and before, and before and before, and then knowing these sorts of films come from the school of silliness and Oh-THE-World-Has-Just-Come-Into-My-Focus sort of embarrassing revelation-catharsis style, I began to stew, and not enjoying the frames from which Fox comes from and shoots into.
So, let’s back up, solar panel loving greenie — it’s massive inequity of health care, resources, education, food, cultural individualism; it’s massive overharvesting of fisheries, over-polluting of cities and rural areas; it’s the capitalists and other financial thugs of the same fiber, but maybe of a different breed of politics culling labor, stopping individual community directions, flooding lands, pushing people off ancestral lands; it’s the depleted uranium, the massive shelling and bombing, the invested capitalists pointing economic weapons like the World Bank and those 100 other chartered killer banks at people who want nothing to do with this slavery, this debt slavery; it’s rain forests being bulldozed and animals and people pushed out; it’s the 6 percent of the population consuming massive amounts of raw resources; it’s the USA using more electricity for air conditioning than dozens of countries in Africa using electricity for all their needs; it’s rampant financial, cultural, linguistic racism.
Now, get this taken care of, and we can talk about, err, what, green energy, green living, green technology! But this is the way of the conservation groups, disconnecting Syrian refugees to NATO/USA/Israel policies. Disconnecting trillions wasted on killing and preparing to kill all the “other” countries of the world. How many more must see documentaries will we have to see to placate or fumigate us, our western minds. It’s an end to capitalism that is a must see movie, showing near a town close by (not). Top 7 must see enviro movies of 2015? Top 10 for Earth Day? Top 5 by World Watch Europe? Another 10 from Eluxe Magazine? How about the scariest by Dazed Digital?
Will there ever by an end to this marketing, this film making, this controlled opposition, this climate disaster-collapse-extinction FATIGUE?
But, alas, the film was the centerpiece to the small town, those old people, those folks looking to keep their little community (theirs, hmm, thanks, Salish and Cowlitz tribes for “giving it up” to the white folk) from the flames of venting boilers and methane flares and hissing smokey chimneys. All for the profits of a company that is backed by the Chinese government (whatever that entails) and the U S of A government (which entails mainlining profits right to the elites, the Point One Percent Profiteers), thanks very much, taxpayers in both nations!
I guess those of you using Zuckerberg F-U Book can go to, “Clean Air Kalama” for that page, or the Columbia Riverkeeper, here, but the bottom line is we are in a fight to the 100th degree on where community rights are trumped by the Trumps, the Hillary’s, those Goldman Sachs and bankers galore and real estate thugs until community is no longer conceptually, legally and practically a gathering and democratic place of ideals, families, jobs, love and life, but places for the rich and the transnationals to do commerce in, at any price (all stops pulled out for the Corporation) to the actual citizens and the community itself.
This small town is facing a 3.1 mile pipeline through 12 properties hit with state eminent domain forfeitures (for a profit, private company, no less), state money to pay for an exclusive new dock for the private company to moor those tankers ready for engorging and on their way to China (to the tune of $12 million) so this LLC company, NWIW – Northwest Innovation Works (sounds like digital production company, uh?) – can produce on 90 acres 10,000 cubic metric tons of methane a day, to double the output of the second largest one (if this Kalama thing gets approved, built and on-line) in Texas which is on 540 acres at an output of 5,000 metric tons daily, and compared to the one in Iran which hits 7,000 cubic metric tons a day.
About 60 people squeezed into the VFW Post 10435 to hear the organizers of the anti-methane plant talk about the consequences to their property values, their little town feel, and the potential of a disaster with 100,000 cubic metric tons of the stuff held in 8 storage tanks right near the Interstate 5 corridor.
A good reason for Gasland director Fox to show up here, for sure, and hats off to him for that, and while he was Skyping in the next room to the Portland audience 30 miles south for their simultaneous premiere of the flick, his energy was in that VFW. Showing this latest film, to be released on HBO in June, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Change Can’t Change, the linchpin to the evening as well as his theatrics.
Most people in the audience were over 50 years old, as I said, with very few young people in the fray – the few young ones were with Portland-Hood River Columbia Riverkeeper.
So, some of those buttons were pushed by these conservation folks – not wanting this sited here (let’s hope not sited anywhere in the world we love despite climate change, as Fox riffs in the title of the film). The plant would be using 4.5 million gallons of water every day to refine the natural fracked gas into methanol. Air pollution including carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide mixed in with fine particulates the daily air for human, animal and plant.
NWIW will be using 300 million cubic feet of fracked natural gas daily, to turn the product into the methanol (this is the math of Capitalism – one barrel of oil energy to get two barrels of oil from the ground, or 12 energy calories to get one food calorie into our gullets), and for Washington state’s residents, we’re looking at 215 million cubic feet per day we use for living and such.
This entire corporate model jiggered for everything in this consumer-retail-free market society, not just big oil, big energy, big gas, whatever you want to call these heathens, is all part of blowing apart the planet – its people, its waters, air sheds, land, and non-human creatures.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion at these events with Fox at the mic and citizens sort of blown away by the fact they have for generations supported this shit society with these shit metrics and shit intended and unintended consequences resulting from this massive orgy-flooded consuming, well, it’s veering away from the very structural problems of racism, classism, elitism and mountains of profits for a very small elite of perverted people who put cash flow, economies of scale, ledgers and parasitic takeovers above (and past) the humanity of it all, us, people, communities. Through the digital lens of Fox is this climate change apocalypse that is sort of a wailing wall emotive thing, tied to probably who Fox is as a person, where he got educated, how many of those elites in the industry want that same wailing and how his circle of even more elites decide that Fox is okay to help get this odd documentary to the HBO market.
It’s a never ending story of Bill McKibbeon and his 350.org (shit, Fox had this fellow in the film, how overdone and meaningless) and someone like Van Jones (not him again, yes, in this film, yes) and the odd guy Lester Brown, as well as Elizabeth Kolbert.
Here, McKibbeon and Goldman Sachs — ***
Or, Bill the whiny one, and 350 Dot Org and Wall Street, ahh, here – ***
Then the tar sands untruths from the McKibbeon group, here, sorry — ***
Then, how about the Fox world of rich democrats pushing that “progressive movement” as a placating, co-opting, lying son of a you know what thing, here — ***
Or, finally, from our friends over at Counterpunch, on big cluster fuck progressive Big Progressive movement, here — ***
I like to bring in another person on the Fox line-up, Elizabeth Kolbert, not a bad writer for the New Yorker/New York Times, who wrote Notes on a Catastrophe, and here analyzing the Naomi Klein of every greenie’s lust:
In place of “degrowth” she [Klein] offers “regeneration,” a concept so cheerfully fuzzy I won’t even attempt to explain it. Regeneration, Klein writes, “is active: we become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.”
To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
Look, for some of us who have been teaching about ecosystems, planetary genocide of people and plants and soils and water, for, oh, 30 years, along the US-Mexico Border, having spent time in Mexico and Central America, having spent time seeing cruise ships eat away coral reefs off Quintana Roo, after seeing swaths of jungle cut down for soy and grass and farting cows, all those plastics in ditches in every backwater town in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, you name it, and the extreme rape culture of the NAFTA boys, twin plants along the Tortilla Curtain, where women are poisoned with chemicals, overwork and the PTSD-trauma of rape and fellow women eviscerated and left for the dogs in the hills after rape, it’s just damned hard to see this Fox and this silliness play out.
We need radical Change, and we need RADICAL, IN-YOUR-FACE, DIRTY, REAL, SCARY, TRUTHFUL documentaries, with some other style than the poor rich white guy or gal posing in their own films like Naomi Klein or any number of them.
Josh Fox is sort of a clown, a little jester, not a journalist, but he plays one in his films, and these documentaries are that same soft shoe American wobbly stuff, never taking the soul and mind out there, into complete revolutionary and anti-capitalist glare.
Additionally, Fox is part of the next cadre of digital film workers who these days seek the soul of fear from their posturing being green and playing this carbon dioxide and runaway climate change and unholy weather monster storms and the like to set up some commentary on other parts of the world who get it, and they always have, and they have been ripped and torn from their land, their cultures, their language of survival and celebration and happiness.
Fox is the pilot of this chugging choo-choo train of others who will follow with these silly Inconvenient Truths, by guys like Gore who is pro-nuclear, pro-Ending Safety Nets, Pro-Cops on the Streets, just another PRO-Capitalist. Fox is the new geeky old geezer of this America’s belief system, loving this thing called exceptionalism, celebrating the mythology of the free (sic) market (sic) economy (sic) and the great deus ex machina of technology coming to the rescue as if that crap we consume and revel in can keep going, as the Lucy Lew, Chuck Norris, Charlize Theron and Double 007 of the green techies come to the rescue.
So, these proposed methanol plants are the work of profiteers who are going to get tons of federal and state money, as the old formula of this shit capitalism continues – corporate welfare, government protection goons for the corporations, and the privatizing of all the profits and socializing all the costs of doing business and unleashing the untold costs to people, animals, land and water.
The model for ecosocialism is to move this planet into retrenchment, to take over all industries, to have a collective nation overlay of controlling all ecosystems, all fisheries, everything, and to make the commitment to rethinking everything to demand living smaller, living with durable goods, and chucking the throw-away food-junk-lives attitude capitalism has spread like Ebola to the rest of the world.
Ian Angus and Simon Butler, outline the following steps in their book Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis:
- Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and biofuels, replacing them with clean energy sources.
- Actively supporting farmers to convert to ecological agriculture; defending local food production and distribution.
- Introducing free and efficient public transport networks.
- Restructuring existing extraction, production, and distribution systems to eliminate waste, planned obsolescence, pollution, and manipulative advertising, and providing full retraining to all affected workers and communities.
- Retrofitting existing homes and buildings for energy efficiency.
- Closing down all military operations at home and elsewhere; transforming the armed forces into voluntary teams charged with restoring ecosystems and assisting the victims of environmental disasters.
No, read on and on about truthful measures to save the world and really not to let it go, at Truth-Out, concerning what real retrenchment means, on how we collectively get to a place where the pain is not collectively immense, where the majority of the world learns to live cooperatively and to wrest control of destinies from the perverted money changers:
In the United States, no one even talks about resource conservation anymore. That’s so quaint, so 1970s. So “small is beautiful” and all that. Since the Reagan revolution it’s been all about the “me” generation, about ever more consumption, about “living very large” as The Wall Street Journal puts it. American houses today are more than twice the size on average of houses built in the 1950s – even as families are shrinking. Most come with central air, flat-screen TVs in every room and walk-in closets the size of 1950s spare bedrooms. And those are just average houses. McMansions offer breathtaking extravagance and waste: swimming pools in the basement next to the bowling alleys next to the home theater next to the gym, the bar lounge and game rooms. And those are just the basements. Upstairs there are the Elle Décor floors and furnishings of tropical hardwoods, Architectural Digest kitchens in marble and stainless steel, Waterworks bathrooms, “bedroom suites” the size of small houses, lighting and audio “systems” and on and on.
Americans are said to use more electricity just for air conditioning than the entire continent of Africa uses for all purposes. Middle-class Americans don’t even drive “cars” much anymore. They drive behemoth gas-hog SUVs and luxury trucks with names to match: giant Sequoias, mountainous Denalis and Sierras, vast Yukons, Tundras, Ticonderogas and Armadas. Many of these are more than twice the weight of US cars and pickup trucks in the 1950s. There goes Obama’s plan to reduce US global warming emissions by boosting fuel economy.
Americans used to vacation at the nation’s incomparable national parks and seashores. Now, increasingly, they jet off to far corners of the globe, or drift about the seas on 20-story high cruise ships bashing coral reefs.
Globalization and the advent of “The China Price” has also enabled industrialists to boost consumption by dramatically lowering the cost of light-industrial consumer goods production, so much so that they could finally annihilate most remaining “durable” goods categories – from refrigerators to shoes, and substitute cheaper, throwaway replacements. Thus, “fast fashion” (or “trashion fashion”) from H&M, Target, Zara and others now rules the women’s apparel market with clothes so cheap it’s not worth the cost of dry-cleaning them.
Perfectly stated above by a perfectly active writer and thinker, but, ya think many greenies have heard of him? I have polled them and the answer is, Who? Richard Smith is an economic historian. He wrote his UCLA history Ph.D. thesis on the transition to capitalism in China and held post-docs at the East-West Center in Honolulu and Rutgers University. He has written on China, capitalism and the global environment and on related issues for New Left Review, Monthly Review, The Ecologist, Journal of Ecological Economics, Real-World Economics Review, Adbusters magazine and other publications. His book To Save the Planet, Turn the World Upside Down came out in 2015.
The final straw that broke the proverbial Hummer-powered camel’s back for many in that Veterans of Foreign Wars hall May 19, 2016 was the fact the company, NWIW, is backed by the Chinese government (Oh, no, not the Chinese!) and that the methanol will end up in China (Oh, no, the Chin-zeeez) at a plant in the city of Dalian, where most of the stuff will be used as raw material to make, drum roll, plastic. Amazing how racist Americans are, blaming the CHINESE for their consumption.
Oh, better living through chemistry, err, plastic, thanks to the Western World, USA and the rest of the white G-8 countries. Imagine, all those digital cameras and clothes and cars and jet airplanes and carpets and every stitch put into every product “consumed” by the red-white-and-blue, hmm, all those chicken fingers and fancy sofas, all that shrunk-wrapped fun we in Western Culture just cannot get enough of . . . .
This is the jig that is up, really, a runaway consumerism, a world controlled by a few elites, the banking and hedge fund mafia, all protected by governments and backed by those riveted and welded wonders of military might.
The entire jig is up, because, first, people just cannot put two and twenty and ten million and a trillion together, to formulate how screwed we are by letting the global elites and the monopolies and super-transnationals run our lives into degradation, extermination and environmental catastrophe.
Wars, famines, unequal distribution of wealth, power, say, input, living, human rights, all wrapped up into this fucking bubble that is the American and Western mind-set of having to tell the story, from OUR point of view.
Until this film (How to Let Go of the World, is just one old film, the same film told some of the same ways using the same film school or film school influenced, or what I call that acceptable documentary style) is receiving standing ovations from those jet-setting Robert Redford-loving freaks at Sundance.
It’s a revolving door of people saying very little but emoting a whole lot, getting that funny elite backing by those elites producing and financing and distributing the same almost near the middle of the middle films.
Both good and bad in the film, of course, and the crowd seemed mesmerized by the shots of “people in the developing world” like Samoa, Vanuatu, Zambia, Amazon Basin, China.
Here, the promo on the website –
In How to Let Go of the World and Love All The Things Climate Can’t Change, Oscar Nominated director Josh Fox (GASLAND) continues in his deeply personal style, investigating climate change – the greatest threat our world has ever known. Traveling to 12 countries on 6 continents, the film acknowledges that it may be too late to stop some of the worst consequences and asks, what is it that climate change can’t destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away?
Production
(Documentary) An HBO Documentary Films release of an Intl. WOW production. (International sales: Cinetic Media, New York.) Produced by Deia Schlosberg, Josh Fox. Co-producers, Trish Adlesic, Diana Meservey, Deborah Wallace, Robert Silverman.
The question of how stories get told, and, then radiating out toward the larger questions – Who Gets To Write the Stories? How Are Stories told? When are they Allowed to be Told? Why Are Some Stories Told and Many more Not Told? What is Deployed and Utilized and Creatively Used to Write/Show Particular Stories?
That is the frame for me, now, going on 40 years, how those Pulitzer Prizes are given out to “those people,” all those minutes and years of fame are foisted to the elite, or the chosen few, or who gets vetted as historian, leader, intellectual, prognosticator, director, producer, when, in fact, the stories of oppression, subjugation, incarceration, annihilation, rapine, dystopia, war, rape, dislocation should never ever be told now by the oppressors, the subjugators, the incarcerators, annihilators, rapers, dystopiators, war makers, dis-locators, yet, here we are, children of the genocides, grandchildren of the re-locators, great-great kids of the manifest destiny, the imperialists. The giant brigade after brigade of whites – Zionist or Aryan – shooting into the dark continent, shooting and shooting into the jungle, into savanna, into the hills, into the fogs, moors, islands.
So, here we go, me trying to get something out of the Fox film, out of his antics and little man here we go with my vision of the world three act drama:
Josh Fox and the Let Go and Love Team (the following, for Fox, is the spur of “moral imagination,” what we still have even after climate change – shit, what a scam, since war and disease and famine and violence seeding is the number one force in society, along with taking away the agency of small local groups to HAVE a say, the ONLY say for them) want to make some big ideas resonate even though Josh is crying over all those dying forests and upturned coral reefs and emaciated elephants:
- democracy
- resilience
- choice
- civil disobedience
- creativity
- love
- innovation
- human rights
- community
- courage
Oh well, the film is innocuous, and, maybe well-meaning, but falls so short since it is in a milieu of middling, and Fox doesn’t catch himself with his racism against Syria, his bizarre elitism when it comes to China, his bizarre crocodile tears every so often.
While a few activists stand out in Fox’s new film as the real thought provokers that need voice and powerful allegiances to fight the capitalists and the Republican and Democrats, all those armies of murderer, all those armies with the weapons of disinformation, propaganda, psychological assaults, it’s the whites, the Westerners, who fall flat. All but Tim DeChristopher when he tells Fox right before being thrown in jail for righteous and non-violent disobedience how we really have to make the change, with climate change (it is happening) whether CO2 is the driver or not, and I have to make it clear that there are A HUNDRED MORE IMPORTANT ENVIRONEMTAL and cultural matters to focus on than this Climate Change Cabal’s focused crap.
Watch DeChristopher, who is touring with Fox, as a disclaimer here, so I can’t say Tim is lambasting much of Fox in his new movie, here, Bill Moyers.
And listen to him over at the George Soro Show, Amy Goodman, err, Democracy Now.
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I think it deepened my perspectives on social justice. I think it matured me, to some degree, you know, because it was two years that I spent with really one of the most oppressed populations in our society, and I saw the people who were struggling with that. I lived with those people for two years. And so, I think that really broadened my perspectives on a lot of things. And I think it will influence my activism, moving forward. You know, I don’t have any intention of slowing down or backing down at this point, but, you know, I see myself as much more than a climate activist. And I think I’ll be involved in a lot of different issues, moving forward now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you’ve talked not only about the inmates you met, but also the correction officers you had to deal with, as well, and what you learned during your 21 months.
TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, and that was a learning experience, as well. I mean, I’d say, in the time that I was locked up, I probably met maybe 50 people that should be locked up, that just really shouldn’t be on the street. And of those, about five were inmates. The rest were all guards. You know, and I think there’s many roles that our prison system serves, at this point, that further those in power. And one of those roles, I think, is an employment service for military veterans who are too psychologically damaged to work in the private sector. So, that was also an eye-opener for me.
I think our economic model, in a big sense — our whole economic system — protects itself by making people dependent upon it. By making sure that any change, any departure from that system, is going to be hard. And it’s going to lead to hardship, both individually and on a large scale as well. We can’t change our economic system without it falling apart, without things crashing really hard. Just like as an individual you can’t let go of your job and all that stuff without crashing pretty hard.
Then, there’s Terry Tempest Williams interviewing Tim for Orion Magazine, and it’s a long one but insightful. Here.
TERRY: But what about racial intolerance? Or intolerance of another species, like prairie dogs — if you turn that word around?
TIM: Yeah, but if you’re tolerating prairie dogs, it’s because you don’t like prairie dogs. I mean, I don’t like the idea of tolerating other races. I don’t like the idea that it’s something we put up with. The idea of tolerating different people, to me, is not something that I’m comfortable with — and when I look at the modern environmental movement, to bring it back to that, I think it’s defined by what we accept. By what we speak out against, but ultimately accept. You know, we’ll sign a petition, or even do an action, or even get arrested for a day, but ultimately we’re gonna go back to our normal lives. Ultimately we’re going to keep participating in this system.
Well there’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Coal trains, methane plants, oil spills, toxins in every ecosystem, every human body, for the price of goods and services that make the old Retailopithecus Sapiens happy, on one serotonin level, and on another level, with the executive part of the brain all haywired and the lizard part all stimulated, full bore.
Amazing how Monsanto is king, how these wars are how America goes about its business, how the European and Australian golden triangle makes its lives happy and haunted by more lust for goods. Interesting how the US of Israel is a Brand In Every School and Product Hawked on Zionist TV.
The show must go on, and Josh Fox creates a bumpy little flick, no change will occur, and the trail of premieres and feel-good sessions for the Q and A sessions afterward, and all the strumming music and silliness of this society’s “prime time movers and shakers” like Fox will be barely footnotes in a country that has been eaten out from the inside.
I drove back to Vancouver in my three-cylinder Metro, 16 years old, the gap in the sky letting in a moon and the shadows of great blue heron. Two owls on the side of the road. Swirls of clouds and bursts of hail, and the road south back home was full of trucks, full of movers and shaking Americans, fearful of their own loneliness, alone with the stuff of king and princes — big plasma TVs, in-board-out-board boats for weekends with Bud and Betty and the crew.
I caught the shadow of those millions of board feet of pine and fire, stripped of forest humus, stripped of earth loving form and shape, ready for those ships lined up along the slackwater Columbia, heading into the belly of the beast that is Global Capitalism and its Evil Twin, Global Consumption.
Monsters from the inside, eating and eating. The film isn’t even a memory now, as that’s what happens with a silly tap dance, and some clapping and singing.
The war is raging, daily, on a thousand fronts, and Josh Fox is ready for another film, maybe confronting the silliness of his profession, mostly, just bells and whistles and a whole lot of nothing.