Silent Running

Watched this on a friend's recommendation. If I remember correctly, the tone of his recommendation was that this movie came out of the 70's eco-hysteria movement, was worth watching along with a few others, and that were were in a new cycle of eco-hysteria that wasn't wholly based on logic. I believe the term he used for the film genre was actually "eco-disaster flicks".

I'd like to talk to him more about that, but without even analyzing the legitimacy of that position, I think it does point out a definite emotional tone in some eco-art and imagining of an eco-challenged future.

Anxiety.
Despair.
Nostalgia.

"Silent Running" is pretty amazing. The last bits of Earth's forests are taken into outer space in pods attached to a space fleet. At great cost, the fleet is maintained by 3 knuckleheads and 1 crazy treehugger. The U.S. eventually can't afford it anymore so they tell the crew to blow up the pods and head on back home. Treehugger loses his shit, kills the other crew members, and tries to keep the pods going. I won't give away the ending.

Garden City

Catching up with a great article and slideshow about vertical farming and produce-friendly urban planning.

"Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact."

My favorite argument for vertical farming on his website - "We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on." The website is also a multi-sourced portal for designs and project submissions from all over the world. Here's one actually conceived for the Gowanus area.

The playing field (story construction)

I found an old article I had bookmarked a good while ago - "A New Breed of Environmental Film" which ends with this paragraph:

"Do not expect a linear narrative in Arid Lands and today's other best environmental films. Indeed, be highly suspicious if someone tries to feed you one, because ecological discourse demands detecting and understanding connections, networks, and implications. The films take you far afield. Enjoy the hike."

The narrative, if any, essentially is still forming. Maybe with enough ingenuity we'll turn things around. Maybe it's too late. But any piece that tried to build an assumption in either direction would be grossly presumptuous.

What I have liked thinking though about in the past few days, and particularly after talking to Kim all afternoon on Saturday (with video camera in hand) is, in fact, going in one direction - assuming we're stuck with the situation we've gotten ourselves into - and seeing what that landscape looks like. Whether it be seeing it artistically or seeing it in terms of highly imaginative social planning or in the loosest sense in terms of any radical response/activity. But even then, even after making a pretty weighty and presumptuous prediction, there's still room and time for hiking. And I think there's something very worthwhile about that kind of speculation. Let's not wait till the house is on fire to figure out where the hose is.

When I saw my friend Jenty a few months ago, she was telling me about the work she is doing at the UN. She's working with a committee that is creating projections of the social crises that will result from global warming and how to deal with them. Drastic scenarios like "Let's imagine there's no water on such-and-such continent in such-and-such number of years: how many people are going to be displaced, where are they going to go, and how will we deal with that hypothetical humanitarian crisis?" I'll have to write to her to get some more details and post about them here if I can.

(1st) shoot

Unless you count Wendy and Mikey in New Mexico, which I'm not sure if I do yet. Finally filmed Kim a little, and it was a lot of fun. The thing that's cool is there's a lot of interactivity possible with her work. She was opening in a group exhibition at Broadway Gallery - “UNNATURAL ACTS and Other Illicit Thoughts About Nature”. I had a few other artists eager to talk to me on camera about their work too, which really helped me get straight in my brain why I'm very particularly interested in her work. It was a bit of a comical, weird scene and I hope I can hear Chris T. give her quick rundown of all the artists' work.

I started taking photos the other day of catalogs and products that feature eco-friendly slogans and branding. A bit of that bandwagon approach seemed to be present at this show. Everyone wants in. Still not sure if that's good or bad.