That is so true

Do your part for the earth

Build a bat box.

Help the bats! They'll help us!

They release swarms of ducks on the locusts.

Let's get the bats on them mosquitoes (and other pests!)

"Bats are amazing animals that are vital to the health of our environment and economy. Although we may not always see them, bats are hard at work all around the world each night – eating thousands of insects, pollinating flowers, and spreading seeds that grow new plants and trees. Step outside around dusk and take a few moments to look for bats in your neighbourhood!"

"...bats save the agricultural industry in North America $3.7 billion every year."

Interesting: air-conditioning is contributing much to global warming

pumping out heat into the air, like turning on a heater in the summertime.

I freaking love this man...

"You know, limitations are not necessarily bad. They actually inspire creation."

"So one day I sat down here and I says this is where I want to build a house. I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do. And I looked up there and I says oh there's the sky, there's the trees, I want that point of reference to be the beginning of the house. So I thought okay I want this curve, 'cause orientation and everything is perfect, and so then in one second that's established. Then I get up and I look up here and I says oh, I don't want that ceiling to be that high and coming this way, so I say lets bring it down to human scale, then I turn around and I say oh I want to look uphill. Twenty seconds the whole house was designed."

Many people have little idea of how actually medieval that way is, in the best and truest sense of the word. During the Era of the Collapsing Cathedrals (a truly apocalyptic time) the process was live and learn as we go. That's how the cathedrals and churches were designed and built. The actual finish of the process is quite open to any number of executions. But they started with a root measurement, which started with someone standing somewhere and saying I want this to go here, and I'll make the reference of this particular viewpoint the standard for my own private form of measurement.

This is totally accessible to anyone today to do. The medieval period wasn't some special secret code that was lost to history. Just watch the series Secrets of the Castle to find that out. They rebuilt from foundations an old castle in France using only the methods and means of the old day and age. And people are like "NOOOO is it even possible for anyone in our modernist age to restore Notre Dame Cathedral or build something like Notre Dame Cathedral NOOOOO!!!" LOL

Powaqqatsi

Since the release of Laudato Si' and the Amazon Synod, the film Powaqqatsi has come to mind every now and again. I can't help but say it was - as much as Koyaanisqatsi - prophetic.

"Powaqqatsi" is a Hopi neologism meaning roughly "a parasitic way of life". In Godfrey Reggio's view, if I remember correctly, specifically: the northern hemisphere vamping off the southern hemisphere. Yet it also includes generally the first world vamping the third world.

Take these words from Pope Saint John Paul II:

"So it is that Christ the Judge speaks of 'one of the least of the brethren', and at the same time he is speaking of each and of all. Yes. He is speaking of the whole universal dimension of injustice and evil. He is speaking of what today we are accustomed to call the North-South contrast. Hence not only East-West, but also North-South: the increasingly wealthier North, and the increasingly poorer South.

"Yes, the South — becoming always poorer; and the North — becoming always richer. Richer too in the resources of weapons with which the superpowers and blocs can mutually threaten each other. And they threaten each other — such an argument also exists — in order not to destroy each other. (...)

"Nevertheless, in the light of Christ’s words, this poor South will judge the rich North. And the poor people and poor nations — poor in different ways, not only lacking food, but also deprived of freedom and other human rights — will judge those people who take these goods away from them, amassing to themselves the imperialistic monopoly of economic and political supremacy at the expense of others. (…)

"May justice and peace embrace (cf. Ps 84(85):10) once again at the end of the second millennium which prepares us for the coming of Christ, in glory. Amen."

--Pope Saint John Paul II, Homily in Edmonton, Canada, Sept 17, 1984

Koyaanisqatsi, the first in the Qatsi trilogy, will always be my favourite over Powaqqatsi. I haven't seen the third. The first just had this non-stop kinetic...trance-like quality, but better it really gets you to re-see, to see anew how the technology of our world is so ubiquitous you simply can't see it for what it is. But just with images and music. Nothing else.

Powaqqatsi, though again just images and music, gets a little more tendentious (sort of the same reason why I'm done with Terrence Malick's films, post Thin Red Line), a little bit more formatted so to speak. Still, it has a quality of its own. The images and the music (which, as in Koyaanisqatsi, act as distinct overlays to each other, never the music as a harmonious accompaniment to the images) forming a whole create some really powerful moments.

There's this one moment early in the film where the camera is panning across a row of children's faces, in slow motion, and there's this one girl's face beginning serious, almost solemn, from the right side of the screen, and within a couple seconds by the time her face is on the left side of the screen, it erupts into a smile, and then completely explodes, again all in slow motion, into laughter. The first time I saw that it was like the flat screen evaporated and I was in some kind of communion. Film is amazing.

Here's a clip from the start of the film (the person who posted it for some reason flipped the right with the left of the screen):


Philip Glass - Serra Pelada (1988) from masalladel oido on Vimeo.


Here's another clip:

Powaqqatsi (Fragmento) from abZurdo on Vimeo.

Chernobyl

I thought the HBO miniseries Chernobyl was very well made, and recommend it. Some of the Soviet/KGB stuff is Hollywoodized/sensationalized/fictionalized. The way things fell out was much more banal, bureaucratic, and not as sinister as portrayed, and there wasn't one solitary woman hero investigator, but several investigators.

Nonetheless, every episode had me, and I credit this series with making me understand how nuclear reactors work (basically) in a way that was gripping.

I think 'gripping' is the operative word in describing the whole series. I was heaving sighs regularly just to relieve the tension and creeping dread throughout. Film is the aesthetic experience of time; when it depicts nuclear energy gone wrong, it's a kind of horror that just gets to you.

Five out of five stars and two thumbs up!

One cleric on twitter was asking what sorts of things could possibly constitute an ecological sin, so he would know for penitents coming to him for confession. He was asking snidely of course, like that proved something. Which reminds me a bit of people who get annoyed by priests who instead of giving them Hail Marys or Our Fathers for their penance, give them the penance of "making an act of kindness", or a number of such acts, and they say, "But how am I to know if I've fulfilled the penance?" Like really? You don't know what could possibly constitute an act of kindness? How are you going to make it into the kingdom of heaven?

Anyways, you don't know what could possibly constitute an ecological sin? You could read Laudato Si' to find out. One good basic place to start is to ask yourself, "Do I waste food?"

Just think of all the generations previous for whom the wasting of food would have been abominable. All the generations going way back, and the experience of food shortages during wars, famine, economic depression, no mass transport and no giant corporations: if anyone from those generations were to have wasted food, you can be sure it would have burned their conscience and it would be a matter they would take to confession.

Yet what to them was abominable, for us today is par for the course and an intrinsic product of our systems. Do you ever decide to leave something in your cupboard or fridge that is about to stale-date or expire, simply because you don't feel like having it for dinner, because it would be dull, and you prepare some other foods instead?

Your cupboard or fridge, in effect, is then a kind of pagan shrine in which you offer foods to the idol of your bodily impulses. You offer your food to the god of waste. At least the pagans of old would actually eat the food they offered to their idols.

It is inexcusable, and relativistic, to say that a huge percentage of food is already wasted in the production and transport system, and that your personal wasting of food doesn't amount to anything and is just an inevitable part of the system. The teaching of the Church is aimed at both the instigators in the larger corporate systems and individuals in those systems.

This is where the ecological understanding comes into play. The food wastage today is simply not comparable to what food wastage would or could have ever been back in those previous generations. Because, as with money-as-debt, or debtflation, what we have today is huge production that equates to huge waste, but not because it is huge production. In other words, we don't have super waste because we have superabundant production; we have superabundant production purposely done for the sake of becoming huge waste. You have to understand how perverse it is; how offensive an abuse it is of God's creation, earth.

So while this sin is, like all old sin, traceable to one of the seven deadlys, like say gluttony, it comes in a newly perverse application as it were. It is a massive abuse of the production of the earth, as usury today, in an almost incomprehensible form, is the abuse - no, not only of money - but the abuse of peoples' labour and productions and talents and goods.

Redwoods

What were these two seedlings in 2009:

Redwood - Giant Sequoia

Redwood - Dawn Redwood

Are now these:

Redwood - Giant Sequoia

Redwood - Dawn Redwood

If they had been in ground they would be a lot bigger at this point, but I've kept them going in pots, and I don't fertilize. Only occasionally with fish/kelp stuff, plus I mix in new soil when putting in bigger pots.

I know the parent of the dawn redwood, and while I know the grove from which the giant sequoia came, I do not know the individual parent. But they are both from seed from the same park/forest.

I have meditated sometimes in the evening about where I would plant the trees, going over all the places that I know of where I could plant them and they would escape the hundreds of ways that people would kill them. This is the kind of thing you have to think about carefully, going over and over very deliberately in your mind - meditating like one of the Australian Aborigines traveling their forest paths in fine detail while sitting stock still.

I figure maybe I'll donate them to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver to be kept as bonsai specimens, or one of the Buddhist temples that do bonsai - as an act of ecumenical outreach?

That's probably the best option.

Elephants say thank you very much