creative forces

Blog # 37…September 2014

We’re surrounded by an amazing work of art...our environment. Despite the careless way we take it for granted, it's an endless creative marvel.  Last week-end thousands of people in NY City hit the streets to demonstrate their love and concern for our home planet with banners, posters and their colourful selves. Thousands more around the world joined them, taking their distress about the environment to the streets. I hope the climate change deniers were watching, including our head of state who decided not to attend the UN climate summit…oh well, at least he’s consistent.

 

New York City, September 21, 2014

 Haida village abandoned over a century ago

Recent view from a zodiak

I was in beautiful British Columbia this summer where their closeness to nature gives them an extra edge in appreciating it as well as lending urgency to their feelings of protectiveness. The islands of Haida Gwaii should be an inspiration to all of us and we should all know the story of the blockade the Haida people staged against the logging companies on Moresby Island in 2005.

Raven, a watchman at SgangGwaii

Art with a message

We owe an incredible debt to native people for their past and ongoing defense of the land.  The Council of the Haida Nation are now participating with different levels of government on a blueprint for forest management, a work in progress that has kept clear cutting to a minimum, at least for now. And since an agreement signed by both parties in 1993, Gwaii Hanas National Park, a UN Heritage site occupying a  large section of Moresby Island, is run jointly by Parks Canada and the CHN,

In This Changes Everything, out last week, Naomi Klein urges us not to depend on native people to defend the land, it’s time we took up some of the load. The Rockefeller heirs are withdrawing from fossil fuels and investing millions into clean energy production...I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you can do.

I wish the smart young dudes who spend so much time making things smaller and faster and adding more and more apps to devices would turn some of that brain power to coming up with some solutions to energy production, transportation and consumption. Just saying.

Public art has become something valued, whether as a political statement, a reminder of a person or place important to our history or something beautiful to turn a utilitarian object into an objet.                                                              

Workers records

Their faces

  These pieces greeted me as I came off the sea bus from downtown Vancouver…they’re a tribute to workers in the shipbuilding industry on the former site of the yards.  I’m starting to notice art out on the streets and in the alleyways here in Toronto too, more about that in future blogs.

                                         And a photo credit and a big thanks to Anne and Roy Strickland.