I Dare You

A very powerful message about why we need to invest in and advocate for girls in developing countries. They are the future of change. I can’t say it any better than this video does, so just watch it.

Home

Brendan and I watch a lot of documentaries, but last night we watched what I consider to be the best documentary I’ve ever seen. Home takes viewers on a ride around an Earth put in dire peril by its most adaptable life form, humanity.

The shot-from-above cinematography is simply stunning. French photographer Yann Arthus-Betrand has managed to turn the most dismally wasted landscapes into abstractions of color and form. One of the disturbing discoveries of “Home” is that there is beauty to be found even in environmental devastation, if you film it from far enough away. As a photographer I found the entire movie one of the most visually beautiful productions I’ve ever seen. The cinematography is second to none.

Anyone who appreciates beautiful and stirring music will also love the soundtrack. It’s extremely emotive. The script is exceptionally well written and powerful. It is narrated by Glenn Close.

A review from Change.org

Hopping quickly over the first four billion of the Earth’s Arcadian human-free early years, we arrive at the latter 200,000. Humans hunt and gather, discover agriculture, build cities, burn fossil fuels for energy, fill dismally dusty feedlots with corn-fattened beef cattle, over-consume resources, shatter the food chain with pesticides. They waste their minds on television, isolate themselves in suburbia, create sterile monuments to modernity, overfish the oceans, desertify the plains, deplete fresh water supplies, promote a wrongheaded “western model of development,” use up most of the oil, and refuse to own up to any of it.

And that’s just the first hour.

By the time we arrive at film’s end, where the narration exhorts us that “it’s too late to be a pessimist,” we’ve also depleted the soil, chopped down tropical forests for palm oil plantations, triggered the Sixth Great Extinction of animals and plants in the Earth’s history, hoarded wealth, built crowded megacities, left most of the swelling human population of six billion plus in poverty and environmental injustice, and tipped the climate’s delicate balance toward runaway global warming.

Throughout the movie I had goosebumps and by the end I had tears in my eyes. Not just from the message but from the beautiful way it is portrayed. This movie is simply a masterpiece. Please set aside a quiet hour or two to watch it. You will not regret it.

This is the world we live in

I thought this short video was rather appropriate after spending a day yesterday living on the equivalent of UN World Food Fund daily rations. To be honest I didn’t find myself too hungry throughout the day, but the worst part was the cravings. I wanted sweet stuff and I desperately wanted coffee. Brendan cooking and eating some delicious smelling dinner in front of me did not help much either. Surprisingly, in the end, I couldn’t even eat all the rice. It almost became a chore. Perhaps if I tried to live on these rations for longer I would get hungry enough to get more of an appetite for it. Anyway, it was an interesting experiment for the day.

Strangely enough I felt really great this morning. I think my food intolerance’s are still at work and a day of eating bland food obviously agrees with me. I might even start doing this every so often just to give my body a break.