UNTIL I RETURNED TO WORK at Green Apple in late May, I had spent the last several years living in other countries on other continents in other cultures that did not celebrate Halloween. Sure, pretty much every culture has it own version of Dress-Up Day, where down is up and up is down and just about everything goes. For example, here is a photo of me and a friend at a Purim party about a year and a half ago, in Israel. But there’s something special about Halloween, for me. And it’s not the candy! It’s the explicit embracing of the dark, holy half of the human soul and the spirit world. So to all my fellow witches in the T-Dot rocking the pentagram, Happy Pagan New Year! To all my Taqwacore Sufis and Pirate Punks, here’s wishing y’all an Eid Mubarak! And to all the Necromancing Ninjas in the house, and to the whole 4-1-6 Zombie Zoo: have a super-duper Day of the Dead!
YIKES! IT’S COLD OUT THERE! Welcome to winter… When we’re doing particularly vigorous work, we work up enough steam to stay warm. But when the temperature dips down low below double-digits, a meal of fresh vegetables just won’t cut it, we need hot soups and stews to warm our bodies up from the insides. So Victor has started coming to work with a Coleman camping stove, and reheating leftovers from yesterday. Great idea! And as you can see from the photos below, John has also been putting the stove to use. Here he is, warming his bones by the open gas fire after getting soaked up to his ankles while floating concrete. Good looking out, guys!
JUST OVER A MONTH AGO, an American bank announced that it had built what it is billing as the largest Green Wall in North America. I have majorly mixed feelings about this new development. On the one hand, it gives green walls great visibility; many more people will come to know of living walls and their beneficial qualities because of this huge installation. On the other hand, this bank has chosen to feature its corporate logo as a graphical element on the green wall itself, by tracing the logo’s outline using plant varieties of different colours. This has the potential to create disinformation in two ways: one, it can confuse the general population about ecological systems and the way they work; and two, it can obfuscate the truth about the actual business practices of this bank, and their effects on the American economy. Because of this ambivalence, I have included photographs of the giant green wall, but with their corporate logos digitally blurred out.
ON SUNDAY MORNING, we greeted the sunrise from the Scarborough Bluffs. Could there possibly be anywhere else in the whole world that we needed to be more than right there, right then?
LAST WEEK WAS JAM-PACKED with all kinds of eco-events. On top of the Cities Alive North American conference on Green Infrastructure, there was the Planet In Focus Film Festival, 10th anniversary. Planet In Focus holds a special place in our hearts: in addition to providing an important platform for environmental video, it is where Peter, Eduardo, and I all met for the first time. Five years ago, I was screening my film The Red Pill, Eduardo was photographing the event, and Peter was cramming his brain with as much eco-information as possible. We all hit it off, and collaborated on our first joint project, the design of the DVD cover for The Red Pill. In the spring, Eduardo and I joined Green Apple, and we spent the 2005 season in the field with Peter, the three musketeers of construction. Today, all three of us are desk jockeys, but we like to relive the glory days of our youth and catch an eco-flick on occasion to keep current with what’s going on in the world, and what’s going on to the world.
