This video, called “Insanlığın Dünyaya Zulmü” (“Humanity’s Persecution of the World”), amusingly and tragically sums up the history of mankind on Earth. I think it would have been slightly better if it ended without the aliens, but it’s pretty freaking great anyway.
JUST 99¢!!!
My essay “WILD SOUL – Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Spirit” is now available from Amazon as a Kindle download for 99 cents.
In the near future, it will be going up at other online venues, in other ebook formats. (If you don’t have a Kindle, you can still read Kindle books with free programs downloadable from Amazon, like Kindle for PC. I read Kindle books on my iPhone and desktop computer.)
Traditional tales across the world describe mankind’s joyful rise in a wild paradise like the Garden of Eden. But they also tell of our fall from such lives of bliss and natural grace.
Our technology, our cities, our toys, our wealth, all have done nothing to ground us as individuals or as societies. If they had, we would live in a near Utopia, rather than the reelingly chaotic and violent world-on-the-brink around us, for surely our affluence and level of comfort is greater than it has been for any people in the history of the earth.
Is Eden forever lost, or is there a way back?
Can we access that marvelous, mythic place in our souls, find a path to its joyful, natural wonders? Or have we slumbered so long in civilized ways that our vital selves are banished for the rest of time?
Can we reclaim the power of the primitive without denying ourselves the comforts and wonders of the modern world?
Exploring sources ranging from the Old Testament and Eastern mysticism, from poetry to popular fiction, from ancient fable to contemporary deep psychology, novelist Tim Byrd finds the prescription for our ills.
We need to live and love more fully, and do things that matter.
We need a renewal of a sense of sacredness towards the natural world, and intimacy with that world.
We need wild soul.
There is some spectacular and gorgeous footage of forests in this video. Which is apropos, as it’s about forests.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand was appointed by the United Nations to produce the official film for the International Year of Forests.
Following the success of Home which was seen by 400 million people, the photographer began producing a short 7-minute film on forests made up of aerial images from Home and the Vu du Ciel television programmes.
This film will be shown during a plenary session of the Ninth Session of United Nations Forum on Forests (24 January – 4 February 2011) in New York. It will be available to all from February 2 – for free – so that it can be shown worldwide.
I’m awake, and I’ve been lax of late with the blog, so I figured I’d type at you a bit.
As the last couple of entries indicate, this has been the weekend of both my big convention and my book festival debuts, at DragonCon (largest SF con in the world, I’m told) and the Decatur Book Festival (largest book fest in the US, right here walking distance from my front door).
It has been fun and exciting and stressful and exhausting, and I’ll revisit it in another post once it’s truly over (I still have a DragonCon panel at 4 pm tomorrow…uh, today. Monday.), hopefully with pictures from at least one of my appearances.
I’m not sure if it’s just the over-stimulation of it all, the public speaking, the meeting of cool new people, the armies of amazingly hot women in cool costumes, or lingering full moon energy, but I got maybe two hours of sleep so far tonight. And I have an earworm of Felicia Day’s lovely voice singing “Do you want to date my avatar?” over and over in my head.
Scanning the news as I sat here in my drawers, wishing I was a-slumber, I came across this headline from The Guardian: “Lost World of Fanged Frogs and Giant Rats Discovered in Papua New Guinea.”
Fanged frogs!
I already wrote about the discovery in the Andes of the world’s tiniest frogs a while back, indication that perhaps the evil Frogs of Doom were up to new tricks after their defeat by Spartacus Wilde and his kids (as chronicled in my novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom). And now this.
Fanged frogs. In a lost world.
They also discovered a species of rat as big as a cat, kangaroos that live in trees, and a fish that grunts. Among many other new critters.
See? There really is pulp in our world.
UPDATE: For another report on the lost world and its denizens, with several pictures, check out The Daily Mail here.
And now, an actual RANT, with SCIENCE!®
Is this YOUR legacy?
One of my pet peeves is people who just toss their cigarette butts around with no consideration for the public weal, the environment, or their own basic human integrity.
I’ve been known to toss smoldering butts back into car windows, or to politely return a butt to a smoker afoot with a comment along the lines of, “Hey, you dropped this. Figured it was an accident ’cause you look like you have more class than those assholes who just toss butts on the ground.”
People respond either belligerently or sheepishly, depending on whether they give a damn about anything outside of themselves or whether they at least don’t want people to think they’re trashy.
I’m sure some of you reading this are smokers. Some of you are smokers and also friends, maybe even good friends. If you’re my friend and a smoker, rest assured that I’m very concerned about your health (though I’ll never broach the subject, since you’re not an idiot and know it’s bad for you). And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you toss your coffin nail remnants into an ashtray or bin where they belong, rather than treating the world as your goddamned ashtray. I think well of you, and just assume you’re better than that.
It’s not just a matter of litter, as ugly as the scattered constellations of dirty cigarette butts in the street, or in a park, or just along the highway, are. It’s actually bad for the environment. Really bad.
A doctor once told me that a single cigarette butt contains enough nicotine to kill an infant. And now this is in the news:
One of the most common forms of litter are cigarette butts. Once these butts enter waterways, they become toxic to fish. According to a new study by San Diego Sate University (SDSU), filter-tipped cigarette butts are deadly to marine and freshwater fish. In fact, researchers would like to have the butts classified as hazardous waste.
Cigarette butts are not biodegradable. The filters are made up of 12,000 plastic-like cellulose acetate fibers that trap nicotine and tar. There’s enough nicotine trapped in 200 used cigarette filters to kill a human! An estimated 1.69 billion pounds of butts are littered each year worldwide, so you can imagine the negative effects these butts have on aquatic life when they wash into streams and oceans.
SDSU Public Health Professor Tom Novotny explains, “It is toxic at rather low concentrations. Even one butt in a liter of water can kill the fish in a period of 96 hours…”
Professor Novotny continues: “When they unconsciously throw their butts onto the ground, it’s not just litter, it’s a toxic hazardous waste product, and that’s what we’re trying to say. So that may be regulated at the local or state level. And we hope people will be more conscious about what they do with these cigarette butts.” [Source: “Cigarette Butts Kill Fish According to New Study,” Blue Living Ideas]
There’s also this article from KPBS at San Diego State University, and likely a bunch more.
So, if you smoke, keep this stuff in mind. You can smell bad if you like, but please don’t be a dick.
UPDATE: A very good friend who’s a vet tells me “One single cigarette butt consumed can kill a dog or a cat according to the National Animal Poison Control Center – nasty !!”
So just think, worst case scenario, a single butt you throw on the ground could kill a dog, a cat, or a baby. Nice work, kemosabe.
Under An Outlaw Moon 