Pondering 7 Billion

(Maybe too many blogs? Today 12.19.11 I opened here to post a blog about journalism [coming shortly] and realized the below never was posted - still needs to be shared - maybe even more.)

Two years ago I took leave from GLOBIO, the children's education nonprofit I founded and was running (proving I don't hate kids - just kids having kids as well as people having them as some spasmodic knee-jerk reaction to wanting to be an adult.) I took leave to catch my breath, renew my love affair with creating images and rekindle my misplaced passion for writing. That was working I thought, but today I also wonder what it's worth divided by 7 billion.

I haven't looked up much since starting down the new road.

Great Ape Diaries is all consuming - writing, photography, thinking, traveling, and reflecting back and forward.

I'm only at the doorstep of the project, I'm convinced it will become The project of my life, (thus far.) It has every element I search for in a potentially great project, in fact it has them in spades: charismatic animals that look and act like us, orphans, threatened habitats, illegal trafficing, corporate greed, modern technologies, war, refuges, poaching, disease, the list goes on and on.

Journalistically I'm trying to remain open, open-minded, open-opinioned, as to where Great Ape Diaries will venture and what it will discover, and then this news:

U.N. Says 7 Billion Now Share the World

Today, because of that baby 7 Billion, I have been thinking endlessly about what that means for us, but especially about the implication for our other Hominidaes; those consuming my daily Google searches. Implication = resource use and abuse.

My thinking has had a reoccurring visual, a street scene from Goma: a squallered, muddy, human poverty-choked wannabe-town on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) border of Rwanda filmed this past summer, and featured in an online video report by VICE, regarding the technology addicted precious mineral coltan. In short Coltan (Columbite-tantalite) is a metallic ore comprising Niobium and Tantalum, found mainly in the U.N. acknowledged semi-lawless eastern frontier region of DRC. In fact, 80% of the world's known reserve resides there - so do most of the eastern lowland (Grauer's) gorillas. The mineral magic happens upon refinement. It's there that coltan is transformed into a heat resistant power which has the unique capacity for storing electrical charge. Exactly the kind of charge every cell phone and similar digital device requires.

(Coltan is one of several minerals being mined legally and illegally in DRC called 'conflict minerals' - more from this NPR radio story and from theWorld.)

Population, over-population actually, isn't about a cute little baby softly wrapped in the fluffy cotton of pink or blue, it's about that scene in Goma. It's about millions of people on the fringe of the wilds where great apes hope to survive; people fighting and killing for their own survival. Most struggle themselves to survive on a dollar-a-day -- seven to ten times less than mining coltan -- so the alternative seems clear. It's about a place where coltan mixes with hopeless dreams, and tattered refugee camps that throb painfully from a savage civil war hang-over, and nearby forests that are being blacked into illegal charcoal for cooking fuel. In not so many months I will be standing on one of those far-away muddy street, filming and interviewing those struggling survivors - I'm going to ask them about coltan and great apes. I'm also going to ask them about baby 7 Billion. Reality is that baby 7B was probably born in a similar village, hut, or back alley; I'll likely hear 7B crying in the dirty distance.

Chances are baby 7B will never know the word coltan. When its wireless day arrives it will communicate on a device future-formed, and coltan will be a historical footnote in the evolution of that device. My fear is so will wild great apes; in DRC that will equal bonobos, chimps and gorillas. On that fact it is difficult to remain journalistic, to remain open-minded.

Pondering baby 7B and her or his impact - specifically on the other Hominids - carries a flood of emotions that I'm certain will flow time and time again over these next few years - I'll work to remain journalistic - please excuse the occasional hint of anger, frustration and even a tear that may creep in.

"The end is where we start from." - T.S. Eliot

When we least expect it life begins living and we are washed ashore in the joy.

I love cycling up hills on my bike, this past year I have begun enjoying the downhills equally (almost) and that has as much to do with becoming as skilled at descending as I am ascending. Confidence.

As the year/decade has concluded and another opened I'm starting to get the hang of it again, my photography and my writing. It's beginning to feel right, the "feeling" is returning. I'm exploring more photography and writing of others and much further afield than I did a decade ago when I boxed up one life and opened up another. I now see those new clothes were only partially mine, the rest I was trying desperately to make fit.

Most of the past half year I have been trying to unpack that old box, retry thoughts, notions, ideas, and see what still fits. It's taken a while, but surprisingly I discovered that I gained no weight, yet grew; didn't shrink, yet have a smaller footprint; and most importantly, never lost my curiosity appetite for the world explored through words and images and sounds.

Growing up we are told there are no short-cuts to success, and on some level I've paid my dues to that credo, but this past year the decade has come more sharply into focus and I've concluded living a life is about learning short-cuts, and more importantly they exist and every well lived life has them.

I'm discovering a strange new attraction to the web and ironically it has increased my enjoyment of reading and writing - both things all its critics rioted against it for destroying. Blogs in particular are becoming ever increasingly a part of my daily/weekly reading agenda. I'll try and share more of them here, and those of consistent interest I'll also post to the new blog section I have started in the right column.

The following I found on a blog by photographer Sean Gallagher that I have enjoyed for what he connects me to as much as what he says. The following quote he posted, found via the NY Times photography, video and journalism blog LENS - well worth checking out regularly. It hit me in a particularly wonderful way today, as I just purchased a range of new cameras and lenses to launch 2010, both new year and new decade, rededicated to images and words.

“What kind of typewriter did Hemingway use?” Jim Estrin, photographer at the New York Times for the last 20 years, asked his news photography class by way of an introduction this morning.

Nobody knew.

“That’s because it doesn’t matter,” said Estrin.

Short-cuts keep surprising me, but come more anticipated by the day.

A Decade In Search Of Truth

In 1999 I began one last project, one that I thought would define my career as a photographer, and nudge forward perhaps my career as a writer. It started off to be my journey, a last journey with cameras in hand. A few years later I was, I thought, embarking down Frost's road less traveled.

Now, a decade later, I found myself looking back to the future. Wild Orphans once again is surfacing as my photographic savior, my sanity check, I need it. As NY Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich, "A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." As the last hours of 2009 flicker out, I realize I need 2010 to be a flight back to truth.

Appropriately, the decade's last December epitomized our collective disengagement from the truth - Tiger Woods, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the US sending 30,000 more troops to "win" a game that has no finish line, buzzer or top-of-the-ninth - or maybe our decade of delinquent decision-making was exclusively due to “bad intelligence,” (to coin a phrase by Bush administration alumni), that pushed us into these fiascoes. Unfortunately the tigers of truth, print journalists, are as rare as their Asian counterparts, and as the decade comes to a close, we are watch their habitat disappear as well. In Washington DC they opened the Newseum — "a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." As the director is quoted on the Newseum's own website, "Visitors will come away with a better understanding of news and the important role it plays in all of our lives,". Frighteningly we don't build museums to the living and vibrant, but to the vanishing and disappeared - is news habitat gone?

Much of 2010 I will be back on the road, exploring this planet, personal and public perambulations. In search of truth I already have some sense of where to look, but know many new roads will appear--filled with excitement and that tingling trepidation when perambulating on a precipice. But the search for truth will be alive, and that's what I crave and that's why so much of life is "blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." it's not alive. It's as if we have become our own avatars. Gleefully cocooning ourselves into our make-believe reality. And most frightening of all... as the climate conference in Copenhagen insanely pointed out - inside that reality we don't need to care.

I care. I have but this solitary existence. I have no guarantee of second chances, no do-overs,no redemption after missing the warning, or as the chorus rings out:

This is it
Make no mistake where you are
your back's to the corner
This is it
Don't be a fool anymore
This is it
the waiting is over

No room to run
No way to hide
No time for wondering why
It's here, the moment is now

So about Frost's road less traveled. I only know roads are man-made, and that any new road is not so much littered with leaves unworn by human footfalls, rather shiny tchotchkes of world blinded by it's own make-believe reality. "Follow them, use them and forget them.... Don't park. [roads] will get you there, but I tell you, don't ever try to arrive. Arrival is the death of inspiration." (Ernst Hass) Truth lives in inspiration.

A poster ad featuring Tiger Woods forebodingly chimes, "tougher than ever to be a Tiger." Paradoxically over the past decade the world has discovered that too, hiding from one lie, while not questioning the other. The caption on another Accenture Woods poster reads "It’s what you do next that counts." True enough for Tiger in 2010, but not just Tiger. Inside the cocoon I think it's easy for life to imitate art because you can never stand back far enough to get a proper perspective.

Nike’s chairman, Phil Knight, told The Sports Business Journal, in perhaps the most prophetic quote of the decade's closing month, that when Woods’s career "is over, you’ll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip." Decades hence I think we will look back on this first ten year span of the new Millennium and realize there were too many "blips", I hope not too many for us too survive. Those blips, like the make-believe reality TV shows that launched the decade, held no truth.

Tomorrow morning is just another morning, but it begins a departure. I have reconstructed a camera bag - filled with all new Canon gear, three decades Nikon left behind; I have the love of my life that will see me through my days on this Earth; I travel first to India for a friend's wedding, a global wedding in a sense; then to Europe to understand why we are willing to suffering to know the truth about ourselves; and to East Africa in search of where all new roads began.