“I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson

We banter words like sustainability and renewable and conservation around without any true understanding of how the world really works when we consume like there is no tomorrow. Few who make the decisions about the future of life on Earth have ever seen, much less lived, the results of their actions and policies. "The meek shall inherit the Earth"... or just be left with the shit left behind?

Photo: Endangered Greater Adjutant Storks, along with the poorest people and cattle, in Guwahati dump, India 
©Gerry Ellis/Minden Pictures

I Wanted Little Red Shoes

I never told anyone before now about the shoes, the little red ones. I suppose over the past forty-years the necessity of revealing it swung widely, from unnecessary to 'that's a little strange Ger." Here I am, at the birth of my life's second half, feeling a need to confess — perhaps it's reveal — out of pride, not embarrassment, my longing for those little red shoes. No they weren't my mother's, nor did I spy them in a department store window, nor lust after them in Vogue magazine. No, I saw them on television. It was a Sunday evening, the moment captured in my mind's eye. The little red shoes appeared suddenly like Dorothy's ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz, but they were even more magically transportive. They had the power to take the wearer not home, but the exact opposite, on journeys far beyond imagination, to places that seemed out of my reach. They were brilliant red high-topped Converse tennis shoes. There on that tiny TV screen they were repelling a hundred feet down out of a leafy tropical rainforest canopy, descending from a visit to a world of unimaginable aliens, on the feet of the most curious creature on our planet — David Attenborough. I so wanted those shoes!

I never forget those shoes. Every time I step off a plane in some foreign land, leap from a canoe into a steaming tropical swamp forest, or wander through a marketplace wafting with words and smells unknown, those shoes are with me.

Yesterday I read a Guardian interview of David Attenborough by David Monbiot:

"While other people’s worlds tend to shrink with age, his seems to expand. His curiosity ranges as widely as ever. His ability to understand and assimilate new information seems unabated. “Oh, I forget things,” he claims. When I press him for examples, he tells me, “Well, where I put my glasses – I had them about three minutes ago and they have simply evaporated, they’ve dematerialised. Oh yeah, and I forget engagements...But these, surely, are afflictions suffered by anyone immersed in the world of ideas. He has no difficulty remembering the things that fascinate him.”

I realized a few years ago what I wanted all along was that life in those shoes. I have been chasing that life my whole life. Knowing Sir Attenborough celebrates 90 years soon, and continues with such zeal, I'm certain can be attributed to those shoes. I think I get it now — it takes courage to wear your youth a whole life, for all the world to see.

Life

you are born,
you laugh,
you love
you cry,
you die.

The only journey... kindness.

Dear Ms Collins

To my dear high school English teacher Ms Collins: I know I was by far your worst pupil - thank you for everything, especially your unbelievable patience. Please know the curse you placed on me some 40 years ago is alive and well. I read, and write, and re-read, re-write, and read more... I'm twice the writer you thought I would be and only half the writer I wish to be.

I crossed a new threshold - figured out I'm at 150 pages read/researched for every page of writing - that ratio will surely climb soon. I don't even want to consider how many of those pages have been re-read (at least once!)  The book stack "to read" now sits idling at 9 not accounting for pdf docs and journal reports... and then there is the wretched little reading list save eyeglasses on my mac laptop, it tallies 103!

So many words, so few great apes - ergh!

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Sometimes War Is Silent

"We sacrifice our boys and girls
in silence. We pay our taxes
in silence. We make the bullets,
the bombs and the planes in silence.

We watch war films and play war games
in silence. When we get our chance
to say something in the poll-box,
our habit is too rock-solid."

except from Susanne Donoghue's 'Sometimes Silence is Silver'

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. ~Issac Asimov

“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.”

- Rudyard Kipling

Every war is the war: the war that will end all wars; the war that will finally crush the aggressors; the war that will disarm our opponents and in so teach them a lesson that they will not be tempted to repeat; war, because (our) god has told us it is just; war, because the infidels have invaded our land; war, because they have disrespected our culture and religion; war, because of our obligation to protect the oppressed; war, because vital resources are at stake; war, because he is a bully to his people; war, because “[he] tried to kill my dad.”

and war, to prevent terrorism.

“We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
~General Omar N. Bradley

Why do we have colleges of war, yet not one of peace?

Why is there no standing army of peace?

Where is the park monument erected to the pacifist, the antiwar leader, the draft evader?

Where is the world leader who can proudly say “no one died in violence during my term.”

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

~Issac Asimov

Walkabout With One's Self

From a mountain top I dream beyond the horizon,

there, where a world not unlike me exists,

there, where minds drift in concert, but not in forfeit of self.

Such a place seems real,

such a place dreams in others,

such a place lives in me.

Why from this mountain top does it seem so far?

So beyond grasp, beyond more than a dream?

Beyond a lifetime’s journey.

I am about to wander down from this mountain top and journey a road in search of that beyond-horizon-place of shared hopes and imaginings.

That road, traveled in stretches and segments all my life, now feels unknown,

a path of great mystery, filled with fear and emptiness.

I have months yet to think of wandering, of perambulating, of walking in reality’s shadow.

So for now that beyond-horizon-place is just that—a mental mirage.

It hasn’t filled a void or crushed a dream or sung a song of hope.

There remains a child in me searching for magic unseen,

a child wanting to touch a special dream.

A dream like that of no other, a dream that lives over the horizon and knows a possibility that we all claim to cherish, but fail to set free.

A child remains a child as long as he sits upon the mountain top,

a safe place to dream.

With trepidation I takes his first steps, knowing that day will lead to day and he will never return.

Only if across that new horizon there should be a new mountain top to climb will there be a chance to dream again,

and a child be once more.

Fear of what you will find

When the ancient cartographers created maps of a world they yet didn't know they marked the blank spaces with illustration and wrote "here be dragons." I fear the map I have chosen for my journey will soon have silent spaces with voids, "here be extinctions."

“And after they are gone, there will be silence. And there will be stillness. And there will be empty places. And nothing you can say will change this. Nothing you can do will bring them back.” 

- Bradley Trevor Greive

Discovering Who You Are Begins With Discovering Where To Begin

I have arrived on a portico fifty-seven years into my journey. I came to learn do the job intended with my life: to be a journalist, a story-teller of truths. After much procrastination I realize I am here because I first must be an apprentice. "My job is to tell people what they don’t want to hear. That is not what I set out to do. I wanted only to cover the subjects I thought were interesting and important. But wherever I turned, I met a brick wall of denial."

Those last words are not my words, but those of writer-journalist George Monbiot. They are the most accurate words to describe the past few years of my life, whether working the Gulf after the BP oil disaster or globally on great ape extinction.

 Like all apprentices I ultimately must find a teacher, at least a guide. My realization, and then pursuit of a mentor is at times known, but more often unknown. Equally important, mentors must change over time, the mystery is knowing when. When is often later than it should be. Monbiot's words come at an important time.

Becoming an apprentice means giving up on thinking you know something, almost anything of where you intend to travel. After experiencing degrees of previous success, the idea of starting anew has tarnished appeal. In my case success is supported by people's accolades and acknowledgements, fans.  To bastardize a quote: Nothing destroys the hunger to discover who you are more effectively than being treated as the hero you were.

The fear of apprenticeship is time. The time it takes to start over. And during the time of starting over you are not successful. There's a fear in that. Ironically, fear fosters procrastination—the squanderer of time. There are few apprenticeships anymore, there is no grace of time.

So, I have been sitting on the steps of the portico, staring out into the world of before, fearing to go inside and begin the journey into the world of after. I need to give myself permission to pass inside, to fail, to not care what others might think, to lay myself open to learning anew; no one else can grant that permission.

Monbiot wrote, "I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping." What I do know is I need to be a story-teller of truths, a journalist, I must find a way to tell people what they don't want to hear, in doing so, I know with conviction, I have heard it.

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The Image - A Covenant of Uncompromising Trust

Over the past two days a couple of stories have erupted on an old, but problematic issue that will never go away yet now more than ever is fanned into full fire by global digital winds: image theft.

Thousands of words have been written on the subject and I'm tired of repeating any of them. My complaint, my concern, here lies in the breaking of what I believe is the "Photograph's Covenant" the image creates an uncompromising trust with the viewer. It says what you see is real, the truth.

Simple theft has reparation. I can asked to be credited, I can ask for the abuser to stop using the image, I can sue their arse off. Breaking the Covenant destroys something I can never repair.

One could extend the Covenant to documentary film and journalistic reporting, both audio and writing, as well. It's simple—the viewer's trust is in the reality of photograph's content. It's an unspoken trust of truth. As photographer Ami Vitale said in a recent NYTimes Lens interview The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls, regarding an egregious disregard of the covenant:

We are responsible as photographers and journalists when we make promises to do justice to their stories and honor them in the way that they have honored us by sharing their stories." 

Like the loss of trust in all relationships, once compromised there is forever lingering doubt. But what saddens and frustrates me more is the increasing disinterest in the trust. No one thinks about it and no one seems to care (except the original creators.) And once decapitated it is gone. As in this example when I recently attended a film documentary about photographer Vivian Maier with friend/photographer Joni Kabana, in Joni's words:

"Another example that some might not realize constitutes theft: last weekend I went to see the Vivian Maier documentary and I saw someone photographing her images, up close, that were on the promotional poster. When I went over and pleasantly reminded her that she was infringing on copyright material, she got nasty and said to leave her alone. She continued to photograph the images so that they looked like she took them. I continued by saying she could not post or use them anywhere, as the rights to the image belong to the photographer."

Sharing images and content from so many sources, from around the world, has inspired and enabled a wonderfully powerful change that I celebrate. Like all changes there are cost, some appropriate, some too high. Loss of the Covenant is too high because we pay that price with our trust.


Above Photo: A screen shot taken from Chris Brown's Twitter account May 1, 2014, depicting the Twitter campaign for #BringBackOurGirls that went viral regarding the hundreds of Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The images, created by photographer Ami Vitale in 2000 in Guinea-Bissau, has absolutely no relationship to the school girl kidnappings.

To see Ami Vitale's original story with the images used as she intended Guinea-Bissau: Rediscovering the Soul of a Forgotten Land
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"he had this great book that he wanted to write"

A day of struggles with writing, knowing you have a story eating away at you from the inside, a global tale, and Steinbeck and the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath:

"One of the amazing things about the book is that Steinbeck knew that he had an epic that he was going to write. He spent months researching it. He spent much of the mid and late '30s with migrant workers. He wrote a long series of six articles for the San Francisco News, and he knew that he had the raw material of an American epic. He was really almost kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. 

And he was plagued by the pressure of it as he's writing it. In his journals, you can tell that he is really weighted by the idea of how to get this right. And he wrote about it: I've done my darnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags. I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written. He wanted the book to become a part of the culture immediately and it did. I mean, if you think about the idea that a major industry was burning this book and you - you know, you move forward to 2014, that's quite astonishing. Can you imagine a novel that would move a major industry to burn it? That speaks to how much of a nerve Steinbeck was hitting in." - Steve Almond

The lingering echoing words, "kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. "

Is What We Carry Is What We Are?

In a few months my ten-year with my current passport will end and I am forced by decree to obtain a new one, whether I like "it" or not. That raises an irritating issue: the newish U.S. over-the-top nationalistic passport that will be forced upon me. "What’s in the Australian passport? There are wombats, dingoes, koalas, emus, and kangaroos, but they don’t say a word." that's the final line from the Slate.com article on one of my pet peeves THE RIDICULOUS U.S. PASSPORT. Like the author I'm proud to be American and very patriotic in a Thoreauvian way, but cling to my old subtle-paged passport with its few blank remaining pages as a symbol of democracy with discretion, intelligence and compassion - like the majority of the tiny percentage of Americans who actually have a passport and use it. On the other hand, perhaps the new one is more accurate, the passport of paranoia and posturing - and all things I travel to get away from.

And by the way... what ever happened to all those yellow, orange and red alert colors the Bush Administration came up with to remind us of how paranoid we should be traveling beyond our front steps?



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Some Days I Need To Be A Photographer

Everything was going fine - cuppa tea made, bike race from Europe watched, cat fed, emails being answered, even worked on the taxes (even though it's April that's way early for me - I'm chronically late to the IRS... but then again they are chronically late with providing all the education and social services I think my money should support), and then I bumped into a trio of stories that I felt compelled to post to my facebook page - after the third posting it hit me: today I miss being a photographer.

Each of the three photo stories had a common theme - they were stories being told through photographs. Different yet the same. Posted here for those not on facebook (I completely understand.) Each about the "need" tearing at my soul today.

First was - 

Photography in the Docket, as Evidence

By James Estrin

Then came - 

How A Female Photographer Sees Her Afghanistan

by Farzana Wahidy

Finally, 
Photographs: The Battle We Didn't Choose | My Wife's Fight With Breast Cancer
By Angelo Merendino


It wasn't like this when I was younger. I shot a lot, but the need was different. Now it's bloodstream stuff. It's a need flowing through me, begging me to not be satisfied not being me. It's the me trying to take control of the eyes and tell a story. After all these years, it still bewilders me that I can't identify this mood in the beginning - it's the one that starts as a hint, slips into attention disorder about all other things, then gnaws at my bones as if I am being consumed from within. Some days I need to tell a story. Some days I need to be a photographer.

Travelers Never Come Home

Portland, OR -
The photograph that graces the header to this blog is called "Earthrise" by astronaut William Anders during NASA's Apollo 8 mission. That mission was the first to orbit the moon. My late camera-colleague Galen Rowell spoke my sentiments best, "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken."

In my satchel-like wallet I carry a folded copy of "Earthrise", I have always thought of it as a picture of  "home." It has become my most influential photograph ever taken. It travels in there aside my U.S.Passport, a folded copy of the 20 things to remember from All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, and the quote, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." from the speech at the Rio Summit by 13 year old Severne Susuki. Collectively these are my home.

I have spent much of the past 12 months on the road from, Indo-malaysia to East and Central Africa, and more recently in India and Sri Lanka. Some of the time I spent alone, some together with my Great Ape Diaries film partner Skye and most recently guiding a collection of tourists. All surrendered different thoughts on this thing I do, travel, observe, reflect.

Reflecting on recent wandering I am certain it is impossible for travel to occur in groups - only tourism. Groups reinforce living in the past. A constant comparison to what was. Someone said to me to travel "they need to step out of their comfort zone" - agreed, but they cannot while always reinforcing their comfort zone with one another. Stepping out of one's comfort zone one does alone. Or at best with a kindred spirit. Three in a space capsule may be the limit of oneness.

The latter, guiding tourists, is something I am self-limited in doing. It has it's teaching moments, or should I say reminder moments. A reminder that touring is not traveling, despite the desire of the tourist to travel. They never come fully prepared to travel, fully committed to accept never returning. Traveling is what the crew of Apollo 8 did on that first circumnavigation of earth's moon in late December 1968. They left their earthly limits. They accepted on some level the opportunity of never coming home.

When I first started traveling I was still living at my parent's home. As my father backed out of the driveway the first time to take me to the airport my mother stood and wept. She later told me it was because she was afraid I would never come home, to that home I never returned. I accepted the opportunity of never coming home, she knew that. She had seen me run away as a child and knew I had insatiable gypsy-feet. Home was where they took me, were they stood.

True traveling assumes a new tomorrow without a comparison to today, or even more critically, all one's yesterdays. That is where the road forks between travelers and tourists...

"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."

Traveling in turn trusts everywhere is home. But therein lies the danger. Home becomes everywhere, every place, and everybody and thing your neighbor. Eventually there is no "there" only here. A war in Congo is here, in me, it's faces my neighbors. There is no international news, only neighborhood affairs. I step into the kitchen and turn the tap and see refugees filling plastic yellow jugs, a family of women and their children bathing at a broken corner hydrant in Kolkata, a rancher in South Dakota looking desperately skyward for rain, and an elephant raiding a community well in Namibia. We share the same roof.

In the past couple years I have turned to Al Jazeera news when in Portland, my only way of seeing the comings and going of my neighborhood. I am at once homesick and lost. The heartache is daily. I think, it's my home, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." Then I'm reminded, they are only tourists, they think when it's all over they will go home.

Travelers never come home, they close their eyes and see the Earthrise.

Time To Perambulate

No I haven't fallen off the edge of the world - although those ancient mariners may not have been too far off - the world has assumed a few straight edges it seems. And not for the better. Worlds need roundness - nature has few straight-edges; they tend to be inflexible. Back to point, my world has been consumed with a new project - Great Ape Diaries - which does and doesn't fit here. It certainly is full of perambulations - just not here.

Like most things in life I plunge in 100% or flop about on the edge like a fish on the shore. I'm at a point in life where flopping doesn't suit me physically or, most importantly, mentally. Meaning is the water in which this fish needs to swim.

I'm coming back here because Great Ape Diaries has thrust me back into the world - traveling and thinking - and all those impressions don't fit quietly into a GAD box. They are most at home perambulating on a blank slate of no pre-intentions.

On Our Better Nature...

"Sherwin Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes in The Art of Aging, "Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise." 

"I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

I read this article on writing and found much of myself in the paragraph from Jonathan Safran Foer:

"I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing, in terms of the day-to-day process," says Jonathan Safran Foer. "I’ve never had characters before I started writing.  I’ve never had a moral.  I’ve never had a story to tell.  I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share.  Auden, the poet, said, 'I look at what I write so I can see what I think.'  And that’s been very true for me in my process.  I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate.  It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts.  So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages." 

As Robert Capa, one of the founders of the agency Magnum Photos, once put it: Arnold's work "falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99

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.

GeoTracking – Canon’s New EOS 1Dx

Overview from Canon:

“Canon has brought the best of the EOS-1D Series of digital cameras into one phenomenal model: the new flagship of the EOS line, the EOS-1D X*. Its full-frame 18.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor and all-new Dual DIGIC 5+ Image Processors deliver high quality image capture at up to 12 fps (14 fps in Super High Speed Mode) and a powerful ISO range of 100 – 51200 (up to 204800 in H2 mode) provides sharp, low-noise images even in the dimmest low-light conditions. An all-new, 61-Point High-Density Reticular AF and 100,000-pixel RGB Metering Sensor that uses a dedicated DIGIC 4 Image Processor, makes the EOS-1D X reach new levels of focus speed and accuracy delivering advanced tracking even for the most challenging shooting situations. Taken all together, the EOS-1D X’s improved HD video capture, numerous connectivity options, combination of processing power and durable construction, including shutter durability tested to 400,000 cycles, make it the ultimate EOS.”

Ya, just another camera body you say – but here might be the kicker (I’m hoping to get a system to test ASAP – then will report here as well as our Great Apes Diaries “the making of” blog.) Canon is also introducing the Wireless File Transmitter WFT-E6A and the all-new Canon GPS Receiver GP-E1.