EDMONTON

21 July 2009

The tasks somehow increase in monumentality, due to the exactitude required and the preparation, let alone the execution. Production takes more and more time, and is increasingly difficult: a clear vision of the road between concept and product would almost certainly discourage the attempt. Nonetheless I find myself rushing to Newark airport on the Pulaski Skyway (love this road) with the monumental Hudson power plant off to the right, and the series of rusted bridges over the River, with that feeling of anxiety - based on the fear of unpreparedness. It always leaves once I am in motion (and realize what I forgot, in this case the spare battery for the video camera.)

But inevitably when flying commercially, one joins the rank of “the problem,” which I spend so much energy avoiding: the carbon footprint, massive use of petrol, the tremendous waste… I devote my life to learning and documenting the hidden cost to our environment of that soda can; to then see them thrown in the rubbish as the airlines tend to do makes me crazy. And the food, or what passes for it, makes me cringe. Watching those overweight kids drink soda after soda and eat hamburgers that have such a staggering impact on the planet makes me want to grab those sodas and burgers from them and ask incredulously: “do you know what you’re doing?” But of course, that is the least effective method of persuasion, so I control myself with a beer (time for a life-cycle analysis of that, I guess.) And I hope that the images I make will educate these same people about their unwitting involvement in the desecration of our world.

But for the time being, I am part of the problem, emitting carbon and eating factory food and hoping for change.