http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34980491

In this article, peppered with the dry, British sarcasm that keeps me coming back to BBC, Jon Sopel outlines the terribly ironic fact that the American media loves weather disasters, but is conveniently ignorant that these disasters are the implication of a changing climate. It goes on to discuss that, although President Obama has been making strides to make climate a policy priority, it is being systematically blocked and dismissed by Republicans.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is rooted in money. Our system is set up in such a way that those who fund the media and political elections are the ones who potentially have the most to lose if humans are, in fact, causing the climate to change. This will always end in coverage to be skewed and blur the truth of climate change and politicians to always vote against changing the status quo. The only way for America to get its head out of the sand is to uproot this system.

Cultures of Nature Final Response Paper (RP6, 4-5 pages)

Due: 5:00 PM Wednesday, December 16

 Option 1: Your Personal Cultures of Nature Manifesto

Manifesto = a public declaration

of the views, aims, intentions, opinions of a person or group

Option 1 for the final response paper is an energetic vision, an articulation and final word on the issues raised in the course. Here you declare and assert your own ideas about nature, and how humans and nature are to coexist now and into the future. The paper should clearly integrate/bounce off/offer homage to some of the texts and ideas discussed in class as well as our out-of-class experiences, and could also incorporate relevant outside source material and perspectives. But the dominant voice and vision in this manifesto comes from YOU. This is your chance to synthesize some of what you have learned in the course, as well as a chance to tackle something you’ve not yet been able to address in a sustained way. The work may proceed from writing you have already done for the course (but be expanded and transformed) or it may be something entirely new. Use graphics, images, or quotes as appropriate, and citations and reference list.

Option 2: Story of a Place and You

Option 2 is your own personal written version of the Story of Place assignment. This is your chance to tell perhaps a more complete or somewhat different Story of Place, as well as to address something that didn’t make the final cut or that others in your group voted down for one reason or another. The paper may be about the same place as the video or a completely different place (about which you have done similar layers of research). This paper may also proceed from writing you have already done for the course blog (e.g., the research log reports). As in your video, your paper should tell an engaging story of change, including historical details and demonstrating knowledge and perspectives on both nature and culture, with connections to some of the texts and ideas discussed in class. What is different here is that you should account for change in YOU as connected to the place. Use graphics, images, or quotes as appropriate, and citations and reference list.

This film had a powerful message about human society and its impact on the Earth’s landscape. It used different images to compare what an uninhabited Earth looks like compared to an inhabited planet. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. There was a lack of narration and powerful music was played through out it. I am unsure how I felt about the lack of speech in the film. The music had a very large influence about how the viewer felt while watching the movie. At certain times I felt bored because I think the images duration were too long and I wanted to jump to the next scene. I think the time period of when the film was made was also a very important factor to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of its message to the viewer. It was made in the early 1980s in a time when everyone thought they were going to die in a nuclear explosion so it felt very real.

The filmmaker Godfrey Reggio said that the Qatsi films are intended to simply create an experience and that “it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means.” He also said that “these films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It’s been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of, it’s that everything exists within [technology]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.” I really like that Reggio wanted everyone to take away whatever they wanted from the film. It allows the viewer to think their own opinions on the film even though Reggio is clearly trying to change people’s opinions of society. He shows no happy people singing at a birthday party, but rather the bad side of society like collapsing buildings and factories being torn down.

I have pondered the question “can art save the world?” many times. I think its important to consider the carbon footprint of every action we make and review the impact it makes. For example, in the EVST Capstone class we are building a Kiosk which is basically just an artistic tree that is supposed to represent how people have no idea where their resources come from. It is a tree covered in newspaper with little branches sticking out. It is a piece of art but most of the supplies to build it came from Walmart. By shopping at a store that is as unsustainable as Walmart to build our art, is our message really valid? This is what I wondered about while watching Koyaanisqatsi. These film makers traveled all over the world to film this film, being flown all over the world to continuously distribute more and more fossil fuels into the sky. The film was not filmed in such a way that is sustainable, so is its message still valid? I am still unsure if I am willing to say art can save the world, but maybe it can change people’s minds.

You’d think that after seeing this film for a second time that I’d be less interested and not overwhelmed, but that was proven false on Monday. Seeing it through older eyes and with more environmental knowledge under my belt, I was even more moved and transfixed by the cult film. My heart rate increased, I was greatly affected by the music, and I had a hard time peeling my eyes from the screen. It’s hard to describe my initial reaction, but after reading my blog post from last year’s class, I had similar feelings of being overwhelmed and angry. This time I was less angry. Does that mean I’ve come to terms with the film and/or with society? There are so many grand and memorable moments that create an out of body experience. In the first section of the movie we are presented with tons of beautiful nature shots and pans along with intensifying Hopi music. The combination of the two make the scene so intense and pure that my thoughts are racing a mile a minute even though I’m only looking at a waterfall or the desert. When normally looking at these things, we are peaceful and calm.

I’m curious to know why the director chose to use lower and slower music during some scenes. What do these moments offer? One scene where this occurred was a shot of the dam, so were the film makers giving us a second to breathe to take in the human impacts on the land? A different scene that was difficult to watch was the plane moving slowly towards the camera. It was happening at an uncomfortable pace, but coupled with intense music made it almost unbearable. The film overall gives the idea that humans through industrialization/machines/technology have altered this landscape so quickly after so many years of it being pristine. We are made aware of tribal peoples at the beginning and end through the cave paintings. This gives the message that the land was taken away from these people and then absolutely slaughtered by our industry. I don’t like to think about it because it happened so long ago and there is little to do about it now.

The built environment has allowed Americans to recreate indoors, shop indoors, move from city to city indoors, and basically do everything with a roof above our heads. Our views of the moon are obstructed due to buildings and bright city lights, and there is no way of escaping what we’ve created/built. We move too quickly through life, and that is displayed when the cars are moving north/south/east/west in the city in sped up time. The lights are moving so fast before our eyes, like a video game or TV cartoon. You feel as if there is no way out, you’re trapped in this maze. So what does this film want to accomplish? I left feeling overwhelmed and exhausted after enduring this 1.5 hour sensory overload. The end of the film ends with words, the five Hopi definitions for Koyaanisquatsi which are almost an environmental call to action. Number 5 is the most intriguing which says “A state of life that calls for another way of living”. We aren’t told how to alter our ways, but this movie instills so much fear that maybe it can be possible? Is this film capable of changing our life styles?

I was following this car yesterday on Rt. 22. This dead buck looks much less regal on the back of this guy’s car than the trophies at Cabela’s.

I haven’t been able to get the chant out of my head since Monday. Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi.

Like many others in our class, the movie weighed really heavily on me. From the very start, I was confused. The film seemed like some type of torture material rather than a documentary. As the film continued, however, I started to feel depressed. I think that many environmental documentaries, like Cove, are presented with a sad or depressing message. This movie was different.

The emotional weight of the film didn’t come from a narrator or a distinct plot line. Instead, it burned analogous images into my brain until I was so overwhelmed with modern society that I could barely keep watching.

The shots of New York City have stuck with me two days later. Although I’m from a densely populated suburb of Boston, I’ve always felt more comfortable in rural settings (you probably know that by now). I’ve been to New York a number of times but I’ve never really enjoyed it. I’m completely overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle. There is always too much going on and everything is cramped and dirty.

Watching Koyssnisqatsi amplified that stress. The film kept repeating the escalator images and the shots of thousands of people in the streets. Everyone seemed so generic, bored, or sad.

Since this piece was filmed in the 1980s, it was interesting to see it with from a modern environmental perspective. The film isn’t addressing climate change or wildlife conservation. Instead, I interpreted it to be a message of warning. “Look what our planet has become. It started as this lush, untouched world that was beautiful. Now, by the billions, we build and move around our cities like robots in an assembly line.”

There was certainly a lot thrown at you in this film. It is hard to process all of it and while I’d like to take another shot at it, I’m not sure if I could stand to watch it again.

The biology class that I am in talked about “The Cove” earlier this semester after reading a scholarly article* about genetic analysis of whale meat sole in Japan. In 1982 an indefinite moratorium was placed on commercial whale hunting. There are exceptions to the moratorium, such as hunting by indigenous people and hunting whales for research. The study we read analyzed whale meat, sold under the umbrella term “kujira”, that was found in grocery stores. While many of the samples of kujira were matched to whales that if they were being hunted now would be illegal, some of the meat was actually identified as dolphin meat. This is where “The Cove” came into discussion, as we shall see in class today. While the Japanese people happily eat whale meat as part of their culture, eating dolphin meat is unthinkable, like how Americans would not want to eat dog meat. I’m a little nervous about watching the film because the trailer that we watched in my biology class was disturbing enough, but I think the issue it addresses is important.

*Baker C.S., S.R. Palumbi. (1994). Which whales are hunted? A molecular genetic approach to monitoring whales. Science 265: 1538-1539.

I fell completely in love with this film. I’m a sucker for any kind of abstract film, especially when it has as a complex and hypnotizing score as Koyaanisqatsi does. Something, in particular, that struck me about this film was how much it explicitly states without saying a word. It makes it completely clear, through camera angles/effects and music, that what humans are doing to their environment is wrong, destructive, and will lead to an inevitable doom. This is not an thesis with which I am unfamiliar, but it usually is presented in the form of shocking statistics and dramatic pleas of those who have already been affected by our “koyaanisqatsi”, if you will.

The parallels it drew between clouds & water and machines & humans were beautifully done visually and musically. I was entranced by all of the shots and transitions from visual to visual. The natural shots were incredible, sensual, dramatic, and complex. They weren’t the usual nature scene. The beginning natural shots displayed life in clouds which was nicely juxtaposed to the life-less clouds that were later shown coming out of smoke stacks and explosions. The pervasive irony of cacophony during the first sped up highway scene and then complete silence when cut to a city scene forces the viewer to reevaluate every learned association that they’ve had with cities. The movie does that in many other ways, as well. By using the same musical theme in the scenes with the commercial airplane and the fighter jet, we’re forced to reconcile the obvious destruction that fighter planes cause with the atmospheric destruction in which everyone participates when they travel via air. It put things side by side that we normally wouldn’t see in that fashion and ties cinematographic and musical threads through those things so that we are faced with direct comparisons that show us uncomfortable truths.

The thesis of this film, which I mentioned briefly above, is that we are living in an unbalanced life and, if we continue in this fashion, the beautiful natural scenes and lively clouds in the beginning will recede into machine-like life which, sped up, will display routine, boring patterns as opposed to the organic, unique patterns of the natural world. The lively beauty of natural clouds will descend into depressingly deliberate dark, poisonous clouds that are only an externality, rather than a phenomenon to be appreciated intrinsically. This argument is made through the artistic juxtaposition of things that we wouldn’t naturally put side by side and the emotional music placed over things that we wouldn’t normally associate with the implied emotion. The film uses musical and cinematographic techniques such as discordant notes, odd-time signatures, heavy bass, unsettling speed, sped-up and slowed-down visuals, and unusual camera angles to place emotions upon common visuals and make us reevaluate our associations with these visuals. This reevaluation causes us to understand how the meaning of the Hopi proverbs relates to our current path of consumption, routine, and destruction.

As for the question, “can art help us save the world?”, my answer is of course. I don’t think we can save the world without it. People are trained from an early age on how to face a verbal argument that challenges their beliefs. They are less equipped with how to handle truth that is presented more abstractly. Then, when they do “get it”, it tends to hit them in a much more emotional way. Emotions, in my opinion, can sometimes be much more strong than reason.

This film made me uneasy. This feeling of discomfort developed as a result of the juxtaposition of scenes of calm, peaceful nature to scenes of frantic human activity, vast development, and destruction. Not only did the content of the images and footage displayed give me this feeling, but the ways in which these scenes were presented gave me this feeling as well. While I cannot say the anxious feelings I had while viewing the film were enjoyable, I would recommend this film as I feel it effectively conveys a meaningful message. I believe this message was effectively relayed to me due to this uneasy, unsettled feeling it provoked in me.

The message I surmised from this film was the koyaanisqatsi, “life out of balance,” of our world currently is troubling and out of hand. The uneasy, unsettled feeling this film provokes demonstrates how disconcerting and undesirable this imbalance is. As mentioned earlier this feeling arises from the content of the scenes shown in this film, as well as the way in which these scenes are presented. The scenes of nature seemed to be calm and at peace as they generally consisted of footage in landscapes fully, or at least partially, illuminated by overhead sunlight and were devoid of much movement other than passing clouds. The scenes of human activity and development seemed frantic and overwhelming as this footage consisted of things such as swarms of people, busy traffic, complex machines, intricate assembly lines, and towering architecture. The rotation between these various nature and human scenes contributes to feelings of uneasiness, while the juxtaposition of these scenes demonstrates the imbalance of life as life in nature and life in the human world appear to be vastly different and separate in these images.

While the content in itself provokes these feelings and demonstrates imbalance, the way in which the footage is shown enhances both of these things contributing to the effectiveness of the theme. The differential pace and motion in which footage was taken and shown displays imbalance and produces uneasy feelings. For instance, the audience witnesses imbalance between footage slowly zooming in on a peaceful body of water, to a shaky view of a drive through urban traffic. In addition, the shakiness of the city traffic view leaves the audience feeling unsettled. The constant, repetitive rotation between footage types of differing content emphasizes the imbalance between nature and man. Feelings of uneasiness are also enhanced by the interludes of destruction scenes signifying the repercussions of this imbalance between humans and nature that occurs in the form of disaster. Music used such as the Hopi chants create a tense tone that promotes this sense of being unsettled. The diversity of the music utilized by the film, combined with these chants seems imbalanced and promotes feelings of uneasiness as well. The imbalance demonstrated by the content and created by the way it is presented in the film results in feelings of discomfort contributing to the theme that this imbalance of our world today is a troubling thing.

The feeling of uneasiness created by this film and the demonstration of imbalance in this film facilitate the passage of this theme to the audience. The audience finishes their viewing of the film, having seen the imbalance and feeling uneasy, understanding our world is out of balance and this is a troubling matter worthy of concern. Effectively conveying this message, as this film does, could motivate people unsettled by this to take action addressing this imbalance between man and nature in our world.

While watching Koyaanisqatsi I was reminded of Alex DeLarge being brainwashed in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. The scene in Burgess’ book that I am referring to is when Alex, a dystopian, ultraviolent thug, is being brutally trained to feel ill at the sight or thought of violence – eyes held open looking at a screen with violent images flashing. He is injected with a substance that triggers the reaction of illness. Of course this is a dramatic reference, but I think Koyaanisqatsi attempts to have a similar effect. Instead of aiming to make viewers disgusted by acts of violence, Koyaanisqatsi aims to make viewers repulsed by the American military-industrial complex.

I felt overwhelmed with imagery and music. While I was angered by the images of destruction (particularly exploding mountains and bombs dropping), I was also angered by the film itself, having scenes that lasted too long (such as the Saturn 5 rocket explosion). Of course, this is what makes Koyaanisqatsi so unique and effectively disturbing. I also was saddened by the dark image of humanity that is painted by this film. The film began with beautiful images of undeveloped, pure nature – river cutting through a rocky desert landscape and clouds rolling over lush green mountains. Clouds are shown to be moving as water moves in the ocean. A desert scene then becomes infiltrated by human impact – some kind of industry appears with wastewater pools and bombs are shown detonating in this landscape.

Koyaanisqatsi intentionally makes viewers extremely uncomfortable with images that linger for unconventionally long periods of time. Images of people (i.e. such as a fighter pilot, gogo-girl-esque casino workers, people on city streets) starring into the camera for more than several seconds left me feeling uneasy and even somewhat violated by the film. I felt that the film was targeting me personally. After all the people on the screen were starring right into my eyes as if they were saying “Are you getting it? Do you see what is happening here? Are you feeling guilty yet?” After all we, the viewers, are all feeding into this fast-paced, industrialized, crowded, machine-like world. We are the processed meat on the conveyor belt.

Koyaanisqatsi aims to show how our American lifestyle will fulfill the Hopi prophecy of the destruction of our world. The film aims to showing the disturbing consequences of our imbalanced, crazy lives. Our bombs and rockets will create the “ashes..thrown from the sky,” our power lines will comprise the “cobwebs spun” in the sky, and our extensive resource extraction and land use will ‘invite disaster” as foreseen by the prophecies. The film aims to disturb us and prompt a change in our aggressive and disastrous military-industrial cycle and congested, unhappy cities. It is a call to slow down because moving quickly is sickening (as shown by the whirlwind of lights of our complex highway systems). This message is strongly conveyed through the association of human action with industrial images. The highway system aglow is paired a circuit board. Humans are associated with meat on a conveyor belt. Rows of duplicate cars turn into rows of tanks. One of the first images of humans in the film is hell-like with fire and red lighting. We are creatures of destruction stuck on the conveyor belt of our ways – cogs in a machine. We are clockwork oranges – explosive ones!

It is clear that viewers are meant to walk away feeling ill at the thought of industry and our fast-paced, destructive lives. However, I wonder how effective a film like this is in prompting change. Who would sit down to watch it? It is a cult film for a reason. A very specific audience would watch it willingly. I suppose when you have a truly captive audience – an Alex DeLarge situation – like in a classroom, people who would not ordinarily watch the film may watch and be impacted. Perhaps anyone who watches it fully can realize that they don’t want to be a cog in the machine. They want to break free and create change. The style of Koyaanisqatsi makes it more fit for forced viewership or cult viewership, not widespread dissemination of information for the masses. For this reason, I would not recommend the film as a catalyst for change. However, I would recommend the film for it’s artistic novelty and aggressively disturbing tactics. Nonetheless, I am a strong believer that art in many forms can be utilized to prompt collective action and change in our world.