HAPPY NEW YEAR from JEFF & LIESBET...
!!!!!!! http://picasaweb.google.com/ilnissky/MomentoMagico# Annual Transition Greetings from Lyttelton New Zealand! Here we are on the brink of another year...and what an amazing most-recent cycle of "Earth's-revolution-around-Sun" it's been!!! We began 2009 in Tasmania, and thanks to Holly, Josi, Jonathan and Michelle, we were able to create our very first film, Cryo 2008, in early January. This was a huge accomplishment for us, and a very exciting one! As well, I'd just replaced my first-ever digital camera (that got stolen in Amsterdam) with an even better one, and my button-finger was itchin' for some action!
Then we went to Flinders Island Tas to visit our friend Arni Balarni, and stayed there for several weeks, living in "semi-permaculture" style with almost no electricity, right next to the sea. Here we first discovered the legacy of Rachel Carson, and her spirit has been with us ever since. At 'Balarnia' we created a massive amount of art, first for Arni then for Jay & Jacki, who also made a lot of things possible for us! We were at Arni's when the bush-fires raveged Melbourne, but didn't know about it for a few days. We returned to mainland Tas and house-sat for our friend Jo in Deloraine, where we finished up our film and began to distribute it in our network of friends. And I have to thank Kim Clark for having us at Jackie's Marsh, as it was there that I first discovered that my D700 could actually photograph the Milky Way!
In May we returned to mainland Australia and made our way west along the Great Ocean Road, and experienced the enchantment of the Grampians, or Gariwerd, for the first time. Then we headed for the Flinders Ranges, and experienced the magic and power of Adnyamanthaha country. In this area we had nice visits with plasmocosmic researcher John McGovern and our friends Bob & Sue Tulloch.
We traversed the Nullarbor by thumb and made our way to Albany WA where Gus, Julie, Petrol and Kurty-kurt had us for several weeks, where we again got heaps of creative projects done, as well as making major headway on our second film, The Chronicles of Balarnia, about our time at Arni's on Flinders Island. On Gus's tv on July 15 I witnessed on ABC news first that Greenpeace "officially declared" "global warming" to be THE major threat to humanity...you know the story...THEN following immediately was Australian Minister of the Environment Peter "do the" Garrett, verifying that the Rudd administration "officially declared" that more uranium mines could be opened/expanded. You might remember Garrett as the skeletal lead-singer for Midnight Oil, whose every song conveyed warnings of environmental destruction and CIA manipulation of Australian government affairs. He's not the most popular person in Australia these days. All this prompted me to write an article called "Nuclear Australia: In Support of Cancer, Terrorism, and Depopulation." Last week I learned that Greenpeace redacted their 15 July declaration as a falsehood.
After Albany we visited Pemberton, the "Tasmania of Western Australia", visited some friends in Perth, and then headed up to visit Martin & Ellen in Kalbarri, our lovely friends for whom we'd done a major mural two years before. We had amazing wilderness experiences at the coastal Red Bluff cliffs and the Murchison river gorge before we headed north to visit Karijini National Park in the Pilbara.
At Denham in Shark Bay, we experienced the Aquarush fiasco. This was where we thought we were going out on a catamaran to see some whales but it ended up being a military-grade speed-boat that was quite literally a "meat-grinder" as well as an acoustic nightmare. We witnessed the operator plowing through flocks of birds and driving the boat at speed while looking through binoculars. The one whale that was spotted fled the area to keep from being harassed by this "eco-tour." We felt extremely endangered by how this guy was operating the boat, at speeds that were totally irrational and dangerous, especially in shallow waters teeming with life-forms, and in a World Heritage area. When we got off, we told him that we didn't think he should be allowed to operate a boat like that there, and asked if he'd ever hit anything. "Not that I know of" was his instant response. A couple weeks later I received an email from a Denham resident informing us that the boat operator had actually hit and killed a snorkeler around Christmas of 2008. Not only had he killed someone, he lied about it AND was still operating unfettered by any kind of government investigation or enforcement. Not only because Liesbet and I, and all the other passengers were put at serious risk, but also because EVERY DAY THAT GOES BY this guy is endangering not only his passengers and any wild-life in or near his path, not to mention himself, and ALSO because this kind of thing is happening all over the world, whereever speed-boats are allowed to operate in areas rich in shallow--water sea-life...because of all these things I have filed a complaint with first the premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, who then "passed the buck" to Minister of Tourism/Education Elizabeth Constable, who then "passed the buck" to Minister of Environment Faragher and Minister of Transport O'Brien. Fremantle-based Center for Whale Research scientists Curt and Micheline Jenner state in their doco Whalesong that whale-watching is by far the most serious threat to the well-being of cetaceans in the entire Kimberly region. So what happens when there's no one left to "pass the buck" to? Maybe we can get the Sea Shepherd team, which now includes New Zealander Pete Bethune's 'wave-piercing' Ady Gil speed-boat (it's so loud that crew has to wear ear-plugs, and it's sound levels are amplified by under-water physics in the whales' hearing range), along with the now-permanent Animal Planet tv-crew, to sneak up on Gregg Ridgely on the Aquarush and blast him with motor noise even greater than his own!!! Would this be "fighting shite with shite" or what? Or, more likely, if these guys ever met, they'd probably have to have a RACE in honour of all the testosterone floating about!!! This "battle of the blasters" would make GREAT TV...but LOOK OUT WHALES!!!
After Shark Bay we headed north to Karijini and had an awesome time there thanks not only to the beauty of the Rainbow Serpent but also to Mike and Jana, a lovely couple from Czech who invited us to join them as they traveled around Karijini. Because of their coolness we were able to visit a lot more of the extremely remote areas than we would have if we were hitching; Hammersley gorge proved to be the most fantastic of all...the dream-time is alive and well there! Plus, in the Pilbara we had about three solid weeks of warm sun and blue skies, something we'd seen precious little of since Flinders Island in February. Our moods were elevated along with our vitamin D levels.
Now that we were within our final month in Australia for this visit, we had to become a litlle more "time-conscious" than we had been in the profoundly time-less Pilbara, reckoned by top Aussie "rupistemologist" Robert Bednarik to be the most powerful region on the planet This didn't mean that we had to freak out about 2012...only that we had to be in Melbourne before our flight on September 23rd.
After a lengthy consideration of everything, we decided not to hitch-hike back across the Nullarbor, but to take the "no-longer-mighty" Indian-Pacific train from Perth to Adelaide; then we hitched out of Adelaide and re-visited our belovely Gariwerd (Grampians) for a couple days before arriving in Melbourne, to visit Rachel, Ian and Josh. Rach took us to visit (still-legendary-but-not-spooky) Hanging Rock, which we found to be very enchanted. Most Australians know of "the rock" because of the early-70's Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which several school-girls "disappeared" into the rocks. The film made it look like something weird happened, maybe even 'foul play.' But I learned from a Philip Adams essay that in the novel on which the film was based, the girls reappear unharmed a few weeks later, just as mysteriously as they had vanished.
Our flight from Melbourne to Auckland was delayed a little from Sydney, but later in the day from our friends' place in Takapuna we learned of the unprecedented major dust-storm that had raged across south-eastern Australia, and shut down airports all along the eastern seaboard. Our flight was one of the very last ones to be able to leave that day.
And we were even more stunned to learn that most credible scientific people in Australia were acutely aware that this dust-storm, the likes of which hadn't been seen in Aus in over 70 years, was bearing radio-active materials, ranging in strength from low-level mining tailings to high-level plutonium lying on the ground at the Maralinga nuclear test site. the nuclear scenario had not yet even come into existence the last time a storm like this hit Aus. This was a MAJOR wake-up call to Australians, not to mention the world, about the environmental mobilization of highly toxic materials made possible by irresponsible human activity. We felt as if the Rainbow Serpent had whisked us out of the way just in the nick of time. Thanks, Baime.
Safely in "green and clean " New Zealand, we journeyed immediately to Great Barrier Island, where, courtesy of John and Peggy-Anne, we were able to spend the next ten weeks in one of the most wonderful, productive and enlightening environments ever, in our own little house two-minute's walk from the beach, with full active & passive solar hot-water/power, broadband internet, and rain-water. Here in this magic womb we really became attuned to "bird consciousness" and, much like at Arni's on Flinders Island, we were constantly in touch with the rhythms of the sea. Swimming in the ocean became second-nature, especially to Liesbet who sometimes went several times per day! We planted heaps of veggies and flowers, and nurtured them from seed to half-a-meter in some cases...huge silver-beet was edible long before we left, tomatoes were bearing tiny ones, sun-flowers were soaring and pumpkin a'spreading, too...SO wonderful to have a wee garden!
The spirit of Rachel Carson was with us all the way, and it was on Great Barrier that I first heard of Clyde and Steve Graf, the hunters-turned-film-makers who had made a doco called Poisoning Paradise, about the on-going widespread use of 'super-toxin' 1080 all over New Zealand. 1080 is so dangerous to humans that for this reason it's use is banned in almost every country in the world, yet 4 tons, or approximately 85% of all that is manufactured yearly, is deployed by DOC in New Zealand. The stated purpose is to control the population of possums, imported from Australia in the late 1800's, which allegedly is running out of control, defoliating forests and eating bird eggs everywhere.
I've already covered this whole story in recent weeks; the Graf brothers' film documents in great detail, with in-depth field work and interviews with top scientific minds (who DON'T work for DOC), the reality of what 1080 does to any and all vertebrates, not only possums, but pets, cows, horses, deer and birds, including the native kiwis and keas. And people.
It kills them very slowly as they writhe in a tortuous and convulsive agony; and in the case of wild-life, their poisonous carcasses lie there to rot in streams and soil, and/or to be eaten by other animals, who then concentrate the residue in their own bodies.
Clyde Graf sums it up in the same basic, common-sense way that Rachel Carson did: what kind of sense does it make to poison EVERYTHING when it's just one target species you're after?
My response was that maybe it's not just the "target species" who's actually the target.
As I began to look deeper into the whole pesticide scenario, things got a lot scarier when I realized that the active ingredient in 1080 is fluorine, the most reactive element on the periodic table, and "cousin" of uranium due not only to its extreme toxicity and ability to induce cancer, but also because of its history with the military-industrial complex and nuclear weapons establishment.
That fluorine is THE mac-daddy of all toxins became very clear; because of its presence in things from pesticides, to pharmaceutical drugs, to agricultural products, to toothpaste, Teflon and CFC's...not to mention 60% of public drinking water supplies in America and New Zealand...chronic fluorine toxicity probably affects more people adversely than does the ionizing radiation from nuclear materials. And its primary source is as waste-products from the processing of uranium and the manufacture of aluminium, steel and computer monitors. Through ubiquity it has attained invisibility.
These revelations were quite profound, and after a lengthy "web-battle" with Australians who didn't want to believe that their dust-storm was radio-active, here was an even bigger battle, with people who believe the "clean and green New Zealand" propaganda and refuse to accept the hard-core reality of what 1080 is and does.
In conjunction with researcher William Engdahl, who authorized me to post extensive excerpts from his book Seeds of Destruction, I created a new blog dedicated to the "Rachels Carson of Today", in honor of the spirit of life, and to help us all become aware of the results of our actions (or inactions) as participants in the "war on nature" which is what human industrial civilization truly is.
All along Liesbet and I have loved the whales and dolphins, on whose planet we are living. No matter where we are, we feel their presence, their consciousness. All this year we have felt them getting "closer" to us, in mind and spirit. We saw some on the boat to Great Barrier Island; there, Liesbet had several sightings, and then one day while we were swimming, three dolphins came out of nowhere and circled us a couple times, less than a meter away. We were blown away...we felt as if we'd been "treated" with some kind of special energy. And it was as if they had come to say "Keep up the good work...and thanks!" This encounter came pretty much at the pinnacle of our realizations about the connections between 1080, fluorine, uranium, vaccinations, 'global warming' and the global 'depopulation' agenda; the dolphins empowered us deeply, to say the least.
With great sadness we left our "home on Great Barrier" and made our way south to the major volcano complex at Ruapehu/Tongariro. The weather was bad, so we just stayed put for three days working on our film, yet in the embrace of the volcano deities.
We stopped off north of Wellington to visit with 1080 activists Kate Winters and Tony Adamson and their five awesome hound-dogs. Kate woke up to the 1080 thing after being poisoned herself in 1998, and is now one of New Zealand's most vocal activists. After sharing a lot of information, we crossed Cook Strait and made our way to the south island. We gradually caught the awesome vibe here that I love so much, and spent a couple days in Picton and reconnoitering places to visit in the Marlborough Sounds area before visiting picture-esque but tourism-over-run Kaikoura. Here, like in Denham, we were confronted with businesses established to capitalize on tourism at the extreme expense of native wild-life. In Kaikoura were dozens of "Gregg Ridgely's" operating noisy and disruptive "eco-tours" using boats, planes and even helicopters to "watch" whales.
These tour-operators are incredibly stupid; they have no idea that just because a whale might not "flee" from their sonic attack and invasion of privacy, it doesn't meant they like it or aren't adversely affected by it. Or maybe they know, and just don't care...because there's easy money to be made. Psychologist Erich Fromm called this the 'marketing character', a new development in the make-up of capitalized-man, and a form of what he referred to as the "necrophilous personality."
Dr.Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in California reports that..."boat noise was impacting the communication. The humpbacks were having to 'shout' above the noise, repeating and simplifying their calls to each other, much like humans trying to converse above the din of a noisy party. 'We detected an information decrease of about 28 percent in the presence of boat noise,' says Doyle. In the limited visibility environment of the ocean, humpbacks rely upon vocalization for their social behavior, which includes feeding. Shipping traffic was disrupting their communication, and by inference, their social activities."
see http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_richards_doyle_040422.html
Also, "by inference", tourism traffic in boats, planes or choppers is equally disruptive to any wild-life it seeks to exploit, whether it's whales, dolphins, or seals.
In Kaikoura the muse of volcanoes beckoned to us once again, drawing us to the lovely town of Akaroa, Maori for "long harbor", where we spent the Christmas week at the best caravan park we've ever stayed at, at least until the 'circus' arrived and set up camp all around our beautiful site, by far the best and most isolated in the park until then. We shifted sites on our last night, which was ok; from our new site we had a much better view of the volcanic crater in which the harbour lies, and on our last morning there we saw the legendary "long white cloud" for which Aotearoa is known...and named!
Now we're "studio-sitting" for our lovely friend Peter Stephen, New Zealand's top luthier and all around great guy! He's gone with his girls up to Golden Bay for a week, while Liesbet and I take care of his garden, paint rocks, bake bread and lasagna, play on the various instruments around, and, yees, write on the trusty lap-top. In the next couple days we will put the finishing touches on our second film The Chronicles of Balarnia...it's at the next level of film-making beyond Cryo 2008. And when Peter returns we are going to start on the state-of-the-art acoustic guitar he is building for me; it's going to have a set of "drone" or resonating strings that cross the sound-orifice, similar to John McLaughlin's Shakti guitar. And soon I'll be recording some new music with wizard Ian McAllister for the first time since 2007, possibly creating new music for our third film! I'm excited...
BE SURE WE HAVE YOUR CORRECT GROUND-MAILING ADDRESS SO WE CAN SEND YOU A DVD OK?
Writing this brief journale of the past year has made me realize what a TRULY FANTASTIC year it's been...and how much we ALL have to be thankful for.
I see the major themes as clear as ever...the beauty and power of nature juxtaposed against the stupidity of irresponsible human actions...leaving in its wake the carcasses of ecocide, of genocide...of ourselves.
All the damage being done by humans could easily be STOPPED...if we wanted to.
The further we go, the less optimistic I am about this actually occurring; the more I learn, the more the opposite seems to be the case.
But we KNOW that miracles are not only possible, they are all around and within us. And in this "sacred moment of time" we want to say THANK YOU to all our friends and family who continue to make us possible, and to the spirit of life, our guardian angels and the Great Spirit for allowing us to be a part of their amazing art we call the universe!
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM JEFF & LIESBET (&Snoetje, Teddy & Freddy)
