Congrats to the Black Eyed Peas!

I would like to congratulate the Black Eyed Peas and their fans for making their song, "I Gotta Feeling", the first song to reach 6-MILLION digital downloads!

The Peas are songwriters that represent a hope for the future that I share and few other bands address, "One World", and they rock-the-house with good vibes preaching their words.

For me, it is about time someone parties-on with positive energy instead of self-preening, misogyny, eminent doom, or bondage/lingerie videos. I honor the fans also because they not only respond to the band and the message, they BOUGHT the download and honored the artists with their purchase. One World, indeed, I hope that includes our planet.

Go Black Eyed Peas!

#rgk

James Balog & the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS)

As the accompanying article explains, in Greenland on July 6-7, satellite imagery revealed one of the largest glacial calvings ever documented. A 2.7-square-mile chunk of Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one-eighth the size of New York’s Manhattan Island, broke off into the ocean!

At the risk of being called an alarmist frightened by the unknown aspects and scale of potential climate change, I think this event might be related. But rather than digress into whether this is 'natural' or not, it is the perfect opportunity to introduce you to another friend and iLCP Fellow, Jim Balog. Jim has worked for years as a photojournalist reporting on natural disasters such as the tsunami in Indonesia and global climate change. He has also done remarkable portrait work of animals and great trees, published as the books ANIMAL and TREE.

In Jim's words, however, he has always been frustrated that global warming is a difficult thing to depict. Then he had a truly genius idea. Working with many sponsors and help from tech staff at National Geographic, Jim developed digital camera systems that drew solar power into a weather-protected housing where a perpetually-charged camera was shooting still imagery every so many designated hours of each day. These boxed camera systems were then bolted onto the fiord walls of significant retreating glaciers all over the world as part of an ongoing project called the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS). Several times a year the digital file card is collected from each of the cameras and all of the single images are 'morphed' into flickering motion films of the glaciers 'in action', so to speak. You need to see these images.  See Jim's Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) video and time-lapse gallery here.  Be patient. They load slowly because there is SO much information. Watch them several times. After seeing the obvious back-and-forth of the ice and the calving, spend time watching the 'flow' of ice in the field behind the calving walls. In this particular Greenland glacier timelapse video you can see the entire icecap pouring over the top of the fiord and descending down onto the glacier, pushing it forward.

GL-05 Ilulissat Glacier from Extreme Ice Survey on Vimeo.

There before your eyes, the icecap/icefield is feeding the glacier, which in turn is calving immense amounts of ice into the Atlantic.

Freaking Amazing!!!!!! This is not my definition of the term 'glacial' - suggesting something moving slowly.

Jim has cameras in the fiord of the glacier that is featured above. He probably has some amazing images from this event that have not yet been collected and posted, but he does add new things all of the time and his site NEVER ceases to startle me about the REALITIES of climate change. If you don¹' believe things are changing RAPIDLY, this might cause you to reconsider. Please enjoy the visual journey of my Fellow iLCP photographer, Jim Balog, and check out his books as well.

#rgk

Save Bristol Bay - Say 'NO' to the Pebble mine!

More than 9,000 cubic meters of waste water penetrated a sewage tank and flowed through a drainage culvert into the Tingjiang River. Photograph © 2010 What's On Xiamen, Inc.

SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

Understandably, Americans are currently focused on the Gulf oil spill and the damage it is doing to one of our most productive fisheries. Less noticed by our media, in Fujian province in China the countries largest copper plant leaked 2.4 million gallons of acidic copper waste into the Ting river threatening that fishery and killing enough fish to feed 72,000 people for one year.

The polluted water devastated fish farms near the river. 
 Photograph © 2010 /CFP   
SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

There are only so many wild, clean fisheries and supportive habitats left.  We seem to be damaging or outright destroying them on a very large, global scale. In North America, Bristol Bay and southwest Alaska remain one of the most productive, bio-diverse and intact systems on the planet and it is ours to nurture or destroy. The Obama administration has taken Bristol Bay out of consideration for oil and gas exploration, but a Canadian mining consortium that includes Mitsubishi and is backed by European gold and copper speculators plans to build the Pebble. Proposed to be the largest open-pit copper and cyanide gold-leach mine in the world, it would create a mega-mine complex or roads, structures and tailings ponds in the middle of the most important headwaters in the southwest Alaska fishery habitat and directly between two national parks.

Shanghang county workers collecting water samples.  
Photograph © 2010 /CFP  
SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

Why would we compromise this extraordinary American food resource for foreign profiteering? Who will pay to clean the site after it closes? The copper acid and cyanide slurry lake left after the mine leaves will have to be 'perpetually impounded' by a dam larger then Three Rivers Gorge in China. As southwest and the Alaska Range are one of the most seismically active areas of the world and it also rains a lot, how long before this lake is breached or overflows becoming yet another news story like the Ting river? Don't let this happen to our American food resources, they grow more precious every day!

Photograph © 2010 Robert Glenn Ketchum

SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE BY SIGNING THIS NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL (NRDC) PETITION!

#rgk

Photo of the Week

Photograph © 2010 Robert Glenn Ketchum 

From the book, Robert Glenn Ketchum, 'The Legacy of Wildness', Preface by Robert Redford

Just Say 'No'... to the Pebble mine

Photograph © 2010 Robert Glenn Ketchum

Finally the public may get some chance to have an opinion about this use of THEIR resources!

Opponents of proposed Alaska (Pebble) mine score in court:
http://ht.ly/2b35G

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Opponents of a huge copper and gold mine being developed in Alaska near some of the world's most productive wild salmon streams have scored a court victory.

An Anchorage Superior Court judge issued a decision Monday clearing the way for a trial to challenge state permits for the Pebble Mine being developed by Canada's Northern Dynasty Minerals and London-based Anglo American.

The lawsuit alleges that the state issued the permits in July 2009 without looking at the harm that could be done to public resources, and it claims that's a violation of the Alaska Constitution.

Judge Eric A. Aarseth found that the Department of Environmental Resources should have considered certain constitutional issues before issuing the permits.

The trial is scheduled for Dec. 6.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

#rgk #earth

Photo of the Week

Photograph © 2010 Robert Glenn Ketchum

The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography (Exhibit)

"Care For Earth" Photograph © 2010 Robert Glenn Ketchum

July 9 - September 19, 2010
Group Exhibition:  "The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography"
Cincinnati Museum Center

Like love, catastrophe can unite hearts—as the New Orleans Museum of Art discovered when it reached out to willing friends, local and national, to help produce its most powerfully ambitious photo exhibition since Hurricane Katrina. 

This traveling group exhibit  is comprised of more than 200 works exploring the moments that shape our being, from intimate memories to historic tragedies. It shows the healing, motivating power of connection at every stage of life (Children and Family, Love, Wellness, Disaster, Caregiving and Healing, Aging and Remembering), through intensely moving images by artists as diverse as  myself, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Tina Barney and Sebastião Salgado, Dorothea Lange and Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander and Sally Mann.

Visit cincymuseum.org for a schedule of events and details. Admission to the exhibit is included with the purchase of a ticket to the Cincinnati History Museum.

July 9 - September 19, 2010
Group Exhibition:  "The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography"
Cincinnati Museum Center
1301 Western Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45203
+1.513.287.7043
www.library.cincymuseum.org
http://www.cincymuseum.org/explore_our_sites/special_exhibits_events/coming_soon/

#rgk