From Right Brain > to > Left Brain functioning

This goes directly to what I do as a visual artist.

Thought Experiments:

1. Psychology:
   Attuning to one’s sense perceptions and thusly emotional state > & > Naming your emotional state.
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2. Western Political Economy:
   And let’s say the Himba tribe are western leaders willing to lie to skew outcomes (for that is what They are attached to). And let’s say they are talking about religion, education, economy or the environment.

   Can you see how without an earnest attachment to what we see, western leaders are capable of creating a “War on Terror”, “Privatization of the Commons” including the “Failure of Public Education”, “Trillion Dollar Bailouts for Capital”, the “Tar Sands”, “Climate Change” and the “Depletion of the Environment?

   I think we need to adopt more earnest subjects to be our leaders.

Brought back from the brink once before, a Great Lake again faces biological collapse

What would it mean to lose one of our Great Lakes? The environmental and economic calamity could devastate the region’s tourism, sport fishing industry, drinking water supply, and wildlife, and could also take a toll on human health. And there would be plenty of blame to go around, from changing agricultural methods to inattentive politicians to weaknesses in our nation’s bedrock environmental protections — many of which can partially trace their existence to concern over Lake Erie in the first place.

Erie is the most fertile of the Great Lakes: It contains only 2 percent of their water but 50 percent of their fish. Its biological abundance, and its location in a densely settled corner of the Midwest, make the prospect of collapse all the more frightening. If conditions grow worse, imploding native fish populations could decimate Lake Erie’s recreational fishing industry. (Fishing generates $7 billion a year throughout the Great Lakes.) The water supply for 11 million people could become undrinkable without expensive treatment. And blue-green algae, linked to liver cancer in China and fatal poisonings in Brazil, could pose a grave threat to people here, too, particularly if ingested.

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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…

- President Eisenhower, Chance for Peace Speech
April 16,1953

Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ [...] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.

BP and our Economic Development Gurus have put East Chicago on a diet of Tar Sands. I thought it appropriate for you to see how the TAR SANDS are destroying our most vital and fragile resources - The land, the water, the air, and our peoples.

[ Elemental ]

Elemental - Trailer from Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Vimeo.

Elemental is a documentary produced and directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. It explores our essential relationship to water, and the fundamental importance of reevaluating that relationship in the face of the global environmental crisis. It is a universal cause told through three stories on three continents, one of which East Chicago is intimately involved.

Eriel Deranger participated in the film and the telling of her story - the story of her people - the story East Chicago is so dependent on for economic development. Eriel is a native Dené from Northern Alberta, Canada. She is a young mother and activist determined to protect the future of her people from the ecological genocide wrought by living downstream from the largest industrial development in the world: the Albertan Tar Sands. I met Eriel in Edmonton last fall.

Remember the “STUFF” BP is piping into our community to refine is more than the land on which she lives - The Tar Sands, it includes Eriel’s Story and the lives of her people. She will tell more…

[Click images to enlarge]

Encaustic, 21″ x 24″

Encaustic, 12″ x 14″

Encaustic, 21″ x 24″

BP didn’t think it important to include [the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill] in the report because, according to the fine print, there’s been “no accurate determination” of how much oil actually leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. And so because there’s no exact measure, they didn’t think they should include it.

BP and our Economic Development Gurus have put East Chicago on a diet of Tar Sands. I thought it appropriate for you to see what the TAR SANDS are and what East Chicago is so dependent on for ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT.

Please listen to Henry. He is a gentle man from the Dene Nation in the Northwest Territories. I recently met him in Edmonton.

Remember the “STUFF” BP is piping into our community to refine is the land on which he lives - The Tar Sands. He will tell more…