IF: Forward

Last night we went into Dolores and met up with some of our  forward thinking neighbors  to attend a fundraiser for our local land conservancy group- which helps ranchers and other landholders preserve the great open spaces so important to Colorado and all of the West where the word "subdividing" is a very, very bad word.

The focus of the evening was the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, a series of film shorts highlighting such things as the Snake River Salmon run  and the fish's coming demise due to four  dams they have to navigate up.

 Sadly, we are protecting less than 1% of the height of the salmon population experienced by Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the Northwest and they are predicted to become extinct in our generation.
On the other hand, is the livelihood of those dependent on the water and power generated by the dams. Definitely on of those issues that there is no good solution. I hope that some very clever ingenious people can think of a true solution and compromise between fish and man!

Other films in the series were several very funny shorts on Animals saving the Planet

The main film of the night was Bag It!

 Interestingly, actually from a film maker just up the canyon in Telluride. I already had a "rap" for hating all things plastic and "disposable", and in the middle of the film, Jon leaned over and said "You're gonna be impossible to live with, aren't you?"
The film was funny, the host trying to use his own containers at the Taco Bell drive through. The very said part if what plastic is doing to our oceans, where it is ground into tiny bits and marine life is eating more and more of it and dying from it.
Another said part,that unlike metal and glass recycling that happens in the US and can be done over and over, plastic recycling is actually shipped to China where the poor, the old and young children, sift through it and very little is reused and then probably only once.
But the film was also great in that it was not for radical environmentalist, and really by all of us changing a few habits, like bringing our own bags, which I keep two extremely light, compact ones in the bottom of my purse and have a whole sack of them in the car for the big grocery store runs. Another change is to stop buying bottled water, Period. It takes like two cups of petroleum to manufacture and transport water to you in a bottle that you can get free from a tap. Take your own "to go" mugs to get coffee- it actually tastes better.
These things do not have to be political, highly charged issues. The last ones I suppose is, but I was convicted last night to send a few emails to Washington to address the issue of plastic consumption in this country and that would be a deciding factor on who I voted for this coming November. We have only one planet and like I always say, "Crap in, Crap out" or as the film said last night "We throw things away, but there is no away!"