Appreciating the Extraordinary
By Char Davies

What message do you most want to convey about the interplay of human experience, technology, and this whole idea of deep ecology?

Well, first of all I'd like to say that I've been reading deep ecology and environmental philosophy for many years as well as working with technology, and I actually felt that there was a gap between environmentalists and writers and people working with new media. A few years ago, I had a talk with Erik Davis, who started the conference, and actually suggested that there be a conference that brings these groups together. So, that's why I was particularly happy that the conference happened and that I could be here.

To even be here, is absolutely extraordinary...

I would say, I think that if I could hone down my message these days as an artist in terms of the need to communicate something to people, which is what fuels me as an artist, it's very simple. To even be here, is absolutely extraordinary, and to be here among such beauty and such infinitely complex beauty, and to be an individual and an individually manifested human life here in this time or and time, but for us it's this time, among a whole myriad of different life flows of other species and other energy cycles on the Earth as if we are part of this vast opera or slow motion ballet and immersed within it...

To me, it's an extraordinary thing and I think that if, and I can say this as an artist, it doesn't mean I live this in my own life, but I think any remindings that any of us, including me, can have of the fact that, "Hey! Isn't it marvelous that we're even here; that we can even be here having this conversation; that such a thing even exists?" can be linked to the idea that the world, this extraordinary natural world that has fed us and clothed us and given us a source of our myths, is so marvelous and so unfathomably complex and mysterious that we will never truly know it. We may project our meanings onto it, but we'll never know it. That to destroy that by being distracted and focused on consumerism, is so tragic. So, to me, that's what I have to say as an artist.

Radio-V/Ethoschannel Index