Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
This video rates very high on the official coolness scale. As the video’s Vimeo page explains this is a visualisation of the northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash out of Iceland. “Due to varying ash density across Europe, the first flights can be seen in some areas on the 18th and by the 20th everywhere is open. The flight data is courtesy of flightradar24.com and covers a large fraction of Europe. There are a few gaps (most noticeably France) and no coverage over the Atlantic, but the picture is still clear.”

The video is remarkable in its own right, for several reasons. First, it’s a snapshot reminder of how fragile modern life is when Mother Nature decides to, like … burp. Wham! A whole continent shuts down. Second, it’s a time-lapse panorama of the frantic rate of contemporary life as it gets back up to speed. Imagine — every one of those shooting lightning bugs is a crowded plane, filled with hundreds of  people dashing from here to there in flying metal tubes while scarfing honey-roasted nuts. (Although I think the snacks, if not the coffee, are better on European airlines.) Finally, if ever there were a visual depiction of what modern physics tells us we are truly made of — just packets of energy, flowing from here to there and there to here — here is our family portrait.

I finally got around to uploading to YouTube this video of a very fun counter-protest. When the hatemongers from Westboro Baptist Church announced they were coming to Charleston, W.Va., Covenant House gathered a host of area folk for a flashy response in early April as the Westborians uncorked their usual ‘God Hates Figs‘ bit. (Though I used their hateful version of that line in the video’s opening screen, it came to me later that Fred Phelps and his sorry crew succeed when they propagate that line in the media. Hence, I’m done with helping them do it.)

This is a video of a flash mob rehearsal in the Covenant House parking lot, set to a wicked techno version of ‘Country Roads.’ Note the final long, continuous take that ends with a flock of pigeons checking out what all the humans are doing down below. Best counter-protest sign at the following day’s protest: ‘God hates signs.’ This video originally accompanied  an April 7, 2010 story in the Charleston Gazette.

“When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.”

~ E.B. White

In the category of ‘Random Eruptions of Joy in Public Spaces,’ I submit this video. The group Naturally 7, traveling on a Paris subway one cold day, enlivens the local space-time continuum with an a cappela version of the Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight.” Watch as some of the Parisiens first perk up their ears, then hop on the vibe:

To view video and story, click image or this link.

If you recycle (and if you recycle at the Slack Street center in Charleston, W.Va.) here’s a video and story I did for the Sunday Gazette-Mail that portrays the guys behind the scenes who sort all the stuff we spit out from our consumerist lives. And since only a tiny fraction of Americans recycle, you can only imagine the flood of recoverable material that splashes and spills like a rampaging river into the nation’s landfills, waterways and purple mountain majesties.

American needs a Manhattan Project of re-use and recycling. Instead, we get these piece-meal, catch-as-catch can, heroic efforts by cash-strapped quasi-governmental agencies and sincere individuals. Remarkably, the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority, whose facility is shown in this story and video, actually operates in the black. Thanks be to the markets for mixed office paper and cardboard, a significant chunk of the center’s income. Director Norm Streenstra, an activist turned administrator, and his staff, seem to be pretty creative in patching together recycling solutions and finding new markets, like the new program for the reuse and recycling of computers and appliances just begun last week at the Slack Street center in honor of Earth Day.

Think of what this mighty country might accomplish were we to focus the same attention to reusing and recycling our torrent of waste as we do to the art of making war.  I know — such idle speculation! Bumblers-in-chief like George Bush and Dick Cheney decide to invade a country like Iraq instead. And how much effort and blood and sacrifice and resources does that divert? Tom Englehardt at TomDispatch.com recently posted an article with eye-popping numbers for what it took to invade Iraq. And what that now means since we now must haul all that stuff home we took to Iraq. From his April 6, 2010 post, titled  “Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition):  U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off”:

In my 1950s childhood, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and forever.”  Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine’s parody, “Ripup’s Believe It or Don’t!”

With our Afghan and Iraq wars on my mind, I’ve been wondering whether Ripley’s moment hasn’t returned.  Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the “drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq”:  “There are… more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq.”

Admittedly, that list lacks the “believe it or not” tagline, but otherwise Ripley’s couldn’t have put it more staggeringly.  And here’s Pillsbury’s Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the “equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York.”

The whole post is worth a read, just for a snapshot of the cost of being an imperial empire and a goad to wondering yet again about this country’s deepest priorities. You can only wonder what might be accomplished if instead of relocating the entire population of Buffalo (and much of its infrastructure) to the Middle East — then moving it back again over the ocean — what that same kind of brute force effort, superhuman logistics and billions and billions of dollars might accomplish if directed instead at dialing back the fouling of the land and the poisoning of the nests where we live our lives. It’s the only place where we have to roost, after all.

“It isn’t pretty,” says Norm Steenstra, eyeing bales of mixed office papers and other recyclables piling up in the Slack Street warehouse of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority that he heads. | Photo by Douglas Imbrogno