I will be screening clips and speaking about this work-in-progress BEHOLD THE EARTH on Sunday at 2:45pm, at the Baird Auditorium of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Please come if you are in the Washington area this weekend and curious to learn what the production is all about.

The talk and screening is part of the US Environmental Film Festival, in its 18th year. For those of you who are enthusiasts for films about the people/nature connection, there are 155 diverse films screening between March 16th and 28th. Special programs exist for children and are marked by a family-friendly symbol in the festival program.

We achieved decent results with the RED camera, and its maximum frame record rate of 120/ sec. I am looking to bump this frame up to 1,000 or more, when we have access to dragonflies again. At this latitude, we are well past that point. Our next dragonfly shoot will be with a PHANTOM camera and lots of sun. We now know our subject. More from Cal DeWitt on the dragonflies of his marsh in the next post.

I learned a lot by trying to contain the dragonfly. Yes, it might fly within a low volume and extremely quiet wind tunnel, with the right lure at one end. But finding the right lure is a challenge. Many failures. What motivates a dragonfly to act? One person found success with a lure that took ten years to culture in his lab.

I do believe that at some point, engineering and ecology can go together. I do believe that environmentalists would do better in the long run if they embraced engineers and the future, rather than let past failures completely cloud their judgement. Yes, it takes effort to succeed. And observational patience. Failing equipment. More to come. Yet, cameraman David W and I are on to something now that’s yielding some success. Containment is part of the solution. Understanding boundaries. And timing. And yesterday, a girl named Ella and her mom Jenny. Thanks, all. Today, perhaps another try…

Our long running series SUNRISE EARTH has several characteristics that set it apart from everything else on mainstream TV. One of these distinctive traits is the show’s pacing. We show you less, and take a long time to do it. Landscapes move at the pace of landscapes, which usually feels slow to most people, especially in light of people’s normal media entertainment (secret confession…even in our show, the editing actually speeds up the mountain). Could today’s TV viewer tolerate a lichen chase scene?

Humans often serve to speed things up, in the name of reaching higher efficiency, productivity, and the minimum threshold of mental excitement without which we probably would perish.

But sometimes we also serve to slow things down. This effort is not only directed at our own activities and perceptions. Dragonflies move incredibly fast. They shift in flight with abrupt angular turns. Their wings move at a speed invisible to the human eye.

Even with the best optical aids, we struggle to see a dragonfly like it was a mountain. Successes like the frame at right are occasional, fleeting, justifying a little celebration and a lot of gratitude.

Words matter. Learning to say hello in the native language of a country that you visit matters. A matter of connection, of civility, of grace. Sometimes the word environment suffers from misuse, and may not be the best word of hello among scientists and people of faith. I remember an older Russian fellow and his translator who I once traveled with in Kamchatka. We were part of the first western expedition allowed into this formerly restricted land. After lunch one day, we were sitting on the hot stones of a remote riverbed, amidst resting monarch butterflies. We got into one of those conversations about language that happens when alert translators are around. Together, the Russian and his translator remarked that the word environment is very different from the world wilderness, because environment refers exclusively to what surrounds humanity (environs). Wilderness is more boundless, untied to us. This difference in meaning exposes how environment measures the world on the basis of people. As Carl eloquently expands upon in the video clip below, creation has bigness and mystery. Perhaps creation captures more of the world beyond man’s measure? Perhaps it is a graceful way of saying hello amidst fellow travelers?