Bodies Upon The Gears Film Festival

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars.
There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.
--Carl Sagan

Bruce Cockburn: If A Tree Falls

If A Tree Falls

I thank you God
for this most amazing day,
for the leaping greenly
spirits of trees,
and for the blue dream
of sky and for everything
which is natural,
which is infinite,
which is yes.
--E.E. Cummings

Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist


Gordon Lightfoot: Ode to Big Blue

In this world, shipmates,
sin that pays its way
can travel freely
and without a passport;
whereas Virtue,
if a pauper,
is stopped at all frontiers.
--Herman Melville
Moby-Dick

Earth First!


Tom Waits: Underground

My job
is to save
the fucking wilderness.
I don't know
anything else
worth saving.
--George Hayduke

There is a time
when the operation
of the machine
becomes so odious,
makes you so
sick at heart,
that you can't take part.
You can't even
passively take part!
And you've got to
put your bodies
upon the gears
and upon the wheels,
upon the levers,
upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to
make it stop!
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all!
--Mario Savio
12/2/64