great film

"The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies :"

Director: Jeff & Sue Turner | Producer: Jeff & Sue Turner
Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2006 | Story Teller's Country: Canada

Tags: Animals As Friends, Asia, Ecology, Environment, Russian Federation, Spiritual Awareness

Synopsis:  

"The grizzly bear is considered by many to be the most dangerous animal in the world. But there is one man, Canadian Charlie Russell, who thinks differently. He believes that grizzlies are misunderstood animals and that our fear of them is not only unnecessary but driving them to extinction. His beliefs have taken him to Russia where he has been raising orphaned grizzly bear cubs for the past ten years in the wilderness of the Southern Kamchatka peninsula. Becoming their surrogate mother, he struggles to keep his cubs alive and teach them everything they need to survive a life in the wild. But will it be enough? The film will reveal, through flashbacks to footage from his early days, the events of the past ten years raising orphaned grizzly cubs in Russia and his attempts to fight back against the illegal hunting and poaching that was killing so many of the bears in Russia. Charlie does all that he can to keep the cubs safe, but in the world of the Russian Grizzly Bear there are no guarantees. Raising orphaned grizzly bear cubs, Charlie has been given a rare insight into the world of bears. He has learned that grizzly bears are not the fearsome aggressive killers that so many believe but rather are gentle and peaceful creatures. Although our misplaced fear of them is driving them to the edge of extinction, it is possible for man and bear to live together peacefully and safely, sharing this earth."



http://www.cutv.ws/documentary/watch-online/festival/play/6781/The-Edge-of-Eden--Living-with--Grizzlies

Akamina Kishenina Provincial Park

(This photo was published in UM School of Journalism's magazine Communique. Photo credits are mine.)

Two summers ago, I was invited to go hiking with the Flathead Wild Team in Akamina Kishenina Provincial Park. Harvey Locke was the trip leader and we went there to explore Harvey's dream of expanding 100,000 acres of protected land into the BC Flathead. This additional land protection would be joined to Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

One day we hiked Akamina Ridge, which is a lovely exposed ridge, a transboundary region, that borders Glacier National Park's North Fork Valley in Montana and the Provincial Park in BC. To read more about this region read my article in Sierra magazine (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/us-canada-border-missing-link-wildlife-connectivity)  or read about it in my upcoming book. This place deserves and needs protection as part of the Y2Y corridor to protect wide ranging carnivores.

A Conscience in Sports

A Conscience in Sports

Benjamin Alva Polley

©

Many sports fans are critical of Colin Kaepernick because he won’t stand during the national anthem, but kneels in protest to the police brutality happening in our country. He has not been offered a contract yet this year with any of the professional NFL teams because of his thoughts, feelings, and opinions being a liability for them. Previous to his first kneeling during the preseason on [Aug 14 and 20, 2016], he was considered a rising star and one that has won MVP awards and other awards because of his exceptional ability and skills as one of the league’s top quarterbacks. However, since then I have heard his critics say, “Love it or Leave it,” “Forty-niners should have signed him on and had him shut up,” “People like that need their ass kicked,” and “The U.S. has given the blacks so much.” They argue that athletes like Kaepernick are not patriotic. However, Kaepernick is well known for speaking up on behalf of patriotism with, “there’s a lot of racism in this country disguised as patriotism ." ...

The current critics seem to be superficially open to multiculturalism and diversity in sports as long as the athletes get in line, stay in line, perform, and shut up. Kaepernick isn’t quite fitting that form, nor are the others that are following with Kaepernick in protest. There seems to be no room in the minds of the critics for the athletes to have thoughts, emotions, or opinions. The critics want entertainment plain and simple, with no room for the complexity that occurs anytime you put humans together with differing backgrounds and thoughts. They don’t want their athletes to be human, it seems. They seem to want a physically elite collective of NFL players without voices, without anything beyond the task at hand, the game. The desire for an elite collective of humans who can physically perform well above the normal human average is uncomfortably reminiscent of another era in our country.

However, in the current era, even the most racist critics are game for paying the athletes whatever they want with contracts for multiple years at millions of dollars per year with one catch: They may not feel, ask uncomfortable questions, nor take a stance against “the real patriots.”

Taking a kneeling stance to honor the young blacks fallen since 2015, 2016, and now 2017 due to police brutality and lack of freedom for each of the estimated 2,000 deaths does nothing vile to the flag, does nothing disrespectful to the anthem, does not even offer up an angry voice to interrupt the words “O long may it wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

To many, when Kaepernick kneels beneath those words that promise and offer a country of freedom to each of its patriotic citizens, it as though the words were written for those young men who have fallen to violence in the streets of St. Louis or Baltimore or many other cities where police continue to brutalize young blacks. When Kaepernick kneels, it is as though the young blacks with silenced voices, the elite multicultural athletes with muted voices, join all the other eras of muted voices that this country and this anthem has stood upon without regard for far too long, and sing the anthem like it is theirs too.