Home was released on June 5th for free, and can be seen in surprisingly good quality on Youtube. As of this writing some 477,000 people have watched it there. It has also quickly gathered a pretty solid fan faction on Facebook.

Sailing can be tough. And bad news generally makes better headlines (and pictures) so you see more of it. This post no exception. Pacific magazine, a favorite on-line stop, had a recent roundup of some of the blue water adventures this season that didn’t go as planned.

Like all of these types of articles these are cautionary stories that probably serve to keep armchair sailors rooted in their living rooms. Between business and the baby I’ve been pretty close to shore myself with one Philadelphia to New York sail this summer as a brief taste of open water.

In any case, love to see that there is so much adventure to be had, and sailors willing to risk their neck. Inspiration. It’s not all about email, iPhones and conference calls.

Admittedly, I am late to this party. Life & Debt came out a while ago, but I just Netflixed it, so I got to see the Stephanie Black directed feature late. Better than never.

The film tells the story of the island nation of Jamaica’s interaction with the International Monetary Fund. And the effects. I polled a friend and Jamaican native in an informal fact-check and more-or-less got the idea she didn’t agree with the film or the presentation. But Jamaica is a pretty partisan place, and the facts as laid out in the film are sad and the presentation pretty compelling. Belinda Becker, who I know as a New York trend-maker, narrates part of the film. Overall the film is riveting because some of the story-lines, the effects of the IMF relationship are so monumentally disastrous and often inhumane, that you’d think it would sit somewhere on the front page of the New York Times. Here is what the New York Times had to say recently about the film:

“The term ”globalization” is so tinged with rosy one-world optimism that it’s easy to assume the essential benignity of an economic philosophy whose name vaguely connotes unity, equality and freedom. But as Stephanie Black’s powerful documentary ”Life and Debt” illustrates with an impressive (and depressing) acuity, globalization can have a devastating impact on third world countries. The movie offers the clearest analysis of globalization and its negative effects that I’ve ever seen on a movie or television screen.”

Whoa. Watch it.

Greenland. I am reading Gretel Ehrlich’s (pictured) book which takes place in Greenland, “This Cold Heaven.” The first book I remember reading about Greenland was Lawrence Millman’s “Last Places.” That was funny, and Millman is a character in of himself.

Ehrlich’s book is much different. It’s not funny. She wasn’t a tourist in Greenland or even so much a traveler, she was a person living there for whatever time she had there (7 years on and off). So more “of” Greenland than a tourist. I found the book at Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby in Soho, a place as special as some of the books you find there. I was skeptical of “This Cold Heaven” at first and even second glance, but after reading the jacket I was hooked. It’s a very good book.

Ehrlich weaves in so much more than her own experience including that of super-explorer Knud Rasmussen and painter Rockwell Kent. Rasmussen was half Dutch and half Inuit and his search for the history of the place and its people took him from Greenland to Alaska by dogsled in an epic three year journey. And that just scratches the surface of who he was a person and what he contributed.

Like Rasmussen, Ehrlich’s focus is on the people, the Inuit and of course the land itself. Surviving the arctic creates a people who are unique on our planet. Stories of starving hunters and successful hunts follow one another like good weather after bad.

There are old stories told to Rasmussen, stories that make up spiritual life on the Inuit as well as Ehrlich’s own stories. She shares her friendships and experiences with stark and at times startling honesty. There is a certain rugged freedom and a connection to the physical; the weather, the animals, eating, sleeping and staying alive and warm.

The constant is the distance between this civilized yet harsh place and civilization as in Denmark or most anywhere else. Not just physical distance, but the distance of a Last Place, a place where disharmony with elements such as the weather can swiftly bring tragedy as it always has. A place where some people find refuge in the cold, when the streetlights and paved roads of the Great Cities seem too foreign, too unnatural. And it’s a place, if we’re right about the Planet warming, that we’ll hear more and more about.

I love Pacific Magazine. The publication brings the indigenous culture of the region front and center without the subtle condescending tone I see in too much media.

Western culture has become so dominant that it could easily erase any other unless there is a strong effort at preservation. And while the medicine, learning, government, and scientific advances that go hand-in-hand with the Western world are many, the lack of connection to the planet is, for me, a very fundamental flaw. I’ve ranted about Captain Cook in previous posts and won’t do so here. Check out the article in Pacific Magazine and the images as they celebrate their culture in “American” Samoa.

Dove Dutch Springs this weekend. The notoriously cold and often cloudy water are the main reasons it took me five years to finally give up the ghost of only diving warm water (not to mention the crowds).

The whole trip was Internet-enabled in that I met (through www.meetup.com) a diving group in New York, Ocean Blue Divers and after a couple NYC-based events, took the plunge with a short trip.

Really good experience. Great group of people and smart. Smart enough to engage Lifeguard Systems to do our Rescue Diver training for the weekend. Rescue Diver is generally the third stage in the big dive organizations development: Open Water Diver; Advanced Open Water, Rescue Diver, and them perhaps on to Dive Master or Instructor.

Lifeguard Systems has a few maverick ideas about safety that may not always be shared by the dive organizations where the primary goal seems at times just to get as many people under the water as possible. Very valuable, would definitely recommend looking at them if you’re exploring diving. They seem a bit more objective than your average dive shop which seems intent on selling you your next piece of gear.

The things we do never cease to amaze and disappoint. A vessel stopped with 65,000 pounds of Shark Fins is the catalyst for the US government to tighten the laws banning “finning”. The New Zealand Herald tells me that the US House of Representatives sent a revised bill to the Senate today. Read about it at the Herald and find out what you can do at: www.stopsharkfinning.net/

Photo: © Rixie | Dreamstime.com

I don’t know why Fiji Times and Pacific Magazine sit in my “weekly” favorites, but they do. Fiji found its way to my favorites mostly from an environmental standpoint but once there the on-going story of the indigenous people and the cultural impact of colonialism became just as compelling. Those beautiful islands we see in Pacific postcards are largely stuck in a post-colonial netherworld.

And as I write this post, “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935) rolls by on my TV, in black and white with the sound turned down. The “natives” don’t look very native. And the movie doesn’t delve into the fact that “First Contact” was a disaster for indigenous peoples.

But, that said, the “Mutiny” really did put Captain Bligh in a 23 foot boat that he would sail, with 18 aboard, over 3,000 miles. Armed with a sextant and aboard an open boat there are probably just a few sailors who could do what he did even today. C’mon no chart, no compass (no GPS). Very few.

A further aside is the story of many of the mutineers (from the year 1789 we’re talking) who made their way to Pitcairn Island where their descendants still live — some 47 or so. In 2004 there was trial of many of these wayward souls for sexually abusing their own inbred young people – read the Wiki. So the long arm of British justice still reached these remote castaways and stirred the very old pot. It’s a very strange story, one that Vanity Fair featured as well. Strange that the ghosts of that day and those people are very real and are still living off-balance lives in that faraway place so long after the original crime.

Can’t mention the Pacific without Captain Cook’s voyage and that is well documented — read Blue Latitudes.

But more so read Fiji Times. It’s curious to see such an ongoing upheaval politically, socially and now environmentally in a place we normally think of as Paradise. Maybe Paradise really is just a state of being, temporary and not any one place after all.

WIRED Magazine chose to push some green buttons. Their cover story provoked usually staid and scientific Real Climate to post a response, “Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths“.

Essentially the WIRED piece cuts to the chase of some long held beliefs that it feels will have to be sacrificed at the alter of reality. Doable change as opposed to things we should do (and never accomplish). They include heartstoppers like giving up on organic food, carbon trading doesn’t work and prepare to accept genetic engineering.

In looking at the two articles, one from the aggressively non-designed and mostly scientific website (Real Climate) and one from a publication which cuts down trees, takes money from auto manufactures and generally must earn a profit from the support of some of the countries biggest commercial enterprises I think I would go with the former, Real Climate, as a more trusted source of info to live by. Sorry Wired, but I really do like the gadget section! Always have.

There you have it, Wired is entertaining, and Real Climate has the truth.

From the UK, “Gordon Brown has signalled he wants Britain to play a major role in the race to build an extra 1,000 nuclear power stations across the world.” It was just a matter of time with oil wedged in over $120 per barrel.

The problem has always been more about the waste than the power. It’s been pretty safe, save for Chernobyl and such. But, with electric automobiles nearing reality the load on power plants would be unbearable with the grid in its current state.

And if not nuclear get ready to hear an awful lot about CleanTech, a word lots of VC’s have seen plenty of, but there is still no “Google” emerging. But add it to your Google Alerts and take a look at what’s bubbling up. Lots.

But nuclear waste? More questions and same questions with few answers.