by Daniel Pinchbeck
Book Review by Cate Montana

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to expend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistics or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of false fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.

DVD Review by Cate Montana

20 min. Written & Directed by Shalini Kantayya

When award winning filmmaker Shalini Kantayya wrote A Drop of Life, she didn’t realize the terrifying, futuristic corporate-owned water supply system she had imagined was already a reality in several countries, including impoverished areas of South Africa, Brazil, and the United States. There, her science-fiction-like water meters have been installed, and just as she envisioned, they are slowly strangling the life, health and economies of the people least able to afford it.