JHUS Staging

Tag: environment

  • Beach Head

    This series of videos is particularly interesting to me. This and the two which follow chronologically were shot in South Haven, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

    Original description: Get your mind out of the gutter. John Henry, the “LowGenius,” steps up with a clear and unavoidable notice: our planet is try to kill us, because we’ve been killing it. It’s time to change, FAST, and without regard for comfort, tradition, or profit.

    So as you can probably tell this was shot while the Deepwater Horizon disaster was ongoing. Having a beach and a large body of water at hand, I thought hey what a great way to illustrate this idea! Drove down to South Haven and shot three videos.

    In this video, I ask the viewer to contemplate what would happen if a Deepwater Horizon type of incident happened in this place, describing walking up and down the beach as far as the eye can see only to keep tripping through tar balls and oil residue.

    This was shot on or around June 26, 2010.

    One month to the day from the publication of this video, a ruptured pipeline spilled around a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, which empties in to Lake Michigan in Saugatuck, roughly 15 miles down the beach in the direction the camera’s pointing.

    Fortunately for the beach, the spill was much smaller and happened inland far enough that the oil was mostly minor soluble residues by the time it got to the lake. Unfortunately for everyone else, a million gallons of oil dumped into a river sucks, and the cleanup and damage impacts are ongoing to this day, twelve years later as of this article’s publication here at johnhenry.us.

    One of many, many times in my career that I’ve inadvertently been a voice which, if heeded, would’ve possibly prevented major disasters. Of course it’s synchronicity and coincidence…mostly. But it does speak to the legitimacy of the stuff I’m trying to put over and discuss and get you talking about, when the things I say are potential outcomes of bad decision-making continue happening, often not long after I’ve said something.

  • Not Like The Other

    “In which JH discusses the logical fallacy of false equivalency in the context of certain arguments that favor continued offshore oil drilling.” Taking on the ridiculous and entirely nonsense idea that wind and solar power are somehow “just as bad” as petrofuels, again while the Gulf of Mexico was being drowned in oil from the Deepwater Horizon. Originally filmed somewhere around Bloomington, Indiana, on June 13, 2010 in NTSC-HD/VHS-C.

  • BP: What Is Wrong? (2010)

    BP: What Is Wrong? (2010)

    Another video from the archive, this time a five-and-a-half minute routine about the incredible experience of running in to someone who needed explained to them why dumping millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico was a pretty bad idea. In a fun bit of irony the “featured image” for this article, which you can also find below, was taken the same day this video was shot, in which I had to explain why the big oil slick in that photo was a bad thing.

    If you don’t recognize it, that thing sticking out into the water from the top of the image is southeastern Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta. The big white thing in the lower center is the oil spill, which you can see covering hundreds of square miles as it drifts off to the northeast.