And so many people seem impressed by how “brave” I am. And that is so not true! I fear for my life a lot of the time. Just not when I am out there, in the wilderness. Honestly, out there is where I feel safest.

But this common reaction makes me reflect on what fear is. Or, more accurately, what leads to a perception of danger. Many of my girlfriends here in Port Alberni won’t go running on trails alone because they are afraid of “something” happening: a fall, a bear encounter. Yet they will go on long road-bike rides, 40 or 80 or even 100 km (my sporty girlfriends here are pretty impressive, I must say!)

I do rides like that too. But it’s doing road rides like that, with cars hurtling past – sometimes only inches away from my body – that makes me experience legitimate fear. Not being alone in the wilderness.

It seems to me that many people’s fear is not proportional to the actual level of danger. It is more about a comfort zone, and what they are used to. Honestly – in my 30 or so years of adventuring, in very wild places around the world, sometimes travelling with others and sometimes alone, I have come across only one serious accident: a hiker in Patagonia who had a very bad fall, and ultimately ended up having his lower leg amputated.

Then I go to some place like Toronto, and drive on those highways, the 401 and 400 and 407 etc. – I see thousands of people enclosed in metal and glass boxes zipping past one another at combined speeds of 200 km/h or more, apparently experiencing no fear! In spite of the fact that the radio is broadcasting a constant stream of info of serious traffic accidents, and that Ontario drivers simply get used to detouring past smashed-up cars every so often, some of which contain dead or injured bodies.

Honestly, in all of my wilderness trips, I have never detoured past a dead body. City drivers just get used to this. And then think I should experience fear in the wilderness.

I recall, back in 2000, when a drunk camper was bitten by a wolf on an island off of Tofino. The incident was headline news around the country. It happened that I had been photographing the wolves involved a few weeks earlier. So, next thing I knew I was fielding all of these media calls.

I talked to one editor in her high-rise in Toronto. She was horrified by the idea of these wild animals appearing from the bush and attacking. I tried put to it into perspective for her. Something like 3000 people are killed in motor vehicle accidents in Canada each year. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are bitten by dogs every year. On average, one person is killed by a wild animal across all of North America per year (a fraction of the number actually killed by domestic dogs).

But Canadians are used to dogs – just as they are used to cars (and car accidents). They have lost their fear of the situations that present true danger, and instead fear what they don’t know: wilderness or wolves or bears.

So what should we be afraid of? In my ideal world, we would all make the effort to become properly informed, and to define what truly are the dangers in our lives.

Ironically, the wolves that were involved in that attack provide an example. Those wolves had become habituated to humans. They had been around people so much that they had lost their natural fear of us. That is why I was able to photograph them, it is why they ended up close enough to a drunk camper to end up biting him, and it is why they were shot.

And that same habituation or desensitization is happening to us now. The things that are most dangerous to us are so intermingled with our daily lives that we do not fear them: fast food and lack of exercise; far too much sugar in the North American diet; cars and car accidents; our industrialized way of life and what that means for global warming and coming food shortages. These things are already killing thousands of people every year, and they will kill many, many thousands more.

These are all very scary to me. Much more so than cougars and wolves and bears.

For most of human history, the world around us has changed very, very slowly.

It’s a bit hard to define exactly when humans first appeared on this planet, because there is no exact date; rather, it was a gradual evolution over many millions of years. But, for the sake of this discussion, let’s call it 200,000 years of human history, which is about how long anatomically modern humans have walked this Earth.

For most of that history, our ancestors existed mainly as nomadic hunters and gatherers, walking in small family bands (or societies) through small territories in which they collected their food. Communities were oriented around “place” – they didn’t have any travel options anyway, right? – and their knowledge of that place: seasonal changes, plant growth, wildlife movements, was key to their success in finding food… and, so, to survival.

By around 10,000 years ago, following the end of the last Ice Age, many of these societies around the world were making the transition to agriculture. Now they were even more bonded to their place, and their knowledge of natural cycles such as seasons, weather and growing cycles were even more critical to their survival.

Connection to place was not simply an airy-fairy spiritual thing – even though rituals and spiritualities did, in many cultures, develop to symbolize this connection (e.g. the Thunderbird on the Mountain, or the Pachamama). Connection to place was a practical key to survival. And caring for that place – ensuring that wild animals were not hunted to extinction, and that soil remained fertile for subsequent years and subsequent generations -  was a logical key to survival.

Up until only a few hundred years ago, most people on Earth never ventured far from their birthplace. It’s only just over 500 years ago that Columbus embarked on his voyages of “discovery”. By the 1700s and 1800s more of a mass movement of humanity started to occur, as Europeans set out on journeys of colonization. But even these were mostly one-of trips: people emigrated (mainly from Europe; also some from Asia and – not by their own choice – some from Africa) to new lands where they made their new homes and developed their new connections, learning what to hunt and how to cultivate crops.

But what’s happened now? In the last century (or less!) we have arrived to this state where nearly everyone in our western society is mobile. Most of us no longer live where we grew up – or our children no longer live near us. Many of us have moved several times in our lives already. And, more significantly, we know that we have the option of moving again. Our lives and our communities are no longer centred upon a place.

Caring for place used to be critical to our survival. It was in our face every day, our place. If we didn’t care for it, the consequences would be felt quickly enough: no animals to hunt, or crop failures.

Our increased mobility, this last century (which, if you take 200,000 years as the length of time humans have walked the Earth, means only 0.05% of our history) has affected our connection to place. In fact, I would argue that it has pretty much destroyed it.

And once we lose that connection: our knowledge of natural cycles and any awareness of our impact on our place, it suddenly becomes much easier for us to damage our place. We no longer understand the consequences of our actions.

What do you think?
Do you have a place you feel connected to?
Do you still live there?

I keep seeing the same advice: Build your brand. And that is fine if you are only interested in, or only working in, one thing.

But I am interested in everything. To some people, that might look like I am all over the place. (Which, in a way, I am, I admit… )

But the thing is: everything is connected. And that’s what I am most interested in – the connections. So this is what I write about - both in my non-fiction and my fiction – and what I try to show through my sound stories (the radio dox) and my photos as well.

I don’t want to travel to some game farm to get the technically perfect, tight close-up of a captive wolf. I want to show that animal in its natural environment, connected to the habitat that it needs to survive. To me, that’s the story: the connection, the relationship.

Everything is connected. I feel that, in our “modern” and “advanced” society, where most of us live in cities far from the places where the things we consume come from, many have lost that sense of connection – but that doesn’t mean that that connection is not there. We’re just not aware of it. Every plastic-wrapped product you purchase is connected – both to where it came from (likely extracted from an oil well just like the one spewing out in the Gulf right now – so who’s really at fault there?), and to where it’s going (trucked to a landfill? or consuming energy as it gets transported and reformed into another product?)

Even if we are not always aware of the connections, they are still there.

So I think that is what I think about, and now what I blog about. Connections. Relationships – to our planet, to our food supply, to movements of our planet, to each other, to our own bodies.

But if I am supposed to be a brand – well, how do I make “connections” my brand? It’s a pretty big thing, not very definable.

A lot of what I do (i.e. why I left my well-paying job in the mining industry to earn a pittance as a writer) is about helping people to have the knowledge to make good decisions. To have the actual information, as well as to try looking at things differently – at times, even popping out of our ingrained “western” world view and reassessing our values and, therefore, our actions. Both about the big thigns and the little things: be it about personal health, or about treating our planet in a way such that the next generation can also live well here, or about preparing ourselves for the earthquake and tsunami that are coming here to the west coast. Every decision we make affects something: the world around us, the people around us, and the people to come.

So if you look at everything I blog about, the theme is there. Connectedness. But if you look at my list of blog topics – well, it looks like I am all over the place.

You’ve probably noticed that my blog activity has been a bit slow lately. That’s partly because I’ve had a busy spring, and have been focussing on my major projects rather than the blog. But it’s also because I am reassessing this blog, and I need your help! I plan to start posting more regularly, but I am just trying to figure out where I should go with the whole thing.

So, for those of you who have been following my blog this year – as well as for those of you who are new to it – what would you like to see here? What do you think I should do? Are you getting the connections I am trying to make, or do I seem to just be going all over the place?

But last month, the West Vancouver Memorial Library contacted me and asked if I wanted to put together a show of my photos. What an opportunity – of course I said yes! So I’ve been frantically preparing images, getting them printed, and now I am framing. And what a good feeling it is, seeing these images printed large.

I remember when I first started to print and display my photos, a decade or so ago. I had been photographing “seriously” for twenty years by then – I’m not saying I was “good” that whole time, but I had been working hard at improving myself: learning the technical stuff, and being ultra-critical about my own work so I could continue improving. But all of that time, all of the photos that I had taken were slides stashed away in little boxes. Once I started doing slideshows, and printing and framing my works – once I started showing them to people – I realized that’s what it’s all about.

I don’t photograph for myself. I photograph because I want to share what I see and what I feel when I am out there; I want to put a frame around a little part of it, and take it back home to share with others. Not many people get to see wild animals in the wilderness these days, and that’s something that’s really important for me. To show wild animals living where they belong: in their natural setting – not captive, not on the “wild game farms”, where so many “wild” animals are photographed these days – but to show the extensive habitat they need to survive. (We need those wild areas to be intact, in order for us to survive, too).

So I’ve had some good fun these last few weeks, going through images and readying them for exhibition. I still haven’t made the final selection of what will and won’t be shown – there will be between 30 and 40 prints on display all together – but I’m offering you a sneak preview of some of them here.

And if you are in or around Vancouver, I invite you to come down and see them all! They will be on display for all of June and July, at the West Vancouver Memorial Library (1950 Marine Drive), open daily (and free entry, of course!). And please, leave a comment here and let me know what you think…

So, even though the lighting was far from great for photography, I am postingt a few of this morning’s pix here just to show you how much bird life there is here.

There are lovely seawall walks in this city – in West Vancouver, for example, and also around Stanley Park, where you can see huge flocks of overwintering seabirds.  Right now, here in West Vancouver, there are huge flocks of Barrow’s goldeneye all along the shorelines.  They are really fascinating to watch as they are constantly in motion, diving down in the shallows to capture small invertebrates in their beaks then popping back up to the surface to eat them.  The water around the birds at surface is constantly bubbling and churning from the activity of the birds below.  You can see in the two panoramic shots here – at the left, there is a male bird just coming up from a dive (you can see him still entirely under the water in the first shot) while at the right, another is arching into his next dive.

While I was photographing the goldeneye, I looked up to see that a pair of mallards had stealthily paddled up to the rocks right beside me, and a pair of oystercatchers had landed quietly beside me too.  Looking around, I also saw a pair of mergansers swimming further from shore, as well as a pir of one of my favourite birds, harlequin ducks, sitting together on a rock dow the shoreline.  I had seen the harlequins earlier – they were what drew me down to the water’s edge – but they are very shy birds, and soon swam away.  I wish I’d been able to get a photo of them – they really are one of the prettiest birds around.  You’d never know from their delicate looks how hardy they are out in the surf zone.

For an online bird ID guide and lots of interesting bird info, check out: http://www.allaboutbirds.org