Last week the Secretary of Health sent out a declaration stating that the Río Santiago was not effecting the health of the inhabitants of El Salto and Juanacatlán. He insisted that the contamination levels were within the requirements of a river in Mexico.
Politics are an interesting phenomenon and, although I believe the statement to be an incredible fallacy, I don’t fault the Secretary. I think any other official would have likely been forced to say the same. It’s bigger than the Secretary of Health; it’s bigger than Mexico. I believe current politics are a result of what a relative few, and fortunate, have demanded from the earth and consequently other human beings. I write to you from a machine that requires the contamination of thousands of gallons of water. I am reminded of my choices evey time I cross the El Salto/Juanacatlán bridge.
Deep in the A2S headquarters, amidst website development and lots of video logging, we have been discussing how to make a video go viral. You post it on youtube, you tag it, you give it a fun catchy name, you bless it with the social media gods, and hope it takes off. Ok, so far so good, until we get to the take off part. Yes, there are experts with many varying ideas for success and I have read quite a few of them – mix luck and a huge network, and you’re getting close. If you have contacts at other blogs you can ask them to embed it and we certainly haven’t exhausted all our resources in that vein yet. We work it on Facebook and Twitter, and do have some success. But it is difficult, preparing to launch the first videos created by our workshop participants and being uncertain how far and wide we can spread them. The workshop participants need to get these videos out to make change and gain support to clean up the river. What can we do?
This week I talk about my experience as a videographer covering IMDEC at a National Dam Conference, and I included a few photos. I also discuss an impromptu tour of the Río Santiago on a day when there was nothing but white foam covering the expanse of the river. You’ll see Flip camera footage by a friend, Rodrigo, who brought me on the tour.
We are really excited to share this short video about the process and participants of our video workshops. Consider this a trailer for the videos they created which we should be posting soon! As always, we look forward to feedback and questions. We plan to publish our video workshop methodology, which is popular education based, once it is more refined.
We wanted to share some photos from our video workshops, the town of Juanacatlán, and the Río Santiago waterfall we often mention. If you click on any photo, it will enlarge and you can easily peruse all of them. To view our whole photo collection, click on this link.
I decided to video blog this week. I discuss my journey with an “environmental vigilante”, named Don Pedro. He took me on a bike tour to his brother’s farm in the hills. Thereafter we climbed a mountain to get footage of the surrounding Juanacatlán municipality. I also talk about my internal struggle in working with a community exposed to intense pollution.
Listen to Steve read his blog post here
Uncategorized | steve | 
23 February 2010 3:19 | 
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