Walking through a silent, snow-laden forest, it’s ironic to think about how far the human race has advanced technologically just in my lifetime. I’ve spent the last week in southwestern Utah shooting high-definition video on my new Panasonic HPX500 camera. I’ve been using the camera professionally since February but wanted to really give it a spin on this trip where the scenery is spectacular, the conditions are rugged and unpredictable, and anything can go wrong- and usually does.
I started out last Friday in Brian Head, a tiny resort town at about 10,000 feet. It’s one of the highest points in Utah and lies among some of the state’s internationally famous landmarks: Zion and Bryce National Parks, Cedar Breaks National Monument and a few a other state and local natural spectacles. The weather was cloudy, snowy and in the 30s when I first stopped at Cedar Breaks.
It was opening day at the park and there were only a few people besides me waiting to get in, coming from California and elsewhere for the Memorial Day weekend. Standing at the railed edge, I looked out upon the 1,000 ft.-plus deep canyon, ringed by red, white and yellow hoodoos, covered with a coating of snow that was probably a meter thick but from this distance looked like powdered sugar sprinkled on a vast plate of garnet crullers. Maybe it was memories of my first trip out west in 1973 to western Colorado. But I thought back to my early days as a TV reporter. If this was 1978, I’d be freezing, the tripod head’s fluid would be stiff, the tubes in the 30-pound video camera would take a few minutes to heat up before it would even work, and the book-sized tape in the 25-pound, tethered recorder might not roll until the unit’s temperature reached 40 degrees. The battery might last fifteen minutes before the frigid airpowerked the life out of it.
But this is 2008. I’m toasty warm in my Gore-Tex clothes, the camera weighs about half of 1978’s load. It fires up immediately and the lithium battery (also about half the weight 30 years ago) lasts nearly four hours unless the temperature is well below zero. There is no tape or recorder. All the video goes on solid state P2 cards with enough capacity for two hours of top-quality, 1080i/24PA HD video which yield staggeringly-convenient but monstrously-large files. Everything works flawlessly.
I return to my hotel room with the truly awesome pictures. Instead of saving video on tapes like the past 30 years- stacking them like cordwood in the corner of the tiny room- I now connect my camera by USB port to my laptop. In fifteen minutes, I copy all the video to the computer, check for quality, delete, edit or save in my editing software, save it, delete the video from the camera’s cards and I’m ready to shoot again.
I repeat this process over the next few days in Kolob Canyon (the northern part of Zion National Park), Zion itself- the more-famous touristy one- Cedar Breaks again, and in and around Brian Head. In just four days, I run out of storage capacity on the laptop (95 GB). So I drive to a Staples in nearby Cedar City and pick up an external 500 GB hard drive that has Firewire 400 ports (four times faster than USB) for just $150! ($1,000 three years ago). In about ten minutes, I’ve hooked it up, programmed the camera to talk to it and I’m downloading my video.
All during this time, I’m using my cell phone and wi-fi (except high in the mountains and low in the canyons) to book new jobs for when I return home to Salt Lake, and communicate with my mother who’s in the process of moving to a new home. If this was 1978, I’d have to stop at a gas station to use a pay phone (and in remote areas like this, there weren’t and still aren’t a lot of either). Personal computers didn’t exist so I’d have to write everything down in a notebook or on my palm or simply memorize it. No wonder communication before computers was so inaccurate.
So as I walk through the forest, encountering a small herd of mule deer and listening to the only sound- wind through the pines- I marvel at the incredible power of humans to create, innovate and make life more efficient. But I also realize that efficiency can no longer be the primary objective of human invention. Conservation is. We’re running out of previously abundant resources like oil and even clean air and water. If we have the creativity to make advances like we have in video, computers and human communication, we can apply it to desalinating ocean water, powering entire cities by the sun, wind or Earth’s heat, driving non-polluting electric cars and growing healthy, organic food in community, hydroponic gardens or our own backyards.
Here in one of the remotest parts of North America- the last part of the continental US to be surveyed- I felt a tectonic shift inside and around me (maybe it was just a bulldozer clearing land for condos a half-mile away). I’m part of a great technological revolution enabling everybody, not just the privileged or super-smart, to make life on Earth not just more efficient but less destructive. My life and career are dedicated to that cause. But mostly because- perhaps ironically- I’m well-off enough to afford to be conservative: with a small c. Now our military, corporations, science, heck- even government, are actively seeking and finding ways to conserve, economize and even reverse the “over-advances” of the past 200 years or so. We are indeed in a new Age of Enlightenment.
And just like the dawn of civilization, this new age’s roots are right here- in the forest.
