Isn't the internet wonderful. Today thanks to the net and this video I really felt I met Ta'Kaiya Blaney, and what a great pleasure! 

I had been making Youtube videos about the Canadian tar sands, so I was feeling pretty mad at the world. 

Occasionally you question what's the use, why keep yelling that our house is on fire when no one smells the smoke or hears your little alarm bell. If people are so senseless, what's the sense in trying to appeal to reason?

Then along comes a ten year old little girl and you know how great humans really are and that it feels so good to keep yelling when no well informed adults choose to hear. She has a mission, to work for the closure of the tar sands. 

What I know as the 'world class' city of Vancouver Ta'Kaiya's people knew as Xwayxway. I have read that some time towards the end of the eighteenth century Captain Vancouver drew a map sectioning off his vision of the city Vancouver from his ship. The incredibly casual art of empire building I thought, and the eighteenth century is called by my history The Enlightenment. 

It was around this time that the industrial revolution was started in my home country of England. I was born in the industrial north of England in a region where everything was black. I can remember even the green grass of England was black with over a century of accumulated coal dust. It was the region of William Blake's 'dark Satanic mills' (the famous Brit anthem 'Jerusalem')  belching out the black pollution from the burning coal that powered the mills. 

Blake was truly prophetic on the potential great evil of fossil fuel industrial power, writing for example in his poem Jerusalem. 

"And all the Arts of Life they changed into the Arts of Death in Albion.

Today we are past peak oil and the fossil fuel industrial revolution should be coming to an end ushering the bright new age of safe clean green energy. But dark Satanic forces are forcing the world to keep burning more and more coal and the worst of all oil - tars sands oil from Alberta Canada.  

Carbon dioxide is belching out of millions of exhausts and smoke stacks accumulating in the atmosphere at a rate that has never happened on this planet before. Tar sands oil is planned to keep that rate increasing. 

My grand father like so many died of emphysema caused by a shorted lifetime of breathing coal ash.  I remember he was kind man who was always coughing and wheezing. 

Now the entire atmosphere of the living Earth is being polluted with carbon and it will choke the life out today's children and all other animal life if it's not stopped. Earth is going to die if the poisoning is not stopped. 

That dark Satanic Hell hole called the sands represents the worst of human enterprise and if we are to survive it must close down. People say it is making too money to close down. It is too big to stop. 

The truth is it is too big not close down and all that money must go to making clean energy. 

Ta'Kaiya comes from a tradition that has held fast to the knowledge that Earth is our living Mother and must be treated well. From this view of the world it just takes a look at the tar sands Hell holes and the lakes of poison to know that it terribly wrong - a horrid bad thing that must be stopped, for good.

This is enlightenment.