Shitty Little

Background

I live and work in Winnipeg. But I was in Toronto. A feature documentary I made about forests and trees, Call of the Forest - the Forgotten Wisdom of Trees, was playing at the Lightbox theatre.  

I was there with Diana Beresford-Kroeger, who is featured in Call of the Forest. Diana is a classical botanist, medical biochemist, conservationist and author. A very good author may I add.  Diana has the most infectious personality and is a real go-getter!

After the screening I was walking around the neighbourhood and I noticed these sad little trees outside an entrance to the Toronto Stock exchange. These sad little ones were not taken care of. Quite embedded into the concrete sidewalk, they were used as posts to attach electrical boxes, pipes and as a place to throw garbage. 

They were, by all accounts, just a couple of Shitty Little trees. 

Evidently good for nothing. 

Why were they even there? 

I took some photos of these sad ones.

It was a perfect example of how we see trees - expendable. Trees as slaves.

Later, as I was walking Diana to Union Station for her train home, I was telling her about these shitty trees I'd seen. It became clear to me just how everything is seen as 'shitty'. There is no regard for anything. Not trees, not nature. Not even human-made shitty things.

When push comes to shove, not even for humans. 

Good or bad. Everything is disposable and expendable. 

So once I had left Diana, I sat down and pulled out my pad and pen. 

I wrote a poem called Shitty Little. Took about 10 minutes. 

Over the next few months, I thought about how best to realise Shitty Little. Laying in bed and seeing the morning light hitting trees reflected on my drapes, the leaves dancing in the wind with the birds I was convinced shadow play was best for this story. Also that my friend Takashi Iwasaki was the perfect person to collaborate with on this project. So Takashi and I agreed to pursue the project.  We did some tests, and made our application to the Canada Council for the Arts. We were so excited that our project had been funded. And so we began. 

There were many stops and starts.

It was Covid. 

But we got it done. 

And much as we had imagined it. 

So what is Shitty Little about? 

It's about greed. It's about people being so detached and so disconnected from nature that we no longer understand the simple basics of how nature works. And because we don't understand it, we have no regard for it. We don't see what good a marsh is, a meadow or a wood?  

We sure don't understand the food webs. What feeds what. Why the smallest of the small is so important.

Native species plants that have long evolved to a place, which feed insects, birds and animals -  We call them weeds. We poison and/or uproot them then replace them with plants that don't belong, that have no evolutionary relationships to the place. We remove homes and food for nature. 

We put nature in a choke hold – and often without even knowing it. 

What does nature need?

Humans put humans first.  Always.

So there is no real consideration for nature. 

It's just a shitty little forest, with shitty little bugs and shitty little birds.  

So we can just go ahead and smash it all up. - Just go ahead and smash up this shitty world.