800 Steps Apart is a video triptych by Brooke Singer and Brian Rigney Hubbard that compares two opposing protocols endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to handle cleanup in Lower Manhattan post-9/11. A Russian émigré, living at 300 Albany Street, was told by the Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the EPA to return to her apartment two weeks after 9/11 and to simply remove the dust and debris with a bucket and a mop. The other site, 130 Liberty Street or the former Deutsche Bank building, is just four blocks from 300 Albany Street, but a world apart in its approach to cleanup. 800 Steps Apart is a video short that is part of a larger documentary project by Singer and Hubbard about communities affected by toxic contamination, abandoned by the EPA and in search of responsive, environmental leadership.

Special thanks to the actors in “800 Steps Apart”: Christopher Murray, Erla Skúladóttir and Elizabeth Sweibel.

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

– Albert Einstein

According to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), cows, pigs, sheep and poultry are among the world’s greatest environmental threats and contribute a staggering 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions—considerably more than transport, which emits 13%. The report, entitled “Livestock’s long shadow,” says the meat industry is degrading land, contributing to the greenhouse effect, polluting water resources, and destroying biodiversity. Livestock use 30% of the earth’s land surface and pastures for cattle use 70% of deforested areas in the Amazon. Massive deforestation is expected as meat consumption is expected to double by 2050 as the populations from emerging countries embrace an unhealthy “western diet” based on meat products and fast food.

Curiously, the environmental threat caused by the meat industry has been mostly absent from the ongoing dialogue about climate change. Even the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth failed to address the livestock industry’s impact on global climate change.

In the video Methane, I combined footage of factory farms found on the web using the search tool in Flickr, YouTube, and various blogs, with an animation from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre Scientific Visualisation Studio. The animation depicts the breakup of the Ayles Ice Shelf in Canada’s Ellesmere Island on August 13, 2005. More than 90% of the ice cap has been lost. The piece shown in the animation is equivalent in size to approximately 11,000 football fields. The Canadian Arctic is experiencing the highest degree of climate change on the planet.

During the calendar year 2001, I took a photograph of the sky each morning when I awoke. The resulting 365 photographs softly fade into one another, collapsing 12 months of time into a 12 minute video. The subtle relationships between the varied blue skies (some with clouds, others depicting an occasional airplane) are created both by a predetermined structure (the calendar) and elements of chance (changing weather conditions).