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Our “Save Valbona” video . . . .

Our “Save Valbona” video . . . .

that kind of needs to “go viral,” if you can help?   http://vimeo.com/49966905 Despite the fact that I seem a bit fat, and have terrible bags under m’eyes, this video that Italian filmmaker Florian Platter made this summer still cuts straight to my heart, stirs up all the stuff that keeps me awake all night, makes me feel fierce, and happy, and scared . . . . and a bit weepy.  And more importantly of course, he focuses in on the central problem.  Valbona – Good Valley – is like everything else good in the world, on the verge of being . . . . well, if not destroyed, at least seriously altered beyond recognition of environmental retrieval.

The fact that this corner of Europe has survived, and even made it to being called a national park is amazing.  Can we band together and save it, ourselves and the people and animals (and life and spirit and beauty) and intelligence that live within it — save it in reality?  It’s not a small undertaking, though it is a small place.

There are huge piles of sand dotted in pairs, triplicates and quintuplets around the valley suddenly – they seem to spring up over night, like some sort of bulky infection.  Huge trucks hurtle up and down the valley all day, beginning early in the morning, piled high with more sand, scrabbled up from the river bed upstream, to be delivered to more piles to be left somewhere near and soon.  Sand of course is for making cement.  The Change has started here, and it’s terrifying in it’s rapidity.  Valbona has been altered more in the last year than I imagine it did in the last 100.  There are noises of explosions at midday, every day, as rocks are blown apart with dynamite, to make way for the sand pile’s cement.
The time to save Valbona is now, I think.  Not later.

Your ideas are probably better than ours, but in any case, they will involve money, a fight with the government and the foreign aid agencies that are supposed to be doing this work, but in everyday experiential fact put pencil pushing, reports, and catering to the same corrupt government that is the main problem to the fore.  Help?  This is a battle that can be won.  But not without a fight.  We’re game . . . .

Stay tuned here for what we decide to tackle this winter . . . .