TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Pleas McNeel (PM)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW)
DATE: April 18, 2002
LOCATION: San Antonio, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Karen Brewer and Robin Johnson
REELS: 2202 and 2203

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers correlate with the time codes on the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. We’re in San Antonio, Texas at the home of Pleas McNeel and it’s April 18th, year 2002 and we’re here today to talk about his life and career and interests and primarily about communications and media and about his interest in—in planning and—and design and I imagine we’ll touch on other issues as well, but that’s where the starting point is. Thanks very much for spending time with us.
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PM: I’m really looking forward to this. It’s an unfettered opportunity to talk about things I care about.
DT: We’ll, let’s see if we can find a starting point for this. Can you say that there was any beginning point, any early exposure to the outdoors, to nature, to the environment in general that might have interested you in this field?
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PM: Well, my family was always very outdoorsy. I mean they were hunters. I mean that was—that was what they called outdoorsy—was to go out and kill things, but they were ranchers and—and—and stuff like that. So, I grew up with a healthy respect for nature and—and the environment. When I was a—I think about six or seventh—sixth grade I took a backpack trip with a bunch of k—other kids through Yellowstone Park starting north and then we went all the way through Yellowstone Park and down into Jackson Hole and that was kind of mind blowing. And one of the adults I grew up with was a man Tom Slick who has become—was famous at the—at the time for leading expeditions to search for the
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abominable snowman and they—it was kind of a cover for his search for s—eastern mysticisms and spirituality and so forth. You know Texans go hunting. They don’t go to talk to gurus in India, but he was extremely interested in—for instance, he would talk about the snowman as a way of trying to figure out—if you could figure out how the snowman adapts to climate, we might be able to figure out how we could better adapt to cold weather conditions and high altitudes stuff and so forth. So, they had a pretty scientific way—it wasn’t you know like they weren’t just goofing on the abominable snowman, but that all had a pretty big influence on me. I—I think the main thing was that I just sort of fell into
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environmentalism by accident. I was a black sheep in my family, kind of an outcast. I—I got involved sort of peripherally, but involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the 50’s and it totally took me out of—of—of—of the social situation that I grew up in. I grew up in a—in—in—in a upper class Texas family and I became really, really sensitized and—and—and good friends with—with black people and that just—I mean all of a sudden I was no longer a member of my peer group. I mean I—I—I couldn’t—I—I couldn’t talk to them
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about what I really felt and I—and I wasn’t a peer with the black people either, but I—I continued that on through the—through my—my whole life and—and—and I became more and more estranged. I—I—I was never—I never fit in anywhere. I didn’t fit in with the people that I grew up with and—and certainly I didn’t fit in with Black people that—that I was working with. I got really good friendships and—and had a, you know, deep relationships and so forth, but I was kind of in a cultural limbo, you know, like—and so forth. And I went out searching for sanity. During the 60’s I was a hippy and I went to communes and I went all over and—and did al—all the stuff that people do in the 60’s and came back to San Antonio and some friends of mine were starting a—an underground newspaper and I helped name it. Actually Allen Ginsberg named it. I took Allen Ginsberg down to the Institute of Texan Cultures and he found an eagle bone whistle in a—in a—in a little case and that became the name for the—for the newspaper. The—The Eagle Bone Whistle was a little flute made out of an eagle bone. It was the last thing that Custard
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heard—the—the sound of thundering hooves and the shrill cry of eagle bone whistles and—and so forth. But we started out with a newspaper that was—we called it an alternative newspaper a—and I just s—got involved in it to—to do movie reviews. I kind of thought that would be fun and everybody sort of flaked out and I found myself within three issues as the Publisher and Editor of the thing. And so what we tried to do was to talk about things that nobody—that wasn’t getting any press. We considered ourselves alternatives press. We were advocacy journalisms—journalists, which meant that we did go out and write stories, but we would go into—to—to—to different places and get people to write stories about what they believed in. And one of the big things that was in—becoming
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in play in Texas at that time was the environment and oh, I—there was a professor at Our Lady of the Lake named Dale Winegar. He taught me how to say the word aquifer. I didn’t know—I couldn’t pronounce it. It took me three or four days—of the Edwards Aquifer—I mean we had done—I mean it was difficult and—and like you couldn’t—nobody said—there were a dozen people around or probably a few more than that. I mean if you consider hydraulics engineers and stuff like that, but just people on the street. Not many people knew that there was such a thing as an aquifer or could pronounce it. I couldn’t pronounce it. Anyway, we began to start—he started the a—the—the—in—introducing me to that and oh, people like David Brower would come and—and since I was the editor of the
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underground newspaper I would go and hang out. So, I hung out with the—day and a half with David Brower and he would wander around very gloomy about how the only way that we can save the planet is to halve the population. This was in 1970 or 71, you know, and—and there was no—there were no suggestions about how we’d do that, but he was very persuasive and—and most of the people that I talk to would talk about well, you know, like unless we half the population, in other words, get rid of half the people that live here, we were doomed. And so that—that really gets your attention and—and so that was kind of the beginning of it for me. A kind of apocalyptic vision of the end of the earth as we know it. One of the things that Brower use to—I think the thing that—one of the things that Brower
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did and I think one of his great understandings was that it—environmental action is—is done with beautiful pictures. I mean he—I met him right after he’d started the Friends of Earth in—in—in—in the Sierra—Save the Sierra Club by printing all those beautiful books and calendars and stuff like that. And that helped sensitized the peop—people to, you know, like what we have to lose, but it was the sense of apocalypse that—that—that—that—that was one of the things that got me really, really interested in it. And—and so we ran environmental issues in—in the—Eagle Bone Whistle. We talked about the aquifer and we talked about air pollution and—and—and—and we did a lot of that and it was very
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interesting. The Eagle Bone Whistle as an under direct quote—underground newspaper here—we’re—we’re—we’re here in—in—in a town whose economy was basically devoted to the military an—and so forth and you would think that it would be very dangerous to do that. Well, it wasn’t particularly. They—the people let us talk about the Civil Rights Movement. We were—we were an—anti war—paper that was our major focus—was against the war in Vietnam. We were pro Civil Rights, blacks, browns, gays whatever. We—we—we touched on all the hot buttons, but it wasn’t until we opposed the North Expressway, which went through Olmos Park. It—it’s right south of here. It wasn’t
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until that, that the Chamber of Commerce—north side Chamber—I guess all of them did, but they—they talked to our advertisers and we lost all of our institutional sponsors; big department stores. All these people were willing to go because they, you know, like they just wanted to make a buck off the hippies, you know, like we’re going to sell them the clothes, we’re going to sell them, you know, it’s lifestyle stuff. But when we came out against dr—building an Expressway through a urban park—boom. We lost a—we lost a great deal of the revenue. It became very difficult to—to—so we had, you know, like head shops and—and—and concerts and—and we had, you know, like the staple of underground newspapers was record ads. Right? You know, like you’d have a half page for—maybe a full page from Capital or—or whatever. So, we had those and—and we had boutiques
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and—and—and so on. But it was environmentalism that—that—that f—I think—it wasn’t environmentalism it was—it was opposing an expensive project that did it. Since the Expressway ha—has—since we oppose that Expressway it—I—I—one of the things that happened was that we won. We—we—we challenged it in the courts. I don’t remember the laws. You can ask my sister. She might remember, but I’m—I’m sure some of the people that—that you interview on this will know exactly case and—and so forth. But we—we challenged the law and we took it all the way and won an—and won and loss—anyway, it was a—we won and won and won and finally we won at the Fifth Circuit, which was an
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appeal—the—the—the Appeals Court in—in—in New Orleans. And that was it. We’d won a—a decisive victory and the Congress just passed a rider on the Highway Appropriations Bill exempting that little stretch of—of—of the highway from the regulations—the federal law and boom they built it. They’ve never built another one through an urban park so it was the last one. It was kind of like the sacrificial lamb, but one of the things that it did was that it dispirited all the—not all of them, but I’d say most of—of really bright young people who had been fervent about opposition and—and environmentalism and suddenly they—they just sort of had their winds tak—taken out of their sails. They—they—they thought well, the game’s rigged. We can’t win and—and—and over the years we’d try to get those people back on other things and they just—we could never do it. We—it just blasted the coalition apart.
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DT: You said The Eagle Bone Whistle also covered some issues regarding air pollution and I think the aquifer as well. Could you mention some of the controversies in those areas?
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PM: Well, San Antonio has pretty good air, but one of the things that everybody was doing was they were running the numbers. That was the—like I hung out with scientists and environmentalists—I mean the professionals an—and they would run the statistics. The—for instance, like on the flood, you know, like just irregardless of—of protecting the aquifer. If you seal, you know, like if you seal off the environment the—you increase the—the power and the pressure of runic—runoff. So, that like one guy ran us some statistics and—and found out that if X amount of houses were built; roofs, driveways, etc., of streets, drainage. That wall of water would come to—s—there would—it—in one theoretical
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circumstance a wall of water would hit and it would go over the Olmos Dam and wipe out downtown San Antonio. It—the numbers were taken extremely seriously by people and—and although nobody really talked about it very much a lot of retention dams and things like this were built to—to make that not happen. Air pollution was—basically came from city planning studies that we would do that—one of the things that we were interested in was architecture and planning and—and another one of my mentors, O’Neil Ford, use to say well, you know, like where—we’re going to—before so—before too many years, we’ll have built so many highways there’ll be no place to go. The world will be covered with
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parking lots and—and—and so forth. And—and it became obvious that like in an esthetic sense. Right? The automobile was wrecking the landscape. It was taking huge chunks—you look at these—I don’t know there was some planner, I—I forget his name, but it’s a good image to have that—like a—these great cloverleaves that you see in these highway interchanges and so forth. They’re bigger than an Italian renaissance city. You could put the whole s—you could put all of Florida in—in—in—in one of those things. And—and you know like it’s—so then the idea was, you know, like we were trying to figure out the
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numbers again. You know like and so well what do automobiles do aside from, you know, like I mean like it’s the transportation wrecking the landscape. It’s—it’s—it’s—it’s—they’re—they’re—they’re bulldozing trees, they’re taking land out of—out of service, they’re dividing up neighborhoods, they’re—they’re doing this and they’re pumping hydrocarbons into the air and that stuff is deadly to you. It—like—so much lead in the soil next to highways that it’s actually poisonous. It’s, you know, don’t let your children eat mud from the, you know, next to the street or don’t try to grow a vegetable garden on a—right next to a highway because you’re running a risk there. But we ran the numbers and we could see that like—it—from 1970 that like by now that we would have dangerous
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levels of all sorts of things. That like we would have our water quality being threatened by the pollution of the aquifer. We would have the air quality going down. We’d have heat island from all the built up stuff. They—they build—I mean we—we just have—like Albertson’s—there was a cartoon in the newspaper, Albertson’s shut down. Well, there was a lovely cartoon in the newspapers. This little girl s—standing in this huge parking lot in front of this little Albertson’s—on the front of this Albertson’s and she’s saying, “Do we get our trees back now?” Albertson’s has gone out of business so are they just going to
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unpeel those parking lots back and put the live oak trees back in there and so forth. And—and—and—and it’s the heat island effect—this—all of this concrete and stuff—this—holds and radiates heat and makes the ambient temperature. San Antonio—the weather patterns actually move around it. If—if you pay attention you can see how your rising heat from cities will—will—will actually displace. You know, the weather will come and you’ll have—there will be a column of heat and the wea—weather will go like that an—and—and so forth. This is one of the things that—th—these kind of modeling and—and—and—and s—developing scenarios and so forth can be very persuasive and I’m sitting in The Eagle
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Bone Whistle. I didn’t really want to know all this, but once you do know it, right? You can’t go back because it’s like you’re living in a place with starving children and you become obsessed with feeding them. It—w—and—my whole thing—I—I—I—my father committed suicide and I had a somewhat dysfunctional s—family and—and so when I was younger and still—I mean this is the major focus of my life. I think is the search for sanity. And I was trying to figure out well, what does it mean? What does it mean to be a sane human being? How can you live, be comfortable, experience love, joy, have a really good time? We’re all tourists here and so as we’re going through how do we enjoy this and—and
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so forth and we look to the great mentors; Christ, and Buddha, and Mohammed and—and they all had this experience of—of—of the, you know, like it’s called the one God, but this great oneness. This acceptance of this—that the totality of everything where if you see it and you feel, it you can feel the animals and the—the—the nature and all of this and this is the reason I think for living or it’s—it’s what we’re wired for. We can have that experience, but we can’t have it if we’re harming stuff. I mean we—we have to open ourselves up to love it and when we do that, then the respect for all living creatures in the web of life becomes very important and—and once you’ve got that I mean you’ve got to figure out ways to—to—to mitigate the harm and if you have, you know, like I was doing
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an underground newspaper and—and we were reaching about 35,000 people and we—we got real intense about environmentalism as a kind of ex—spiritual experience that you have to—this web of life was not something of a abstract thing, but it was the basic foundation of our existence. It was why we live here and why—well, what we can become if we’re open to it and so forth. And then after we lost the funding I—I—I began to get a little—I mean really burned out because we were doing as volunteers and I was putting the newspaper—almost every issue had a different crew on it by—towards the end. And—and
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finally I put together a crew, but I was losing it. I mean I was losing—it wasn’t the idea of the horror, but it was the—it was just the shear work of—of—of going against the stream.
DT: The reason for Whistle—Eagle Bone Whistle being in San Antonio was I guess to—to address the issues that weren’t being dealt with in the Express News or in the conventional…
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PM: The hippies were getting bad press.
DT: Can you talk about some of the shortcomings you saw in the conventional media that—that led to the Alternative Weekly being put together?
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PM: Well, the Alternative Weekly was really put together by a guy who wanted to start a pornographic magazine and he suddenly found out that like he’d gotten the wrong people an—and so for his dreams of starting a pornographic magazine just went down the tubes because none of us would even do adult film theater ads. Right? Much less personals, you know, meet for whatever. But the—it was just a—again it was the 60’s and the—there was no conspir—I, you know, people always talk about me running an underground newspaper as though, you know, like I was in touch with this conspiracy and so none of the people who were doing this ever really met any—e—each other. I mean we—we—we were not in
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communication. It was all grass roots. It was all extremely site—site specific. But it was in the air. The idea is that we were against the war in Vietnam and we were against death and we were for life. And—it—the reason that it was all very, very not too difficult to organize and put together things like that, it’s because we had lots and lots of—of—of young people with graduate degrees who didn’t want to go to Vietnam and they needed justification. They needed etc., etc., there’s a whole lot of reasons. But like if you’re going to oppo—your government says we’re going to war and if you’re against it, you’re a traitor. Right? Well, if you’re all by yourself it’s really hard to stand up to the government, but if people
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are all together all over the country are saying yes, we feel that way too, then it makes a difference and it allows people to be braver than they would have been and so all these other issues came along with that. And so we began to open ourselves to—I mean the whole idea of environmentalism a—and—and—and doing action, going to the streets. I—I would—I remember once standing in front of a group of guys dressed up as skeletons in front of the draft board and reading a poem by somebody that—I—a guy handed me the poem—a guy—a political activist named Tom Flower asked me to read the poem. But it put—it got my name in the pic—in—in the newspaper and so everywhere I went now I’m
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identified as a leader of the antiwar movement and so forth. Well, I’m getting more and more estranged from my family and from—from all the, you know, like and so forth. I’m letting my hair grow it’s—it’s just—I—I’m becoming a total outsider and—and so forth and I’m beginning to—it really actually wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I figured what a blessing it is to be a black sheep in a dysfunctional family, you know, like you don’t want to be, you know, like you don’t want to be successful in the environment because that means you become a dysfunctional person with it.
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DT: (Inaudible) as an outsider, as a black sheep, that weren’t apparent to the establishment at least as regards to the environment?
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PM: Absolutely. I mean the—the—the—like say for instance, I mean you asked about the press. Well, the press goes along with and the local press went along with the developer community, with the conventional wisdom and so forth and—and they were really, really frightened of any kind of information about environmentalism because they thought that, you know, like they were a threat to—to their income, that these people were after them and so forth. Some years later we did the Environmental Design Charrette. I had developers come up to me and say, “Pleas, you got to understand that like we want to do this now because we’ve discovered that like if we design with nature and do it properly, right, we can make more money, but the people want what we sold them.” You know, and it was
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something that Disney and General Motors and remember all those films about the world of the future and so forth filled with electrical appliances? It was all stuff that you could buy with a credit card, keep you in debt, it would, you know, like etc., etc., etc. We have this world of the future and we live there now. I mean it’s—it—it’s amazing that the big cloverleaves that eat up so much land. Right? Well, those were part of, you know, like projections built by large corporations by—by—Walt Disney did the articulation of—Epcot was a great sale to peace, the media. I use to do a graduate school lecture called Bewitched in the Company’s Store and Bewitched was a popular television show. It was
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about the—this woman who was a witch who fors—forswears sorcery and her husband who was an advertising executive. I mean this is—this is all really all American, but the thing that you—if you look deeply into it you would see that everything that they had was off the rack. And like if you watched it very closely, within an hour of that show almost everything they had was offered in an advertisement for sale. Credit again was the—wa—was the key and a materialistic kind of culture and they—an—and—and the big spiritual thing. An—and this is what the newspapers do—it wasn’t an evil conspiracy. It was just
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that this is what people want. They want the quote “American Dream.” Well, the American Dream was based on having all these things and these things had built into them planned obsolescence lessons, which meant that you buy these things and they end up in a landfill five years later and you had to get a new one an—and—and—and so on. And so everybody is—is scrambling after the American Dream and they’re blinding themselves to the consequences, the co—true cost of these things, which was the environmental degradation and the degradation of society. Neighborhoods, you know, before television, you know, people would sit on their porches and talk to each other. Now you walk down streets and
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you don’t see anybody out on—there’s no streetlight at all. People are inside watching TV. Air conditioning of course made a big difference around here too. But, no, I mean when we first came out—the first issue of The Eagle Bone Whistle had an interview with Allen Ginsberg on it. And Allen Ginsberg talked about how—like Americans are material junkies—as if you tried to take away their material from them, they’ll do just what a junkie will do. They’ll lie, they’ll steal, they’ll cheat, they’ll kill you, you know, and—and—and one of the incorporators of the newspapers was a—was an aspiring politician and one of his opponents used that quote to run against him. I mean accused him of being a communism—communist because he had supported this newspaper that—in which Allen
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Ginsberg accused Americans of being materialist junkies. That enraged people, absolutely enraged them, I mean the—there were a lot of things that Allen said that could of enraged people a lot more, but that’s what they—that’s what they picked on. And I’ve noticed all my life it’s been this whole idea of the American Dream. It’s the right to own stuff and irregardle—without knowing—you don’t want to know the cost because once you do, you know, like there’s a guilt thing or—or whatever, you know, like we all know about sweat shops and so forth. I just bought a new printer and it’s made in China, you know, I don’t know what that means, but I mean I think I know what it means, but—but and I’m not against globalization. I—I think that one of the things that can probably s—possibly say
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this is that—but we were always swimming up against the stream and the one thing that w—that—that we did that—at—that—well, the two or three, but—but one of them was attacking materialism. People don’t like that. They don’t want to be said that their lifestyle’s wrong, that their, you know, like that they’re making bad choices with their lives. And so that’s where, you know, like that’s where a lot of the tension came from. It was, you know, like they always talked about—they’ve never shown hippies as spiritual people in—in—in films period. I mean it was Maynard G. Krebs as a b—I was lead man. Maynard G. Krebs as a beatnik. He was able—wore a little beret and he, you know, had—played bongos. Well, that had nothing to do with the beatniks as I lived it in San Francisco.
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But the thing that we were really about was the beginning of this assault on American materialism. I mean you remember all the old beat poetry, you know, like your tail fins daddy and your cheap plastic this and that and you live in your little ticky tacky houses and you live your sterile empty little lives and so forth and a lot of beat poetry. Superficial beat poetry really concentrated on that. It was a rebellion against the 50’s materialism and that became the celebration of life in the 60’s, which opened, I think, a whole generation up to seeing things more than just get mine, live in my little place an—and—and—and fill my life up with materialism and so on. Yeah, the newspapers never ever would write a good story about antiw—antiwar movement and they, you know, like they would portray the
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antiwar movement as a bunch of—at best unwashed stupid, you know, people who were afr—just chicken. We had, you know, remember the peace symbol the—we call it the footprint of the American chicken and when they would yell things like hippy, I mean, that meant it was like the word nigger. The—the word hippy meant I have the right to kill you if I want to if I can get away with it. I mean—I, you know, like I could shoot you and—and—and there—no Texas—every, every, you know, a Texas jury understands. So, it—it—it—it’s not like—we still don’t know—I mean the public doesn’t know just exactly what—what—what the youth rebellion in the 60’s was. And—and—and they all say, well, of
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course it failed. Well, of course it didn’t, you know, like there’s no people wearing long hair, oh, there are people wi—a lot of people can wear hair any way they want to now. It doesn’t matter, but the—it—it’s like we kept losing fighting these battles and losing them. We lost all. Everything we—I mean we won the w—ultimately we won the war in Vietnam and we got them to stop and people who look at this right now I’m sure would—some of us—some of them would call me a traitor for having done that. I was a veteran by the way. I had been in the Army. I knew what armies did. I had no illusions and most of America
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didn’t. During that time we got to see the war on TV and so forth, but we—here in San Antonio we’re never disrespectful of soldiers. We considered ourselves trying to save their lives. To—to—try and keep them from making the horrible mistake of going and—and—and—and killing people. It—it’s—it’s not a light thing to kill another person an—and especially in a kind of dubious context.
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DT: Why do you think the antiwar movement peace effort got packaged together with support from environmental protection? What was the connection there?
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PM: It was just the respect for life. The—the—the idea is that once you—you make a stand for life then all the rest of the things that go along with that. I mean you—you—we bega—it—you see how cynical people could be by sending people off to kill people, and then you can see how cynical they were about cutting down forest, or how negligent they were about polluting the rivers and so forth. How incredibly suicidal our society was becoming. We were matil—materializing our—our—the way we thought. The—the consensual reality was descending. Consensual reality as I see it is—is—is really the kind of world that we all
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live in. It—it’s—it’s the agreements that we all make of—of what a life is and—and—and what you need to be successful an—and so forth and these—this consensual reality was moving down. When it happens in war, people start becoming more bestial and they become—they—they get lower and lower. It—if you assume that like evolution means that like we are evolving and that, you know, like and—and—and—and—and you can’t say that we’re finished. Right? Because we haven’t been here that long—that we’re evolving. There’s a great potential for us somewhere as—as sentient beings with—with—with the power to—to do good, wonderful, unimaginably, spectacular, beautiful things, but we see this evolution and—and—and we see it moving up. We see—you look at the history of mankind. We’ve been getting better and better and better and better and better. We live
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better. We treat each better and—and so forth. It’s—it’s a historic curve and—and so forth and—and in America it really took off, you know, people living better and better and better and better. But then this war thing comes and you sings—you begin to see the mental consensus be going—going back down again, you know. And—and the—it—it was—like the war made the word communist—gave the word communist a lot. I mean it—it always had a lot of caché because it was politically useful to a lot of people. But the thing that brought us all together was the, I think, was that anybody that did anything that disturbed the establishment any way was called a communist or something like that. They’d figure out some dirty word that meant that you were a left wing, no good, radical nasty and so forth. And there weren’t that damn many of us and there were environmentalists, there were Civil Rights people, there were all these people and they were using the same bloody word, communist. I mean they used a lot of words and so forth and all those words were delivered by people and you could tell that one of the things that was behind what they were saying was that I’d kill you if I could, you know. So, I like—I mean we—we lived in an environment where the FBI was running a thing called COINTELPRO, which the—like
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half the people that I—I—people use to come and sleep on my living room floor and as—they were deserters and they were going to—to Canada and so forth and we helped them do that. An—and after all—things sort of settled down—we found out that half of them were undercover agents of various kinds. They were all kinds of flavors and we use to get on the telephone and—and we’d talk to the FBI agents. I don’t think anybody ever really tapped my phone, but you know, like we always treated telephone conversations as though they were being tapped by somebody and we were all in the drug culture too, which meant you know like everything was s—secret and coded and you were out of, you know, we were
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really, really, you know, like lived in an outlaw kind of culture. And there weren’t very many of us and we were—that’s where the whole thing began to come together with the activists and the environmentalists and all of that. At least that’s my suspicion.
DT: Do you think that’s the link? That there’s an activist, advocacy, promoter, agitator, you know, political sense that—that joined all these people together—they—they felt that there was something wrong with the status quo of the establishment?
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PM: Yeah, it was self-preservation. We felt something was wrong with the status quo for sure and that we’ve discovered that like we had better music, and that we put together great concerts and—and—and so forth. And we could bring all these—these issues together and there would be critical masses of people together an—and—and so forth and people who probably—I don’t know I—I—it—it—the—the war was a great catalyst for change and it—I—it—it changed the Vietnam War and others now. But the Vietnam War was a great catalyst for—for change in America, but it did solat—make a solidarity out of all the old—out of all the outsiders. And I think, you know, like pot smokers and so forth and—and
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people who took LSD and—and so forth who were also a big part of that because psychedelics altered the way you—you looked at conventional reality as well. I—some of the scientific says it doesn’t really—what it does is it just puts you more in finely touch with your—your true self. Helps you shed, you know, like layers of—of—of consciousness that you’ve built up. We all sort of—we—we construct ourselves out of our experiences and out of our desires and so forth and—and we become at any given moment the sum of a lot of, you know, just habit’s and—and—and all sorts of things that—that—the—the drug experience would—would just t—would just take that away and this t—let the—let the big
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experience. And so that was a big part of it as well—was the drug culture and the antiwar movement and then environmentalism. But at the root cause of it I think was just that the—the—the sensitization to the brotherhood of all living things and—and—and the f—the, you know, like once you find out that—like—well, you know like they’re talking about the Daisy Cutter Bomb now that they’re dropping on Afghanistan as a fuel air bomb thing. The—when I was doing the—the newspaper we would look at these weapon systems and we would think about, you know, like—well, you know the Spooky—that—the big old
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airplane that has the chain guns and everything. If flies around and just—well these things can—can put f—ex—it can make everything in the size of a football stadium just explode. I mean rabbit’s, bunnies, trees, flowers—I mean everything dies. It’s gone. It’s shredded and so forth and—and once—I mean talk about this—these realities—I mean this is—this is an environmental impact of—of incredible ferocity and—and—and—and—and—and—I don’t, you know, like I don’t even go—quite—it—it—it’s unspeakable. It—that—that—the—that we use our science to do this sort of thing. But I mean we have these capabilities and now we’re of course t—spending more money to have—I mean we’ve—j—once
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you’ve got these things then you use them. Right? And they’ve been very effective in Afghanistan and—and so forth, but you know, like get it—and the body counts. We don’t count rabbit’s or gazelle, you know. We don’t count trees and plants and stuff like this, but if you’re going to have a successful life on this planet, you have to be aware. You have to be connected to those things. It’s spiritual, it’s—it’s a dynamic, that enriches life beyond anything that we can talk about. I—I—I think it’s the peace that, you know, passes understanding, perhaps, but it’s the—the ability to feel like you really live here and you—and—and your life is—it’s okay, you’re here, it’s important, it’s—it’s—it’s a privilege and—and so forth and I want you…
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DT: Can I ask you about something related about building this awareness sentence not just through the newspapers, but I understood that it’s—it’s the 70’s (?) you also helped set up of other ways of communicating such as through Public Radio.
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PM: Well, that was the—that the—the next step for me when I understood that the—the power of being able—I mean because like we changed a generation in the way people thought. I mean we had hundreds of thousands of people affected by The Eagle Bone Whistle. I mean there were 35,000 readers and they would pass it around. It just changed the dialogue and—and we found that like there was a hard core 40,000 people around here that all had shared the same beliefs. But then it became obvious that we had hit a wall and a guy named Lorenzo Milam wrote a book called Sex in Broadcasting. It was a handbook in starting a community radio station and I read one of the—somebody handed me a copy of it
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and—so, we went off to set up a Public Radio station and that up—as a matter of fact we were pretty—in—in those days—and we didn’t call it Public Radio, we called it community radio because it—Public Radio sounded like a government press handout. But community radio was something grass roots and it was indigenous. It—it—it didn’t pump information from outside and—and mess with our minds with other peoples ideas, which was okay, but we at least would be able to—to share our—our—our own—our own thoughts. So, I—we—I put together a corporation called San Antonio Community Radio Corporation and w—and—and we filed—it was a long, long process. We—we set out to file an FCC application for FM frequency 89.1 and it—the process of getting it to appl—
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getting the application through the FCC took about seven years—seven, eight years and lots of adventure stories along the way. But we finally got the FCC application or no I think when it started going weird was—Henry Gonzales got us a $25,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cover expenses and then all of a sudden everybody in town wanted to do it. And—and so like we had a dozen competitors and so I spent all my time for a year or so just going around getting the competitors to join us. At one place the people just—they were so obnoxious that I said to hell with you. You just go and take it to—we’ll have a hearing; we’ll blow you out of the water. And they—and—and by doing
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that they’d finally came around and—and so forth. But then we get the FCC application, we’re ready to go, we’re building a—now this is my own personal hunch. I—the community radio station was going to be called KURU for you are you, y—you know, and a friend of mine had a persona, the uru guru and you are you and we thought it was kind of cute. But—and we were going to put it in San Antonio Museum of Art. We rehabilitated a building over there and—and so forth and we were ready to go. We had this Class A Board Of Directors. , some of the very best people in San Antonio and so forth and a guy named John Burnett, wonderful guy, he’s a stringer for NPR. Yeah, John—John was writing for the Express News at the time and he came to the warehouse and he interviewed our little crew—our hard-core crew. And he wrote his article and the first part of the article was
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about me and it was about how impressed with it that he was with me and how I reminded him of Allen Ginsberg and the free speech movement in Berkeley. And it like—that—and then—then he talked about the plans, right, but after that article the—the San Antonio power elite wouldn’t return the phone calls or honor the $50,000 pledges and all the rest of that and so forth and so it went into a kind of a tale spin until it was gathered up in another in—in—in—in a final attempt, which put together the classic radio station with this one and put on Texas Public bec—became to—became—came together as Texas Public Radio. Using the appli—KSTX, which is the Public Radio station here now was the application that I wrote for the FCC, and the front money that we had raised for it from the Federal
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Government and some other stuff. But it—it—it’s now on the air and one of the things that—that we were—aside from that—I mean we were very, very much interested in—in—in—in—in creating local production. We wanted to use the radio as an art form for—for local creative people. It’s basically an a—NPR station now. It doesn’t do that much local production, but the other thing that it does do and it does do very, very well what we consider the really desirable thing, was it upped the level of discourse. And—and—and f—what you need in a community in South Texas especially, I mean the radio and—and the radio is run by rednecks and I—I mean they were—they were low rent and so forth and I—
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I mean like you could go into the—you could listen to the broadcasting and—and then it was all mired and—and old ideas and these—this again the White Supremacist Heritage of—of Texas, which sort of got it’s birth here at the Alamo. But Public Radio has changed the way people talk to one another now. Before you’d have guys that’d sit there and they’d talk about cars and they were all right wingers and, you know, and so forth. Not with conviction, but just with a lot of energy and—but now people who I think the—the most important thing that it does is that it takes people who are sensitive to things like the environment to—to intellectual pursuit’s to the arts. It—it—it makes them feel like they’re not alone anymore and they’re not living in the savage town that can turn on KSTX and
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they can listen to the—the wonderful shows that are piped in that—and it makes them feel more comfortable. It gives them more—and it just raises the level of discourse and—and so forth. But I didn’t get to go the last mile. I was the—the our board of directors was—was totally dispirited when we began to lose our funding sources and I think they were blaming me and nobody said it. They were all really good polite people, but that was a kind of turning—I may have blamed myself a little bit, but—and it was nothing that I did. It was, you know, like again it was a perception that was created by—by John who’s a lovely person and a good writer. He’s a very good writer. He was just the…
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DT: Could you explain a little bit more about how a Public Radio station you think creates not just a discourse but a community that—that is having this conversation among itself? I mean it seems like a lot of the environmental initiatives that I’ve seen come about because of a few environmentalists have joined together and they make a group. And it seems like through your efforts that the newspaper and then later the radio station you managed to put together sort of a virtual group through the radio waves. Does that compare in a sense?
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PM: Yeah. It’s a—it’s again I—I think that a—a lot of what, you know, like activism is—is—is costly and—and—and it, you know, like you—you have to step out of the—out—out—out of the regional local consensual reality. You—you—you oppose the—what everybody thinks is so and things like Public Radio help you to understand that you’re not alone and virtual groups maybe, maybe not. The plans that we had for radio station was to actually enable to do that and—and perhaps one of the reasons that it didn’t succeed. But I think that, you know, like again what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t so much matter whe—with what—what—about—well, content does, but—but it’s what’s important is that we
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grow up a little bit. That we begin to think and talk at high—at a higher and higher and higher level and—and, you know, like we use to talk about consciousness raising and it—I mean that’s basically what it’s all about. Is it, you know, like you raise up consciousness and then all of the things that are at risk and at catastrophic risk especially are more easily understandable. And again before—well, like Public Radio—one of the things that Public Radio did was that before Public Radio the media was kind of like the media is becoming today. You know people would shout at each other and then people would call in and they would rag a right wing radio commentator and he’d put them down and so forth. And—and
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discourse was extremely uncivilized and—and I mean people couldn’t talk. They would talk in these little boxes that, you know, like well, you said one key phrase and that means you’re a communist, right? I don’t know now that there are no communist I’m not sure what it is, a terrorist I guess. But the—but—the—the idea is that, you know, like they’ll have some ist, some way to define you. An environmentalist is—is a kind of way of pigeon holing people u—up. But we—we would have these inane combats that—that—that went no—nowhere. Now people actually will talk things through on a higher level. We got a
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long way to go, but boy it’s—it—it—it s—upped the level of—of civilized conversation by 20 percent. I’m being, I think, very conservative. I—I—I think it—it really changed the way people dealt with one another.
DT: Let’s see if I’m getting this right. Your saying that part of what a community radio station and maybe even a Public Radio station that’s satellited NPR does is that it—it creates a more civilized discourse between people who aren’t necessarily likeminded. I mean it’s not like putting all of the environmentalists or communists or the right-wingers in one room and they all agree (?). It sounds like you’re creating forum where people who want to have a civilized conversation, some of them can do that. Is that…
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PM: Yeah, it’s a milieu. It—it—it—it—it—it’s a, you know, like it—it’s a—it’s—it’s—you’re—you’re—it’s—it’s just the place that you live is a little gentler or a little more intelligent and—and so forth. And—and—and of course like in South Texas we’re very cut off, you know, from—from mainstream thinking. I mean you guys come from Austin, right? People in Austin tha—tha—that I talk to a lot of times think of San Antonio as a third world country. The—as far as technology’s concerned, Austin is on the charts as up in
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two—two or three. It’s very high. San Antonio on the—on a Yahoo survey recently—we had gone down from 67 to 69. Now we’re 80 miles from Austin. That’s a big difference and there’s a labor force here. It could be, you know, like it—it could be useful, but it’s not being tapped by Austin because they think that they’re—they’re behind the times. So, I mean we live in a little bit of a different world and—and part of what we’ve been trying to do is to bring that world up a little bit, you know, to—to make it a little more sophisticated. A lot of things have—have—have been the—I think a very important thing—I mean this is
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not ne—well, to me environmentalism means not just dealing with nature, but it’s environment is the people you live with. It’s everything and the light is blinking.
[End of Reel 2202]
DT: Mr. McNeel, we were talking at the end of the last tape about the way a radio station can put you in touch with environment sort of at large that it’s not just nature and wildlife, but—but it’s intelligent human beings. Can you explain what you meant by that?
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PM: Yeah, it—I mean you—I don’t see how you can con—s—separate the components, you know, like if you’re going to treat trees well you have to treat people well. You have to—it’s a—it’s a state of—well, hopefully a kind of a state of grace that we aspire to. The environment includes the psycho sphere if you will or—or an infosphere. Infosphere is where our consensual reality comes from and it’s where we’ve sort of put our—I have put—put my shovel in wi—is—is the—it—it—it’s the way we create reality by using communications technology’s. And if you would, you know, scratch almost anybody in the
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United States—I—I, you know, like I—I—it—it—if you sit quietly in a place with that—that is silent as possible and—and you just relax for a long time you’ll hear television commercials in your head and little snatches of movies and—and bit’s and pieces of stuff that’s come from the mass media. And—and these things have become essential parts to what we perceive of as ourselves. You know like when you here a lot of talk about, you know, like the—the—the way women are—are depicted. You know like they—Victoria Secret model and so forth when most women don’t look like that, but they feel like they should, you know, and so forth. Well, where did that come from, right? That’s a—well,
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there’s a lot of reasons for it, but a lot of it’s artificially implanted by the media and—and s—so our environment really is our collective experience that again I go with the consensual reality like the Matrix. We—we—we live in this—this environment that’s partially fiction or maybe more fiction than not. And—and the—that—like if you live your life watching television without the nature channels and so forth, you’re not even aware of nature and you—I mean I saw a Ford commercial. This guy was talking about, “Well, all I want is a Ford Mustang Convertible with a throaty V8. Life don’t get any better than that.” And I thought, gee, poor guy. You know, like it’s got to be, you know, like—but the—the—the whole idea is that we’re selling this shallow life to people and—and—and the
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shallow life based on—on—on—on—on acquiring things a—and so forth. And life could be so much richer and so forth and—and—and part of the environment is that like as we expand ourselves—I mean, you know, like you could say some peoples consciousness’s are the size of a walnut. They don’t go outside their brains and other people c—consciousness expand out and can take in large vast spaces and they are the lucky ones and—and they are the ones that we put up as our—our holy people. And the thing that we do instead of trying
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to be like the holy people is that we make an icon out pf them and worship them. Right? Instead of looking on them as invitations to something grander that we’re capable of. So, I mean you know like fixing the environment is fixing ourselves. It’s finding sanity and it’s finding the balance that—that—that—that—that we have—have lost. And I mean there’s the, you know, like the—the whole Indian myth of, you know, living with nature and so forth. The—the—it—it’s—it—it—it’s very, very close to it. We s—perceive it—it and we shuffle into our consciousnesses this potential of—of that, but mostly it’s go to Shoppers World or whatever and—and—and, you know, get the latest thing or—or have the cool car.
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I mean it’s amazing that people spend—I—there was a wonderful ad about retirement, but this guy had this—show’s this guy’s got this great watch and it—it’s got—tells times in all these zones and so forth and it’s got all this blah, blah, blah and it costs $15,000 and—and he said, “You know you could have that watch and what is it going to do for you? It’s going to help you tell time.” You know or what’s it going to do—but like if you put the money in a IRA, you know, etc., etc., but I mean why do we need to deck ourselves with all of these status symbols and so forth? Well, probably it’s because we don’t want to face our
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mortality and—and the idea of this unity with this natural process. It’s a little scary to us and the reason that I’ve been into communications was to try to make it less scary. To—to—to sort of share this sense of wonder that comes from being interrelated with all of that or it—it—it—the—the—the possibilities of that.
DT: Maybe you could talk about how you try to provide more of this connection and access availability for people through your work in setting up the community access TV in—in Austin.
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PM: Well, I—I—I—because I—I now, you know, like 10 years or 12 years in, right? I have all this experience in FCC applications and law and I know about, you know, all of that and—and—and so forth and cable television franchise comes to San Antonio and I help write it. And so in order to do that I hang out with people in Austin who are doing the same thing and the commut—created Austin Community TV and it was wonderful. I mean it was a free wheeling public access—it—if—it—you could walk into there and you could check out cameras and—and—and that you had a little—you had a community of people
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who were producing television and it—it was beautiful. And we tried to put together the same thing here in San Antonio, but again San Antonio has a sort of military mindset. The guy who was setting up the—the—the cable television franchise had been a saber jet pilot, flew MIG Alley. I mean it’s not for sissies, but he saw those of us who were putting in the access movement as communist again. Right? The red menace and because we had put together a tri ethnic coalition with black activists and brown activists, me, I was the token white guy. I mean there were a few of us but I was actually the—one of the only White guys. And—but, you know, we were tri ethnic and—and—and scary as hell. So, when they built a franchise we—I personally went for three years down to—we had made a deal with
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them that we were going to set up an access system like the one in Austin. It was going to be independent and—and we would provide programming and they would help fund it. And—but because of their fear for the red menace or whatever it was, they decided to keep it in house and so forth and set up their staffing so that it was kind of against access and—and—and I produced shows for them—or not shows I produced groups. I tau—I took COPS. I took The Conversation Society. I took all these different kinds of groups. COPS is not police officers, but Communities Organized for Public Service. And taught them how to use access and so forth and we produced shows and they kept getting nominated for Ace
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Awards. I didn’t know until later that a lot of the Ace nominations was because of the stuff that we did, but they never respected us or helped us or supported us. They—they always treated us like dirt and it was amazing. I would take people down there to do—become access producers and they would treat them like dirt. It was a miss opportunity because we saw it as a way of—of kick starting a communications infrastructure—a produc—of films would come to Texas they wouldn’t hire people from San Antonio becau—you know, etc., etc., etc. But we needed to build a production community and it was a missed opportunity. I
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think Austin did it well and I think because of ACTV and Armadillo World Headquarters. I think those two things really helped make Austin what it is today. The University of Texas, of course, is—is pivotal in that, but now Austin is now one of the high tech centers of the country and we are just down the road from Austin and yet we’re the 69th and it—we might as well be in another country. And it’s because of these attitudes and it’s—it’s the attitudes towards nature, it’s the attitudes towards one another or racism is a—is a factor. It—it—it—all of it and it’s beginning to change because all of the struggling that we’ve done to make communications technologies available to people. The idea was that if we could
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create a cr—critical mass of people who are capable of using capable com—communications technologies and then give them the outlet to distribute that then we could begin to educate one another. We would learn about each other’s—the way we live, you know, it’s not so scary—the differences. We could learn about what people are interested in; environmental causes, all sorts of things. But we would again create this—it’s like ecosphere that has consciousness in it, that has—that has the collectivity of human mind and it—it didn’t work because of the resistances—the old resistances. I’m pretty convinced. I—I became an alcohol—a pretty serious alcoholic about that time and kind of lost it for a while, but the—but I’m been sober now for about 16 years. But the—the
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technology has changed and I remember how excited I was. I mean I didn’t kit—quit plugging away. I was a consultant to the Cable Advisory Board, but we were just stymied everywhere trying to create this. I was a persona non grata at KLRN, but because of de—a lot of reasons. I—I guess maybe I ought to explain one of them. I—I—I was sort of tricked into going to a—I thought it was a planning meeting on—on—on reforming KLRN. KLRN use to have—KLRN and KLRU use to be a—the same television station, a transmitter in Wimberley and most of it’s viewers and most of the money came out of San Antonio, but all of the power resided in Austin. And so we were trying to get more local representatives. We were trying to get Hispanics hired, black people hired, we wanted to have some
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Hispanics on the air—what—it, you know, etc., etc., etc., and I went up to this conference thinking I was going to just talk to some people. I walked into a room at the Austin Public Library. There were 500 people and television cameras and everything and it was just—I—and I got to the door and he said you’re on next and a good thing too because it just scared the sh—shit out of me and—and so he put me on th—when I get nervous I—I start cracking jokes and—and so like I, you know, like I was saying things like, “Well, you know, like I guess, you know, like the fact that KLRN doesn’t hire Hispanics is not really
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important since their signal doesn’t even reach the Hispanic community in San Antonio.” And—and—and things like that and afterwards I—I—I was going down the elevator with the guy who was the head of Texas whatever—whatever the umbrella corporation was. His name was Bob Shinket and he yelled at me. We were in the elevator together. He yelled at me. Why are you and so forth and—and—and—and then after that people that I was working with to do projects who were—made their living working with KLRN asked to have their names taken off my projects because they were afraid they would lose their jobs because of association with me. And I mean again this is—this is not unusual for Texas
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Progressives. This is what happens to us. They—they try to minimalize us or—or demonize us and if we get feisty. Right? They try to—they—they—they—they—they really get—they really get tough and it was—it was extremely difficult for me when, you know, like because that was the only outlet I had at the time was the possibility that maybe I could produce television shows for KLRN. Right? I—I do produce stuff and—and—and work with them and—and—and a wonderful person named Charles William, but I still feel kind of like, you know, like they’ll find out that I’m here and make me go away, you know, but I
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think that’s all over. But—but now the new technology has made it possible. The little camera that you’re using here, these things are capable—I mean like kids can now form video production groups like a little garage bands. And—and—and kids are now buying, you know, like in saving up their money instead of buying a new car, their buying a G4 Macintosh and a digital 8 camcorder an—and starting making movies and they’re and so forth. I did a little series on gangs for KLRN and came away with the firm conviction that we don’t need—we don’t need to eradicate gangs. We need more gangs and—and one of the gangs that I envision are little gangs of kids with television cameras roaming around San Antonio t—helping us learn who each other is. And about—the red lights not on. Is that…
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DW: That’s fine. I took it off so it wouldn’t be distracting.
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PM: The—about ten years ago I—I was working—I’d been working as a political consultant because that was the only way that I could make a living doing television and play with the toys, you know, and then play with—I’d go to Match Frame and Post over there and it was my—it was—I just loved it a—an—and so forth. And—and I—I did it because I thought I was making a difference and—and so forth. And I was also making a living. It was pretty good. But where was that going? I’m—that’s a pretty…
DW: I have a question that goes back just one question before that about this video empowerment movement is also the possibility of there being a digital devise as well.
PM: Yeah.
DW: There was something you said earlier if you spend a lot of time working on the computer or being on the computer remember it’s virtual reality. I think the key word there is virtual.
PM: Yeah.
DW: Not reality, virtual (inaudible)
PM: That’s right.
DW: So, in some ways what seems like a great liberator as in the case with (?) technology (inaudible). I’m curious if you had some ideas on where the little (?) of that? I mean especially the environment. You can see the Grand Canyon (inaudible) virtual toward the Grand Canyon, but you can’t really.
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PM: Now that it’s filled up with concrete we’ve got the—the virtual version…
DW: And so I wondered if (inaudible) you know…
PM: I think it’s…
DW: (Inaudible) that keeps it from (?) into the—the (?)?
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PM: Well, I think that the—the—the hope is, is that as we empower people the diversity of points of view will—will—will create a marketplace of ideas. I—it—it—it would be tremendously dangerous if—if—if we tried to—if anybody tried to—to—to regulate it. I mean it’s something that’s inevitable and it—as far as I can tell it’s highly addictive. The—the—the use—the multi user Virtual Reality games eat up—I mean kids get just really sucked into those things and they just sort of disappear. We—we were messing with—
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trying to convert 3D VR—oh—Virtual Reality games to planning tools at one time and I had a group of really gifted kids and—and one of them had a friend who had built a three dimensional model of his apartment. And he lived there for a week—I don’t know how long it was. I—it was longer than 36 hours. He had put on glasses an—and so forth and he walked around in a pretty crude car—cartoon representation of his environment. And when the time was over he took his headphone—his—his eyepieces off and he just had this incredible rush of stimulus and he was out in his yard looking at ants. It was like an acid trip, you know? And what became pretty obvious that like Virtual Reality is a form of
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stimulus deprivation and that this kid had been, you know, like there was—there’s a lot of—in us that is starved for actual contact in reality and if we remove that we’re in big trouble. I mean neurologically tr—in—in big trouble and I agree. It’s a very dangerous thing to—but I think it’s highly inevitable. The—the—the Impeg 4 format now is—makes these really highly interactive—and it’s not finished. I mean, you know, like they’re still working on this and there’s all this intellectual property debates going on, but it will make it possible for kids to go into these—these—these virtual worlds and—and—and kind of live there. But…
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DT: I guess the vehicle for this will be the Internet and broadband…
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PM: The Broadband…
DT: Could you talk a little bit about the work that you’ve done sort of on—on the Internet on virtual watershed model and some other ideas?
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PM: Yeah, t—ten years ago we started a—I went into a—went out to Southwest Research and—and met a guy named Richard Murphy and—and he told me about the Internet. Gave me an Internet connection and I’d been invited to join this Think Tank here in San Antonio at—at—met—breakfast time an—and so on and I had gone a couple of times and I took Murphy who was a Network guy and he had given me a Internet connection and that was all typing in those days. We were on a NASA satellite. Interesting story that—like the first place that I—I went in the world and this is a answer—I’ll—this—this virtual—the dangers of the virtual world. But it’s still typing—we were typing back and forth an—and—and NASA set up this thing called DEVEL L, D-E-V-E-L, but it was—the idea was to transfer NASA technology to the third world and they used low earth orbiting satellites to—they
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could be re—it could be received by little satellite dishes—inexpensive satellite dishes and so forth. And when the satellite would come over you it would take your signal and when it would come over Bangladesh it would down load it. And the first problem that I encountered was this woman in Bangladesh. I think it was Bangladesh. It may have been Pack—Pakistan. But she had a l—a school and the school had a vegetable garden and the vegetable garden was watered by this pond. It was a dry place. And she was tremendously worried about pond evaporation and seepage. It wasn’t evaporation it was seepage. The water was seeping out of the pond and so she typed in a message to everybody on DEVEL
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L. How do you do this? How do I put something to keep the water from seeking—seeping out of our—our holding tank? And a peo—some people in Kenya told her about geofabrics, very expensive, couldn’t do it, these were poor people. And then some people in Thailand who, ironically, I knew had a—t—came—came up with a suggestion on how to use a kind of plastic that you could find in a garbage dump in—in—in—in Bangladesh. How you could put it together with irons and how you could make a pond liner that would lon the—line the pond and not only that an evaporation cover, which would keep the thing from evaporating. And so here’s this organization that’s built to transfer high technology to the
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third world being used in a people-to-people way to solve very, very human scale problems. In the old days what would have happened was—would—these people would have needed the pond and so forth. Well, the U.S. aid or whatever would have gone and given them (?). Well, we build a dam across the valley and the village would have been flooded or something, you know, like. But here it was people talking to people. They were—there—there was a discussion about what you can do with pig bristles and there were—there was a lot of countries that were on this to have the pig as a kind of central animal and—and—and pig bristle use. They make brushes. They make all sorts of things
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out of pig bristles and so they were talking about doing things with pig bristles and—and—and how to make pumps and so forth, none of it involving high tech. It was all peer-to-peer. People talking how to make their lives better with what they had and—and—and—and that’s kind of colored my version of how we use this thing is that we can connect peer to peer to—to put together people who live in different watersheds talking about how they’ve solved problems in their watersheds, how we solve problems in our watershed. You know like in slowly but surely build up a global sort of net buddies circled of people who share
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and exchange information about how you do things. And we started an organization called Salsa Net and in 1993 or so, I invited Murphy to come down and Murphy and I an—and the guy who now runs Roadrunner here in San Antonio went and gave a little speech about the Internet to these people or we gave them a little talk and—and—and so forth. And at the end, Murphy offered, these people were supposed to be the brightest people in the region, everyone an Internet connection through his NASA computer. Not one person took him up on it. Not one. And it was amazing and then it slowly but surely the Internet began to creep into—to usage. I was doing an opera and I—I—this is me getting way off the
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subject, but we were trying to pre-visualize an opera using Virtual Reality so that we could have people like Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and Little Joe Hernandez work together in virtual space. It was pretty impractical, but the idea was that we could create something that we could show to potential investors and that would help us not waste the time of very, very busy people and so forth. And—and—and so that got me thinking in—of using three dimensional modeling as—as a tool. I mean like you would be able to sit in any seat in the amphitheater and you would be able to—we—we—we could test the
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architecture and we could run the way the sets that we had very mech—sophisticated kind of mechanical sets and so forth and how they all worked and so forth. So we could—we could run virtual simulations and so forth and then while I was doing it the architect who was designing the amphitheater and I were working very closely together, he got me involved in the Environmental Design Charrette with the American Institute of Architects. And it was, I think, the most remarkable collection of people and the gentlest. It was so beautiful. I mean we had people from all walks of life come, intellectuals and community
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people and architects and planners, engineers, biologists. And—an—and they come up with wonderful plans to design with nature and the plans were all drawings and we ended up and it’s at www.salsa.net go to—click on Public Studio and—and—and—and the Environmental Design Charrette. It’s—there’s a little streaming video of—of what it felt like, but there’s—but—but you can see the results of the work. And—and the site is unfinished, but where we got to was putting up, you know, the—the statements and we—we also photographed with 35milimeter camera these large drawings and we put them up
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there. So it—you have photographs of big drawings a—an—and so forth. Well, that triggered me into a process. Now why don’t we create a virtual landscape where we can actually pretest these ideas and people can come into this virtual landscape or look at it on their desktop or come into a room and look at it on big shared screen and—and—and—and work together to design anything that has—well, anything really. But we were thinking in terms of—I was thinking and still am in terms of community planning. The project that we’re working on right now and—and the architects are not returning my phone calls. So, I know it’s—I’m going through the period again like of—sometimes people are—you’re a
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hero and sometimes you’re a crazy and—and—and it just—it just cycles like that. Fortunately, I’ve been through it enough so I’m—I—I—I know that there is an end. But the idea is to take a terraform model of the region here that we call the bioregion and it’s the—it’s—it’s an artificial definition of—Peter Burg made me define the bioregion. He’s the father of bioregionalism and—and the head of a—an organization called Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco. But we don’t have a bioregion. We have a confluence of bioregions made up and—and so I just defined our region as the watershed between the Guadalupe and the Nueces Frio Rivers. They all come out of a pretty similar spot on top of
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the Edwards Escarpment and flow to the Gulf of Mexico and it’s all just south of Austin and so forth. The next one would be, you know, it’d—the Colorado River runs across the top of our map but it’s not part of the—the—the region. But I—what I first see as a three-dimensional terraform map that you can look at on a computer. You can see the shape of the land and it has in it virtual water and the water has the chemistry of the water and the way the chemistry is arrived at is that it’s inputted by school systems up and down the streams as part of science projects. They—they go out and they do the data sampling and
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they plug in the latest thing and so forth. Met a ga—a guy from Texas A & M who had been working on fish models as a way of testing streambed health. He put these cute little blue fish into little cages and put them in streams and—and—and when the water would go bad the blue fish would die. They couldn’t run it was a—and so forth and—and—and—but he managed to create a mathematical formula for these things. So, now whe—there—it is down in Texas A& M they have a mathematical indicators species that they can stick into a virtual stream and so it—once the schools sys—if the school systems are plugged into it
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inputting the data—if the pollutants get out of hand a little virtual indicators species can flop out on your computer scream with X’s in it’s eyes. A friend of mine suggested if it gets worse the thing could begin to biodegrade up out there and so forth. But it makes it a kind of a game, but you know like the idea is to collect the real science, the hydrology and—and—and the geology and the—we have people who do heat island modeling and so forth in atmospherics and so forth. The—the—the gal that does the heat modeling was—spent most of her life modeling—making theoretical models out of gas giants out of the gas plant and so forth and so she’s an—can do atmospheric models. And we can put these
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things together so that you can take a look at this part of Texas from up in the air, zoom into a place where there is a neighborhood and the neighborhood could have three-dimensional models on it and the little models could be generated again by school projects and—and design firms and so forth. So, like if a large department store wanted to come into your neighborhood and put a department store with a great big parking lot and so forth they could put the model of their building down in the environment and it would be
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connected. The—the little mantra was VRM—VRML on GIS on—on a meta database and Virtual Reality models sitting on top of a GIS grid, which is like a spread sheet for geograph—it’s a—it’s a geographic spr—you all know what that is. Anyways it’s a geographically based kind of spread sheet and you can put layers of—and so forth so you can gather—have a lot of information about what those little virtual models are sitting on and the meta data base then is linked to the GIS and it has the—the hydro dinen—the—the water. It has all the chemistries. Is has all, you know, etc., etc. It’s very complicated, but—but we would use the interface so that average people could access that data without having
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to be scientists. So, Mrs. Gar—Garcia could figure out what the affect of a proposed building is going to do to her tomatoes, etc. The—the problem around here is that people are continuously bickering like the water, the—how we allocate the water in the Edwards Aquifer and the rivers and so forth. It—it—it gets ad hominem, but people begin to argue on a personal level with each other rather than real data. But if we had a way of using these Virtual Reality tools, which are going to come and kids are going to get into them and they’re going to get lost in there, but if they had something that—for them to do when
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they’re there—it’s a form of stimulus depravation in some—you know like people are going to have to learn that you have to disengage from those things and so forth. There will be lost souls I’m sure. But…
DT: Do you think this is a way to convict more people besides just the people at the zoning board or the planning commission to get engaged with their future?
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PM: That’s the—that’s the idea is to give the ordinary citizen a chance at understanding what these people are talking about. The big problem is—I see right now is—is—is literacy and it’s maybe in—in some cases too little of literacy and in another case it’s too much. Here in San Antonio the custom has been for some time to put get—put together boards and panels on the environment—a master plan, which nobody can read because it’s written by this giant committee and it’s made up of dense paragraphs filled up with circumlocutions and in—in many ways. You know like you—committee, well, I say
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would, should, we got to, you know, like and so forth and these paragraphs are very, very dense and the average person doesn’t stand a chance. The thing that the Environmental Charrette taught me was that—like if we’re going to deal with these incredibly complicated environmental planning problems, we need to do it with a picture-based language. It’s the way architects and planners and so forth do it and it’s the way that helps people understand it—cutaways of streambeds, models of how the terrain works. If those models could be made into virtual living organic things then we’ve—we’ve got a shot. We are now working
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on a proposal for a thing we’re calling Digital Collaboratories. The idea is to have Charrette like things videotaped using the power of virtual modeling. Maybe in—in places where it’s appropriate to come to decisions to put to voters in a way that the voters can actually understand. I mean nobody can understand a lot of the issues the environments—the problem is a lot of environmental issues have been so filled up with words and—and emotions and excessive rhetoric on both sides. I mean the idea of, you know, like how long before you’re debating a serious water problem do you start calling each other fools or, you know, like—it’s just a—and they’re arguing back and forth in words. If they could s—have pictures like a sandbox that we could play in. Like a—these little models where we could
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see the effects of what we do. And these things would be held at a limited duration and—and—and so on.
DT: Just to be the devils advocate, I think one of the environmental models that has been most widely discussed in recent days is—is the climate models that predict whether there’s global warming going or not and—and it seems like the debate hasn’t centered so much on what to do with the results, you know, if—if in fact the climate is changing, what do we do to mitigate that, but rather are the results accurate? Is it based on sound science? And you know some of that is probably somewhat cynical and maybe not the best intentions, but how do you prevent your terraform model or the—the virtual watershed model from disintegrating in that kind of debate—the quality of the data that goes in or the—actually the algorithms that…
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PM: Well, I mean the—the debate sounds very much like the debate about whether or not smoking was bad for you and—and—and the—the idea of, you know, like the—the facts aren’t in that smoking is bad for you. But if you had a virtual lung and you put virtual smoke into it—nicotine and—and so on and—and see the—project out a, you know, and so forth. People would be able to see. One of the things that really d—changed my life—I—I used to smoke as well as drink, and O’Neil Ford had a lung removed and he used to carry slides of it around in his pocket and I—we were sitting in a place called The Friendly Spot and he whips out a—a slide of his lung sitting on a—on a—on the marble lab. Right? And
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he—and he—I lit up a cigarette and he said look at that. And this is killing me and it did and it didn’t stop me smoking right away, but by golly it started me on the path towards knowing—I mean like it’s pretty incontrovertible when you see a picture of a lung that’s been ravaged by a life time of chain smoking, which is what he did. And it wasn’t a pretty sight and it was very persuasive. And I think that like we can use similar things to help people understand that. And—but basically it gets back to the idea of respect. I mean global warming is—well in my humble opinion not in—not debatable. It’s a—it’s a solid fact.
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People who are fairly moderate like—Bill Moyer’s did a special on the environment and Bill Moyer said kind of like David Brower told me. He said we’ve got oh, 20 years I think. There were two of them. He came out the same time. One said 20 years. One said 40 years. To get our act together or we get off the planet. I mean we are facing extinction. Human species “kkk,” gone. Right? Life will adapt. George Carlin said, “Well, maybe what the world wanted was—what the world didn’t have was plastic so it created people to produce plastic. Now it’s got plenty of plastic and can do away with us. It—it could be something simple like that but I mean we have this complicated series of choices and we’re in this
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incredible period of denial. I mean it’s—it’s dis—it’s disrespectful, it’s—it’s—I don’t know, it’s just bad manners. I mean how can we live—I mean we don’t—we are—we have all of this mythology, that supports the idea that we’re the lords of creation. A lot of our philosophy says we’re the in point of history. This is—we’re the apex. Right? This is as good as it’s going to get. I don’t believe that. I think we’re—we’re on the beginning of a journey and we’re at a crossing point where we can either continue to evolve into something really spectacularly wonderful or like the dinosaurs, be written off as one of natures really, you know, interesting experiments. Some day they’ll dig up our bones and,
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you know, try to figure out what Washington was. I remember a science fiction story where they dug down into the fossilized remains of Washington and interpreted the name Washington as pound-laundering. They—you—they took all the words and (inaudible) but I think that like we have the chance and I can’t not say this that like I started off with the apocalyptic vision from Dale Winegar and Dale ended his days believing that we had irrevocably done it. That there was no backing out of this and I’ve talked to a lot of people that feel the same way. We did a little survey, this is very interesting, of intellectuals when we were—I was doing a little documentary film like this one and we were going around
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interviewing all the people who had important roles in water. And I began to notice that all of them felt that, you know, the planet would be better off if there were no people on it. This is like more than just David Brower’s halving the population, but this was the fact that we were some kind of evil virus that had, you know, like infested the planet and was eating it up and so forth. And so I began to play with that idea with—with intellectuals and I began to find out that it’s very, very widespread. That a lot of people—if pressed, will say well, if people wouldn’t be on this, this would be the—we’re on—would there be a Garden
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of Eden and so forth. And—and—in that could be the seeds of our destruction too, you know, the—the idea this is the fatalistic vision that says well, we, you know, like we don’t belong here. Well, we—I think we do and I think that we can evolve and I think that we can’t think that we can’t and so forth. The—the statistics agree…
DT: Maybe you can give us an example of—in terms of water and watersheds why there’s this spectrum of sometimes disgust and sometimes fatalist and sometimes optimism. What are the problems in San Antonio involving water supply and waterfall in your view and why is there this range of opinion about what to do and what the consequences will be?
PM: Well, I’m not—not particularly qualified, you know, to—to—to give you the truth, but I can give you my opinions. Like my position would be to gather like you’re gathering the information from me from all of them and then, you know, like present it. But we have the—the—the old Texas possession attitudes. It’s my water; anything that’s under my land is my water. The guys that are trying to model the aquifer are having a hard time getting permission to go in people’s property to do the survey. And—but this feeling of possession and then there’s the competition and—and so forth that—in San Antonio I forget, but there was over 50—like in Bexar county or some—it was like there were 40 or 50 different
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separate suppliers of water at one time. And then a guy drilled a well—the catfish farm. Somebody will tell you about this and go into that. That was a big change. We all of a sudden saw that this free capture vision of, you know, like everybody’s the lord of his land and the water beneath it—is not true because this guy was sucking the aquifer. He could literally have sucked the aquifer dry. He could have personally created a disaster and so now we were be—I mean but this how primit—it wasn’t long ago and—and we are just groping into a—an understanding of how to live together. And—and absolutely essential to
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all environmental causes is this idea is that we don’t—the Texas myth and tradition is about rugged individualism and it considers ideas like collaboration and cooperation and things like this, kind of sissy. And—and—and like real men, you know, well, all the things that real men do and—and we’re still in that kind of mindset and that makes it difficult for us to talk about f—sharing because they—I mean it’s all tricky. You know like you have probably talked to my sister about or if you haven’t already, but about the—the—the manipulation and—and—and all the underg—back stu—the back-story on this is just, you
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know, like it’s wheeler-dealers. And—and a lot of it, I think, has to do with protecting my share of this stuff and some of it, I think, is just dilettante politics. People argue with one another and—and fight these silly wars because it gives their lives a s—a shallow and sort of superficial feeling of meaning, you know. There’s a French existentialist playwright named Arable I’ve been quoting lately. Wrote a play, I think, it was called Stairs. I never saw it. I read about it. I read the play and—and under—I—in the Evergreen Review and—in back in the 50’s, I think. But it—it was Spanish. The curtain opens, there’s this s—sta—
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stairs and this guy ca—is running up and down these stairs and he just does that for 15 minutes. He’s going top to bottom, running up and down these stairs, up and down the stairs and a guy comes out of the—he says, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” He says, “Because it gives me the impression of living.” And I think there’s a lot of politics. As a political consultant, I—I remember one of the things that I use to try to do, was to try to denature the tough talk in the board rooms where we would meet with the candidate and the candidates cronies and consultants and backers and so forth. And I’d try to keep them from using harsh language because it would f—do—do the campaign, but
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what would happen wo—wou—would lower the tenure of the campaign and what would happen would be—we’d be sitting around this room. When women came I thought well, everything is going to get better, it got worse. We’d have a couple of beers and somebody threw out the first sports metaphor and then after a couple of beers he was—we’d get into the Jack Daniels and—and so forth and by the time—a couple of drinks around—I mean people are talking about—we’re going to put our hand down his throat and rip his bleeding heart out and so forth. And this was about a small little race and these were people talking really, really tough, you know, like they were, you know, they—they were—they were
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strutting around like tough guys and they weren’t. They were trial lawyers, which I guess are pretty, you know, they—they’re—they’re not wimpy I guess, but—but it seemed to me like the kind of f—phony super macho that—that—that wimpy people put on when they’re trying to be impressive and it just doesn’t quite look right, you know. But it has a lot of violence in it an—and it—and it—and it excites them. It gives them a kind of sexual thrill. When we were editing really hardball political commercials I’d have the editing room just
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filled with people. They’d bring their ice chests and they’d be, “Yeah, oh get him.” And when we were doing the kind of Morning In America stuff—the, you know, the—the standards—good family man, just served in the Army and so forth. Nobody cared. Nobody came, but boy it was the hard stuff. They just loved it an—and it was a kind of sexual thrill and I think it’s the kind of voyeuristic or not voyeuristic, but it’s a—it’s a—it’s a feeling that unempowered people have when they get allowed to pretend like their tough for a while, you know, and…
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DT: When you look into the future and—where do you think the environmental issues could be that generate this kind of sturm und drang or that involve real survival questions? Where do you think the environmental problems are going to be either perceived or real?
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PM: Well, if the stuff that everybody says is coming true, people will start to die and then they’ll start to—here’s the—this is the—this is—he—here’s the—like ho—how it would happen with the aquifer is that like cancer deaths would go up. You wouldn’t know it—I mean it would be statistically insignificant and then they’d be statistically more significant and then a little more and then somebody would notice that they were clustering in. Somebody would suspect that maybe it’s the water and then the denial mechanism the—j
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—I go the jaws syndrome, you know, like, “You’re going to shut the beach on the 4th of July just because of a shark attack?” And so forth and th—then—then they (?), well, there’s not enough study, we’ve got to study and so more and more and more people will die until it’s just really obvious and then it’ll either be too late or people will act. That seems to be the kind of grim scenario that’s—that’s the one that makes the most sense to me at this moment. I—I might feel better in—in a couple of months. If we could put together some serious way of—of educating the people to how the environment works by using pictures and models, cartoons, you know, like—but with real serious science behind it, you know,
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like it’s a meta database with all the facts. Now these meta data bases are—don’t have the information in it. Now there’s a lot of business c—to be done collecting this data and it—and doing all this. There’s a lot of motivation to push the Broadband to get the games going, but there is an—also an awful lot of money that can be saved by developers by using these devices to make developments that use less electricity to work well with the watershed that are—that are intelligent and that don’t have problems and—a—a—and so forth. And that they an—a—a—and as it turns out, costs less to produce and has a higher rate of consumer satisfaction and so forth. What single issue? I’m not sure that there’s a
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single issue. Right now the comedians in New York are talking about global warming a lot because it was up 98 degrees in New York the other day and John Stewart on the Daily Show remarked that he saw a dinosaur (?). I didn’t know if that was a bad sign or not, but—but it’s—it’s slowly but surely this stuff seeps in to our consciousness and—and—and we’re going to dimi—we’re going to look back at the time—right now people—I mean absolutely bilaterally—belittling alternative en—energy sources. In—n—I mean it’s—it’s—it’s just—it’s heartbreaking to—to hear people—you can hear the—the—the cynicism in—in—in their voices—when—or cynicism dis—disgust in their voices when
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they talk about, you know, like, “Well, I want my SUV by god and, you know, like I—you’re going to ask me to give up me lifestyle.” Basically that’s what we’re doing. Basically this is the hard fact. Americans have to l—they have to live with less. Americans have to join the world community and cut their consumption of the world’s resources and that’s not something anybody’s going to sell to anybody because the h—idea is to consume more. That’s what we are, consumers. Consumers are—is—it is a good definition for what a tapeworm is—it—as far as I know. But it—it—it doesn’t seem to me to be a very noble
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concept wh—when—if—if you’re talking about people as consumers. What’s going to trigger it? I spent some time with William Kunsler back in the 60’s and Kunsler was just completely rapped up—in—in this mo—idea that every moment in human progress requires dramatic loss of human life. Is—you just don’t do it—I mean you can’t theoretically say well, you know, we’re going to do it, well, we’re going to hold off as long as we can. We’re going to smoke until we either get the cancer or get convinced that smoking is bad for us. We’re going to pollute until global warming (inaudible), you know.
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I—I have no idea. I—the—the—the—the wisest thing that I can think of in moments like this and I can’t remember the name of the saint. It was Saint Thomas of something. You might know, but it wasn’t (?) I don’t think, but he was asked what he would do if he knew that the world was coming to an end in an hour. He said I’d go water my little tree. And I—that’s kind of the, I think, the right answer is that like we just keep on and—and—and we do the best we can. And if—I—here is something in this—the thing that brought us together in the 60’s was the Vietnam War—fear of death, great motivator. Right? The
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environment may supply us with another unifying thing like that, fear of death. Fear of death sharpens the—the r—the resolve—the will.
DT: How do you pass on this resolve to a coming generation—to a younger group of people?
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PM: Involvement. It’s a—the—I think one of the tragedies of—of—of this city and probably most is that like we have non-profit organizations, boards of directors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah that don’t have kids on them. That like—the worst example is a group here in San Antonio—I guess I won’t name them but, they had a—a dinner party and it—and—and they had the kids that they were raising money for serve this dinner to rich white people wearing tuxedos. For dessert the rich White people had chocolate mousse and chocolate pianos—little sculpted chocolate pianos. And the disconnect was just
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unbelievable f—better that—to have those kids serving on the board of directors or having the—the rich people serve the kids or—or whatever. But one of the things that we need to do—I’ve given up on—on grown ups as far as technology transfer, the digital divide and all of this stuff. Adults don’t get it. They just can’t do it. They can’t even teach it. The way I’m trying to plot strategies to help kids teach kids teach kids and empower them to do this—this work. And I—and I think that like the—the most important thing is to have kids—every person involved in decision-making should have a high school surrogate.
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And—and—and we—we’ve been trying to sell this as a—a way of—of getting out of long boring meetings (inaudible) high school student. But the idea…
DT: In other words, (inaudible) godfather or godmother, we should all have godchildren to…
58:10 – 2203
PM: We should all have godchildren and—and—and that—but it—it comes from involvement and—and kids are not allowed to participate with adults in—in—in most of our—our social structures. Like kids don’t sit on Boards Of Directors. I put boards of directors together and not have teenagers on them…
DW: (Inaudible) case something like kids in the (?) society. The kids in Seattle—a kid like Julia Butterfly who was only what, 20, 21? Do you see that as being analogous with the movements of the late 60’s or early 70’s?
58:45 – 2203
PM: Yeah, well, I—I—I think it’s—it is—it—it—it’s tak—it’s like taking the old play book exactly. And—and—and—and doing it and Julia Butterfly is the—but I think it’s—it’s got to be more than that. It’s got to be more than protest and protest is important. We have to call attention to these problems, but we have to give kids the opportunity to be a part of the process as well. And—and I mean like the—the river authority or—or—or the Edwards Aquifer. You—should—they should have kids sitting on those boards of directors or attending them and kids working with the—you know, like have kids throughout ev—
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everything. Not that the kids are going to do any better, but by—but—but like they will at least have some idea when they get there that—of what it’s all about or what it’s really all about because what we know of how things are done is quite different from the way things are really done. I mean politics is not done s—I mean it’s done at another level than elections really. It’s selecting candidates, it’s making potential candidates drop out it’s—it’s like who gets to the final—I mean there’s a lot of stuff that goes—goes into a lot of—a lot of these things that—that the—the—the kids ought to know. That’s my solution it—if they’re engaged and involved. Now Julia Butterfly—I don’t her personal story, but I mean
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to do something heroic like that one would guess that she grew up in an environmentally conscious activist family and so she’s acting out kind of like her Dad’s and Mom’s, you know, like she—she’s being the—a family hero. What we need is to have kids who probab—may grow up with the guy who has the SUV and—I don’t want to demonize people with SUV’s. They can make those things efficient too, but the kid growing up with the parents who don’t have a set of environmental attitudes, but—but—but I think once that you—you see the truth, then you become engaged. And—and—and to me the only hope we’ve got—and kids will be—kids love this. I mean they—they—they—they like being
1:01:10 – 2203
taken seriously and so forth. So, if you want kids to help, you make them a part of the process. And if you want to get them involved, you don’t do parties for them or little this and that and get them t-shirts and get them to work on the concert or stuff like that. They have to get into the boards and work on the c—decision-making process. They have to actually be where they can actually make a difference. It’s a rush. I mean the adults know that and it’s fun. They go there because it’s, you know, like it’s kind of f—sports for them and the—the kids—the kids are not allowed. So, what we’re trying to do right now is
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working through—with kids teaching kids digital cinema to record the development of our regional information network to—and then we’re going to stream all of this stuff and so—so—so we can begin to educate the people of this region to the possibilities and techniques and the hardware and software and so forth of—of technology and what it can do for us. The…
DW: The tape has run out.
PM: That’s a pretty good…
[End of Reel 2203]
[End of Interview with Pleas McNeel]