[QUICKTIME /media/1216336866.mov 450 268 true true]

In April, I went to New York’s American Museum of Natural History to show a work-in-progress film on Russia’s Altai Republic at a conference on cultural and biological diversity. I met Satish Kumar, who has edited the magazine, Resurgence, for 35 years. Satish said to me, “Please be careful with the subject of sacred sites. The Ganges is not sacred alone. The Ganges is considered sacred because all rivers, all water, is sacred. We designate certain places as sacred only to lead the limited human mind to grapple with the sacredness of all life, every place.” I asked if he would be in the San Francisco Bay Area any time soon so that we could interview him for Losing Sacred Ground. He said, “I’ll be there in May,” and we arranged an interview in the gardens of the Green Gulch Zen Center. There are rarely moments in the middle of a film interview when you start to wonder where you are going to cut because every word you are hearing has the ring of eloquent truth, but as the hour-long interview with Satish unfolded I could not help but think “this man does not waste a word.”

One of the true frustrations of documentary filmmaking is that an interview bite in the finished film cannot possibly run longer than 45 seconds. So what if a complex question like “How do we need to address global climate change?” takes 3 minutes, or 3 hours, to really answer.

I hope you enjoy and appreciate this three-minute, uncut clip from our interview with Satish Kumar, on the subject of the real cause of global warming and what we need to do to truly change the course of our society.