Bleak Beauty Blog

Burn Zone, is Danny Lyon’s newest published work. Burn Zone is a Cri de Coeur directed at the artist community and our youth asking them to join the fight to save planet Earth. In it, photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon, tells the story of his return to New Mexico after thirty years and the dramatic changes caused there by the use of fossil fuels. Illustrated with new black and white photos and including a list of fifty climate criminals, prepared by the climate activist Josephine Ferorelli. Each listed member of government, or the academy, has received massive amounts of money from the fossil fuel industry, in order to lie, and undermine any affective democratic action to save the planet. These are serious criminals in our midst, on the level of those charged with genocide during the Nuremberg trials. One of them has been nominated for Vice President of the United States.

Bleak Beauty offers the entire contents of Burn Zone free to anyone who wishes to read it, download it, or print it. We want to have the widest possible distribution of this work, and hope you will put it out there, to every person and every website and organization possible.

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Sample from the book

This is a question of power. I realized early in my life that my own ability to direct my life and destiny was power, and the more my own life and destiny were in the hands of others, the less power I had. But many people, like journalists, teachers and artists, have another kind of power, the power to influence others. The power of the press is very real and on it is built one of the great foundations of American society.

I also realized when I was young that one of the great dilemmas of modern life was the utter powerlessness of the individual. The catastrophe that faces the planet is a perfect example of that. None of us as individuals is responsible for this. None of us as individuals can stop it or even affect it through our actions. Nor can we stop war or start one, free the prisoners, or disarm our murderous citizenry. We cannot even control the ugliness around us. All we can do, if we have the means, is go somewhere else. The lack of individual power is central to modern life.

But when we act, when we publish, when we break the law we do not
agree with, when we act politically, we empower ourselves. This has a profound effect on how we feel about ourselves. However much we are tossed about by circumstances and history, we have saved ourselves because we have done something to change ourselves, and ultimately, to change history. History moves slowly, like a turtle, but it moves nevertheless, steadily and relentlessly. I have lived my life. I have fished in the San Juan and sat by an open fire with my grandchildren. It is your life you are fighting for. Someone who is 20 today will live a long time into the future. You are in a fight for your life.

PURCHASE Burn Zone
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Read Burn Zone (.pdf)