DAVID HEINTZ:

As a teenager in 1950s Ohio, I knew that our species could not continue to reproduce and consume without facing serious environmental consequences, probably in my lifetime. I don’t know how I knew this. Nobody taught me to think this way. I’d rather have been wrong. I remember watching a popular science series in 1958. A 2007 documentary on global warming showed a clip from one show. The co-host, “Dr. Baxter,” gave a prescient warning. He said the amount of CO2 we were dumping into the atmosphere, even then, appeared to be changing the weather, and unless curtailed could lead to unpredictable changes in the global climate.

I’ve been a committed recycler and efficiency hound ever since, an advocate for population control, species and habitat protection, respect for life. It just seemed like a natural moral imperative. I’ve been a pacifist since the mid-60s when Pacifica radio educated me on the history of Viet Nam and U.S. imperialism.

My college experience led me through theater and philosophy, visual art and design, photography, film and eventually to information theory. I’m convinced that a new understanding of information can have implications across the whole topic of human learning, cognition and creativity.

The child of a preacher and a teacher I never wanted to be either. Now I’ve spent most of my life as an educator, and find myself getting progressively “preachier” in my acquired ideology.

A college research project led me to discover and define conceptual links between the writings of Marshall McLuhan, existentialism, Zen Buddhism, Dada and experiential psychology. I had been introduced to Zen Buddhism, both as a mental practice and a practical philosophy. Somewhat later I was exposed to the writings of Gregory Bateson, Thomas H. Kuhn, Henri Bergson and other scholars who were interested in media, information, time, psychology, creativity and connections between them. The Dutch author Tor Norretranders gave me a missing piece of the puzzle with his concept of “exformation.” These ideas helped to define my intellectual path for 30 years. I saw that information theory offered an intellectual framework to interweave my passions, creative thinking and the environment.

I stumbled into filmmaking during my last year in college, and taught myself enough technique to make some personal, experimental films. Five years later, through a huge stroke of luck and good connections, I found myself teaching filmmaking in a regional art school in California.
Faced with the challenge of teaching creative practices to young artists, I found myself developing strategies to provoke and channel their creative impulses through processes of experimentation, questioning, risk-taking, problem solving and other methods to exercise their intuitive thinking. Confronted by students who were interested in narrative filmmaking, a direction very different from my own, I was forced to examine the structures and the forces involved in “visual story telling.”

During this time, a personal tragedy and other issues with anxiety and depression led me into the psychotherapeutic process and to extensive reading in psychology.

My teaching career has resonated with this core intellectual project. The most profound realizations have been in the application of Information Theory to an understanding of early childhood cognition and creative thinking. (As step-dad and father, I’ve had the great gift of watching two boys, one from age three, one from birth, grow to become successful, creative adults.) I’ve discovered what I consider to be startling links between the structure of the unconscious and narrative theory, and now believe they may provide new insights in the larger realm of eco-politics.

Since the beginning of the disastrous Bush era, this project has morphed from a scholarly exploration to a political agenda. Now the links between unconscious fear and desire, our destruction of the environment, and the failed relationship between media and democracy have shaped this work into a sermon, a rant and a manifesto.

heintz.reckons@gmail.com