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Ecology and Environment


Ecology and Environment



GLADESMEN: THE LAST OF THE SAWGRASS COWBOYS

Directed by David Abel

In a classic battle of competing interests, gladesmen and their airboats are being banned from Everglades National Park in the world's largest attempt to restore a damaged ecosystem.

Gladesmen: The Last of the Sawgrass Cowboys is an award-winning documentary about the federal government's ban on Florida's iconic airboats in much of the Everglades. The measure is part of the world's largest and most expensive effort to repair a damaged ecosystem, a vast river of sawgrass and cypress swamps that has been ravaged by more than a century of development, pollution, and other environmental degradation. The outcome will determine the future of the region's water supply and its ability to withstand rising sea levels. It may also lead to the demise of the Gladesmen, who for more than a century have hunted alligators and gigged frogs, sought peace on isolated tree islands, and taken refuge from the ever-increasing development that has carved up the Everglades.


DVD / 2018 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 86 minutes

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GUARDIAN

Directed by Courtney Quirin

Against the backdrop of BC's spectacular Great Bear Rainforest, Guardians and the salmon they monitor are victims of science censorship and reckless extractive industries.

Part hermit, part biologist, Guardians live on boats, full-time, in one of the last pristine frontiers of the world to monitor salmon, the backbone of the ecosystem, economy, and culture along British Columbia's coast. But, in an age of science censorship and soaring resource extraction in the form of fracking for oil and natural gas, Guardians and the wildlife they have dedicated their lives to protect are now disappearing.

GUARDIAN is a cautionary tale about the role of science in environmental decision-making and the repercussions of its censorship.


DVD / 2018 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 76 minutes

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SYMBIOTIC EARTH: HOW LYNN MARGULIS ROCKED THE BOAT AND STARTED A SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Directed by John Feldman

Explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a scientific rebel who challenged entrenched theories of evolution to present a new narrative: life evolves through collaboration.

SYMBIOTIC EARTH explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a brilliant and radical scientist, whose unconventional theories challenged the male-dominated scientific community and are today fundamentally changing how we look at our selves, evolution, and the environment.

As a young scientist in the 1960s, Margulis was ridiculed when she first proposed that symbiosis was a key driver of evolution, but she persisted. Instead of the mechanistic view that life evolved through random genetic mutations and competition, she presented a symbiotic narrative in which bacteria joined together to create the complex cells that formed animals, plants and all other organisms - which together form a multi-dimensional living entity that covers the Earth. Humans are not the pinnacle of life with the right to exploit nature, but part of this complex cognitive system in which each of our actions has repercussions.

Filmmaker John Feldman traveled globally to meet Margulis' cutting-edge colleagues and continually asked: What happens when the truth changes? SYMBIOTIC EARTH examines the worldview that has led to climate change and extreme capitalism and offers a new approach to understanding life that encourages a sustainable and symbiotic lifestyle.


DVD / 2018 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 147 minutes

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JUMBO WILD

Directed by Nick Waggoner

A 25-year battle in Canada's iconic Jumbo Valley pits developers of a large ski resort against conservationists, backcountry skiers and First Nations, who revere it as home of the grizzly bear spirit.

At the headwaters of the Columbia River in BC's Purcell Mountains, Jumbo Creek cascades out of deep snowpack, past crumbling glacial ice, wildflowers, and grizzly tracks. The Jumbo Valley has long been revered for its beauty; and to the Ktunaxa Nation, it is known as Qat'muk, home of the grizzly bear spirit.

Part of an important international wildlife corridor, the Jumbo Valley is one of only two areas in North America where grizzly bears can freely roam between Canada and the U.S. But, for nearly 25 years, local people -- First Nations, conservationists, backcountry skiers -- have fought a large-scale ski resort in Jumbo. Developers face environmental assessments, political roadblocks, and local outcry.

JUMBO WILD highlights the tension between the protection of wilderness and ever-increasing development interests in wild places, while bringing to life the passionate fight to protect the Jumbo Valley.


DVD / 2015 / (Grades 7-9, College, Adults) / 60 minutes

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GREEN FIRE: ALDO LEOPOLD AND A LAND ETHIC FOR OUR TIME

Directed by Ann Dunsky, Steven Dunsky, David Steinke

Explores the life and legacy of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac) and his land ethic philosophy.

Aldo Leopold is considered the most important conservationist of the 20th century because his ideas are so relevant to the environmental issues of our time. He is the father of the national wilderness system, wildlife management and the science of ecological restoration. His classic book A Sand County Almanac still inspires us to see the natural world as a community to which we belong.

GREEN FIRE explores Leopold's personal journey of observation and understanding. It reveals how his ideas resonate with people across the entire American landscape, from inner cities to the most remote wild lands. The film challenges viewers to contemplate their own relationship with the land.

GREEN FIRE is the first feature documentary about Aldo Leopold's life and contemporary legacy. It features commentary from conservation leaders including scientists, ranchers, scholars and three of Aldo Leopold's children: Nina, Carl, and Estella. Curt Meine, Leopold's biographer, serves as the on-camera guide, making connections between Leopold's ideas and their expression in the conservation movement today. Peter Coyote gives voice to the Leopold's brilliant writing.


DVD / 2011 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 73 minutes

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BUTTERFLIES & BULLDOZERS: DAVID SCHOOLEY, FRED SMITH AND THE FIGHT FOR SAN BRUNO MOUNTAIN

Directed by Ann Dunsky

The fight to save San Francisco's San Bruno Mountain speaks to the global dilemma of economic growth versus species preservation.

This film deals with the global dilemma of economic growth versus species preservation.

San Bruno Mountain provides a context to explore these complex questions. The mountain is San Francisco's lost landscape, a mostly intact remnant of the ecosystem that once covered the city's hills. It is the site of the nation's first Habitat Conservation Plan, a controversial compromise that trades development for additional habitat preservation and management.

For fifty years, people have fought to protect San Bruno Mountain and its rare butterflies. Told with humor and insight by participants and observers alike, BUTTERFLIES & BULLDOZERS is a story about the rights of nature and the rights of people, about compromise and commitment, and the tough choices we all have to make.


DVD / 2010 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 62 minutes

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ECOLOGY OF MIND, AN

Directed by Nora Bateson

A daughter's loving film portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers, Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, systems theorist and ecologist.

AN ECOLOGY OF MIND is a portrait of Gregory Bateson, celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, and systems theorist. His story is lovingly told by his youngest daughter, Nora, with footage from Gregory's own films shot in the 1930s with his wife Margaret Mead in Bali and New Guinea, along with photographs, filmed lectures, and interviews.

Gregory Bateson was a man who studied the interrelationships of the complex systems we live in with scientific rigor and enormous integrity. His theories, such as "the double bind" and "the pattern which connects", continue to impact the fields of anthropology, psychiatry, information science, cybernetics, urban planning, biology, and ecology, challenging people to think in new ways.

Through this film, Nora Bateson sets out to show that his ideas are not just fodder for academic theory, but can help instruct a way of life. She presents his thinking using a richly personal perspective, focusing on the stories Bateson used to present his ideas and how the beauty of life itself provided the framework of his life's pursuits.

Hoping to inspire its audience to see their lives within a larger system, glistening with symmetry, play, and metaphor, AN ECOLOGY OF MIND is an invitation to ask the kinds of questions that could help thread the world back together from the inside.


DVD / 2010 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 60 minutes

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SOLA: LOUISIANA WATER STORIES

Investigates how the exploitation of Southern Louisiana's abundant natural resources compromised the resiliency of its ecology and culture, multiplying the devastating impact of the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina.

Everywhere you look in Southern Louisiana there's water: rivers, bayous, swamps, the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico. And everyone in Cajun Country has a water story, or two or three or more. Its waterways support the biggest economies in Louisiana - a $70 billion a year oil and gas industry, a $2.4 billion a year fishing business, tourism and recreational sports.

They are also home to some insidious polluters: the same oil and gas industry, 200 petrochemical plants along a 100-mile-long stretch of the Mississippi known "Cancer Alley," the world's largest Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico and erosion that is costing the coastline twenty five square miles of wetlands a year. At the same time, SoLa is home to one of America's most vital and unique cultures; if everyone who lives there has a water story they can also most likely play the fiddle, waltz, cook an etoufee and hunt and fish.


DVD / 2010 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 62 minutes

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BIG RIVER

Directed by Curt Ellis

Following up on their Peabody Award-winning documentary KING CORN, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis have returned to Iowa with a new mission: to investigate the environmental impact their acre of corn has had on the people and places downstream.

In a journey that spans from the heartland to the Gulf of Mexico, Ian and Curt trade their combine for a canoe, and set out to see the big world their little acre of corn has touched. On their trip, flashbacks to the pesticides they sprayed, the fertilizers they injected, and the soil they plowed now lead to new questions, explored by new experts in new places. Half of Iowa's topsoil, they learn, has been washed out to sea. Fertilizer runoff has spawned a hypoxic 'dead zone' in the Gulf. And back at their acre, the herbicides they used are blamed for a cancer cluster that reaches all too close to home.

A lively investigation and a worthy follow-up, BIG RIVER grows to ask is industrial agriculture worth its hidden costs?


DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2009 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 27 minutes

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DIRT! THE MOVIE

Directed by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow

The story of Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility, from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.

Dirt! The Movie introduces viewers to dirt's fascinating history. Four billion years of evolution have created the dirt that recycles our water, gives us food, provides us shelter, and that can be used as a source of medicine, beauty and culture.

However, people have become greedy and careless, endangering this vital living resource with destructive methods of agriculture, mining practices, and urban development. The word dirt has become "dirty". This abusive behavior has yielded catastrophic results, which the film does not shy away from: mass starvation, drought, floods and global warming.

Dirt! The Movie proves that times are changing. More than 25 renowned global visionaries in countries around the world are discovering new ways of thinking as they come together to repair this natural resource with practical, viable solutions. These participants include Bill Logan, Andy Lipkis, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Fritjof Capra, Pierre Rabhi, Wangari Maathai, Wes Jackson and Majora Carter.

To capture these prescient people and their inspiring stories, the production team filmed in more than 20 locations, including Argentina, Brazil, France, India, Kenya, and several regions of the United States.

On their journey, the filmmakers found:
  • farmers and agronomists re-discovering sustainable agriculture
  • tiny villages standing up for their right to feed their families
  • scientists discovering connections with soil that can help reduce global warming including ways to generate electricity from soils and sediments
  • inmates finding inner peace and job skills in a prison horticulture program
  • children uncovering the secrets of soil fertility and eating from edible schoolyards.

  • Dirt! The Movie uncovers the surprising ways we can repair our relationship with dirt and create new possibilities for all life on earth. You may never look at the ground beneath your feet quite the same.


    DVD / 2009 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 80 minutes

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    END OF THE LINE, THE

    Directed by Rupert Murray

    The first major feature documentary film revealing the impact of overfishing on our oceans. Based on the book by Charles Clover.

    THE END OF THE LINE delves beyond the surface of the seas to reveal a troubling truth beneath: an ocean increasingly empty of fish, destroyed by decades of overexploitation.

    Exploring the tragic collapse of the cod fishery in Newfoundland in the 1990s, the imminent extinction of the prized bluefin tuna, and the devastation wreaked by illegal catches and surpassed fishing quotas, the film uncovers the dark ecological story behind our love affair with fish as food.

    The film argues that unless we demand political action from governments, responsible menu selections from restaurateurs as well as changing our own consumption habits, we could see the end of wild fish by mid-century.


    DVD / 2009 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 82 minutes

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    SEA CHANGE, A: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT FISH

    Ocean acidification threatens over one million species with extinction--and with them, our entire way of life.

    A Sea Change documents how the pH balance of the oceans has changed dramatically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: a 30% increase in acidification. With near unanimity, scientists now agree that the burning of fossil fuels is fundamentally reshaping ocean chemistry. Experts predict that over the next century, steady increases in carbon dioxide emissions and the continued rise in the acidity of the oceans will cause most of the world's fisheries to experience a total bottom-up collapse--a state that could last for millions of years.

    A Sea Change broadens the discussion about the dramatic changes we are seeing in the chemistry of the oceans, and conveys the urgent threat those changes pose to our survival, while surveying the steps we can take to reduce the severity of climate change. The film's protagonist Sven Huseby asks how will he explain to his oldest grandchild, Elias, what is happening to the oceans and their ecosystems.

    A Sea Change is both a personal journey and a scientifically rigorous, sometimes humorous, unflinchingly honest look at reality. It offers positive examples of new technologies and effective changes in human behavior that we all must choose before the oceans are lost.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2009 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 83 minutes

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    WATERLIFE

    Directed by Kevin McMahon

    An epic cinematic poem that reveals the extraordinary beauty and complex toxicity of the Great Lakes, the largest remaining supply of fresh water (20%) on Earth.

    The film tells the epic story of the Great Lakes by following the cascade of its water from northern Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, through the lives of some of the 35 million people who rely on the lake for survival.

    Providing earth with 20% of its surface fresh water and its third largest industrial economy, the Great Lakes are a unique and precious resource under assault by toxins, sewage, invasive species, evaporating water and profound apathy. They are also one of the planet's great preserves of extraordinary wilderness beauty and a bounty of unique species.

    WATERLIFE blends these realities with a dreamlike fluidity as it pours through the lives of some amazing characters. We meet an Anishinabe medicine woman who walked 16,000 miles around the lakes to sympathize with them; the last of the great Michigan fishing families; a man whose lakefront home now borders a field thanks to sewer overflows; the people of a village where mysterious toxins ensure that most new babies are girls; and the residents of Love Canal, a notorious Niagara Falls neighborhood abandoned in the 1970s and now dubiously refurbished.

    Along the way, WATERLIFE show viewers the Great Lakes as they might appear to a seagull, a fish or a water molecule...and from a myriad of other amazing perspectives. Filmed over a full year with a battery of specialty cameras and techniques, WATERLIFE provides an unprecedented view of an incredible ecosystem rarely seen by the city dwellers who form most of its population. From the ornate fountains of Chicago to the sewers of Windsor, viewers are carried through marsh and pipe, across pounding waves and through thunder clouds on a journey which, as the film says, has no "ending or beginning, that shapes every body it passes through and unites them all across space and time."

    WATERLIFE's director, Kevin McMahon, is one of Canada's most innovative documentary filmmakers. Gord Downie, leader of The Tragically Hip and a Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, narrates the film. Topping off this epic cinematic poem is a fabulous soundtrack featuring Sam Roberts, The Allman Brothers, Dropkick Murphys, Sufjan Stevens, Sigur R?, Robbie Robertson, Daniel Lanois, Phillip Glass, Brian Eno and a new song by The Tragically Hip. Plus check out the award-winning interactive website.


    DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2009 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 109 minutes

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    SENSE OF WONDER, A

    Rachel Carson's love for the natural world and her fight to defend it.

    When pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring" in 1962, the backlash from her critics thrust her into the center of a political maelstrom. Despite her private persona, her convictions about the risks posed by chemical pesticides forced her into the role of controversial public figure.

    Using many of Miss Carson's own words, actress Kaiulani Lee embodies this extraordinary woman in a documentary style film which depicts Carson in the final year of her life. Struggling with cancer, Carson recounts with both humor and anger the attacks by the chemical industry, the government and the press as she focuses her limited energy to get her message to Congress and the American people.

    Beautifully shot in HD by Academy Award®-winning cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, at Carson's cottage in Maine, the film is an intimate and poignant portrait of Carson's life as she emerges as America's most successful advocate for the natural world. Based on Kaiulani Lee's popular play of the same name.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2008 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 55 minutes

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    AMERICA'S LOST LANDSCAPE: THE TALLGRASS PRAIRIE

    Tells the story of one of the most astonishing alterations of nature, the North American tallgrass prairie.

    AMERICA'S LOST LANDSCAPE: THE TALLGRASS PRAIRIE tells the rich and complex story of one of the most astonishing alterations of nature in human history.

    Prior to Euro- American settlement in the 1820s, one of the major landscape features of North America was 240 million acres of tallgrass prairie. But between 1830 and 1900 -- in the span of a single lifetime -- the prairie was steadily transformed to farmland. This drastic change in the landscape brought about an enormous social change for Native Americans. In an equally short time their cultural imprint was reduced in essence to a handful of place-names appearing on maps.

    The extraordinary cinematography of prairie remnants, original score and archival images are all delicately interwoven to create a powerful and moving viewing experience about the natural and cultural history of America.

    Amongst those interviewed are writer Dayton Duncan, Wes Jackson of The Land Institute, biologist Laura Jackson, linguist Jerome Kills Small, historian Anton Treuer, landscape historian Lance Foster, writer Richard Manning, and Nina Leopold Bailey and Carol Leopold -- two of Aldo Leopold's children.


    DVD (Color) / 2005 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adult) / 60 minutes

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    ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT, THE: ACCOUNTING FOR A SMALL PLANET

    Dr. Mathis Wackernagel introduces the Ecological Footprint, a resource accounting tool that measures human demand on the Earth.

    Humans are the most successful species on the planet. But our growing economy is placing unprecedented demand on the planet's limited ecological resources. How can we assure our future well-being?

    "We can choose to live on a depleted planet or we can choose to live on a rich, biologically diverse, more stable planet" proposes Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, co-creator of the Ecological Footprint. He suggests that an essential step in avoiding depletion is to track ecological assets, allowing us to make more informed choices.

    In the film, Wackernagel introduces the Ecological Footprint, a resource accounting tool that measures human demand on the Earth. Footprint accounts work like a bank statement, documenting whether we are living within our ecological budget or consuming nature's resources faster than the planet can renew them.

    In just thirty minutes, the film paints a picture of our current global situation: for the first time, humanity is in "ecological overshoot" with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year. Most countries are running ecological deficits, with Footprints larger than their own biological capacity. Wackernagel explores the implications of these ecological deficits, and provides examples of how governments, communities and businesses are using the Footprint to help improve their ecological performance.

    For Wackernagel, "Sustainability boils down to how we can all live well, how we can all have great lives, within the means of one small planet." He concludes on a hopeful note, showing how a new organization, Global Footprint Network, is partnering with government agencies, businesses, universities and NGOs to support the use of the Ecological Footprint and to help turn this vision of a sustainable future into reality.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2005 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 30 minutes

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    NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, THE

    William McDonough, Michael Braungart & the Birth of the Sustainable Economy

    Architect Bill McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart bring together ecology and human design.

    While some environmental observers predict doomsday scenarios in which a rapidly increasing human population is forced to compete for ever scarcer natural resources, Bill McDonough sees a more exciting and hopeful future.

    In his vision humanity takes nature itself as our guide reinventing technical enterprises to be as safe and ever-renewing as natural processes.

    Can't happen? It's already happening…at Nike, at Ford Motor Company, at Oberlin College, at Herman Miller Furniture, and at DesignTex…and it's part of what architect McDonough and his partner, chemist Michael Braungart, call 'The Next Industrial Revolution.'

    Shot in Europe and the United States, the film explores how businesses are transforming themselves to work with nature and enhance profitability.


    DVD (Color) / 2001 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 55 minutes

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    SALMON FOREST, THE

    Reveals the fragile connection between salmon, bears, trees, and people in the NW rainforest.

    On Canada's Pacific coast, winding from the north end of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border, is over 400 kilometers of forested inlets and islands. This is the largest tract of intact temperate rainforest on earth -- it's more than twice the size of Switzerland. Here millions of spawning salmon that support dense concentrations of forest life, return every year. It is also where grizzly bears, black bears, bald eagles, seals, otters, gulls, and countless invertebrates thrive. Bathed in mist and rain year round, this is one of the most biologically diverse and lush places on the planet. Much of life here still remains secret and unknown.

    Biologist Dr. Tom Reimchen, however, has uncovered one of those secrets. He has discovered why both black and grizzly bears fish at night and revealed the link between the salmon and the forest.

    Entomologist Dr. Neville Winchester is also featured as he investigates the vast array of strange-looking arthropods and insects that litter the forest canopy. In addition, the Gitga'at, a First Nations people, are featured reaffirming their connection with the land and sea and performing their traditional Salmon Dance.


    DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2001 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 52 minutes

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