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Environment and Sustainability
Directed by Bo Boudart
A CONCERNED CITIZEN documents the work of Dr. Riki Ott, a whistleblower who predicted the Exxon Valdez oil spill hours before it happened and came to the aid of her Alaskan community in their battle to get fair compensation for their loss of health and income.
More recently Riki, a toxicologist, author, and activist, has been organizing the Gulf coast communities as they struggle to recover from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Taking the lessons she learned as an activist, she is also spearheading the campaign called Ultimate Civics, a complete civics curriculum she developed that empowers students to participate in their democracy. Recognizing the power of money in politics she advocates for a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood, and to reform campaign finance laws. She lectures nationally and internationally, inspiring students from fifth grade through universities and adults to take action and showing by example how one person can make a difference.
"It is my hope that, as people's health, livelihoods, and property are harmed by these extreme oil activities, people will understand the need to shift off oil to safer energy options and take action to achieve true energy independence. This is the movement that I see growing in all regions of our country."
DVD / 2019 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 41 minutes
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Directed by David Abel
Climate-changed ocean temperatures shift New England's lobster fishery across national boundaries, sparking international tension.
The buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is warming the oceans, and the waters off New England's coast are seeing some of the most dramatic temperature increases on the planet. This is having a major effect on lobster populations and the fishermen who rely on them. The southern New England lobster fishery has collapsed and the catch has moved north into cooler waters.
LOBSTER WAR documents an escalating conflict between the United States and Canada over waters that both countries have claimed since the end of the Revolutionary War.
The disputed 277 square miles of sea known as the Gray Zone--the swath of water surrounding Machias Seal Island at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy--were traditionally fished by US lobstermen. But as the Gulf of Maine has warmed lobsters have migrated north and the Gray Zone's previously modest lobster population has surged. As a result, Canadians have begun to assert their sovereignty in the area, contesting American claims to the bounty and foreshadowing potential conflicts exacerbated by climate change.
DVD / 2019 / (Grades 10-12, Adults, College) / 74 minutes
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Directed by Christopher Beaver
Las Vegas provides an example to the world of how any city can and must create its own sustainable water solutions.
Las Vegas is perhaps the most famous resort city in the world. It is also the thirstiest city in the driest state in the US, so it has had to be proactive in developing solutions that conserve and redistribute water, their most precious resource. Currently the city is faced with only 2.6 inches of rain per annum, a seventeen-year drought, a constantly expanding population and competition for shared resources. As a result, the city has been forced to create its own sustainable water solutions and in the process has turned itself into an example for other desert regions.
Everything to do with their water supply and disposal is watched, measured and checked. Water is recycled and returned to the source. Every drop is monitored acoustically to detect possible leaks within 6500 miles of pipes. 40% of the water is recycled for indoor use and returned to Lake Mead, 40% of what goes out comes back, but the remaining 60% is for outdoor use and either evaporates or goes back into the ground.
The film follows the story of Patricia Mulroy, the controversial founder of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Her strength and leadership "helped launch a quiet revolution that will shape Colorado River politics far into the future, and perhaps provide a path to safety in the face of intensifying water scarcity."
The story of Las Vegas's approach to water sustainability is full of surprises, and we hear it from many different perspectives. After all, the strip is just a small part of the valley, but it is the engine that provides the cash to enable the experimentation that has created these models for survival.
DVD / 2019 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 55 minutes
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By Christopher Walker
Since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, Ecuador's Waorani tribe, have defended their Amazon rainforest with spears. In the 1950's American missionaries cleared the way for oil companies to enter Waorani lands. Now 70% of Ecuador's Amazon, home to some 12 tribes, has been divided into oil blocks, polluting one of the most bio diverse rainforests of the planet. Only one small tribe, the Waorani, have successfully fought to keep oil off most of their land.
25 years ago, director Christopher Walker went to the Amazon to tell the Waorani's story in the documentary film TRINKETS & BEADS (AMPAS Outstanding Documentary, Best Cultural Survival Film, Mountainfilm, Best Documentary Paris Environmental Film Festival) Now, Ecuador has started to auction off the last virgin rainforest to the international oil industry - including the Yasuni National Park, thought to contain more species per acre than anywhere else on earth. At the end of 2014, Walker returned to Ecuador to see if the Waorani could still win their fight against big oil. He filmed over three years, up to the imminent auction of Waorani oil Block 22.
SPEARS FROM ALL SIDES follows the young, charismatic Waorani activist Opi as he tells the dramatic story of a vehement, community based resistance by tribal communities in one of the most remote and beautiful areas of the world. It reveals the duplicity of the Ecuadorean government and the oil companies in their attempts to defeat the Waorani at all costs, including the co-option and subsequent betrayal of the former Waorani leader Moi - the hero of the previous film. Out of disaster, Opi sees a possibility of hope - regaining their autonomy which they lost with the arrival of the missionaries 60 years ago.
SPEARS FROM ALL SIDES, besides being a gripping story following action and events as they unfold, demonstrates the complex battles at the frontlines of climate change which we are rarely able to see on film.
DVD (Spanish, Color, With English Subtitles) / 2019 / 90 minutes
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Director: Matthieu Rytz
What if your country was swallowed by the sea? The Pacific island nation of Kiribati is one of the most remote places on the planet, far-removed from the pressures of modern life. Yet it is one of the first countries that must confront an existential dilemma of our time: imminent annihilation from sea-level rise. President Anote Tong races to find options, from mass migration to building underwater cities, but many Kiribati are already seeking safe harbor overseas, leaving behind 4000 years of Kirabati culture.
With sweeping cinematography, filmmaker Matthieu Rytz captures the shifting dynamics of climate change while crafting a portrait of the Kiribati people that reveals their strength of character and grace as they confront the inevitable change they are facing head on.
DVD / 2018 / 77 minutes
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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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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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Directed by Katharina Stieffenhofer
Through a group of Canadian organic farmers-both large-scale and small-scale-we experience a full growing season with all of its rewards as well as the challenges of a changing climate.
When Terry and Monique left the opera to pursue their true passion-ecological, small-scale farming-their story of community and resilience took center stage. FROM SEED TO SEED follows their young family and a diverse group of farmers in Southern Manitoba, for a season of challenges and rewards.
Scientists are working with these farmers using a blend of ancient traditions and cutting edge science to develop improved methods for growing food ecologically and in a changing climate.
This hopeful story provides a Canadian perspective on a global social movement that regenerates the land, farming, and communities toward a healthier future for us all.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 87 minutes
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Directed by Avi Lewis
Following El Salvador's civil war, a farmers' cooperative puts down roots, builds resilience and provides a model of how to mitigate climate change and resist unsustainable, extractive development.
In a fertile floodplain in El Salvador, where the great river meets the sea, a peasant movement puts down roots - growing resilience in the scorched earth of exile and civil war. But soon these farmers and fishing folk discover new challenges, and this time they are global: climate crisis, exacerbated by an economy of ruinous extraction. The solutions they come up with will be a revelation for audiences in the prosperous north. On the surface, the life of these campesinos may resemble the past: but in their model may lie the key to the future.
Canadian journalist, media personality and documentarian Avi Lewis, along with his wife, author Naomi Klein, has advocated for radically new social and political structures as the only viable and effective response to climate change. In KEEPERS OF THE FUTURE he profiles the Baja Lempa coordinadora, a farmers' cooperative that demonstrates how "deep local democracy" can help even a poor population build environmental, economic and political resilience.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 24 minutes
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Directed by Rita Baghdadi, Jeremiah Hammerling
The oil boom in N Dakota sets off a crisis in a rural community, forced to confront the meaning of progress as they fight for a disappearing way of life.
Between 2011 and 2016, drilling for oil in America reached an unprecedented peak, setting off a modern day gold rush in one of the most rural communities in the country: Trenton, North Dakota. Kalie Rider and her older brother Jed are both striving to rebuild farming in their family, having suffered the foreclosure of their parents' farm during the traumatic 1980s farm crisis.
When their uncle Roger makes a decision to sell a piece of his land, it sets off a domino effect of industrialization in Trenton. Now, with the church being eyed for a diesel refinery, the community becomes riven by competing interests. While Jed faces the possibility of having to uproot his young family and move away, Kalie learns to organize and resist.
Through its lyrical core, the film challenges the notion of "progress" as it questions the long term human consequences of short term approaches to land use, decisions that ultimately affect all Americans, rural and urban alike.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 70 minutes
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Directed by Kim Beamish
Observes the daily life of a family running an oyster farm in a lake on the SE coast of Australia, as they deal with climate change, pollution, and the fickleness of consumers.
OYSTER captures the daily routines, chaos and drama in the lives of Dom and Pip Boyton, a lively and hard-working second generation oyster farming family on Merimbula Lake on the southeast coast of New South Wales, Australia.
The film watches as Dom and Pip juggle the demands of parenting two precocious young boys with the long hours, logistical decision-making and labor required to keep their crop of Sydney rock oysters healthy and thriving. The Boytons and the other members of their oyster farmer collective face a host of challenges, from climate change and the threat of environmental disaster to the fickleness of the buyers and luxury markets that the collective depends on.
Oysters have been called "the canaries of the estuaries" due to their importance as bioindicators, and as we watch Dom and Pip combat threats to their vulnerable operation-such as the proliferation of the invasive Pacific oyster and bacterial contamination triggered by severe "east coast low" storms and an influx of vacationers-OYSTER presents a unique and intimate look at a business whose fortunes are entwined with the health and stewardship of the environment.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adults) / 80 minutes
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Directors: Lisa F. Jackson, Sarah Teale
A multi-billion dollar American development is poised to engulf a small coastal community in Mexico with a mega hotel/condo complex. But local people are banding together to save their way of life and the delicate ecosystem on which they all depend. This powerful yet intimate documentary reveals how rampant, unsustainable development is destroying communities, ecosystems and long-held ways of life all over the world - and how it can be stopped.
Rosario Salvatierra is a fourth generation fisherman in Todos Santos, a small desert town on the Pacific coast of Baja California Sur. For generations hundreds of fishermen have launched their boats into the sea directly from Punta Lobos, the beach just outside of town. But all that is about to change. As Rosario walks along the beach he is confronted by a massive sea wall and a concrete platform that stretches for hundreds of meters from the breakwater back towards the mountains. Thousands of mangroves that once protected the beach have been bulldozed, an arroyo backfilled, dunes flattened and a boutique hotel and massive tourist complex is being constructed on the site along with the first of a projected 4,472 homes, the residents of which will triple the population of the town.
It is all part of an American mega development, called Tres Santos, that threatens to transform and overwhelm the town of Todos Santos. The fishermen themselves are being pushed off the beach and the development would drain the already diminished aquifer, taking drinking water from a town where many residents already do not have access.
What are the rights of small, under-represented communities in the face of global business interests and unsustainable development and what can they do to stand up for those rights and their way of life? For the last year Rosario, who is one of the leaders of the Punta Lobos Fishermen's Cooperative, has been asking these questions and pushing the fishermen and the town to stand up for their rights. He is being supported by his 29 year-old daughter Maria Salvatierra and John Moreno, a young, charismatic Mexican lawyer.
The film follows the efforts of the Salvatierra family as they struggle to educate and organize their community against the developers and as well the efforts of Moreno to inform the fishermen of their legal rights as he takes on the municipal and then federal governments on their behalf. As Moreno slowly begins to succeed in his efforts to thwart the developers, they begin to target him in increasingly threatening and desperate ways. The developers, in collusion with local politicians, also attempt to divide the town, the fishermen and families and we watch as they work to stay united. As Rosario points out early on "we are taking on giants".
DVD (Spanish with English subtitles) / 2017 / 83 minutes
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Directed by John de Graaf
The story of how a mining town recovered from its legacy of pollution and prospered by building community around the battle to save their beautiful river.
Born in the California Gold Rush, Nevada City was once the scene of some of the most destructive environmental practices on earth. By the 1960s, the town was a backwater, its extractive industries dying. Then it was discovered by the "back to the land movement." It was a second gold rush but with a different idea of gold based on nature, community and a sense of place.
The fight to save the Yuba River from proposed power dams brought conflicting factions of the community together while different ideas about the meaning of wealth have led to changes in local food production, education, arts, music and a commitment to building community. Once a place whose essence was individualism, competition and extractive industries, Nevada City is now moving toward a future of solidarity, stewardship, and livelihoods based on renewable resources, husbandry and sustainability.
Featuring two dozen of Nevada City's most active citizens and their stories, REDEFINING PROSPERITY is the remarkable story of a beautiful California town and the outward-looking, creative people who call it home and forged its new identity.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 57 minutes
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By Julia Dahr and Kisilu Musya
Five years ago Kisilu, a Kenyan farmer, started to use his camera to capture the life of his family, his village and the damages of climate change. When a violent storm throws him and a Norwegian filmmaker together we see him transform from a father, to community leader to an activist on the global stage.
THANK YOU FOR THE RAIN is a feature documentary by Julia Dahr and Kisilu Musya. It addresses a range of issues linked to climate change, including climate justice, urbanization, gender equality, education, access to water, climate refugees, and adaptation.
DVD (Color) / 2017 / 87 minutes
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Directed by Ian Cheney
Contrasts sci-fi ideas about terraforming Mars with the state of NYC's waterways, and questions the viability of colonizing Mars before making our own planet sustainable.
Could humans live on Mars? Would we want to? Emmy-nominated filmmaker, Ian Cheney, provides insight into our currently unsustainable relationship with our home planet by examining the sci-fi speculation of "terraforming," or making another planet Earth-like, by altering its atmosphere. He calls on a multifaceted brain trust to process this big idea including a desert camp of Mars hopefuls, a bevy of sci-fi writers, Hurricane Sandy survivors, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, and a who's who of astrobiologists and earth scientists. BLUESPACE makes a strong case for taking better care of our water-rich planet so that future generations won't have to resort to interplanetary colonization.
At times whimsical and funny, serious and poignant and always stimulating, this is a unique exploration of current thinking about the origins and evolution of life and its relationship to water.
DVD / 2016 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 73 minutes
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By Anne Georget
For more than six decades, doctors, nutritionists, and public health officials have been waging a war against high cholesterol in an effort to fight heart disease. It's a war that has seen the demonization of saturated fats, the rise and fall of hydrogenated oils, and the introduction of several generations of "miracle" drugs.
But what if the basic premise linking cholesterol and heart disease is wrong?
CHOLESTEROL, THE GREAT BLUFF convincingly argues that the link between cholesterol and heart disease is tenuous - and that its persistence results from a potent mix of bad science, entrenched interests, and pharmaceutical profits.
The problems date from the earliest days of the cholesterol hypothesis, first proposed by physiologist Ancel Keys, who proposed that a diet high in saturated fight leads to cardiovascular disease. Medical journalist Dr. Dominique Dupagne cites evidence that Keys cherry-picked his data. But it was too late. Americans were trying to understand what lay behind the soaring rate of heart attacks, and fat seemed like the perfect villain. Once saturated fats were to blame, heavily industrialized products such as "pure vegetable shortening"-the result of a process including emulsification, bleaching, and steam-cleaning-come to be seen as healthier foods.
As the film makes clear, researchers who made any serious attempt to study other hypotheses-that sugar led to vascular disease, for instance-found themselves threatened, their research funding cut and their careers derailed.
CHOLESTEROL, THE GREAT BLUFF deploys an array of authoritative and engaging experts to attack the foundations of the cholesterol hypothesis. Author and nutritionist Sylvain Duval uses markers and easy-to-understand analogies to explain the mechanisms of how cholesterol works and how the body uses different fats. Investigative journalist Nina Teicholz lays out how Keys came to demonize cholesterol, and details the intimidation faced by those who sought alternatives. Cardiologist and nutritionist Dr. Michel de Lorgeril, who did the first study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, is scathing in his views on the pharmaceutical industry's complicity in propagating faulty research, including the studies that led to the widespread adoption of statins. The film also hears from an array of other researchers, physicians, and writers who, among other things, question the notion of "good" and "bad" cholesterol.
Peppered throughout are vintage and recent clips from advertising (including Tom & Jerry pushing margarine), sponsored films, and newscasts blaring the latest cholesterol breakthroughs.
DVD (English; French With English Subtitles, Color) / 2016 / 82 minutes
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ByValentina Canavesio
FOOTPRINT takes a dizzying spin around the globe, witnessing population explosions, overconsumption, limited resources, and expert testimony as to what a world straining at its limits can sustain. We spend time with indigenous health workers, activists, and the ordinary people in the Philippines, Mexico, Pakistan and Kenya, women who all challenge the idea that our world can continue to support the weight of humanity's footprint on it. FOOTPRINT offers unprecedented access to the people on the ground who are all in their unique way challenging the status quo and making us rethink what's really at stake. There are surprising revelations on who are the players standing in the way of solutions and those pushing for it, without losing sight of the array of possible solutions that open up when we take the time to ask this critical question of how many of us there are in the world and what the Earth can sustain if we are to all live a dignified life.
DVD (English, Swahili, Urdu, Tagalog, Spanish, Color) / 2016 / 82 minutes
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By Nikolaus Geyrhalter
HOMO SAPIENS is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being.
What will remain of our lives after we're gone? Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, though humanity has disappeared. Now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature after being taken from it so long ago. HOMO SAPIENS is an ode to humanity as seen from a possible future scenario.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 94 minutes
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Directors: Heidi Brandenburg & Mathew Orzel
In this tense and immersive Sundance award-winner, audiences are taken directly into the line of fire between powerful, opposing Peruvian leaders who will stop at nothing to keep their respective goals intact. On the one side is President Alan Garcia, who, eager to enter the world stage, begins aggressively extracting oil, minerals, and gas from untouched indigenous Amazonian land. He is quickly met with fierce opposition from indigenous leader Alberto Pizango, whose impassioned speeches against Garcia's destructive actions prove a powerful rallying cry to throngs of his supporters. When Garcia continues to ignore their pleas, a tense war of words erupts into deadly violence.
DVD (Spanish with English subtitles) / 2016 / 103 minutes
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Director: Dena Seidel
A thrilling journey to the world's most perilous environment, Antarctic Edge: 70 Degrees South joins a team of world-class scientists as they explore the West Antarctic Peninsula.
In the wake of devastating climate events like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, oceanographer Oscar Schofield teams up with a group of researchers in a race to understand climate change in the fastest winter-warming place on earth: the West Antarctic Peninsula. For more than 20 years, these scientists have dedicated their lives to studying the Peninsula's rapid change as part of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Project.
Filmed in one of the most perilous environments on the planet, Antarctic Edge brings to us the stunning landscapes and seascapes of Earth's southern polar region, revealing the harsh conditions and substantial challenges that scientists endure for months at a time. While navigating through 60-foot waves and dangerous icebergs, the film follows the team as they voyage south to rugged, inhospitable Charcot Island to study the fragile and rapidly declining Adelie Penguin. For Schofield and his crew, these birds are the greatest indicator of climate change and a harbinger of what is to come.
DVD / 2015 / 72 minutes
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Directed by Sue Williams
Debunks the notion that electronics is a 'clean' industry by revealing the human and environmental cost of electronic gadgets that are designed to die.
Consumers love - and live on - their smartphones, tablets and laptops. A cascade of new devices pours endlessly into the market, promising even better communication, non-stop entertainment and instant information. The numbers are staggering. By 2020, four billion people will have a personal computer. Five billion will own a mobile phone.
But this revolution has a dark side that the electronics industry doesn't want you to see.
In an investigation that spans the globe, award-winning filmmaker Sue Williams investigates the underbelly of the international electronics industry and reveals how even the tiniest devices have deadly environmental and health costs.
DEATH BY DESIGN tells the stories of young Chinese workers laboring in unsafe conditions, American families living with the tragic consequences of the industry's toxic practices, activists leading the charge to hold brands accountable, and passionate entrepreneurs who are developing more sustainable products and practices to safeguard our planet and our future.
From the intensely secretive electronics factories in China, to the high tech innovation labs of Silicon Valley, DEATH BY DESIGN tells a story of environmental degradation, of health tragedies, and the fast-approaching tipping point between consumerism and sustainability.
DVD / 2015 / (Grades 7-9, College, Adults) / 73 minutes
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By Jane Caputi
FEED THE GREEN: FEMINIST VOICES FOR THE EARTH, by Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor and scholar Jane Caputi, challenges the cultural imagination surrounding the destruction of the environment and the link and influence on femicide and genocide.
No nation is immune to the effects of global warming, but the impacts of climate change are felt disproportionately by those who face racial and socioeconomic inequalities. In the US, African Americans, Hispanics and other racial and ethnic minorities are more vulnerable to climate change. Globally the effects from global warming are likely to be unequal, with the world's poorest and developing regions lacking the economic and institutional capacity to cope and adapt.
FEED THE GREEN features a variety of feminist thinkers, including ecological and social justice advocates Vandana Shiva and Andrea Smith, ecosexual activists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens; ecofeminist theorist and disability rights activist Ynestra King, poet Camille Dungy, scholars and bloggers Janell Hobson and Jill Schneiderman and grass roots activist La Loba Loca. Their voices are powerfully juxtaposed with images from popular culture, including advertising, myth, art, and the news, pointing to the ways that an environmentally destructive worldview is embedded in popular discourses, both contemporary and historical. Required viewing for Women's and Environmental Studies as well as Pop Culture.
DVD (Color) / 2015 / 35 minutes
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By Brent E. Huffman
SAVING MES AYNAK follows Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori as he races against time to save a 5,000-year-old archaeological site in Afghanistan from imminent demolition. A Chinese state-owned mining company is closing in on the ancient site, eager to harvest $100 billion dollars worth of copper buried directly beneath the archaeological ruins. Only 10% of Mes Aynak has been excavated, though, and some believe future discoveries at the site have the potential to redefine the history of Afghanistan and the history of Buddhism itself.
China is investing nearly three billion dollars in Afghanistan's untapped copper reserve, the second largest in the world worth an estimated $100 billion. The cash-strapped government of Afghanistan signed away the rights to this deposit with little oversight. The Chinese government-owned company plans to mine the copper using an open-pit method, the cheapest, most environmentally destructive style of mining. By doing so, the archaeology site, as well as the entire mountain range, will be completely demolished.
SAVING MES AYNAK examines the conflict between cultural preservation and economic opportunity through the lens of the Afghan archaeologists and local villagers who work and live near Mes Aynak. Qadir Temori and his fellow Afghan archaeologists face what seems an impossible battle against the Chinese, the Taliban and local politics to save their cultural heritage from likely erasure.
DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 58 minutes
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By Denis Delestrac & Sandrine Feydel
"Buying landscapes, protecting landscapes, accumulating new landscapes - it's a phenomenal opportunity." -- Steve Morgan, CEO, Wildlands Inc.
After years of working to undermine environmental regulations, governments and corporations are starting to think about the value of nature - and how they can profit from it.
BANKING NATURE is a provocative documentary that looks at the growing movement to value the natural world - and to turn endangered species and threatened areas into instruments of profit. It's a worldview that sees capital and markets not as a threat to the planet, but as its salvation - turning nature into "natural capital" and fundamental processes such as pollination and oxygen generation into "ecosystem services."
In the film we meet economist and former banker Pavan Sukhdev is perhaps the world's leading authority on the valuation of nature (one square kilometre of Hawaiian coral reef: $600,000). In his view, the best way to protect endangered species and ecosystems is to assign them a value - because if we can't measure the services nature provides, we can't recognize them within our current models.
In Uganda, we meet men who measure trees to determine how much carbon they store - and a banker from the German firm that sells the resulting carbon credits. Meanwhile in Brazil, steel giant Vale destroys rainforest, replaces it with tree plantations, and reaps the benefits of environmental credits.
Once we start measuring the value of nature, we can start turning it into securitized financial products. BANKING NATURE asks, can we trust the very same people whose management of the mortgage market nearly led to a global economic collapse to safeguard nature by turning it into financial instruments for speculators?
DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2014 / 90 minutes
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Director: Sara Dosa
Every September over 200 seasonal workers, most of them Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, Mien and Thai, set up a temporary camp near the tiny town of Chemult, Oregon. They remain until the first snowfall, searching the lush woods of Klamath County for the rare matsutake, a fungus highly prized in Japan. This sensitive, probing documentary examines the bond between two of these hunters in one unusually hard season.
Elderly Roger Higgins is a Vietnam vet who returned from the war traumatized and alienated. "We couldn't get a job, so we made our own jobs. I would get out there in the woods and just work." Kouy Loch is a Cambodian immigrant whose experience as a starving slave laborer under the Khmer Rouge taught him the foraging skills that now afford him a living. The men cemented their relationship years before over the shared pain of their Southeast Asian experience, becoming almost like father and son as they traipsed through the trees together. But Roger is too sick to do much hunting this year, and Kouy must walk the forest on his own.
The Last Season contrasts the past with the present, the camaraderie of the mushroom hunters' camp with Higgins's remote home in the woods and the hope of a yearly treasure hunt with the vagaries of climate and falling prices. The result is a poetic film about friendship, nature and life.
DVD / 2014 / 78 minutes
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Directors: Harriet Gordon & Peter Getzelsl
Armed with low-tech gear and high-minded notions that penguin populations hold the key to human survival, Ron Naveen lays bare his 30 year love affair with the world's most pristine scientific laboratory: Antarctica. Famed as a place that wants you dead, this film follows a ragtag team of field biologists to some of the harshest corners of the planet, where they track the impact of climate change and ocean health by counting penguin populations. From the tip of Argentina to the ominous Deception Island, The Penguin Counters is a treacherous, heart warming journey by a 21st century Dr. Doliitle who dreams of conserving this stunning but fragile region for future generations.
DVD / 2014 / 67 minutes
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Directed by Christopher Beaver
Follows San Francisco's innovative efforts towards achieving zero waste, thereby dramatically reducing the city's carbon footprint.
Only one third of the waste in the United States is recycled or composted. Why? Industry, through its practice of planned obsolescence, plays a major role; our lives are almost totally dependent on unrecyclable petroleum products. In order to reach zero waste, we need to change our relationship to garbage and view the things we discard as resources, rather than waste.
RACING TO ZERO examines our society's garbage practices in terms of consumption, preparation, use and production, and discovers some amazing solutions in San Francisco, which is successfully taking the necessary steps to reach zero waste. Cities all over the United States have instituted zero-waste policies of their own, and it is through these mandates that we are challenged to think differently about not only how we handle our garbage, but what it can become.
DVD / 2014 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 56 minutes
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By Kees Brouwer
Hidden deep inside a massive mountain in inhospitable Spitsbergen is the most important vault in the world: the Global Seed Vault. It is 20 degrees below zero and the vault is able to withstand earthquakes, floods, missile attacks and nuclear disaster. It's Noah's Ark for our food production with the largest diversity in seeds from all over the world, a backup of as many crops as possible and the toolbox for seed breeders. This is vital, for by 2050 there will be 9 billion mouths to feed. But the success of the vault also shows its downside. The increasing strategic importance of seed has given rise to the fundamental discussion on the question: who do the seeds belong to?
Not all countries are willing to donate their seed collections to the vault these days. Emerging economies regard their own seeds as a green gold mine for which others will have to pay. And large seed companies patent their latest seeds. If seeds can no longer be freely used, the diversity will decline which makes it vital that all seeds are freely available.
The 'Doomsday Vault', as it is called today, and its worldwide mission, is the life's work of the inspired American professor Cary Fowler. In February 2013, on the occasion of the vault's five-year anniversary, he met with an international management committee in Spitsbergen to discuss the current deadlock. SEED BATTLES gains an insight into the worldwide political and strategic game that is being played. The stakes: our daily bread.
DVD (Color) / 2014 / 50 minutes
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By Jose Cohen
A driver who was kidnapped for the contents of his water truck. A man filling dozens of fifty-gallon drums with water, in an urban neighborhood whose residents have spent more than three decades fighting for running water. Large drifts of industrial foam billowing through the air from a drainage canal, and contaminating crops with heavy metals and coliforms.
These are just some of the striking moments in H2OMX, a masterful, award-winning documentary about getting water to and from the 22 million people of Mexico City.
Built on a basin surrounded by mountains and with little drainage, the city is facing a water crisis driven by geography, population, and history. With a growing population, a depleted aquifer, and 40 percent of the water being brought in by aqueduct from another drainage area being lost to leaky pipes, the challenges are huge.
H20 MX captures the scope of the problem by taking us to a wide range of locations in and near the municipality, and introducing us to people dealing with a wide range of water-related issues. On the fringes of the city, we meet residents who can only access water by filling large jugs and hauling them back home with donkeys. We visit what will one day be the largest wastewater treatment plant in the country, only to learn that it is already five years behind schedule, and won't deal with many of the contaminants that make crops irrigated with the water dangerous to eat.
Meanwhile, as residents struggle to get access to fresh water, periodic floods-caused by storm sewers overwhelmed with torrential rains and sewage-overflow on a regular basis.
There are solutions: a pair of enthusiastic young industrial designers are helping rural communities install rainwater harvesting systems that, together, are collecting millions of gallons of water a year; fixing leaky pipes could mean not having to go as far afield for water; and proper treatment can allow purified water to go back into the aquifer. But none of this will be easy-and time is running out.
From stunning shots millions of gallons of water on the move to Mexico City and aerial views of a drainage canal choked with miles of garbage, to interviews with those trying to solve the water problem and those who must live with it every day, H2OMX captures the complexities of trying to provide one of the most basic of human rights-access to clean water-to one of the world's megalopolises.
DVD (Color) / 2013 / 82 minutes
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By Winnie Hoskyns-Abrahall, Bill Hennessy
In plain language, master electrician and solar installer Bruce Hankins explains AC coupling, the combining of a grid-tied solar electric installation with an off-grid battery backup system.
As the world turns to sustainability, solar enriches our lives. SAVING SUNSHINE takes a look at today's developments in solar electricity and its increasing role as power provider.
Combining the best features of off-grid, stand-alone solar installations with grid-tied systems that provide distributed generation, photovoltaic systems have evolved into AC-coupled systems. They provide back-up, stand-alone electricity while also using renewable solar energy for our everyday electrical needs.
This combination of renewable energy and energy storage connects multiple inverters with maintenance-free batteries and opens the door to energy independence in a sustainable, low-carbon future.
Teachers, electricians, system installers, architects, owners of grid-tied systems and solar advocates will find the clear explanations in SAVING SUNSHINE helpful in learning the specifics of an AC-coupled system and how it forms a local distribution system to deliver electricity in a more reliable and environmentally friendly manner.
DVD / 2013 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 34 minutes
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By Beate Lendt
DREAMING OF A TREE HOUSE is a film about the pioneering community-building project of the world-famous architect Frei Otto in Berlin, called the Okohaus-an experimental, ecological, customized housing project in the city center.
Including interviews with Frei Otto, Christine Kanstinger-Otto, Hermann Kendel, Yona Friedman, Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, and other involved architects, planners, and inhabitants, the film shows the development and the philosophy of the project, which was built for the International Building Exhibition in Berlin 1987 (IBA).
The "Ecohouse" project hosts a number of experimental solutions to adaptable home building and personalization. The film explores the ideas that motivated the project, its underlying sustainability themes, and asks how these ambitions were realized.
DREAMING OF A TREE HOUSE ultimately asks: What can we learn from the Okohaus? How can its design, building process, and the experience of its 20-plus year occupation inform ecological and design issues currently relevant to our society?
DVD (Color) / 2011 / 85 minutes
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By Marie Monique Robin
OUR DAILY POISON-a shocking documentary film that reveals a broken safety system concerned more with protecting trade secrets than human health. (In one key moment, a member of the UN agency responsible for setting acceptable daily limits of poisonous chemicals admits that the numbers are "theoretical" and have "nothing to do with the real world.") The film shows that the main cause of the epidemic is environmental: it is the result of the 100,000 chemical molecules that have invaded our environment, and primarily our food, since the end of the Second World War.
The film is divided into three distinct, but interrelated sections, making it ideal for classroom use. In the first, Robin meets farmers suffering horrific health problems-such as leukemia, Parkinson's, and brain lesions-linked to pesticide poisoning, and looks into the effects those same pesticides have on people eating fruits and vegetables.
Robin then moves on to the broken regulatory regime, using the artificial sweetener Aspartame as a case study. It is a cautionary tale about the revolving door between government and industry, and the influence of money on research findings. Finally, OUR DAILY POISON reveals the inadequacies of testing individual compounds in a world where everyone carries around a cocktail of synthetic chemicals absorbed from food and the environment-many of them mimicking the body's own hormones.
OUR DAILY POISON is a smart, well-researched and thoroughly compelling documentary that will reshape the way you think about everyday products and the systems that are supposed to ensure their safety. It explores ways in which people can protect themselves by strengthening their immune mechanisms, through food, as demonstrated by many scientific studies (whose findings are rejected by the pharmaceutical industry).
DVD (Color) / 2011 / 112 minutes
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Investigates the looming collapse of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna stocks and the role EU policies have played in the crisis.
With growing global appetite for sushi, bluefin tuna is big business--one fish can sell for up to a hundred thousand dollars. But scientists and environmentalists now argue that Atlantic bluefin-- the kind caught in the Mediterranean--is on the verge of collapse, and that the rules designed to protect them aren't working. At the heart of the dispute over bluefin tuna regulation is the European Union. Its member states include big fishing countries like France, Spain, and Italy. For the EU, the task is to prevent a final, and terminal, collapse of bluefin stocks. Looting the Seas investigates why, and reveals a world where even the experts seem unable to agree how to ensure the sustainability of Atlantic bluefin stocks.
DVD / 2010 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 26 minutes
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Directed by Yves Billy
Could the bluish-green liquid sloshing around in a laboratory beaker save the world from climate change? The liquid is an algae-based bio-fuel, and scientist Steve Mayfield believes it is a sign that a post-carbon future is drawing closer.
If we're going to avoid catastrophic climate change, we will need to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But which alternatives are the most promising?
POST-CARBON FUTURES, examines the options&mdashfrom massive wind and solar projects, to re-engineering the planet itself, to more modest local efforts.
From his office in sunny California, John Woolard of BrightSource Energy sees the future in solar power. The company runs the largest solar plant in the US. Located in Nevada, it produces enough energy to power 15,000 homes. Woolard says we don't have an energy problem, we have a collection and distribution problem. But with 2,000 new cars hitting the road in Beijing every day, and China set to open a new coal-fired plant a week for the next decade, the truth is we will require far more energy than solar and wind energy can produce&mdashunless we want to cover the surface of the earth with collector panels and windfarms.
Some believe the solution lies in enormous, continent-altering projects&mdashsuch as a plan to blanket the Sahara in solar panels to produce electricity for Europe. Meanwhile, the developers of the proposed green city of Cao Fei Dian, 150 miles from Beijing, see the future in a city built from scratch on in-filled coastal land.
POST-CARBON FUTURES makes the case that we need a completely different approach to economic growth and prosperity&mdashthat geo-engineering and building huge projects simply in order to maintain a consumer society makes no sense.
British environmentalist Tim Jackson, from the University of Surrey, and French writer Paul Aries both argue that our current economic system has trapped us into needing to constantly increase our emissions. Aries, a leading advocate of the "de-growth" movement passionately argues for a re-imagining of our economic system&mdashnot just cutting back on emissions but redefining prosperity itself.
The film travels to the UK, where we visit the British "transition town" of Totnes, which is converting itself into an environmentally sustainable community, and meet permaculture activists in San Francisco who dream of turning the city's 1,800 acres of lawns into sources of food, fuel and fibre.
The Copenhagen and Cancun climate summits resulted in stalemates. But perhaps the focus on international treaties is misplaced. Maybe our best hope for bold changes lies right in our backyards.
DVD (Color) / 2010 / 53 minutes
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Directed by Ian Cheney
Blending seriousness and whimsy, filmmaker Ian Cheney explores the promise and perils of urban farming.
TRUCK FARM tells the story of a new generation of American farmers. Using green roof technology and heirloom seeds, filmmaker Ian Cheney plants a vegetable garden on the only land he's got: his Granddad's old pickup. Once the mobile garden begins to sprout, viewers are trucked across New York to see the city's funkiest urban farms, and to find out if America's largest city can learn to feed itself.
Blending serious exposition with serious silliness, TRUCK FARM entreats viewers to ponder the future of urban farming, and to consider whether sustainability needs a dose of whimsy to be truly sustainable. Featuring nutritionist Marion Nestle, chef Dan Barber, explorer Henry Hudson and a very lonely seagull.
DVD / 2010 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 48 minutes
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