This week the Obama administration approved our nation’s first offshore wind farm to be built in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When completed, the 130 turbines will be able to produce enough electricity to meet 75 percent of the demand to the nearby islands. What an exciting moment in the environmental and sustainable energy movement! Though on the opposing side, there are local Cape Cod residents who aren’t very happy about seeing turbines in their distant horizon.
It seems like dirty energy has been getting a lot of attention lately and more documentary films are being made that expose their business practices and negative effects. Cape Wind will be joining a number of these films (inlcluding Dirty Business) at our Reel Engagement Residency next month in San Francisco. From stories of mountain top removal to natural gas drilling to mineral rights and land ownership, participating films at Reel Engagement will focus on the design of community engagement campaigns that explore the consequences of our relentless demand for energy and natural resources that reveal glimmers of hopeful change from the emerging energy revolution.
As Thursday is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re thinking about our impact in the sustainability work that we do, and the change that media projects like No Impact Man can spark.
How do filmmakers create an audience engagement campaign that is unique, yet has ties to a movement that already exists? Gillian Caldwell, Campaign Director of 1Sky, puts it simply when speaking about their partnership with No Impact Man, “It’s important that the relationship be reciprocal.”
Working Films and The Fledgling Fund are excited to bring you the second video in our series, No Impact Man: Activating Your Audience. It illustrates the benefits of mutually beneficial relationships and demonstrates creating opportunities for participation that extends the story beyond the film. Watch the video and find out how No Impact Man and its partners, like 1Sky, worked together to move participants from individual action to collective action.
Would you like to see the United States recycle just as much garbage as they do in Cairo? Then check out this Garbage Dreams widget. You can watch a clip from the award-winning film about the inspiring recycling practices of the Zaballeen in Cairo and sign onto a letter asking President Obama to support policies that will assure 75% of our trash gets recycled by 2015. Most importantly you can use the widget to sign up to host your own screening of the film and create an ever bigger impact with it in your community.
Please be sure to click on the share button in the widget and post it to your blog, Facebook or Twitter, or just pass it along through email so that others can check out the film and get involved!
The Age of Stupid hasn’t called it quits now that their film is finished and out in the world. They are broadcasting live from the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen with the aim to make “the most important meeting in human history comprehensible to people without degrees in hot air”. The filmmakers are working in close collaboration with NGOs to distribute the Stupid Show via the internet to a number of audiences and engage a number of global citizens in Copenhagen.
You can watch it live on the ageofstupid.net or view past shows. Tonight they will be talking to environmentalist, writer and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben.
The Stupid Show is hosted by oneclimate as part of their Copenhagen 24/7 webcast.
What do indigenous communities in the Amazon and a rather prosperous coastal town in North Carolina have in common? Not much you might think, and generally you would be right. There are certainly many differences, but it turns out that folks concerned about the environment and public health in Wilmington, North Carolina have much to learn from communities struggling for environmental justice in the Ecuadorian villages featured in the film Crude. A screening of Crude at the Cucalorus Film Festival in Working Films’ hometown of Wilmington, N.C. gave me the opportunity to make the connection between a powerful international David and Goliath story and local struggles to protect our health and environment.
Joel Bourne, and Andy Myers with me, Anna Lee
Crude is a real-life, high stakes legal drama that uncovers the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case in which indigenous communities are suing Texaco/ Chevron for the environmental, cultural, and medical devastation that the companies’ oil exploration have wreaked on their communities and land. We don’t have any oil exploration happening on the coast of North Carolina, but we do have a multi-national corporation called Titan America that has gotten 4.2 million dollars in tax incentives from our county commissioners to build the fourth largest cement plant in the country, right on the banks of the beautiful Cape Fear River.
For those of you that don’t know much about cement plants, they are coal fired kilns that spew particulate matter including mercury and other toxic chemicals into the air and water. In order to make the cement, companies have to quarry limestone, a process that has the potential to drastically deplete and pollute our local aquifer.
As part of the community events of Tales from Planet Earth, Troy Gardens and MACSAC participated as community partners in the screening event of What’s On Your Plate? along with filmmakers Catherine Gund and Sadie Rain Hope-Gund. What’s On Your Plate? follows Sadie and Safiyah as they talk to each other, food activists, farmers, new friends, storekeepers, their families, and the viewer, with a mission to understand the story behind the food we eat.
This film traveled to Madison a year ago as part of the build up to this festival to host a special rough cut screening for youth at the Sherman Middle School in order for the filmmakers to gain strategic feedback on how to make the final cut of the film appeal to youth – an essential target audience.
At the beginning of 2009, we hosted a strategy summit with the filmmakers and non-profit organizations focused on increasing access to healthy and affordable food; reducing obesity; and connecting local farmers to schools and families; in order to develop the audience engagement campaign by hosting. For us, it was really awesome to be able to see all the strategy and plans come to fruition and play out in front of us. It has felt quite gratifying after having participated in the work behind the scenes to then experience the film event with the audience of young people and their families.
Check out the video above, featuring an ode to dirt by youth gardeners, to get a sense of how the adventures of What’s On Your Plate? were connected to the adventures here in Madison.
Gregg Mitman thought Tales from Planet Earth would be a one-shot deal. The UW-Madison history of science professor and interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies was a principal organizer of the 2007 environmental film festival. “Opening night, there was a line two blocks long waiting to get into the Orpheum,” he remembers. He had anticipated 500 people might show up that first night. Instead, more than twice that number turned out. By the end of the festival, total attendance was estimated at 3,500.
Success like that has a way of turning one-shot deals into sequels. Scheduled for Nov. 6-8, this year’s expanded edition of Tales from Planet Earth represents a significant leap in ambition. Driven by the strong attendance of two years ago, plans for the 2009 festival have grown to set almost double the number of films on a cornerstone theme of “Justice.” Tales 2 also engages in close partnerships with nine community organizations, endeavoring to broaden the definition of environmental to include social aspects of the word.
“I would say you can’t tease those two apart,” Mitman observes. “We’re really trying to get people to reconceptualize environmental and social justice,” he continues, “emphasizing the idea that the environment is not just about wildlife and public lands but the places where people live, work and play.”
Huffington Post has partnered with the No Impact Project to bring No Impact Week to their readers on October 18th.
This summer, Working Films hosted a strategy summit for No Impact Man in preparation for Colin’s highly anticipated book, award winning blog, and companion documentary about his family’s year long experiment in sustainability. The summit brought together the creative energies of the No Impact Project with leading environmental organizations such as 350.org, 1Sky, Alliance for Climate Protection, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), Center for a New American Dream, Climate Counts, Food and Water Watch, ioby, National Council of Churches (Eco-Justice Program), among others. The goal from the start has been to support the movements to fight climate change, help people make their lives more sustainable, and curb mindless consumption.
“We want to spark a conversation about the way our culture looks at consumption,” says Arianna Huffington. “We hope that after focusing for just over a week on how our daily habits impact the world around them, our readers will see the effect our actions have in a new light. It will be very interactive and social – and empowering.”
Thousands have already signed up to participate, and today they launched a guide for No Impact Week that is available for download to make your week fun and meaningful. There will be plenty of opportunities to share your story on HuffPost Green, and many are already tweeting about it using the hashtag #nipweek and following @noimpactgroup.
On Earth Day many people are looking to environmental organizations to help them understand how they can reduce their consumption, stop global warming, and other efforts to improve the health of our Earth. These are important issues to tackle, but I find it even more exciting to discover organizations that are making additional strides to address environmental and social justice at the same time.
The Oakland Food Connection is an environmental justice organization in the Bay Area that brings together practical gardening, food security and nutrition to urban schools. One of their projects includes creating a rooftop vegetable garden at a local elementary school. I found out about this project on RyanIsHungry.com where Ryanne explains, “These vegetables will serve as more than just a healthy meal, they’ll help educate kids and their parents about the possibilities that exist beyond processed, packaged foods and the often limited variety of produce sold in stores.” It’s my hope that they will also be turned on to issues around industrial agriculture and its negative consequences that spans economic, labor, and the environmental issues. Check out the video to hear from the director of the Oakland Food Connection and learn more.
Other environmental justice organizations that focus on green jobs are also receiving more attention as the climate justice movement is growing. In the extra from the Everything’s Cool Activist DVD, Green Job Revolution , Van Jones who is the Founder and President of Green for All explains that there is only one solution to the ecological and the economic crisis: we need a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Green for All is at the forefront of the national movement to building an inclusive green economy.
Check out the Green Job Revolution video below to hear more of what Van Jones has to say and see what the Chicago-based organization Growing Home is doing to provide job training and create employment opportunities for homeless and low-income people in Chicago within the context of a non-profit organic agriculture business.
Solutions are rooted in every city and town in America. Today and all year long – since Earth Day is everyday – let’s support and celebrate efforts for environmental justice.
