Green Options

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.

During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.

Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.

The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.

After more than seven hundred hours of filming and editing, largely underwritten both by himself and those organizations supporting his visionary film-making endeavor, Chris Bedford has offered an inspiring documentary, Coming Home: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, where people are, once again, people, not reduced to “consumers” or “tax payers” (recently on the hook for billions of dollars of bailout money).

As an award-winning film maker for such films as What will we eat? and The Organic Opportunity, Bedford has honed his craft to capture both the pivotal work of the late E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and subsequent endeavors of the E.F. Schumacher Society and the creation of a local economy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

While viewing the film Coming Home, officially released at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I realized that this was no ordinary 37 minute documentary. It could very well be the start of a revolutionary way to view the local economy, starting with sustainable agricultural systems and the organic foods these farms provided to community residents and ending with BerkShares, a local currency. According to Coming Home, about 2 million BerkShares are now in circulation throughout Berkshire County. As of February 11, 2009, 100 BerkShares equal 95 U.S. dollars.

From provocative interviews, timely quotes and excerpts from E.F. Schumacher or from those in the community, Coming Home weaves a story of hope, empowerment and some practical ingenuity at just the right time when We the People are searching for solutions, turning not to Congress, but to our communities, and to Main Street, not Wall Street. Carefully selected footage and fine editing work makes for an engaging review, even for the most skeptical of viewers who may not see the power in communities that have their own farmers, radio station, interdependent retail district and currency.

Palo Alto, San Francisco and East Palo Alto (then, coming to a city near you)–Each year, the eleven year-old UN Association Film Festival chooses a theme related to the UN Charter, and this year it is “Blue Planet, Green Planet”.

Numerous other human rights issues will be addressed as well, but the environment and our collective relationship to it will be explored in all sorts of creative ways. And if you think that documentary films are like the “talking heads” we used to sit through in elementary school, be prepared to be very pleasantly surprised.

Between October 19th and 26th, the Festival will screen 41 documentary films from as many countries. Having seen at least a couple of the films every year since the Festival’s founding, I can tell you that great storytelling is great entertainment, and real life stories can be even more engaging than fiction.

Hopefully, the schedule of films in the main festival will be posted on the UNAFF site by the time you are reading this, but the general schedule is:

These facts may surprise you:

1.1 billion people live without clean drinking water.*

There are over 116,000 human-made chemicals that are finding their way into public
water supply systems.*

Water is a $400 billion dollar global industry; the third largest behind electricity and oil.*

Flow, a new film about the implications of the world water crisis, can help you wrap your head around those dismaying figures. The film, which opens tomorrow, investigates the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with a careful attention to politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Stories are told about how water has changed people’s lives and health, communities’ economies, and corporations’ bottom line. Throughout the film, we are asked to ponder “How did a handful of corporations steal our water?” and “Can anyone really own water?” For centuries water has been called “blue gold,” and after this film you will understand why.

Mark Twain once said, “Whiskey is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’ over.” In Irena Salina’s award-winning documentary, FLOW, which opens this Friday, the global battles to own, protect, and understand water are virtuously examined. Experts have labeled the world water crisis the most important political, social and environmental issue of the 21st Century, and with 3,900 children dying every day from water borne diseases caused by the lack of access to clean water, one can see why this is a critical issue.

In our conversation, Irena Salina shared her thoughts about the spiritual nature of water, the Earth’s fever, and what needs to be done to alleviate the crisis:

You spent five years making this film. Why do you think it’s so important for people to care about water?

The earth is made of almost 70 percent water, and we are made of almost 70 percent of it. Without it, we won’t exist. From the moment we are born, to when we are adults we are surrounded by water and it is one of the main things we need to live. And we need clean water because ever 8 seconds a child dies from diseases from unsanitary water. There is so much to water and most people don’t know about it.