Green Options

I am thrilled to report that the Dole Food Company has finally dropped their ridiculous lawsuit against the filmmakers of the powerful documentary Bananas!*. It appears that the courts have ruled that the fatuous defamation lawsuit of the criminally inclined Dole was proven to be nearly as lacking as the multi-national corporation’s integrity.

Just a few minutes ago I received this rather nonchalant tweet from one of the movie’s Swedish creators, Fredrik Gertten: http://bit.ly/IoQ96 DOLE dismissing the BANANAS!* law suit it seems.

Filmmaker Ken Burns’ most recent PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, is a stunning and utterly engrossing tribute not only to our country’s many awe-inspiring natural landscapes, but also to our nation’s fundamental democratic principles. Burns interviews scores of ordinary people, from park rangers and activists to journalists and historians, as they trace the origins of our greatest collectively-owned resources, and share their unique personal experiences in the vast beauty of our national parks.

“When we look at the parks and we look at the United States and we examine the whole idea of democracy, I think that the park experience is an exploration of the idea of freedom.”

-Shelton Johnson, Park Ranger

When dermatologist June Irwin first stood up in 1985 to speak at a Hudson, Quebec, town council meeting about the potential link between synthetic lawn pesticide and herbicide use and human and animal illnesses, she was written off as a flake. Irwin persisted, though, attending “every single town meeting in Hudson for six consecutive years - each time reading aloud a different letter with new observations and facts.” Eventually, she got her message across, and Hudson (population 5000) became the first town in North America to ban the use of these chemicals.

“What’s on Your Plate?” is a compelling new documentary that follows two eleven year old African American city kids, Sadie and Safiyah, as they explore their local New York food systems over the course of a year. The film accompanies the two girls as they embark upon a quest to learn more about food politics and the origins of what they are eating.

Catherine Gund, filmmaker and co-founder of the feminist [...]

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.

[UPDATE: Dolphin Slaughter in Taiji's 'Cove' Suspended]

A seemingly paranoid, ex-dolphin trainer slowly drives through a foreign land while being pursued by police and other locals may appear to be the start of a riveting spy thriller and in some cases that’s exactly what this film is but instead of drawing from the mind of Robert Ludlum, this situation comes from a real life deep dark cover up. Four years in the making, The Cove, surrounds the slaughter of thousands of dolphins in Taiji, Japan instantly thrusts viewers into a sort of Flipper espionage that not only rivets the audience but sends them on an emotional and educational rollercoaster.

The Cove refers to a sea inlet of the coast of Taiji where on the surface the town seems to embrace dolphins but in reality some of the local politicos as well as a handful of fisherman keep the dolphin slaughter a secret to not only most locals but the rest of Japan as well.

Lately the long foggy nights of summer make me wistfully yearn for the drive-in movies of my youth. Bad movies and sticky salty gooey food were merely condiments for the socializing that was really the main event on so many long ago August nights. Sadly, all of our local Bay Area drive-ins have gone dark years ago; however, this summer in San Francisco we now have something even better, the bike-in movies.

Throughout this summer the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is hosting a series of free bike-related movie screenings downtown at 7th and Mission Streets, right across from the Good Hotel. Once a month the hotel’s barren parking lot is transformed into a festive and inviting public space, where hundreds of people gather for free entertainment, socializing, and to eat tasty locally made snacks.

The “Story of Stuff“, with Annie Leonard, is another great educational short film from Free Range Studios, who also brought us an informative, witty and horrifying tour of factory farming in  “The Meatrix“.

This creative agency explains that they do not “work to sell products, they create work that sells ideas that build a more just and sustainable world”; and they are driven by a belief that “the right stories told in revolutionary ways can transform society“.

A new documentary film, “Food Inc.” exposes a frightening portrait of how dysfunctional and destructive our food system has become, and how dishonest corporations repeatedly compromise safety for profit. The movie illustrates how our nation is almost totally divorced from seasonal food, biodiversity and local production. We have entrusted the safety of our food system to a small handful of huge greedy corporations that are destroying us and the planet with massive monoculture factory farms and poisonous chemicals.

Looking for information on solar panels, organic vegetables, or endangered species? You go to one of your favorite green blogs, right? But if you’re looking for a film review, or a preview of an art exhibit, or information on pending education legislation, you head to a different blogosphere… unless it’s eco-focused, you won’t find those things on sustainablog or other environmentally-focused sites.

On Tuesday, the Sundance Channel quietly rolled out an effort to change that. Billed as “film, art, music, design and more as we see it - filtered through that space between the underground and the mainstream,” the new SUNfiltered blog provides an eclectic range of content… and, as with the company’s television programming, green is a part of the mix.

As a company with a sensitive finger on the cultural pulse, it’s no surprise that Sundance has made eco-consciousness a part of the new blog. Of course, you’d also expect them to hire a smart, savvy blogger with an eye for cutting-edge green developments to cover this beat, right?

You’d expect that. What you’ll get, however: me.

Host Sean Daily talks subject with filmmaker Irena Salina, director of the documentary “FLOW: How Did a Handful of Corporations Steal Our Water?” about the global water crisis and her experience making the film.

Wired Magazine referred to the documentary as the “scariest movie at the Sundance [...]