*** Notice: For the protection of property rights, this catalog is available for online browsing only. Please drop us a line if you would like to receive a copiable version of this catalog. Thank You!

Environmental Issues

ANOTE'S ARK

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

ATOMIC HOMEFRONT

By Rebecca Cammisa

ATOMIC HOMEFRONT shines an urgent and devastating light on the lasting toxic effects that nuclear waste can have on communities. Focusing on a group of moms-turned-advocates in St Louis, Missouri, the film follows the women as they confront the EPA, government agencies that are slow to provide aid, and the corporations behind the illegal dumping of dangerous radioactive waste in their backyards.

Both a harrowing indictment of institutional misconduct and a tribute to the heroism of mothers fighting to protect their families, ATOMIC HOMEFRONT is essential viewing for anyone interested in environmental grassroots activism, government and corporate responsibility, and the effects of nuclear waste on human health.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 96 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BACKFIRED: WHEN VW LIED TO AMERICA

Directed by Dale Bell

Investigates the largest auto scam in the world, tracing VW's deliberate installation of defeat devices in their diesel cars to circumvent California and US vehicle emissions standards.

BACKFIRED: When VW Lied to America tells the inside story of the VW scandal as it unravels beginning at West Virginia University in 2013 where a group of unsuspecting students accidentally discover the defeat device while doing rare on-road testing. They immediately share their stunning discovery with CARB (California Air Resources Board) that verifies the findings and engages with the EPA and DOJ to plot carefully filing suit against VW's top executives. VW is slapped with the largest fine in US auto history: $15 billion in what's now known as "Dieselgate." And, it gets worse. Most recently, it was discovered that VW secretly tested emissions from defeat devices on innocent monkeys at a lab in New Mexico.

From West Virginia to California, to Washington DC, to Germany and Paris, we hear from those who broke the case and sought justice. BACKFIRED will leave viewers with new insight into the role of regulators, the power of money, and the willingness of major corporations knowingly to endanger the health of millions and to increase carbon emissions dramatically. Most important, it will inspire viewers to think about our obligation to our children and to continue the fight for clean air and a livable planet.

DVD / 2018 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adults) / 61 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

PLANE TRUTHS

Directed by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin

With the "Pivot to Asia" increased activity at the navy base on Whidbey Island, WA is making life unbearable for locals and wildlife - collateral damage in the ever increasing militarization of our society.

The recent expansion of Navy training activities in the Northwest has many local residents concerned. Will more of our communities become collateral damage?

Community members on Whidbey Island, the San Juans, and the Olympic Peninsula are disturbed by an increase in noise caused by new EA-18G "Growler" jets based at Naval Air Station Whidbey (NAS)--and a significant proposed expansion of daily Growler test flights. On Whidbey, communities have been additionally impacted by water system pollution caused by chemicals (PFOA & PFOS) used for firefighting on NAS landing strips.

PLANE TRUTHS explores a variety of perspectives on these issues from farmers, current and retired military personnel, environmentalists and other citizens of the affected areas. Viewers will learn how the noise of the Growler jets has affected daily life and business operations in many communities, about the regional environmental impacts of expanded Growler flights and newly approved Navy training in Olympic National Forest, the potential economic ramifications of increased Navy activity and associated population growth, and the status of--and Navy response to--water system pollution on Whidbey Island.

As the ideology of perpetual war becomes ever more embedded in our economy, communities near US bases here and around the world face similar problems.

DVD / 2018 / (Grades 7-9, Colleges, Adults) / 33 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

SEQUEL, THE: WHAT WILL FOLLOW OUR TROUBLED CIVILIZATION?

Directed by Peter Armstrong

Looks at the influential work of David Fleming, who dared to re-imagine a thriving civilization after the collapse of our current mainstream economies and inspired the Transition Towns movement.

Opening with a powerful 'deep time' perspective, from the beginning of the Earth to our present moment, this film recognizes the fundamental unsustainability of today's society and dares to ask the big question: What will follow?

Around the world, fresh shoots are already emerging as people develop the skills, will and resources necessary to recapture the initiative and re-imagine civilization, often in the ruins of collapsed mainstream economies.

We encounter extraordinary projects and people from four continents, from renegade economist Kate Raworth, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Gaian ecologist Stephan Harding to localization revolutionary Helena Norberg-Hodge, inspirational practivist Rob Hopkins, eco-pioneer Jonathon Porritt and philanthropist/composer Peter Buffett. They are cultivating a resilience not reliant on the impossible promise of eternal economic growth; developing diverse, convivial, satisfying contexts for lives well lived.

All were inspired by the posthumously published lifework of the late David Fleming, "Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It", a work of rare depth that is rekindling optimism in the creativity and intelligence of humans to nurse our communities and ecology back to health.

DVD / 2018 / (Grades 7-9, College, Adults) / 61 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

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 / (Grade 8evel: 10 - 12, College, Adults) / 147 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

AWAKE, A DREAM FROM STANDING ROCK

Directed by Josh Fox, James Spione, Myron Dewey

Record of the massive peaceful resistance led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to the Dakota Access Pipeline through their land and underneath the Missouri River.

The Dakota Access Pipeline is a controversial project that brings fracked crude oil from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and eventually to Illinois. The Standing Rock Tribe and people all over the world oppose the project because the pipeline runs under the Missouri river, a source of drinking water for over 18 million people, and pipeline leaks are commonplace. Since 2010 over 3,300 oil spills and leaks have been reported.

Moving from summer 2016, when demonstrations over the Dakota Access Pipeline's demolishing of sacred Native burial grounds began, to the current and disheartening pipeline status, AWAKE, A Dream from Standing Rock is a powerful visual poem in three parts that uncovers complex hidden truths with simplicity. The film is a collaboration between indigenous filmmakers: Director Myron Dewey and Executive Producer Doug Good Feather; and environmental Oscar-nominated filmmakers Josh Fox and James Spione.

The Water Protectors at Standing Rock captured world attention through their peaceful resistance. The film documents the story of Native-led defiance that has forever changed the fight for clean water, our environment and the future of our planet. It asks: "Are you ready to join the fight?"

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 89 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

COMPANY TOWN

Directors: Natalie Kottke-Masocco, Erica Sardarian

Crossett, Arkansas is home to about 5,500 people, one Georgia-Pacific paper and chemical plant owned by billionaire brothers Charles Koch and David Koch, and a startling rate of cancer and illness. This groundbreaking investigative documentary follows local pastor David Bouie as he fights to save his community. It offers a rare look inside a small town ruled by a single company, where the government's environmental protections have been subverted and ignored, leaving its citizens to take on entrenched powers in a fight for justice.

Crossett's residents are up against one of the nation's largest industrial company: Koch Industries. Pastor Bouie worked at the Koch's Georgia-Pacific plant for ten years, and on the street where he lives, 11 out 15 households lost someone to cancer. He seeks answers and actions to help protect the lives of his neighbors, many of whom have worked their entire lives at the plant, making products like Angel Soft, Brawny Paper Towels, Quilted Northern and Dixie paper cups. He galvanizes the town, revealing untold stories of health and medical crises.

Crossett is just one of hundreds of towns across America polluted by big business and failed by local, state and federal environmental protections. Company Town ultimately asks, what do you do when the company you work for and live next to is making you sick? It is the story of a modern-day David vs. Goliath.

DVD / 2017 / 90 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

EVOLUTION OF ORGANIC: THE STORY OF THE ORGANIC MOVEMENT

Directed by Mark Kitchell

The story of organic agriculture, told by those in California who built the movement.

EVOLUTION OF ORGANIC, which brings us the story of organic agriculture, told by those who built the movement. A motley crew of back-to-the-landers, spiritual seekers and farmers' sons and daughters rejected modern chemical farming and set out to invent organic alternatives. The movement grew from a small band of rebels to a cultural transformation in the way we grow and eat food. By now organic has mainstreamed, become both an industry oriented toward bringing organic to all people, and a movement that has realized a vision of sustainable agriculture.

This is not just a history, but looks forward to exciting and important futures: the next generation who are broadening organic; what lies "beyond organic"; and carbon farming and sequestration as a solution to climate change -- maybe the best news on the planet.

The film is divided into four "acts".

Act I: Origins - Looks at the beginning of the organic movement in California when the 60s counter-culture moved back to the land.

Act 2: Building Organic - Follows the development of increasingly effective organic farming techniques concentrating on the soil and the microbial life within it.

Act 3: Mainstreaming Organic - Organic booms, growing 20% annually for two decades.

Act 4: Organic Futures - The next generation of organic farmers as well as carbon farming and sequestering carbon dioxide hold out great hope for combating climate change.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 86 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

KEEPERS OF THE FUTURE: LA COORDINADORA OF EL SALVADOR

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

PATRIMONIO

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

REDEFINING PROSPERITY: THE GOLD RUSHES OF NEVADA CITY

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

THANK YOU FOR THE RAIN

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

TRIPLE DIVIDE (REDACTED)

Directed by Joshua Pribanic, Melissa Troutman

Exposes the mishandling and cover-up of drinking water contamination related to unconventional natural gas extraction - aka fracking - in Pennsylvania.

This award-winning "bombshell" documentary covers the impact of fracking in one of the country's most pristine watersheds. With exclusive interviews from oil and gas industry leaders, independent experts and impacted residents, TRIPLE DIVIDE [REDACTED] covers five years (2011 - 2016) of cradle-to-grave investigations that reveal how regulators and industry keep water contamination covered up.

The documentary's title pays homage to one of only four Triple Continental Divides in North America, a place that provides drinking water to millions of Americans, signaling to the audience that everything, and everyone, is downstream from shale gas extraction.

Award-winning actor Mark Ruffalo co-narrates this film.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 53 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BLUESPACE

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 includes both the original 73- minute version of the film and a 54- minute classroom version.

DVD / 2016 / (Grades 10 -12, College, Adults) / 73 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

DIVEST! THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT ON TOUR

Directed by Josh Fox, Steve Liptay

Chronicles 350.org's 'Do the Math' bus tour as it launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign onto the national and ultimately international stage.

As world governments struggle to meet the aspirational limit of 1.5¢XC of global warming agreed to at COP21 in Paris, a new campaign is targeting the fossil fuel industry in an effort to withdraw its social license to operate. DIVEST! Chronicles 350.org's 'Do the Math' bus tour across the United States in 2012 as it launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign onto the national and ultimately international stage.

Each night Bill McKibben and special guests laid out the findings in his landmark Rolling Stone article 'Global Warming's Terrifying New Math' and made both the moral and historical case for divestment. Three years later over 500 institutions representing over 3 trillion dollars in assets have committed to divest. The campaign is winning, but with the clock ticking down the question remains: will the victories add up enough to matter?

Featuring Naomi Klein, Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Josh Fox, Terry Tempest Williams, Winona LaDuke, Desmond Tutu and Ira Glass.

DVD / 2016 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 77 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

FOOTPRINT: POPULATION, CONSUMPTION AND SUSTAINABILITY

By Valentina 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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

HOMO SAPIENS

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

HOW TO LET GO OF THE WORLD AND LOVE ALL THE THINGS CLIMATE CAN'T CHANGE

Directed by Josh Fox

Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox contemplates our climate-change future by exploring the human qualities that global warming can't destroy.

In his new film, Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox (GASLAND) continues in his deeply personal style, investigating climate change - the greatest threat our world has ever known. Traveling to 12 countries on 6 continents, the film acknowledges that it may be too late to stop some of the worst consequences and asks, what is it that climate change can't destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away?

Featuring, among others, Lester Brown, Elle Chou, Van Jones, Elizabeth Kolbert, Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, Tim DeChristopher, Petra Tschakert.

DVD / 2016 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 127 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

CENTRAL PARK: THE PEOPLE'S PLACE

Director: Martin L. Birnbaum

Central Park: The People's Place is a loving portrait of New York's collective backyard. It is a biography of a living place that continues to evolve as the city changes. The documentary explores its historic creation as the first truly public park, its psychological and sociological significance, artistic design, and role as an urban oasis as the world becomes increasingly aware of the importance of green spaces. The film celebrates nature's seasonal changes with beautiful photography and original music that capture the 'good vibes' of a park filled with New Yorkers at play. Home to birdwatchers, sunbathers, kids playing, musicians giving impromptu concerts and big events like Shakespeare in the Park and the New York City Marathon, Central Park is central to the life of the city.

Central Park: The People's Place examines both the collective and individual experiences of Central Park, rejoicing in the diversity and splendor of an American experiment in social democracy

DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 97 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

FEED THE GREEN: FEMINIST VOICES FOR THE EARTH

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

SAVING MES AYNAK

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BANKING NATURE

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

SURVIVING THE TSUNAMI - MY ATOMIC AUNT

By Kyoko Miyake

Film director Kyoko Miyake remembered Namie, a fishing village ravaged by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, as her childhood paradise. Revisiting her family's hometown after 10 years abroad, Miayke's multilayered documentary examines the disaster's profound personal, social and environmental impact.

While Namie's younger generations have permanently relocated elsewhere, Miyake's Aunt Kuniko, like other older residents, has clung to dreams of eventually returning to her home. Over the course of a year, Miyake follows this warm, indomitable businesswoman as she recalls happy family memories and strives to adapt to life outside the contamination zone. In the process, Kuniko starts questioning her unconditional trust in Fukushima's plant operators and pro-nuclear past in a community that once hoped to house a nuclear power station.

A timely reminder of Fukushima's continuing meltdown, this insightful, often funny film offers fresh perspectives on Japanese national identity and today's most pressing global concerns around nuclear energy.

DVD (English, Japanese, With English subtitles) / 2013 / 52 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

***Price on web-site may not be current and is subject to modification by quotation***

Email :
inquiry@learningemall.com

Websites :
http://www.learningemall.com [ English ]
http://www.learningemall.com.hk [ Chinese ]

Follow us: