Online Resources (video streaming, etc)

Tropical Green 2006

In February of 2006, EEI and MDC hosted a two-day conference exploring sustainability in the South Florida region.

If you are on an MDC campus, follow the link above to links to digitized recordings of the seminars and workshops that took place.

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Affluenza

AFFLUENZA is a groundbreaking film that diagnoses a serious social disease - caused by consumerism, commercialism and rampant materialism - that is having a devastating impact on our families, communities, and the environment. We have more stuff, but less time, and our quality of life seems to be deteriorating. By using personal stories, expert commentary, hilarious old film clips, and "uncommercial" breaks to illuminate the nature and extent of the disease, AFFLUENZA has appealed to widely diverse audiences: from freshmen orientation programs to consumer credit counseling, and from religious congregations to marketing classes.

With the help of historians and archival film, AFFLUENZA reveals the forces that have dramatically transformed us from a nation that prized thriftiness - with strong beliefs in "plain living and high thinking" - into the ultimate consumer society.

The program ends with a prescription to cure the disease. A growing number of people are opting out of the consumer chase, and choosing "voluntary simplicity" instead. They are working and shopping less, spending more time with friends and family, volunteering in the communities, and enjoying their lives more.

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An Inconvenient Truth

Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late.

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The Corporation
WINNER OF 26 INTERNATIONAL AWARDS! 10 Audience Choice Awards including the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis. Taking its status as a legal "person" to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics - including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

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Cosmic Voyage

Written and Directed by Bayley Silleck
Produced by Jeffrey Marvin and Bayley Silleck
Narrated by Morgan Freeman

The Academy Award nominee Cosmic Voyage combines live action with state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery to pinpoint where humans fit in our ever-expanding universe. Highlighting this journey is a "cosmic zoom" based on the powers of 10, extending from the surface of Earth to the largest observable structures of the universe, and then back to the subnuclear realm--a guided tour across 42 orders of magnitude!

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Canticle to the Cosmos
With Brian Swimme

Canticle to the Cosmos tells the scientific story of the Universe with a feeling for its sacred nature. Brain Swimme, BS, PhD., featured in the BBS series Soul of the Universe along with Stephen Hawkins, hosts this classic series on the New Story of the Universe. Designed to be used as part of an academic curriculum, in small group study, or for individual enrichment.

12 -60 Minute Programs Include:

1. The Story of Our Time

2. The Primeval Fireball

3. Feast of Consciousness

4. Fundamental Order of the Universe

5. Destruction and Loss

6. A Magical Planet

7. Sex, Death & Dreams

8. The Nature of the Human

9. Fire in the Mind

10. The Timing of Creativity

11. The Human Story

12. A New Prosperity

Brian Swimme is a mathematical cosmologist of the graduate faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
 

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The Future of Food

There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.

Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.

http://www.thefutureoffood.com/index.htm

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The Global Banquet
Politics of Food

Part 1 Who's Invited?: Giant corporations allowed to control the world's food system through free trade policies. Timely and provocative, this video examines how the corporate globalization of food threatens the livelihoods of small farmers in the U.S. and developing countries, and how free trade is the route to mounting hunger worldwide, despite an overabundance of food.

Part 2 What's on the Menu?: Mass produced, low-cost food imports to developing countries; cash crop exports that deplete natural resources and render developing countries unable to feed themselves; and some genetically modified crops. Farmers, laborers, environmentalists, animal rights activists, church groups and students work to rewrite unjust free trade policies. (2001)

Cine Golden Eagle Award Winner. Creative Excellence: U.S. International Film & Video Festival

Study Guides
http://www.olddogdocumentaries.com/dg_gb.pdf
http://www.maryknollmall.org/studyguides/129_38.pdf

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The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos
by Brian Swimme
80 minutes

What does it mean to be human, to be alive on planet Earth in the midst of the vast universe as it is now understood? Cosmologist Brian Swimme takes us on an exhilarating journey in search of the new story that is developing in answer to this question. From the Milky Way to the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. Drawing on 20th century discoveries in quantum physics and cosmology, he presents a stunning perspective.

Highly Recommended - 3½ Stars - Video Librarian
Inspiring to teachers, college classes and the philosophically inclined. - Booklist
Bronze Apple Winner - National Educational Media Award

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The Next Industrial Revolution

Directed by Chris Bedford & Shelley Morhaim
Produced by Shelley Morhaim for Earthome Productions
Narrated by Susan Sarandon

While some environmental observers predict doomsday scenarios in which a rapidly increasing human population is forced to compete for ever scarcer natural resources, Bill McDonough sees a more exciting and hopeful future.

In his vision humanity takes nature itself as our guide reinventing technical enterprises to be as safe and ever-renewing as natural processes.

Can't happen? It's already happening...at Nike, at Ford Motor Company, at Oberlin College, at Herman Miller Furniture, and at DesignTex...and it's part of what architect McDonough and his partner, chemist Michael Braungart, call 'The Next Industrial Revolution.'

Shot in Europe and the United States, the film explores how businesses are transforming themselves to work with nature and enhance profitability.

Read More:
http://www.thenextindustrialrevolution.org/context.html

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OCA National Director Speaks Out on 'Farms Not Arms'

Ronnie Cummins is the Director of the Organic Consumers Association. Here he speaks at a Farms not Arms press conference in New York about the need to understand how the war is impacting the environment, social justice, organics and the sustainability movements. In this excerpt, Cummins focuses on the necessity for these various movements to join together into a united coalition.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_9317.cfm <http://alerts.organicconsumers.org/trk/click?ref=zqtbkk3um_1-f7x31f9x3343236&amp;>

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Sacred Balance - TV Series

In the past half-century science and technology have worked wonders – healing disease, extending human lifespans, cloning life-forms, communicating instantaneously with the other side of the globe. But along with all this progress there have been terrible costs: environmental, social, and spiritual.

In Journey Into New Worlds, the opening episode of The Sacred Balance, David Suzuki travels to Arizona, England, Massachusetts and to the Pacific Northwest rainforest in search of a new vision of the Earth and our place on it - a worldview we once had but seem to have forgotten. In The Matrix of Life, Episode II of The Sacred Balance, David Suzuki travels around the world, exploring our intimate relationship with water and air. In part three fire and creation is the theme of exploration and part four is titled "Coming Home."

This four-part series explores science and spirit and rediscovers the human place in nature. Thoughtful, revelatory, eye-opening, brain-opening -David's experiences leave the viewer with a sense of wonder for life in all its diversity and magnificence.
http://sacredbalance.com/web/series.html

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The Story of Stuff

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

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Super Size Me (2003)

From The New Yorker
Fascinating and nauseating. As a life-style stunt, the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats only at McDonald's for thirty days. It's not a happy set of meals: he puts on twenty pounds, develops heart palpitations, and is rendered impotent (much to the smirking dismay of his vegan girlfriend). While even "heavy users" of McDonald's don't eat fast food as often as Spurlock does during the experiment, he becomes an overweight case in point that Big Macs and their brethren have contributed to the supersizing and the deteriorating health of Americans. Even more worrying are Spurlock's forays into school cafeterias, which have become nutritional wastelands. He tells this toxic story with visual flair and the statistical punch of an inspired muckraker. And, if you want to eat something after the movie, be sure to look away during the shots of stomach-reducing surgery. -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
 

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Who Killed the Electric Car

With gasoline prices approaching $4/gallon, fossil fuel shortages, unrest in oil producing regions around the globe and mainstream consumer adoption and adoption of the hybrid electric car (more than 140,000 Prius' sold this year), this story couldn't be more relevant or important. The foremost goal in making this movie is to educate and enlighten audiences with the story of this car, its place in history and in the larger story of our car culture and how it enables our continuing addiction to foreign oil. This is an important film with an important message that not only calls to task the officials who squelched the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, but all of the other accomplices, government, the car companies, Big Oil, even Eco-darling Hydrogen as well as consumers, who turned their backs on the car and embrace embracing instead the SUV. Our documentary investigates the death and resurrection of the electric car, as well as the role of renewable energy and sustainable living in our country's future; issues which affect everyone from progressive liberals to the neo-conservative right.

http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

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