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The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet
In Heidi Cullen's new book, The Weather of the Future, she explores the possible ramifications that will take place if we continue to ignore global climate change. She uses sound science to predict the challenges we could face and paints a portrait of this future world that goes beyond hot summers. To read an excerpt from the eye-opening book, click here.
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Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa M. Hamilton
A century of industrialization has left our food system riddled with
problems, yet
for solutions we look to nutritionists and government agencies,
scientists and chefs. Lisa M. Hamilton asks: why not look to the
people
who grow our food?
In this narrative nonfiction book she tells three stories, of an
African-American dairyman in Texas who plays David to the Goliath of
agribusiness corporations; a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico
struggling to restore agriculture as a pillar of his community; and a
modern pioneer family in North Dakota breeding new varieties of
plants
to face the future's double threat: climate change and the patenting
of
life forms. In unique ways, these "unconventional farmers" reject
the
passive role that modern agriculture has insisted they accept and
instead reclaim their place as stewards of the land and leaders
within
society.
Threads of history and discussion weave through the tales,
exploring
how farmers have been pushed to the margins of agriculture and how
that
has led to the broken food system we grapple with today. These
unusual
characters and their extraordinary stories make the case that in
order
to repair the damage, we must bring farmers back to the table.
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Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, By Bill McKibben
Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben
offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those
warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge
that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only
unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly
melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human
has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still
recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.
That
new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs
large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans,
or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the
endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on
the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on
old habits any longer.
Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on
scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can
hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community
(in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to
weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is
our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.
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The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard
What’s in the Story of Stuff book?
It’s all the stuff you asked me about! After launching the Story of Stuff film, I received tens of thousands of emails asking for more information than I could possibly fit into the film. I wrote this book to explore these issues further with you and to share a journey both personal and material. While exploring where our t-shirts, laptops and books come from, I also share my own journey along the way. I share stories of how I went from being a high school kid interested in forests to an adult fascinated with garbage to realizing that the real solution lay beyond either of those issues in isolation.
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Change by Design, by Tim Brown
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation introduces design thinking — the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy.
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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.
In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context -- out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.
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HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard
The Story of Cosmetics
The Story of Cosmetics examines the pervasive use of toxic chemicals in our everyday personal care products, from lipstick to baby shampoo. Produced by Free Range Studios and hosted by Annie Leonard, the seven-minute film reveals the implications for consumer and worker health and the environment, and outlines ways we can move the industry away from hazardous chemicals and towards safer alternatives. The film concludes with a call for viewers to support legislation aimed at ensuring the safety of cosmetics and personal care products.
The film was made in close partnership with The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics a national coalition working to protect the health of consumers and workers by securing the corporate, regulatory and legislative reforms necessary to eliminate dangerous chemicals from cosmetics and personal care products.
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Food, Inc.
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli-the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising-and often shocking truths-about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
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The Garden
The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country's largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
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FRESH
FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across
America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the
rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and
confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental
pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging
healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a
future of our food and our planet.
Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and
activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award;
sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by
Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner,
David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.
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Oceans
Disneynature, the studio that presented the record-breaking film
“Earth,” brings OCEANS to the big screen on Earth Day, 2010. Nearly
three-quarters of the Earth’s surface is covered by water and OCEANS
boldly chronicles the mysteries that lie beneath. Directors Jacques
Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud dive deep into the very waters that sustain
all of mankind—exploring the harsh reality and the amazing creatures
that live within. Narrated by Pierce Brosnan and featuring spectacular
never-before-seen imagery captured by the latest underwater
technologies, OCEANS offers an unprecedented look beneath the sea in this
powerful motion picture.
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Dirt!
DIRT! The Movie--directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow--takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility--from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.
The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, "dirt is very much alive." Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. "Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt."
DIRT! the Movie--narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis--brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.
DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: "When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked." But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.
"The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again."
What we've destroyed, we can heal.
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Gasland
When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for natural-gas drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND.
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