Movie Review Friday: Human Planet

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film or television event with an environmental theme. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday.

Human Planet (2011)

Airs on the Discovery Channel Sundays at 8 p.m. through Apr. 24; available on DVD Apr. 26

It’s a slick idea: Turn the classic nature-doc formula on ourselves. The result isn’t, as one might expect, just another smarmy reality show. In the BBC’s capable hands, humans get the same treatment Planet Earth gave natural phenomena and Life gave animals. The finished product, an eight-part series, is as much art as it is documentary.

Tracking “the most remarkable species of all,” as the trailer calls us, into insane situations, we see humans fishing on the treacherous cusp of Victoria Falls, scaring a full pride of lions off its meaty prey, and enduring a 60-mile trek through icy Himalayan passes just to get to school. We see, basically, men and women conquering seemingly unconquerable elements — and sometimes each other — as they vie for dominance and survival.

The storytelling is expertly done, with well-informed pacing, unobtrusive narration (courtesy John Hurt), and adept use of music and slow motion. Human Planet owes much to its crisp, color-drenched cinematography; “wow” moments happen every few minutes. Behind-the-scenes clips show how frustrating, and how gratifying, it must be to work on these globetrotting BBC productions.

How to Host a Fractivist Party

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is well on its way to becoming a household term, but most people still don’t know what it is. There’s even a new term for fracking activists: "fractivists."

Fracking is a rock-shattering method of extracting natural gas during which hazardous chemicals can leach out and pollute both air and drinking water. Residents of a Pennsylvania town near a fracking site can light their drinking water on fire. Not exactly thirst-quenching.

When filmmaker Josh Fox was asked to lease his Pennsylvania land for natural-gas drilling, he got curious and embarked on a “cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination.” The result was Oscar-nominated Gasland, a film documenting the astonishing realities of the fracking industry and how they affect our health.

Shocked that fracking is allowed to continue? Or just want a free DVD? It’s your lucky day. The Sierra Club’s Hydrofracking Team is sponsoring Gasland house parties across the country. Sign up to host, invite a few friends, and the Club'll send you a copy of Gasland. Don’t feel like hosting? You can also search for a party to attend in your town.

--Sophie Matson

Movie Review Friday: John Muir in the New World

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme that's currently in theaters or on DVD---or in this case, on TV.

John Muir in the New World (2011)

Premiers Monday, April 18 on PBS; check your local listings for broadcast times.

 

Just in time for John Muir Day (Apr. 21), this reenactment documentary by Catherine Tatge follows the life of the pioneering environmentalist and Sierra Club founder from his arrival in the U.S. from Scotland to his peaceful death at a ripe old age. And if you thought Muir was an eccentric loner who wasn’t comfortable unless he was lost in the woods, well, you’re about right.

That isn’t to say his story isn’t truly inspiring. We watch a ginger-haired young Muir escape the clutches of his hard-line Calvinist father, for whom nature is the work of the devil and something to be conquered. Muir then goes to college, attempts to walk from Wisconsin to the Amazon, sleeps in a Savannah graveyard, and works in a factory. Along the way, his environmental ethic develops at approximately the same rate as his legendary beard.

Reenactment documentaries can suffer from leaning too much to the “reenactment” side of things, but John Muir in the New World sidesteps that pitfall by having been shot mostly on site in Yosemite and Alaska, where Muir did the bulk of his famous wanderings. Moreover, the only time we hear Muir’s “voice” is via his actual letters and writings. The result is a tantalizing and envy-inspiring view of what Muir’s life was really like.

Movie Review Friday: Earth: The Operators' Manual

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme that's currently in theaters or available on DVD. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday.

EARTH: The Operators' Manual (2011)

Airing on PBS next week

Few things are more frustrating to an environmentalist than encountering someone who denies the existence of climate disruption. In a new PBS documentary premiering next week, author and glaciologist Richard Alley, a member of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. climate committee, provides an arsenal of data and science to counter the skeptics.

Billing himself as "a registered Republican [who] plays soccer on Saturdays and goes to church on Sundays," Alley wants viewers to know that he's not coming from a place of political ideology. Instead, he presents a balanced and purely scientific account of why warming is happening, how science clearly indicates that it's human-induced, and what we need to do about it. Going beyond a basic recap of the greenhouse-gas effect, Alley provides a wealth of technical science — from carbon's different isotopes and their sources to an accounting of the global energy budget — in digestible ways.

Bird Cams Offer Rare Glimpses Into Avian Lives

In a 2.0 world, social media allows people to connect to new communities, ask new questions, and create new dialogue. But can social media help people connect to nature? That’s a central question for a host of websites that feature streaming video footage of animals (birds, mostly) at home in nature.

Bird cams let anyone with a computer play the role of Big Brother, taking a peek into the private lives of animals they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. Over time, bird-cam devotees become amateur scientists, making discoveries about bird behavior and asking questions typically posed only by professional ornithologists.

“Different pieces of information get picked up by different people and they kind of run with them,” said Patrick Keenan, outreach director for the Biodiversity Research Institute, whose website features live, streaming video of bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and loons. BRI’s cameras, installed in nests, have documented behaviors — like a rogue mink that pushed a loon off its nest to eat its eggs — previously unknown to science.

The cameras act as full-time monitors so scientists and the public can observe birds without having to camp out in a blind all day. “You have to watch the birds all the time and they can actually be very secretive,” Keenan said. Though scientists have used hidden cameras for years to spy on animals, streaming video makes it possible for the public to go undercover too.

BRI isn’t the only site on which to watch birds. Click through for a list of other popular cams:

Movie Review Friday: Dive!

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme that's currently in theaters or available on DVD. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday.

Dive! (2009)

Limited screenings available

 

Though dumpster-diving has become more popular lately, many people still cringe at the idea of scavenging for food from trash bins. Not Jeremy Seifert, who wrote, directed, and produced Dive!. It's an award-winning documentary about the amount of food waste produced by American grocery chains, a conversation piece that's as entertaining as it is informative.

The film’s modest budget ($200!) is inversely proportional to its message. Along with cute clips showing Seifert’s young son playing with food that Dad finds on dumpster dives, Dive! opens with some glaring statistics that become more monumental as the film progresses: 9.6 billion pounds of food are wasted in the U.S. alone, yet 854 million people continue to go hungry around the world. So where is all this food going? Into the dumpsters, of course. To prove his point, Seifert films himself and his “freegan” friends pulling out mounds of food every night from their local Trader Joe’s dumpsters, enough not only to feed their friends and family but to store in freezers to last an entire year.

Movie Review Friday: Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme that's currently in theaters or on DVD.  

Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War (2008)

Available on DVD

 

As if war wasn't bad enough already, now we have worry about the whales, too. An early segment of Alice and Lincoln Day's 2008 documentary Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives , a treatise on how warfare destroys the environment, explores the damaging effects sonar and underwater naval testing have on sea mammals like humpback whales, who use sound to communicate. Apparently, regular deafening bleeps from submarines discombobulate the whales.

This is only one example of how military activity disrupts the environment, which one commentator calls "war's silent casualty." The Days have a remarkable knack for finding file footage from all the conflicts they examine, and they get input from an incredible diversity of politicians, activists, NGO policy wonks, and veterans. Some of the topics we've seen before, like planes spewing Agent Orange over Vietnam's forests, but others will be new to some viewers: the total annihilation of olive forests across Afghanistan, which speeds desertification and ruins local economies.

The film visits battlefields all over the world, from Rwanda to Cambodia, as far back as the U.S. Civil War and as recent as our ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. Along the way, forests turn to deserts, animals are displaced, and children are born with horrific defects caused by chemical weapons.

Movie Review Friday: Rivers and Tides

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme that's currently in theaters or on DVD. 

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time (2001)

Available on DVD

 

For British artist Andy Goldsworthy, the natural world is canvas, material, and companion: "Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land," he declares at the start of Thomas Riedelsheimer's quietly expressive documentary. Goldsworthy's site-specific sculptures are formed from twigs, rocks, ice, leaves, and flowers. In a Zen-like approach, the artist spends hours cultivating moments of fleeting beauty: the mysterious shapes revealed as clay dries and cracks, the ethereal line formed by the sunlight hitting stretched wool at a certain angle, or the colors created by red-rock shavings splashing into a stream and dissolving. 

Though the footage of "finished" sculptures is stunning, the crux of Goldsworthy's artistry is just as apparent in the "failures." Every collapse helps him better understand the materials he uses. The fourth time a stone cairn collapses like a set of Jenga blocks, Goldsworthy muses, "I obviously don't understand it well enough."

To say that the documentary delivers a poignant message about humanity's place in an ever-changing world is to acknowledge that human existence is as temporary as a melting ice sculpture and that the environmental impact of a billion people is like the wave that overtakes Goldsworthy's beach sculptures.

But Goldsworthy's art is more joyful than either of those solemn, sweeping statements suggests. "It doesn't feel at all like destruction," he says. And anyone who has ever built a sand castle or knocked over a tower of blocks knows that there is a sense of release and an inherent humor in making something that will immediately be destroyed. Watching Goldsworthy build and set free his creations is a reminder that life, though brief, is beautiful.

--Della Watson

Youth Produce Environmental Change Through Film

 

Those who believe that the current generation is apathetic clearly haven’t heard of Youth Producing Change, a series of films presented by Adobe Youth Voices and the Human Rights Watch featuring stories by teen filmmakers across the globe. But many of them aren’t just filmmakers – they’re environmentalists as well.

Hands of Love tells the story of David Were, a teenager who lives in the largest slum in Kibera, where simply going to the bathroom can be a threat. After his father loses his eyesight in an attack, Were gathers up friends from his community and creates a clean-up crew solely dedicated to fostering a healthier environment. 

“We decided to come together and do something that the community can appreciate,” Were said. “We live in the second largest slum in Africa and don’t have good ways of disposing waste or cleaning the toilets. We took it upon ourselves to do something for the community because we didn’t want harm to come to anyone else.”

Daily Roundup: March 9, 2011

Techno-Fail: New studies suggest that the rebound effect, wherein consumers with efficient cars or appliances actually increase their overall energy consumption because of cost savings, is more significant than economists realized. New York Times

Mad About Trains: In true Mad Men style, actors Vincent Kartheiser and Rich Sommer have joined forces with U.S. PIRG and Funny or Die to create a spot touting high-speed rail. Mother Nature Network and Sierra Daily

Carbon Bull's-Eye: China announced targets for a five-year plan to reduce national energy consumption, in line with their goal for reducing carbon intensity by 40% by 2020. This is the first plan that sets an objective for carbon emissions based on GDP. Scientific American

Feature Film: The NYT’s piece on the Gulf oil spill, “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,” will be made into a movie, possibly directed by Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Huffington Post

Clean Plate Club: Americans discard 40% of the food we produce each year, wasting close to $2,200 per household, not to mention the energy it takes to grow, process, and transport that moldy cheese. Good

--Zoë J. Sheldon