Documentaries and Videos Archive

A New Documentary Calls Out Drinking Water’s Impending Demise

The first voice you hear in the new documentary Last Call at the Oasis is Erin Brockovich's—the famed water justice advocate whom Julia Roberts portrayed on the big screen.

"Water is everything. The single most necessary element for any of us to sustain and live and thrive is water," says Brockovich as her voice plays over clips of water abundance—gushing rivers and streams. "I grew up in the midwest and I have a father who actually worked for industry ... he promised me in my lifetime that we would see water become more valuable than oil because there will be so little of it. I think that time is here."

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HBO Takes on the Weight of the Nation

by Sarah Henry, via Grist.org

HBO has a history of tackling important American healthcare crises. In recent years, the cable network has taken on addiction and Alzheimer’s to much critical acclaim. And now the network has turned its attention to another huge health problem: Obesity and its enormous economic, emotional, social, and health cost on individuals, families, communities, and the country at large.

As Americans have gained weight in recent years, rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other obesity-related health problems have also skyrocketed. Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”) rates are soaring among kids. And this is a generation that may well die at a younger age than their parents, largely because of medical concerns associated with excess weight.

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Liquid Batteries: Rethinking Our Power Grid

Donald Sadoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT, has earned a crescendo of recognition this year for his pioneering work on an entirely new type of battery, one based on floating layers of high-temperature molten metal and salt.

The battery could provide electricity storage on a scale useful to major electric utilities—allowing them to store energy whenever it’s available and cheap, and then pump it back into the grid when it’s most needed. Such storage capability could be the key to making intermittent sources of power—such as sun, wind and tides—a reliable part of the world’s energy supply.

The innovative approach earned Sadoway a coveted spot at this year’s TED talks; a video of his remarks [below] garnered more than 440,000 views in its first three weeks online.

What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage—so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap."

Source: MIT News Office

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Crying Fowl: The Backyard Chicken Underground

by Daniel Klein, via The Perennial Plate

The backyard chicken trend is becoming more and more prevalent these days. But in many North American cities, keeping a flock of hens is still illegal. We met up with some unlikely outlaws while traveling through Tennessee who are breaking the law by producing fresh farm eggs, right in their back yard.

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The Push for California’s GMO Labeling Proposition

The recent FDA petition drive from JustLabelIt.org found that over 90 percent of American's favor labeling of GMOs. As you will hear in the video below, the BioTech giants are going to go into dis-information overdrive attempting counter this sentiment. (But the same survey also found that people aren't inclined to "swallow" the BioTech party line!)

The next GMO labeling battle ground is in California. The California Committee for the Right to Know is pushing hard to make a deadline of April 22, 2012 to gather 800,000 physical signatures to qualify a landmark initiative for the 2012 California Ballot. If it gets on the ballot and passes in November, this initiative would make GMO labeling a fact in the most populous state in the US.

Because this is a California Ballot Initiative, the campaign needs in-person, physical signatures. These signatures cannot be gathered online.

Visit LabelGMOs.org and find where you can go to sign the petition and find out what you can do to help. It's time to show BioTech that the citizen's pen is mightier than the corporate dollar

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Mapping Wind Energy as Art

Engineers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas from Google have produced as astounding personal art project called the Wind Map. It is a live visual demonstration of wind patterns in the United States.

According to their website, "Surface wind data comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. These are near-term forecasts, revised once per hour. So what you're seeing is a living portrait. And for those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum speed may occur over lakes or just offshore."

If anyone still harbors doubts about the usefulness of wind as an energy source, this map should allay them.

Below is a video capture of the map in action. Click here to visit the live site.

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Eating Alabama—A New Food Film

by Madeline Ross, via Grist.org

It seems like every month someone launches a new eating experiment. Whether it’s eating only food grown within 100 miles for a year, growing an entire family’s food supply on an acre in Appalachia, or raising corn in the Midwest, the modern food movement has been shaped around many such specific, time-bound efforts.

The new film Eating Alabama starts out along similar lines, as filmmaker Andrew Beck Grace and his wife Rashmi return to their home state of Alabama to film a yearlong attempt to eat locally and seasonally. In the process, Andrew sifts through family photos of farms long buried under suburbia, and travels the state interviewing the farmers scraping by in present day Alabama. The result is a film that artfully combines one family’s story with an in-depth look at a group of small farmers committed to rebuilding the local food system in the South.

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Secret of the Seeds—GMO Film Preview

At this year's Natural Products Expo West, documentary director Jeffrey Seifert played an excerpt from an upcoming film about GMOs (introduced as "Secret of the Seeds"), inspired by Haitian farmers who destroyed Monsanto's donation of 475 tons of genetically modified vegetable seeds after the 2010 earthquake. The film project is produced by Joshua Kunau and Elizabeth Kucinich (wife of Dennis Kucinich).

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Show and Tell: Making the Case for Organics

This child's experiment of growing sweet potato vines turned into an wonderful object lesson in organics.

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The Apple Pushers: Mary Mazzio’s Heartfelt Documentary

by Bruce Boyers

Several years ago, Mary Mazzio came to a crossroads in her life. Down one course her education would take her, as an attorney, into politics; down another, she could become a filmmaker. She ended up choosing the latter and could not be happier about the decision. “I’m so glad that I took this path,” Mazzio told Organic Connections. “You could only dream that you could create content that would actually motivate or inspire people. We’ve seen that happen time and time again, and there’s nothing more humbling or rewarding.”

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Michael Pollan’s Animated Food Rules

This video by Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle uses vegetables and stop-motion animation to illustrate Michael Pollan’s Food Rules in a wonderful and creative fashion. It has been entered in an RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts) competition. You can vote for it here: www.thersa.org/film-competition.

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GMO Foods: Labels Matter—Just Label It!

More than HALF the foods at U.S. grocery stores are likely to contain genetically engineered ingredients. And you wouldn't know it, because the FDA doesn't require labels for foods with genetically engineered (GE) ingredients--also called genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Sign the petition to demand that the FDA do its job and make labeling mandatory.at http://www.justlabelit.org. Over 600,00o people already have. Let's make it a million!

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GMOs—the Making of the Movie

Not long ago we reported on an in-progress documentary on the subject of GMOs, being made by filmmaker Jeremy Seifert. The genesis of the film was Jeremy’s reading of a news item that Haitians were protesting in the streets against Monsanto’s offer of earthquake relief in the form of 475 tons of genetically modified seed; it intrigued him enough to go down to Haiti and film the protesters. When he returned, he discovered that the majority of the American public were completely unaware of GMOs and the fact that biotech alterations were in most of our processed food. Thus Jeremy began his yet-unnamed film about GMOs and their impact.

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Message from Earth: Organic Matters

Anvil Knitwear Inc., a leading manufacturer of sustainable apparel, is being considered in the 2012 TED Ads Worth Spreading challenge, an initiative to recognize and reward innovation in advertising. The digital short, "Message From Earth: Organic Matters," was created to educate consumers to choose and farmers to grow organic, as well as draw a connection between what we wear and the environmental and social repercussions it has on the world.

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Fast Food, Fat Profits: Obesity in America

This amazing video gives an stunning and sobering look into the obesity epidemic in America, the complex causes behind it and some sensible solutions. It is rare that we have seen such a comprehensive, well composed and objective overview of the situation.

Obesity in America has reached a crisis point. Two out of every three Americans are overweight, one out of every three is obese. One in three are expected to have diabetes by 2050. How did the situation get so out of hand?

Fault Lines', Josh Rushing explores the world of cheap food for Americans living at the margins.

What opportunities do people have to eat healthy? Who is responsible for food deserts and processed food in American schools?

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GMO Labels Matter to Moms

Robyn O’Brien, mother, activist and founder of the AllergyKids Foundation shares her story on why she wants the FDA to label genetically engineered foods.

Join her — and over half a million Americans — in contacting the FDA to require the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods?

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Making a point about food waste

In a past article on Organic Connections, we covered food activist, Jonathan Bloom, and his book American Wasteland. The article and book talk about how America wastes a huge percentage of its food for a variety of reasons.

Daniel Klein is a chef, activist, and filmmaker living in Minneapolis. Daniel has been documenting his culinary, agricultural and hunting adventures on film in a series called The Perennial Plate, featuring long winters, urban gardens, ice fishing, slaughterhouses, foraging for wild edibles, and more.

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Why Twinkies Are Cheaper than Carrots

Why are Twinkies cheaper than carrots? Because we as taxpayers have already paid for the ingredients!

As we move into 2012, the subject of the Farm Bill and agricultural subsidies will again come to the fore. Here's a great video that makes the case against what has become the cash "cow" of the Big Ag world. We as taxpayers are paying for these subsidies, making these ingredients artificially cheap. About one third of the billions in farm subsidy funds go to corn alone, which is why high-fructose corn syrup is in almost any processed food we eat.

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Documenting the Realities of Farming

Agriculture is often painted in simple, black-and-white terms. On one side there’s the evil industrial-agriculture meat farmer, raising animals with inhumane practices, polluting the environment, eating up fossil fuel, and tainting products with hormones and antibiotics. On the other side, we find the sustainable practitioner, letting animals roam freely and graze, as nature intended, using no antibiotics (as they’re not needed in this setting), and creating a natural cycle in which pollution is not an issue.

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Rapping for Organics

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The Flavorists: Engineering Food Addictions

On November 27, 2011 CBS 60 Minutes ran a segment called "The Flavorists: Tweaking Tastes and Creating Cravings."

This piece gives a wonderful view of some of the inner workings of Givaudan, one of the largest flavoring companies in the world. Here's the clip of this segment.

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Documenting Young and Passionate New Farmers

Industrial agriculture has left our soil infertile, has destroyed biodiversity, and has produced foods lower in nutrients and abundant with pesticides. On top of that, according to the new documentary Greenhorns, the average age of the American farmer is 57. Where is the next generation of farmers, and how are they going to usher in a new age of sustainable agriculture? Greenhorns documents the answer. They’re here, they’re young, their farms are sustainable, and they’re passionate about what they’re doing.

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SNL Takes on Pizza as a Vegetable: Commentary from Seth and Kermit

Saturday Night Live weighed in with excellent commentary about Congress declaring pizza sauce as a vegetable. With $5 million spent by the processed food lobby to get Congress "thinking" this way, what could be more perfect that to have SNL show how lobbying can make logic disappear in D.C!

Editorial comments from Seth Meyers and Kermit the Frog just can't be omitted from the conversation about this!

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Michael Pollan’s Updated Food Rules

Michael Pollan is releasing a new hardcover edition of his 2009 book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, but this edition is illustrated by Maira Kalman.

Pollan is an author most associated with the food movement, with best-sellers like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food to his credit and his frequent contributions to blogs and food-oriented publications on topics like farming, health and eating.

In this new edition, Kalman’s illustrations are fun, light and personal—just the way eating ought to be.

Here's a video of Pollan reading a few of his food rules:

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Helena Norberg-Hodge: The Economics of Happiness

by Bruce Boyers,

Back in the early nineties, I had occasion to spend a fair amount of time in a Mexican village called Ajijic, on the shores of Mexico’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Chapala. Looking back, I can see now that I was there in the midst of a very pivotal event: the encroachment of a global economy on what had once been a thriving local economy. Daily, still making their way up and down the town’s cobblestoned streets were local merchants of all kinds, selling lake-caught fish, handmade furniture, ice cream, water and many other products. The weekly open-air market sold locally grown fruits and vegetables (the tastiest I’ve ever had to this day), meats, and handmade nonedible products as well.

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