By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

It’s the ecology… That might’ve been the mantra of the early 1990’s (instead of “It’s the economy, stupid!”) if more American public leaders besides Al Gore been heeding environmentalists’ warnings.

But now current films like The Age of Stupid, a terrifying backward glance from future decades, are trying to make up for lost time. This new documentary/dramatization, among many other environment films hitting movie houses and TV airwaves, are challenging our collective consciousness regularly – if not haunting it.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Midway into Ken Burns’ new ode to American history, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (starting on PBS Sept. 27), the filmmaker tells how the nation’s early park caretakers realize that wildlife is integral to preserving the parks.

You’d think this would have been obvious. But it came as an epiphany in the 1930s, decades into the development of the park system.

Oddly, until then, the public had been so busy ogling mountains and gaping at the exotic canyons of America’s national parks, that the animals seemed secondary, even incidental. Wildlife appearances were welcomed, of course. Bison wandering through a Rocky Mountain meadow enhanced the mountain vista beyond. Mountain sheep verified that one was high in the Rockies and the faithful appearance of the Yellowstone bears at the “bear dumps” or roadside feeding stops made an excursion to see Old Faithful complete.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby knew their documentary about ocean acidification would have to pass a high test to avoid overwhelming a public already challenged to understand many technical facets of climate change.

To sound the alarm about yet another looming global warming catastrophe, the potential destruction of all marine life, their film would have to be engaging, accessible, down-to-earth.

Happily, A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish succeeds on all those levels. Humanizing this critical issue like no previous film or book, it follows the soft-spoken Huseby on an odyssey of discovery as he meets with scientists and activists in Alaska, Seattle, California and Norway trying to understand the phenomenon of ocean acidification.

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From Green Right Now Reports

Downtown Film Festival–Los Angeles will hold its fourth annual Sustainable L.A. event, co-presented by arts>Brookfield Properties, on Thursday, Aug. 20, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 7+FIG at Ernst and Young Plaza.

This special event will be located at 7+FIG at Ernst and Young Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, at the corner of 7th and Figueroa Streets. A farmer’s market and product expo take place on the main level, while the speakers and films will take place at the 7+FIG Art Space on the second level of the center. A reception at the Festival Lounge at the AT&T Center will follow the event, beginning at 7 p.m.

“After four years, Sustainable L.A. is not only an important part of our Festival, but an anticipated event for environmentally conscious residents from all over the Southland,” event director David Andrusia said in a statement. “In the past, our mission has been to educate people about the value of sustainable lifestyles; this year, our goal was to make the event as do-it-yourself as possible so that people can learn exactly how to do so in ways that are rewarding, easy, and—yes—fun.”

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Food, Inc. could easily have turned our stomachs upside down. There’s lots of raw material – cows mired in manure, pig carcasses whacked about on conveyor belts, immobilized chickens locked in dark crowded coops – to make the point about how mass food production can be an unhealthy affair.

The film does dish up selected gross-out shots of slabs of beef, downer cows, dead hens and grimy CAFOs. There are a few gasp-aloud moments, such as when chickens are beheaded (inexplicably, this hard-to-watch scene is on a small sustainable farm operation). But the beauty of this wonderful documentary lies in its restraint. Rather than beating up corporate culprits Smithfield, Cargill and others with the big stick of blood and guts, Food Inc. strolls confidently and methodically into our packaged food wonderland, armed with words, telling anecdotes and revelations of corruption and greed that make its case more compelling.

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The Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

From Green Right Now Reports

This Friday is World Environment Day and the big event will be the global premiere of the environmental film Home. Narrated by Glenn Close and directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the photographer and author of Earth From Above, the film can be seen in movie theaters, on DVD, and for free on television and the Internet.

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By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now

Is there any more emotional moment on TV than when you hear the words “Driver! Move that bus!”?

Admit it, you love it. That’s host Ty Pennington’s climactic moment on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition every Sunday, when a family in need sees – for the first time — the beautiful, brand new house that has replaced their dilapidated, crowded or otherwise inadequate home.

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By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

These days it’s not just individual Hollywood A-listers who are going green in their personal lives; they’re taking the entire movie set in a sustainable direction. Some eco-driven insiders have even started up side businesses to complement their work in film. And who knows, with emerging companies like Film Biz Recycling in New York and EcoSet Consulting in Los Angeles, the industry may have just conjured up a new wave of green troops.

Shannon Schaefer, founder of the fledgling EcoSet Consulting (website still in progress), is on the front lines. During her stint as production secretary on the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man in Minneapolis last fall, she helped the Coens and FOCUS Features studio divert more than 11 tons of waste from the landfill.

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By Paula Minahan
Green Right Now

Piles of cracked and broken shells. Gnawed bones pushed aside. Remnants of what tempted with shameless excess. And in the background, a young Army recruit observes, “This is what we fight for, you know. Not so you can waste food, but so you can have plenty.”

It’s just another day at one of Sin City’s copious casino buffets as depicted in the award-winning documentary, Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas. The film, shown on PBS and at indie festivals nationwide, is MIT cultural anthropology professor and filmmaker Dr. Natasha Dow Schüll’s sometimes humorous, often outrageous look at American indulgence.

“Las Vegas is a great exemplification of things that are shared, that are afoot in American culture in a very extreme way,” says Schüll. “All over America, the buffet amplifies things endemic to our society. It doesn’t surprise me this kind of waste, which is celebrated as a public ritual at the buffet, is carrying over to the more private domain of the household. It’s very OK to throw out food.”

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By John DeFore

While you’re sitting around the table on Thursday, be sure that in addition to giving thanks for whatever combination of fowl and starches sits on the plate you also pay due respect to the water in your glass. As a new documentary insists, it’s not something to take for granted.

FLOW (the title’s an acronym for “for love of water”) is a frightening film full of outrages and dispiriting facts about the state of water here and abroad. Stocked with scary tidbits for Americans who take water safety for granted — Can it be that 40% of the brief but nasty illnesses we attribute to “something we ate” are actually caused by water? Can you believe that drugs like Prozac linger in the water supply so long they’re found in the flesh of fish? — it also travels to areas where the scene is more dire: Bolivia, where the World Bank’s insistence on water privatization led to horrible things; India, where dying of water-borne pathogens is commonplace.

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By John DeFore

The latest edition of an annual report by the International Energy Agency was released this week, and while the news may not be unexpected, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

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By John DeFore

James Bond has often fought men who sought to bend the Earth to their whims. But this time around, the evil scheme is a tad more realistic than a planet-sized death ray.

In the new Quantum of Solace, which opens tomorrow, the super spy’s personal vendetta (he’s hunting the folks who killed his girlfriend in the last movie) leads him into the world of a big-time operator named Dominic Greene, whose name lends itself to a glitzy organization, Greene Planet, that is ostensibly trying to help the environment and the world’s poor.

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