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Dirt! The Movie

Dirt! The Movie
Related:  Justice/ Sustainability DocumentariesPermaculture

A Quiet Revolution: The Earth Charter and Human Potential | Resource Center A 30-minute film featuring three dramatic case studies of how individuals in India, Slovakia and Kenya have contributed to solving local environmental problems. Narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep, and featuring interviews with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other experts, the film's primary message is that even one person's action can make a dramatic difference. "...feeling powerless to affect the crisis facing humanity, many do nothing. But a growing number of ordinary people are carrying out a quiet revolution." "Sometimes I tell myself, I may only be planting a tree here, but just imagine what's happening if there are billions of people out there doing something. Just imagine the power of what we can do..."--2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai The film is now available in 8 languages--English, Japanese, Chinese (traditional), Korean, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. Click here to view the full video ▲ Back to top

When to Plant App When to Plant App The When to Plant app is available now for $1.99! Knowing the best times to start seeds, direct sow and transplant garden crops is key to growing a successful garden. Our When to Plant app — recommended in Wired magazine's App Guide as a Top Pick for gardening apps — gives you the best planting times for vegetables, herbs, fruit, cover crops and common companion planting flowers. By using your ZIP code and a database of almost 5,000 weather stations across North America, the When to Plant app locates average frost dates for your garden from the nearest station, and calculates the best range of planting dates for each crop. This app is a helpful tool for spring, summer and fall planting. The When to Plant app is available in the Apple App Store for $1.99 and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Here is a glimpse of the When to Plant app, plus more about what it can do: The app provides easy access to National Weather Service long-range forecast maps (U.S. only).

Car pollution, noise and accidents 'cost every EU citizen £600 a year' | World news The perennial complaint from drivers that they are excessively taxed has been challenged by a study which concludes that road accidents, pollution and noise connected to cars costs every EU citizen more than £600 a year. The report by transport academics at the Dresden Technical University in Germany calculated that even with drivers' insurance contributions discounted these factors amounted to an annual total of €373bn (£303bn) across the 27 EU member states, or around 3% of the bloc's entire yearly GDP. This breaks down as €750 per man, woman and child. The report recommends that such so-called externalities be factored into the cost of driving, noting that even the €373bn tally does not include costs from congestion or ill health caused by lack of exercise. The study, The True Costs of Automobility, accepts that such calculations necessarily have an element of approximation but give an important overall picture. He said: "Some 86% of passenger journeys and 90% of freight go by road.

Waste = Food Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun­gart to change their production facilities and their products. Watch the full documentary now -

The Green Cone is a backyard solar digester that reduces 90% of food waste This ingenious digester/composter, made in Ontario, is the simple, natural way to divert food waste from landfills. No matter how much I think about reducing food waste while shopping and cooking, there will always be food scraps left over. My town does not have green bins or organic waste collection of any kind, which means that each household is responsible for dealing with the piles of food waste generated on a daily basis – and I always have a lot, since I cook so much. There was a time when I tossed it in with the household garbage, but eventually I installed a regular black box-style composter. While I loved having a place to put most of the food scraps, there were still plenty of items that could not go in, ending up in the trash instead. Then I discovered the Green Cone. © Compostec The Green Cone has double walls that heat up in the sun, cycling oxygen to the chamber below that is humid and connected to the surrounding soil, and speeding up the breakdown process.

Climate Justice Advocates Slam Doha's Emerging 'Sham Of A Deal' By Jon Queally Climate Justice Advocates Slam Doha's Emerging 'Sham Of A Deal' By Jon Queally 08 December, 2012CommonDreams.org With terms like "sluggish" "tough-going" and "extremely sour" used to describe the tone and progress of the UN climate talks in Doha on Friday, the hope for an agreement that could actually meet the ever-escalating challenges of global warming caused by human pollution was seemingly at an all-time low. Climate campaigners and civil society groups are convinced that the commitments being exchanged among the international delegates are not nearly enough, exposing the ongoing futility of trying to get rich nations to take responsibility for their outsized carbon footprints or increase their meager financial commitments to developing nations. "The tone of the negotiations is extremely sour now," said Greenpeace international director Kumi Naidoo Friday morning. "As civil society movements," she said, "we are saying that this is not acceptable."

Green The Film Ollas: Unglazed Clay Pots for Garden Irrigation A Sri Lankan villager fills his olla Photo copyright © Craig Mackintosh I first encountered the concept of using unglazed clay vessels for sub-surface irrigation in Bill Mollison’s “The Global Gardener” film series. Mollison comments that the technique might be, to paraphrase, “the most efficient irrigation system in the world.” Ollas (pronounced “oy-yahs”) are unglazed clay/terra-cotta pots with a bottle or tapered shape that are buried in the ground with the top/neck exposed above the soil surface and filled with water for sub-surface irrigation of plants. Ollas may be the most efficient method of local plant irrigation in drylands known to humanity due to the microporous (unglazed) walls that do “not allow water to flow freely from the pot, but guides water seepage from it in the direction where suction develops. ub-surface irrigation as water oozes out of it due to the suction force which attracts water molecules to the plant roots. This video shows a potter’s wheel technique:

This Mexico City Building Eats Smog For Lunch There are plenty of architects these days who are doing their best to design buildings that are energy efficient and utilize green technology. And then there’s Allison Dring and Daniel Schwaag of the Berlin-based firm Elegant Embellishments. For Torre de Especialidades, a hospital with a new tower currently under construction in Mexico City, the duo has developed a tile called proSolve370e, which will cover the façade of the building. The tile’s shape and chemical coating will help neutralize the chemicals present in the city’s smog. Yes, that’s right, this building will literally eat pollution. Dring tells TakePart that Elegant Embellishments was formed in 2006 as a kind of architectural start-up to self-initiate projects that incorporate new and often invisible technologies. She adds that, “A common thread in our work is the visual articulation of technologies that have the potential to alleviate the ecological impact of cities but often require a reexamination of current practices.

Films For Action Presents: The Top 100 Documentaries Inspiring the Shift to a Sustainable Paradigm By Films For Action / filmsforaction.org Film offers us a powerful tool to shift awareness and inspire action. By hosting community film screenings and sharing them online, they offer a method to break our dependence on the mainstream media and become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait for anyone or anything. Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries below. Just imagine what would be possible if everyone in the country was aware of how unhealthy the mainstream media was for our future and started turning to independent sources in droves. Creating a better world really does start with an informed citizenry, and there's lots of subject matter to cover. Our society needs a new story to belong to. But most of all, we need to see the promise of the alternatives - we need to be able to imagine new exciting ways that people could live, better than anything that the old paradigm could ever dream of providing. Community Suggestions

10 Easy DIY Free Greenhouse Plans Gardening is a relaxing and rewarding hobby. If you are a person who seeks to be independent, a garden can help you achieve that. In that regard, growing your own plants or vegetables will be more than rewarding. And you don’t even have to stop when the cold weather strikes. Yes, plants and especially vegetables are sensitive to harsh atmospheric conditions, but that’s no impediment for you to commit to growing your own food and taking care of your own garden. 1. free plan 2. free plan 3. free plan 4. free plan 5. free plan

Adam Minter Adam Minter is an American writer and Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. He has covered the global recycling industry for more than a decade. His first book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade is an “insider’s account of the hidden world of globalized recycling, from the U.S. to China and points in between.” Your new book is called Junkyard Planet. The global waste, recycling, and refurbishment industry is the hidden, multi-billion dollar backstory to the familiar globalization tale told by Tom Friedman and other popularizers of the modern economy. Nonetheless, it’s a difficult story to tell, in part because most people come to the global recycling industry with preconceived ideas about waste “dumping,” exploitation of labor and pollution. How does China play a central role in America’s garbage exports? To be clear: the U.S. doesn’t export garbage to China. Today, scrap recyclables are the biggest volume export from the U.S. to China.

Wall of Films! | Over 500 Social Change Documentaries on 1 Page Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries above. Just imagine what would be possible if everyone in the country was aware of how unhealthy the mainstream media was for our future and started turning to independent sources in droves. Creating a better world really does start with an informed citizenry, and there's lots of subject matter to cover. From all the documentaries above, it's evident that our society needs a new story to belong to. The old story of empire and dominion over the earth has to be looked at in the full light of day - all of our ambient cultural stories and values that we take for granted and which remain invisible must become visible. But most of all, we need to see the promise of the alternatives - we need to be able to imagine new exciting ways that people could live, better than anything that the old paradigm could ever dream of providing. So take this library of films and use it.

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