Films and books
Books
Films
Books
Jane Goodall: Beyond Innocence
This second volume of Jane Goodall's autobiography in letters covers the years of her greatest triumphs and her deepest tragedies. During this time she made many of her most important discoveries about chimpanzee behavior -- including the dark discovery that like us, they wage war and commit murder. She gave birth to a son, Grub, but her marriage to his father, Hugo van Lawick, came to an end. When some Stanford University students working with her were kidnapped by guerrillas, she was thrust into an international controversy. She fell in love with and married Derek Bryceson. After surviving a plane crash with him, she realized that her life had been entrusted to her for a reason. A visit to an American laboratory where chimps were injected with HIV made that reason clear, and she began to dedicate herself not just to understanding chimpanzees but to saving them. Derek's death in 1980 was a terrible blow, but afterward she threw herself even more relentlessly into the battle to save our closest relatives and to repair the health of the planet.
Africa in My Blood told of a young woman finding her life's work in the place of her dreams. Beyond Innocence tells of the events that shattered many of those dreams and changed her from a rather private observer to a public crusader.
Jane Goodall: Harvest for Hope
A Guide to Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall with Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson (Warner Books, 2005)
For anyone who's ever wanted to know how to take a stand for a more sustainable world, renowned scientist and bestselling author Jane Goodall, with co-authors Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson, delivers an eye-opening call to arms that explores the social and personal significance of what we eat.
In Harvest for Hope, Goodall presents an empowering and far-reaching vision for social and environmental transformation through the way we produce and consume food. With practical, user-friendly chapters such as "Doing Our Part: Help Farm Animals Live Better Lives," "An Organic Wave Worldwide," and "Eat Local, Eat Seasonal" - and a comprehensive resource guide, readers will discover the dangers behind many of today's foods, along with the extraordinary individual and worldwide benefits of eating mindfully. Harvest for Hope uncovers the choices that support the greater good and will preserve our own health and that of future generations.
Daniel Quinn: Ishmael
www.ishmael.com/origins/ishmael
Ishmael is a half ton silverback gorilla. He is a student of ecology, life, freedom, and the human condition. He is also a teacher. He teaches that which all humans need to learn - must learn - if our species, and the rest of life on Earth as we know it, is to survive.
Quinn says Ishmael is a story about hope:
"I think we have a much finer and more exciting destiny than conquering and ruling the world," he says. "This book shows that we can learn about what that destiny is from the life around us - and in Ishmael it just happens that life speaks with the voice of a lowland gorilla."
Desmond Morris: The animal contract
www.desmond-morris.com/books.php
Renowned ethologist Morris examines the spiritual roots of the human-animal relationship and how humans have betrayed their fellow species in the quest for progress. Impassioned and highly readable.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal
www.islandpress.com/bookstore/details.php?prod_id=1668
In humanity's more than 100,000 year history, we have evolved from vulnerable creatures clawing sustenance from Earth to a sophisticated global society manipulating every inch of it. In short, we have become the dominant animal. Why, then, are we creating a world that threatens our own species? What can we do to change the current trajectory toward more climate change, increased famine, and epidemic disease?
Ehrlich, Paul R. - Ehrlich, Anne H.: Betrayal of Science and Reason. How Anti-environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future
In this hard-hitting and timely book, the authors challenge those who use appealing but misleading rhetoric - labeled "brownlash" - to downplay the reality and importance of global environmental problems. The Ehrlichs provide an eye-opening look at current environmental problems and the fundamental importance of the scientific process in solving them.
Films
Home
We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.
The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.
For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.
HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet.
Age of Stupid
The Age of Stupid is a 90-minute film about climate change, set in the future. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father, Brassed Off) stars as a man living alone in the devasted world of 2055, looking back at "archive" footage from 2007 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?
Green the last orangutan
"Green" - a film which needs to be seen
This is not a documentary for the faint-hearted but it is a documentary that should be viewed by as many people as possible. Winner of Best Documentary Short in the recent Durango Independent Film Festival, and directed by Moez Moez, "Green" documents the last hours of a female orangutan's life.
She is first seen packed into a duffel bag, her head bumping from side to side as she is driven in the back of a pickup truck. She is taken to a clinic but it is too late to save her. It is almost as though the life is being sucked from her as her environment is destroyed. She becomes just another victim of deforestation and palm oil plantations.
The film portrays the beauty and diversity of Green's once lush ecosystem through from elephants, a variety of primates to dragonflies. However the loggers soon move in and the destruction commences.
The documentary tracks each of the threats that orangutans face - from the timber industry supplying the exotic furniture trade or the pulp and paper market through to the palm oil industry feeding the insatiable demand for food, cosmetics and biodiesel. The illegal pet trade thrives in the middle of the destruction. The film also documents the soul-destroying situation of wild animals in captivity.
It pulls no punches. We cannot absolve ourselves from it as it is us, the global consumers, who are the cause. A list of "credits" at the end of the film runs through not only the various companies involved along the supply chain but finishes pointedly on "the consumers around the world." Unfortunately this is one credit where you won't want to take a bow.
Sharkwater
For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure. What it turned into was a beautiful and dangerous life journey into the balance of life on earth.
Driven by passion fed from a lifelong fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks historical stereotypes and media depictions of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of the seas.
Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world's shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.
In an effort to protect sharks, Stewart teams up with renegade conservationist Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Their unbelievable adventure together starts with a battle between the Sea Shepherd and shark poachers in Guatemala, resulting in pirate boat rammings, gunboat chases, mafia espionage, corrupt court systems and attempted murder charges, forcing them to flee for their lives.
Through it all, Stewart discovers these magnificent creatures have gone from predator to prey, and how despite surviving the earth's history of mass extinctions, they could easily be wiped out within a few years due to human greed.
Stewart's remarkable journey of courage and determination changes from a mission to save the world's sharks, into a fight for his life, and that of humankind.
The Cove
"Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, The Cove follows a high-tech dive team on a mission to discover the truth about the international dolphin capture trade as practiced in Taiji, Japan. Utilizing state-of-the-art techniques, including hidden microphones and cameras in fake rocks, the team uncovers how this small seaside village serves as a horrifying microcosm of massive ecological crimes happening worldwide.
The Cove exposes not only the tragedy of dolphin slaughtering in Japan, but also the dangerously high levels of mercury in dolphin meat and seafood, the cruelty in capturing dolphins for entertainment, and the depletion of our oceans fisheries by worldwide seafood consumption. We also see how the mandate of the International Whaling Commission has been manipulated by the Japanese Fisheries Agency for its benefit and its subsequent effect on the rest of the world."
NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD!
www.amazon.com
Synthetic Sea-Plastic in the open Ocean
"...for every 6 pounds of plastic that we got, there was only one pound of zooplankton."
Captain Charles Moore
www.algalita.org/pelagic-plastic-voyages.html
www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Synthetic-Sea-Moore.htm
Plastic resin pellets, "nurdles" absorb and bioconcentrate toxins such as PCB and DDE up to 1,000,000 times their levels in ambient sea water.
The American people produce 100 billion pounds of small plastic pellets each year. This stuff never goes away. The environment is filling up with it. Plastic toys don't last very long, do they? Not as usable toys they don't, but as bits and pieces of plastic junk, they do. Not all this plastic makes it to landfills; indeed not all the raw material even makes it to manufacturing plants. The most common contaminant on Orange County Beaches is preproduction plastic pellets.
