Playlist
<p>Children living on a former naval base re-imagine the threat of radioactive waste buried beneath their homes. In this collision of fantasy and realism, underlying environmental and class issues come to the fore in the psyches of Treasure Island's youngest residents</p>
<p>High school student and poet, Chasity Hunter, experienced intense flooding in her New Orleans neighborhood during both Hurricane Katrina and recent summer rainstorms. Inspired to find out how safe her city really is, she investigates her city’s infrastructure and questions water experts, finding her own voice along the way.</p>
<p>In times past an anarchist community of pirates called Madagascar home. It was an island beyond the law and off the map, a place of rogues, booty and bounties. These were outlaws moored on a marooned ecosystem. Set adrift 88 million years ago, the island is a castaway in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a band of ecological stowaways. In this splendid isolation it has evolved into an unparalleled wonderland of the weird and unique, diverse and unbelievable.</p> <p>A political coup in 2009 left the country adrift once more – isolated from the international community, deprived of foreign aid and conservation funding. One of the planet’s most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and luxury. Amidst political uncertainty, the island’s fragile and unique ecology is being smuggled out illegally, boat by boat, gem by gem.</p> <p>www.tobysmith.com<br /> www.unknownfieldsdivision.com</p>
<p>Mama Qota is a seventeen minute documentary interviewing Aymaran men (native Peruvians) in thier own language (subtitles in English). These community representatives (the women wouldn’t speak on camera) illuminate our understanding of how this culture relates to the lakes in thier home land as an extension of thier own bodies, and as a spiritual source as well as ending ground. Marina Morikawa is a modern day environmental scientist who has been miraculously successful cleaning the pollution of these water bodies using natural methods. He is also interviewed, revealing a similar understanding of how we are mirrors of our Earth.</p>
<p>Desertification in Kenya resulting from unsustainable development and use of trees for firewood, has caused substantial environmental damage such as Drought, land erosion, dried up river bed due to insufficient amount of rain and lose of wildlife and birds; Social damage such as families going hungry because their crops have failed, villagers having to walk long distance to find water or firewood and villages losing their land to developers.</p> <p>One woman, Wangari Maathai, decided to empower communities by giving them the tools and knowledge to replant the country with trees creating ʻgreen beltsʼ of forest, especially in the mountain catchment areas where rivers flow from, in order to prevent further environmental damage- soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, clean water. Women are supported through the scheme to nurture seedlings in tree nurseries and planting trees, through a sustainable and viable framework. The long-term vision of the Green Belt movement is to create a movement beyond our 4000 community groups and plant 10 billion trees in Kenya. What started as a simple tree planting programme became a movement that helped bring about democracy in Kenya.</p>
<p>Gustavo Londoño hunts birds’ nests in the Manú National Park in Peru. He rigs them with cameras to identify what predators eat eggs and chicks. His research results suggest surprising challenges that some birds will face as the region warms further.</p> <p>Director | Daniel Grossman<br /> Editor | Simon Werdmuller von Elgg<br /> Music | Cedric Conti</p> <p><strong>Daniel Grossman </strong>has been a print journalist and radio and web producer for 30 years. He has reported from all seven continents including from near both the south and north poles. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and a B.S. in physics, both from MIT. He was has been awarded a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship. He is author of Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise, and coauthor of A Scientist’s Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists.</p>
<p> A busy drop of water showing some of the stunning diversity of the microbial world. Here there are many different types of ciliates, bacteria, flagellates and microscopic animals, all coexisting in a few microliters of water.</p>
<p>The journey of the Fungus on its hunt for the perfect Algal mate punctuated by events that occur in the Lichen lifecycle.</p>