The Trailer for No Impact Man: The Documentary is Here
July 16, 2009
For everyone who has gotten sucked into Colin Beavan’s journey of living as green as possible in New York City via his blog No Impact Man, we’ve got a special treat: the trailer for the documentary of the same name.
Beavan is a writer who has set out to have as little impact on the earth as possible for one year. That means no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets…
From No Impact Man:
The way I see it, waiting for the senators and the CEOs to change the way we treat the world is taking too long. Polar bears are already drowning because the polar ice is melting. In fact, research shows it’s worse: they are so hungry, they are actually starting to eat each other.
I can’t stand my so-called liberal self sitting around not doing anything about it anymore. The question is: what would it be like if I took the situation (or at least my tiny part of it) into my own hands? I’m finding out.
Click the image below to view the trailer. An accompanying book will be available September 1st.
Link [No Impact Man]
Environmentalism Flows Through the Lineup at the Sundance Film Festival
January 21, 2009
The Sundance Festival itself might not be very green, but the lineup of films it’s showing this year sure is, with environmental themes showing up in at least 8 of them. The festival opened last Thursday and runs until the 25th, and is the scene of the world premieres of such anticipated films as ‘No Impact Man’ and ‘Earth Days’. And, these 8 films are just the ones that were accepted – many more environmental documentaries were turned down.
From CNET:
“We turned down about 50 environmental docs this year, and some really good ones. We didn’t get anywhere near that many in the previous two years combined,” said David Courier, a programmer for the festival’s U.S. and world documentary competition. “We’ve had a history of showing terrific environmental docs, but this is the year for it, for sure…It’s absolutely a reflection of what’s on people’s minds.”
Check out the descriptions below, courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival website.
The Beekeepers
The Beekeepers is an experimental documentary film that explores Colony Collapse Disorder: due to the changing environment, bees all over the world are dying. With beekeeping threatened with extinction, Richard Robinson’s film charts the history of this ancient profession, searching for answers to its current plight while daring the documentary form to be as artful and mysterious as its subject.
Who is the greatest swimmer of all time? Michael Phelps? Mark Spitz? If gold medals are your barometer, then maybe, but I’d like to see either of them drink two bottles of wine a day and still swim the length of the Amazon river. This feat is attempted by Martin Strel, an endurance swimmer from Slovenia, who swims rivers—the Mississippi, the Danube, and the Yangtze to date—to highlight pollution in the world. In his fifties and rather overweight, his treacherous journey brings him face to face with many obstacles, including water predators, rapids, and toxic pollution.
Flipper was one of the most beloved television characters of all time. But ironically, the fascination with dolphins that he caused created a tragic epidemic that has threatened their existence and become a multibillion dollar industry. The largest supplier of dolphins in the world is located in the picturesque town of Taijii, Japan. But the town has a dark, horrifying secret that it doesn’t want the rest of the world to know. There are guards patrolling the cove, where the dolphin capturing takes place, who prevent any photography. The only way to stop the evil acts of this company and the town that protects it is to expose them….and that’s exactly what the brave group of activists in The Cove intend to do.
Crude
Can 30,000 plaintiffs from five Indigenous Ecuadoran tribes find justice from Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil producers? Who is responsible for the unconscionable dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadoran Amazon, poisoning the most biodiverse place on the planet? Filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s latest documentary picks up the thread of the infamous “”Amazon Chernobyl”" case, a 13-year-old battle between communities nearly destroyed by oil drilling and development and one of the biggest companies on earth.
Possessing both a cosmic perspective that reaches into the vastness of time and space, and the kind of warm, earnest energy that inspires small revolutions inside human hearts, Dirt! The Movie offers an important and timely look at the vital relationship between those of us on Earth and something that is easy to take for granted—the soil upon which we tread. Inspired by William Bryant Logan’s acclaimed book Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, directors Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow employ a colorful combination of animation, vignettes, and personal accounts from farmers, physicists, church leaders, children, wine critics, anthropologists, and activists to learn about dirt—where it comes from, how we regard (or disregard) it, how it sustains us, the way it has become endangered, and what we can do about it.
Director Robert Stone concocts an inspiring and hopeful work in Earth Days, a feature documentary that recounts the history of the modern environmental movement from its beginnings nearly four decades ago. Environmental activism really began with the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and precipitated an unexpected and galvanizing effect on the national psyche. Told through the eyes of nine very divergent witnesses, including a secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, who actually cared about the environment; a biologist, Paul Ehrlich; a congressman, Pete McCloskey; and an astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, Earth Days is a visually stunning, globe-spanning chronicle of watershed events and consciousness-changing realizations that prompted a new awareness: the post–World War II American dream of a future world created by scientific progress, new technology, and economic expansion was rapidly changing into a nightmare.
The End of the Line
Sound the global alarm. Scientists predict that if we continue fishing at the current rate, the planet will run out of seafood by 2048 with catastrophic consequences. Based on the book by Charles Clover, The End of the Line explores the devastating effect that overfishing is having on fish stocks and the health of our oceans.
No Impact Man
GLOBAL WARMING! The headlines scream it; the thermometer confirms it; but few of us do much to address it. Author Colin Beavan and his family are pictures of liberal complacency—sophisticated, takeout-addicted New Yorkers who refuse to let moral qualms interfere with good old-fashioned American consumerism. Then Colin turns things upside down. For his next book, he announces he’s becoming No Impact Man, testing whether making zero environmental impact adversely affects happiness. The hitch is he needs his wife, Michelle—an espresso-guzzling, Prada-worshipping Business Week writer—and their toddler to join the experiment.
Link [Sundance Film Festival]
No Impact Man: The Cultural Barriers to Environmental Change
November 19, 2008
Colin Beaven, a.k.a. No Impact Man, pondered the social obstacles to environmental change on Monday, wondering why so many of his neighbors were so averse to seeing bicycles on his block. A woman who lives nearby threatened to have police remove one of his rickshaws from the sidewalk where he parks it, saying it makes the street look untidy and implying that the sight of it brings down the neighborhood market.
From No Impact Man:
And the thing is, the way that bikes are parked in New York City is kind of untidy. There is little dedicated space to park them so we New Yorkers lock bikes to lampposts and street signs and parking meters and scaffolds and railings and anything else we can find.
That’s cultural barrier number one: that the infrastructure does not exist to support change.
One of the biggest barriers to people turning to biking in NYC is the fear that their bikes will get stolen–nowhere safe to leave them. The good news is that new planning regulations will soon require every new building to provide indoor bike parking.
Colin noted that cars ugly up the streets more than bikes, and that a hundred bikes replacing a hundred cars would look far nicer. But, people have come to accept cars as a given, no matter how ugly they may be.
This is just one small example of how many social obstacles we will really have to overcome to push real environmental change. If people fight bicycles parked on the sidewalk, they’ll really get worked up about vegetable gardens in place of lawns, compost piles and other ‘unsightly’ things that are part of a green lifestyle.
Perhaps the biggest social obstacle is the fact that the mainstream public sees the green movement as an attempt to take things away from them. You know, that idea that we environmentalists just want to ruin everyone’s fun, forcing them to give up things they see as God-given rights, like driving Hummers around their bourgeois suburban neighborhoods and running the A/C with the windows wide open. We’re just a bunch of grumpy, Chicken Little commies, aren’t we?
Link [No Impact Man]
Photo credit: Colin Beaven
Help No Impact Man Fight Global Warming
May 26, 2008
Colin Beaven, also known as No Impact Man, aims to make an impact that will help the planet: he’s meeting with his representative to push a plan for an effective global warming mitigation policy and he needs your help. All you have to do is cut and paste the text he’s written into an email and send it to him so he can serve them all up to Representative Nadler. It will only take a minute of your time, and you might just win a copy of Morgan Spurlock’s ‘What Would Jesus Buy’ DVD.
Colin explains the policy he’s urging:
- Introduce, as soon as possible, a non-binding resolution to the House of Representatives asserting that we need a climate change mitigation policy with a goal of no more than 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide (read why here). Furthermore, the resolution should say that the United States must collaborate with the international community to achieve an effective successor to the Kyoto Protocol that will achieve the 350 goal or better (depending on how the science progresses).
- Pledge to support the 1sky.org policy platform that also includes creating five million green jobs (through, for example, weatherizing our buildings and manufacturing solar panels and windmills), and placing a moratorium on the building of new coal power plants.
- Pass on to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter addressed jointly to her and Representative Nadler, in his position as Assistant Whip, asking them both to push for the introduction of new and the strengthening of currently pending climate change legislation to reflect the crucial 350 goal. This means, at the very least, aiming for an 80% reduction in climate emissions below 1990 levels by 2050 and a 25% reduction by 2020.
Help him reach his goal of 3,500 emails! Visit No Impact Man for more information, and be sure to pass this post along to your friends to get them to send one, too.
Link [No Impact Man] via [Treehugger]
