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A Season for the Earth

RESOURCES


WEBSITES     FILMS     BOOKS


 

Websites

ENERGY & TRANSPORTATION

Car Sharing
"Get online" with a car sharing network and you'll get convenient access to a fleet of vehicles (cars, vans, trucks) in your neighbourhood and across the city - and pay only when you use them.

Building America
Building America is an industry-driven research program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, designed to accelerate the development and adoption of advanced building energy technologies in new and existing homes.

Energy Star
ENERGY STAR is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy helping us all save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices.

Transition US
The Transition Movement is a vibrant, grassroots movement that seeks to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. It represents one of the most promising ways of engaging people in strengthening their communities against the effects of these challenges, resulting in a life that is more abundant, fulfilling, equitable and socially connected.


ECONOMICS OF BEING GREEN

Green America
Green America is a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1982. Their mission is to harness economic power—the strength of consumers, investors, businesses, and the marketplace—to create a socially just and environmentally sustainable society.

National Green Pages
A Directory of products and services for people and the planet.

Living Economies
The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks with over 21,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada.

Small-Mart
Small-Mart is an initiative of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). The Small-Mart Revolution aims to improve the prosperity of every community, in the U.S. and abroad, by maximizing local self-reliance and opportunities for locally owned businesses.

Social Investment Forum
The Social Investment Forum (SIF) is the US membership association for professionals, firms, institutions and organizations engaged in socially responsible and sustainable investing. SIF and its members advance investment practices that consider environmental, social and corporate governance criteria to generate long-term competitive financial returns and positive societal impact.


EDUCATIONAL TOOLS

Ecoliteracy
The Center for Ecoliteracy supports and advances education for sustainable living. They believe that schools play a pivotal role in moving us beyond our growing environmental crises and toward a sustainable society. They recognize schooling for sustainability as a process that fosters abundant living on a finite planet and makes teaching and learning come alive.

H2O Calculator
Find out your water "footprint" with the H2O Calculator, and get water saving tips!

Recycle City
Fun, interactive site from the EPA with pictures and activities to help you learn all about recycling.

Story of Stuff
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute film that takes viewers on a provocative and eye-opening tour of the real costs of our consumer driven culture—from resource extraction to iPod incineration.


GUIDES AND TIPS

Better World Handbook
The Better World Handbook is the definitive guide for the average person wanting to make a positive difference in the world. Their intention is to reach people who normally would not consider themselves activists, people who care about creating a more just and socially responsible world for everyone but don't know where to begin.

Earth 911
Earth911 is an environmental services company that addresses solutions for products' end-of-life for both businesses and consumers. Find tips for reducing your impact, reusing what you’ve got and recycling your trash.

 

The Green Guide
National Geographic's GREEN GUIDE makes living in an environmentally-aware way personal, practical and positive. Not political or activist, the GREEN GUIDE is chock-full of simple, useful, ideas, broken down into achievable steps, that make going green a gradual and affordable process rather than an all-or-nothing plunge.

GreenLife
Daily green tips for living well and doing good from the Sierra Club magazine.

Live Neutral
LiveNeutral was created to foster education and action around the imminent problems of greenhouse gas emissions. They help make it easy for individuals and organizations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions directly and through participating in innovative market-based solutions to global climate change.

Recycling Guide
This recycling guide provides a starting point for consumers in the USA and Canada searching the net for recycling information. The information is for regular folks with regular household quantities of materials to recycle.


FOOD & AGRICULTURE

Food Routes
The FoodRoutes Network is a national nonprofit organization that provides communications tools, technical support, networking and information resources to organizations nationwide that are working to rebuild local, community-based food systems. FRN is dedicated to reintroducing Americans to their food – the seeds it grows from, the farmers who produce it, and the routes that carry it from the fields to their tables.

Food & Water Watch
Food & Water Watch is a non-profit organization working with grassroots organizations around the world to create an economically and environmentally viable future. Through research, public and policymaker education, media, and lobbying, we advocate policies that guarantee safe, wholesome food produced in a humane and sustainable manner and public, rather than private, control of water resources including oceans, rivers, and groundwater.

Seafood Choices Alliance
Seafood Choices Alliance helps the seafood industry— from fishermen and fish farmers to processors, distributors, retailers, restaurants, and food service providers —to make the seafood marketplace environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.Seafood Choices seeks to collaboratively find solutions that empower a responsible seafood industry to make positive change.


FORESTS

Environmental Papter Network
The Environmental Paper Network represents over 100 organizations working together to accelerate social and environmental transformation in the pulp and paper industry. Their goals are to protect the world’s last endangered forests, safeguard our global climate, and ensure abundant, clean drinking water and respect for community and indigenous rights.

Forest Stewardship Council
FSC is a certification system that provides internationally recognized standard-setting, trademark assurance and accreditation services to companies, organizations, and communities interested in responsible forestry.


NETWORKS FOR ACTIVISM

11th Hour Action
This community network was created to help individuals and communities take sustainable action on the local, regional and national levels. By providing a means for people to share their ideas and solutions within our framework of sustainability goals, they hope to encourage others to take similar steps.

Earth Action
EarthAction's mission is to inform and inspire people everywhere to turn their concern, passion and outrage into meaningful action for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world. EarthAction is the world’s largest action network with over 2,600 organizations in 165 countries and thousands of policymakers, journalists and citizens. They have carried out 84 campaigns since they began at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Earth Day Network
Earth Day Network was founded on the premise that all people, regardless of race, gender, income, or geography, have a moral right to a healthy, sustainable environment. Their mission is to broaden and diversify the environmental movement worldwide, and to mobilize it as the most effective vehicle for promoting a healthy, sustainable environment. They pursue our mission through a combination of education, public policy, and consumer activism campaigns.

The Climate Project
The Climate Project supports more than 3,000 diverse and dedicated volunteers worldwide who have been personally trained by former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore to educate the public and to raise awareness about climate change.

 

 

MISCELLANEOUS

Earth Justice
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.

Wiser Earth
WiserEarth helps the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build alliances. All tools and content are free to use. The site is commercial-free too.

 

OCEANS & WATER

Ocean Conservancy
Ocean Conservancy leads the world's most astounding grassroots cleanup effort. Every year in September, more than half-a-million people in 100 countries remove millions of pounds of trash from beaches and waterways all over the world—and collect data on what they find.

The Ocean Project
The Ocean Project advances ocean conservation in partnership with zoos, aquariums, and museums (ZAMs). We help them reach their millions of visitors and the public on the importance of conserving our ocean planet.

Oceanic Society
Established in 1969 as a non-profit conservation organization, the Oceanic Society's primary mission is to protect endangered wildlife and preserve threatened marine habitats worldwide. The Society works to establish protected natural areas, supported and sustained through scientific research, in cooperation with local communities.

Prevent Runoff
Guide to prevent contributing to polluted runnoff. States report that nonpoint source pollution is the leading remaining cause of water quality problems. These pollutants have harmful effects on drinking water supplies, recreation, fisheries and wildlife.


SPIRITUAL CENTERS

Cool Congregations
Take the Interfaith Power and Light Carbon Footprint Quiz!

Energy Star for Congregations
Most congregations can cut energy costs by up to 30% by investing strategically in efficient equipment, facility upgrades and maintenance. With free, unbiased information and technical support from ENERGY STAR, your congregation can more easily improve stewardship of your budget’s energy dollars, and of the earth by reducing energy waste and energy costs, while protecting the environment.

California Interfaith Power and Light
The mission of California Interfaith Power and Light (CIPL) is to be faithful stewards of Creation by responding to global warming through the promotion of energy conservation, energy efficiency and renewable energy. This ministry intends to protect the earth’s ecosystems, safeguard public health, and ensure sufficient, sustainable energy for all.

The Regeneration Project
The Regeneration Project is an interfaith ministry devoted to deepening the connection between ecology and faith. Our goal is to help people of faith recognize and fulfill their responsibility for the stewardship of creation. We do this through educational programs for clergy and congregations that achieve tangible environmental results and impact public policy.


YOUTH

Kids for Saving Earth
The mission of Kids for Saving Earth is to educate, inspire, and empower children to protect the Earth's environment. Kids for Saving Earth provides educational materials, posters, and a highly acclaimed web site featuring environmental education curriculum and activities.

EPA Kids Club
The Environmental Protection Agency's interactive website for kids. They'll help you explore your environment and learn how to protect it. They've got games, pictures, and stories.

Kids F.A.C.E.
The mission of Kids for A Clean Environment is to provide information on environmental issues to children, to encourge and facilitate youth's involvement with effective environmental action and to recognize those efforts which result in the improvement of nature.

New Thought Families
This is a place to pray and play knowing that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. This is a place in cyber space to circle up any moment of any night and day with like-minded community ... to remember who we are, why we are here, and that we are all children of God - of Source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Films

The 11th Hour
Produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio.  With contributions from over 50 of the world's most prominent thinkers and activists, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, and journalist Paul Hawken, the film documents the grave problems facing the planet's life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans' habitats are all addressed. The film's premise is that the future of humanity is in jeopardy.

An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth presents a convincingly rational approach to explaining the dangers of global warming. With the help of animator Matt Groening (of The Simpsons fame) and state-of-the-art flat screen monitors, the film lays out Al Gore's well-documented concerns that we are in the throes of a climate crisis that threatens life on Earth as we know it.

Arctic Tale
Arctic Tale, an animal-centric documentary, uses unadulterated authentic footage to capture close up impressions of of a walrus pup and polar bear cub. With these lovable tykes leading the way, the film swims directly and deeply into disturbing environmental issues like global warming and pollution and, most especially, the shrinking arctic ice.

Blue Planet: Seas of Life
This magnificent 8-part series contains the most awe-inspiring underwater photography ever filmed from every end of the ocean. Host David Attenborough swims with blue whales; we see the habitats of coastal creatures like seals, turtles and crabs; the polar bears of the arctic and of course the amazing sharks. But the real winner here is the expedition into the open ocean, miles beneath the surface, to film sea creatures that live in complete darkness, many that have never been filmed before. They are pretty gnarly looking and prove that real life is far more bizarre than anything Hollywood could cook up.

Blue Gold: World Water Wars
In every corner of the globe, we are polluting, diverting, pumping, and wasting our limited supply of fresh water at an expediential level as population and technology grows. The rampant overdevelopment of agriculture, housing and industry increase the demands for fresh water well beyond the finite supply, resulting in the desertification of the earth.

The Cove
In this heart-wrenching and eye-opening documentary, director Louie Psihoyos’ team of filmmakers and activists go undercover to expose the tragic massacre of thousands of dolphins in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji. The cruel slaughter and lack of response from the Japanese government and the International Whaling Commission are such powerful contrasts that Taiji’s sister city, the town of Broome in western Australia, recently severed ties with the Japanese village.

Crude
This David vs. Goliath documentary examines a decades-long battle between the indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon and oil giant Chevron over chemical contamination that the Amazonian inhabitants claim was caused by oil drilling 35 years ago. Filmmaker Joe Berlinger expertly depicts the tragic environmental damage, the complex legal fight that ensues and the heroes who fight against the odds to bring one of the largest corporations in the world to justice.

Dirt
DIRT! The Movie--directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow--takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth's most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility--from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation. DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: "When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked." But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action. "The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again." What we've destroyed, we can heal.

Fuel
Change your oil, change the world. That’s the message behind Fuel, the recipient of a Sundance Audience award and 11 standing ovations. Filmmaker Josh Tickell brings the issue of America’s oil addiction right into your living room by uncovering the rising domination of the petrochemical industry. But not all hope is lost, says Tickell, who argues that there are currently many solutions available to help power the nation with clean, renewable energy.

FLOW: For Love of Water
Irena Salinas' documentary is about the global crisis we face as Earth's fresh water supply constantly diminishes. The film presents top experts and advocates to show us that every aspect of human life is effected by pollution, wastefulness, privatization and corporate greed as it relates to a natural resource that's more valuable than oil. The film shows in no uncertain terms that if we continue to abuse our water supply, Earth will become uninhabitable and humankind will become extinct. The investigation points fingers at water companies such as Nestle, Vivendi, Thames, Suez, Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Food, Inc.
Those who still believe that their meat is raised on sprawling farms in idyllic lands would be wise to watch Food, Inc., which delivers on its promise to lift the veil on our nation’s food industry. Filmmaker Robert Kenner gives viewers a whole new perspective on double cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets by chronicling the many facets of society that our current agricultural system negatively affects, from local farms and oil prices to consumer health and worker safety.

Green: The New Red, White, and Blue
In this documentary Thomas L. Friedman explores various "green" and "not-so-green" technologies--hydroelectric, solar, wind, and nuclear power, hybrid, electric, and hydrogen-fuel-cell cars, clean-coal, bio-fuels, and energy-conservation methods. He looks at what works to reduce the output of greenhouse gases, carbon emissions and ultimately stop global warming and ensure political stability throughout the world.

Garbage Dreams
This award-winning documentary follows the lives of three Zaballeen — Arabic for “garbage people” — whose livelihood, sorting and recycling the trash of 18 million residents of Egypt’s capital city, is threatened when Cairo decides to privatize its garbage services. Director Mai Iksander'a documentary even caught the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which recently awarded the Spirit of Youth Association, where the boys receive training in the collection and reuse of trash, a $1 million grant.

 

 

The Garden
This Academy Award nominee documents one Los Angeles neighborhood’s fight to save their 14-acre community garden, the largest of its kind in the U.S. After turning a barren area into a vibrant garden that helps feed an entire community, the South Central Farmers must now keep the garden from being bulldozed by a wealthy developer. Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy's story is a poignant one of community activism, greed and the strength of the human spirit. (For a 10 percent discount on home-use DVDs and bulk DVDs, use the code "MotherNN.")

No Impact Man
Colin Beavan’s quest to lead a zero-impact lifestyle for one year results in a personal journey that shows how much we begin to appreciate the little things in life when we cut out all the unnecessary stuff — like $900 boots. Despite the message of reduced consumption, the documentary smartly avoids being overly critical by showing viewers both the benefits and difficulties of living a no-impact lifestyle.

Poisoned Waters
This in-depth investigation reaches into the far corners of America’s waterways and pulls out a wealth of disturbing information on the new wave of pollution that’s causing massive fish kills, mutating frogs and threatening human health. Interviews with environmental experts such as William Ruckelshaus, who was the first head of the newly formed EPA in 1970, provide valuable insight into the state of America’s oceans, rivers and streams. Best of all, you can watch it online for free, courtesy of PBS.

Sacred Earth
“Sacred Earth” is a revolutionary new program that goes beyond the discussion about the natural world and immerses you into an experience with it. The first in a series of films by Emmy Award® winning director Jan Nickman, “Sacred Earth” is a personal and profound journey through the natural world unlike anything you have ever experienced. A place in which by simply being there, you are changed.

Thirst
Is access to water a right for everyone? Or can it be bought and sold in the global marketplace? Those are the questions that people from around the world, and even in the U.S., face daily. Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman's shocking exposé of the escalating fight over safe, affordable drinking water will make viewers think twice the next time they take a sip from the tap.

Up the Yangtze
Up The Yangtze takes you cruising on China's mightiest river to meet people who's lives are altered by contstruction of Three Gorges Dam, built to harness hydro power. Effect on lives of countless citizens relocated from flooded river banks has been devastating. The dam's construction has played ecological havoc along the historic waterway's entire length. It's ironic that tourism Up the Yangtze swells as waters rise to forever engulf the famously scenic Three Gorges landscape. This film, which won several prestigious Cinema Eye Awards, raises questions about short term economic gains versus long term ecolological loses.

The Water Front
Residents of Highland Park, Michigan, known as the birthplace of the auto-industry, have received water bills as high as $10,000; they have had their water turned off, their homes foreclosed, and are struggling to keep water, a basic human right, from becoming privatized.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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