Mountainfilm Blogs: November 2011

Wade Davis spoke at Mountainfilm 2011 about his work with Mountainfilm Commitment Grantee Paul Colangelo on the Sacred Headwaters of British Columbia. Now his book on the subject is available.

In a rugged knot of mountains in northern British Columbia lies a spectacular valley known to the First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. There, three of Canada's most important salmon rivers -- the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Nass -- are born in close proximity. Now, against the wishes of all First Nations, the British Columbia government has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. Imperial Metals proposes an open-pit copper and gold mine, called the Red Chris mine, and Royal Dutch Shell wants to extract coal bed methane gas across a tenure of close to a million acres.

Mountainfilm screened Danny Macaskill's Way Back Home in 2011. Now, he has another amazing bike film worth watching called Industrial Revolutions.

Industrial Revolutions is the amazing new film from street trials riding star Danny Macaskill. Filmed and edited for Channel 4 's documentary Concrete Circus.

With our symposium theme of population, we are paying particular attention to articles about the subject and both National Geographic and Grist are offering up extensive series on population that are worth checking out.

From National Geographic:

Population is a complicated topic. With the worldwide population slated to top 7 billion in 2011, we decided it was one we needed to tackle. But we wanted to do it in a way that gives readers room to think. We spread out our coverage over a year, with articles that take deep dives into specific issues—demographics, food security, climate change, fertility trends, managing biodiversity—
that relate to global population.

Read More

At the 2009 festival, Mountainfilm presented Howard Zinn's The People Speak. Directed by Squid Show's Sasha Cuccinello and featuring Mountainfilm guests such as Tom Shadyac, Josh Bernstein and Susan Saint James, the show consists of readings of first-person letters and speeches by historical figures including Sojourner Truth, Geronimo, and others. Now, you can bring this memorable show to your community with this The People Speak kit.

Mountainfilm 2009 and 2011 guest Bill McKibben has become one of the leading environmental writers and activists, organizing the recent Keystone XL protest at the White House. He recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Now filmmaker Stephen Thomson has combined McKibben's words with striking footage of the events he writes about. The result is powerful.

Tornadoes, fires, floods, crop failures—they’re all isolated events, right? This powerful video from Bill McKibben and Stephen Thomson helps connect the dots of the climate catastrophe.

In the U.S. 40 percent of all urban trips are less than two miles, but 90 percent of those trips are made by car. GOOD Magazine, along with CLIF Bar, has introduced the Two Mile Challenge to try and get more people to make those short trips on their bicycle. To further that effort, the magazine has offered up the GOOD Guide to Biking for the Planet, which has a lot of helpful information on biking.

From GOOD:

"Don't just run your errands—bike them! If you consider that each mile you travel by bike instead of car prevents one pound of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere, the benefit of bike riding becomes clear."
Read More

Roko Belic's film, Happy - which won the Audience Prize at Mountainfilm this past year - discusses international levels of happiness. Here is a chart rating some country's gross national happiness.

From GOOD.is:

Mean Happiness
For decades, the World Database of Happiness has tracked how happy people are - not at all happy (1), not very happy (2), quite happy (3), or very happy (4). As it turns out, most of us are mostly happy, even when things aren't going so well. Here's a look at how happy some people said they were (on average) over the last 30 years.

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Chris Paine's film Revenge of the Electric Car showed Mountainfilm 2011 audiences how the Electric Car transformation was inevitable. If you were inspired by the film and thinking about an electric car for yourself, here is a short video primer on Electric Cars from GOOD Magazine.

Tim DeChristopher is serving a two year term in Federal prison near Ferlong, California. In a recent letter to Mountainfilm Festival Director David Holbrooke, he wrote:

"Overall, I'm doing really well. The moving around before I got here was stressful but it's been nice to settle in here the last couple of weeks. In a way, I have been waiting to get here for over two and a half years, so I actually have a relieving sense of moving on with my life."

If you want to write him, you can get all the details here. Also, check out a recent interview Mountainfilm 2007 guest Jeff Goodell did with DeChristopher for Rolling Stone.

Explorer Robert Falcon Scott led a partly successful but ill-fated team to the South Pole, reaching it on Jaunuary 17, 1912. The problem was Roald Amundsen beat him there by five weeks, crushing Scott's dream of being the first. Scott perished on his return and there has always been an enduring mystery about what happened to some of the photographs he took. A new book, The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott has published some of the photos, excerpted here in the NY Times.