early fall 2009 series


On Christmas Eve, 1968, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration gave humanity its biggest gift. The Apollo 8 mission turned its eye away from the matters at hand, took a picture of the planet Earth hovering in space, and beamed it back to Houston.

The power of that image galvanized the environmental movement, and made people the world over understand on a basic level how interconnected we all are as residents in a fragile ecosystem. Its repercussions have echoed across the decades, and are still felt today as a new movement, with a keener sense of the globe's fragility, fights against global warming, pollution, habitat destruction and unnecessary wildlife loss.

In this calendar, we celebrate the activists who started the environmental movement in the '60s and '70s as well as the people who carry the torch today with gestures large and small. We'll also look at the increasingly treacherous survival of polar bears, and take a hard look at the pitfalls of gas drilling - an issue of immense importance to Upstate New York, where industrial-scale hydro-fracturing drilling of the Marcellus Shale is poised to begin.

We begin with a screening of Earth Days on Wednesday, October 14, shown in advance of Sustainable Tompkins' and the Finger Lakes Bioneers' major regional conference entitled "We Make Our Future," which will take place from October 16-18 at Ithaca College and feature a live-via-satellite presentation of the national plenary addresses from Bioneers' (www.bioneers.org) headquarters in San Rafael, California. Bioneers is a 20 year-old, global forum that focuses on practical solutions for people and the planet. Seven years ago, by linking nationally renowned speakers with local sessions, topical programming and experts on the ground, Beaming Bioneers Satellite Conferences began inspiring a potent mix of the 'globall - local' approach toward our many challenges. For more information about the conference, visit www.wemakeourfuture.org.

Earth Days is the moving story of the American environmental movement from the earliest awakenings stirred by Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring, to its triumphant 1970 Earth Day celebration and its increasing political victories throughout that decade - and to its faltering in the conservative era of Reaganomics.

We now find ourselves in a new era of environmental activism, where we talk as much about global warming as our own carbon footprint. One man who decided to deal directly with his impact on the environment was Colin Beavan, who took himself and his family on a year-long journey to discover just how much the choices of three people could help to save the world. No back-to-the-land hippies here, though - they lived in New York City, and Beavan's wife is a latte-swigging, Prada-loving editor of Business Week Magazine. Their journey in No Impact Man creates a thoughtful, compelling and genuinely enjoyable film.

Activism takes many forms, but the Yes Men have a style all their own. Pranksters who got their start stealing talking Barbies and G.I Joes, swapping the voice boxes, and putting them back on the shelves, they have evolved into impersonators of corporate spokesmen who use their stolen notoriety to speak truth to power. Whether stating on the national news that Dow Chemical will reimburse the families that suffered because of the toxic Bhopal gas leak (Dow stock tanked), or telling oil execs about the upside of Global Warming (victims can be used to make candles!), the Yes Men's audacity, as portrayed in The Yes Men Fix the World, is hysterically refreshing.

There isn't a lot of humor in Split Estate, an eye-opening look at the impact of gas drilling in the Midwest. The recent natural gas boom has billed itself as a clean alternative to fossil fuels and the beginning of energy independence, but the reality has been far more complicated, with landowners forced to accept drilling rigs right outside their front doors, groundwater becoming contaminated, and public health, especially among children, suffering. This isn't a Midwest problem, though, which will become clear when our screening of Split Estate is introduced by Helen Slottje of Shaleshock, a grassroots group of Finger Lakes residents who are concerned about protecting local communities and the environment from exploitation by the energy industry with regards to drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale.

Oil and gas development affects a wide range of people and creatures around the world, and Ice Bears of the Beaufort presents a colorful, intensely moving portrait of another population in danger. The polar bears in this documentary, shot by a single resident of an Inupiat Eskimo village, were abundant and thriving during the five years of shooting, but in 2008 Alaska leased the region for offshore oil drilling. Filmmakers Jennifer and Arthur Smith III '75 will present the film and discuss the situation.

The series is cosponsored with Sustainable Tompkins, Finger Lakes Bioneers, the CU Sustainability Hub and the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future.