“We all live downstream from something.”

by Lauren Wissot

Premiering at this past Sundance Film Festival, Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce’s “The Atomic States of America” is now coming to a digital – here’s to iTunes and Netflix! – format near you. Unsurprisingly, given that Argott is one of the forces behind “Last Days Here,” last year’s winner of the music doc category at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (and for more on that flick, see my interview for Global Comment with Argott and his longtime editor and co-director Demian Fenton), “Atomic States” is a refreshingly entertaining look at a very thorny social issue. Based on Kelly McMasters’s memoir about life in her Long Island, nuclear-reactor hometown, the film eloquently universalizes the many risks of “going green” – or as McMasters likes to say, “We all live downstream from something.” I spoke with the passionate co-directors prior to the film’s (Sundance Institute Artist Services Initiative-enabled) January15th release.

FEMA is to the privatization of disaster relief what charter schools are to the privatization of public education

If you live in the United States, you almost certainly know that a big hurricane-turned-post- tropical-cyclone called Sandy hit the East Coast earlier this week. Unprecedented in size and scope, the hybrid storm, popularly dubbed a “Frankenstorm,” caused damage from North Carolina and all the way up through parts of Eastern Canada. More than 8.2 million people in the US lost power. Electricity is slowly being restored, and at this writing, the death toll has reached 55.

It no longer seems alarmist to conclude that London burning was a precursor of what is to come elsewhere in the industrialized world, including the United States.

Noyo Food Forest is working to show that there’s a place for everyone on urban farms, but everyone hasn’t gotten that message yet.

Walking onto the site of the Noyo Food Forest on the brink of spring, you’re struck by the amount of activity going on; beds exploding with vegetables, volunteers building up compost and weeding, starts bursting out of their flats in the greenhouse. Founded in 2006 by Katrina Aschenbrenner, Kim Morgan, and Susan Lightfoot, the Noyo Food Forest aims to ‘cultivate a healthy local food system by providing opportunities for education, social enterprise, and community involvement.’ The primary production farm is located along the eastern border of Fort Bragg, a small town on California’s north coast, right next to the high school.

What is the future of food production in a world of rapid climatic change and heightened weather extremes?

Maybe states can properly regulate fracking. As usual however, science follows our thirst for cheap energy rather than careful research and cautious treading.

The United States’ desperation for domestically produced energy continues to lead to destructive decisions that decimate ecosystems and human lives. Mountaintop removal coal mining tears apart the West Virginia mountains; a recent study has connected mountaintop removal with a rise in birth defects. Coal industry lawyers responded by blaming the defects on incest. Oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has resumed after last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. Former petroleum company employees staff underfunded and demoralized regulatory agencies. In the face of nonexistent national leadership on clean energy, Americans continue embracing poorly tested energy technologies with reckless abandon.

Fracking is a process by which millions of gallons of fluid are pumped down a well into rock. The resulting pressure fractures the rock, allowing wells to bring up difficult to reach natural gas. Supporters say that it provides cheap, domestically produced energy that we need for economic growth. They claim that burning natural gas is less deleterious to the climate than coal or oil.

Though he does refer to very recent pop culture and political examples, the problems that Žižek addresses are sadly likely to prove durable: environmental crisis, growing economic inequality, problems surrounding intellectual property, and advances in science that challenge our sense of what it means to be human.

Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, updated paperback ed. (New York and London: Verso, 2011).

Jokes about the Rapture express a deeper anxiety about the decidedly apocalyptic times we live in, expressing some of the often unacknowledged uncertainty about the sustainability of our current system of living.

While the West may go green, more mercury is discharging into the oceans and causing sustained pollution. By fueling the desire for cheaper greener electricity, we are literally poisoning ourselves.

Thomas Edison said two prescient things about the manufacturing of lightbulbs: “we now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb” and “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.” Edison’s dream is realised in modern compact fluorescent lamp bulbs or CFLs, which provide cheap light in homes, schools and workplaces. Indeed they are becoming so popular that the traditional incandescent light bulbs are disappearing from the shelves and the European Union, the United States, Canada, Cuba and Venezuela are adopting CFLs as standard.

By switching to energy saving bulbs, EU citizens will save almost 40 TW·h (almost the electricity consumption of 11 million European households), leading to a reduction of about 15 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year.

CFLs are popular, not only because of the cheap light but they save 80% of the energy of incandescent bulbs and last fifteen times as long. They reduce carbon emissions which is vital for planetary survival. CFLs produce less heat which can allow significant savings in air conditioning in certain climates. They also provide a feel good factor because switching to CFLs allows people to make their homes greener and contribute to the green movement.

Lauren Wissot talks to “Gasland” director about fracking, artistry and activism, and PR attack dogs.

I tend to prefer reviewing documentary features to fiction, not because of any affinity for reality over fantasy, but because a bad doc just tends to be less painful to sit through than a mediocre fiction film.  But when it comes to the nonfiction genre itself I have one very big pet peeve – activist docs done by lazy directors, who forget to explain why we should even care in the first place, thinking that simply putting forth rational arguments negates the need for pulling emotional heartstrings.  After all, Al Gore’s stale lecturing in An Inconvenient Truth didn’t move moviegoers to take action.  For those that did, it’s the polar bears, stupid.