Sustainable Living and Agriculture

The documentary, "The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil," was inspired when Faith Morgan and Pat Murphy took a trip to Cuba through Global Exchange in August, 2003. That year Pat had begun studying and speaking about worldwide peak oil production. In May Pat and Faith attended the second meeting of The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, a European group of oil geologists and scientists, which predicted that mankind was perilously close to having used up half of the world's oil resources. When they learned that Cuba underwent the loss of over half of its oil imports and survived, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the couple wanted to see for themselves how Cuba had done this. During their first trip to Cuba, in the summer of 2003, they traveled from Havana to Trinidad and through several other towns on their way back to Havana. They found what Cubans call "The Special Period" astounding and Cuban's responses very moving. Faith found herself wanting to document on film Cuba's successes so that what they had done wouldn't be lost. Both of them wanted to learn more about Cuba's transition from large farms or plantations and reliance on fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers, to small organic farms and urban gardens. Cuba was undergoing a transition from a highly industrial society to a sustainable one. Cuba became, for them, a living example of how a country can successfully traverse what we all will have to deal with sooner or later, the reduction and loss of finite fossil fuel resources. In the fall of 2003 Pat and Faith had the opportunity to return to Cuba to study its agriculture. It was a wonderful trip. They saw much of the island, met many farmers and urban gardeners, scientists and engineers - traveling more than 1700 miles, from one end of Cuba to the other. It was all they had hoped for and more. In 2004 Community Service, Inc. (CSI) began raising money and organizing a third trip (October), to film in Cuba. Greg Green, cinematographer and director of The End of Suburbia documentary, was the chief videographer. Faith Morgan shot the second camera, John Morgan did still photography and Megan Quinn, Outreach Director of CSI, was sound director. After their return from Cuba, they secured assistance and direction from Tom Blessing IV, producer, and Eric Johnson, post-production supervisor and editor. Together, they bring over 40 years combined experience in film and television production. The goals of this film are to give hope to the developed world as it wakes up to the consequences of being hooked on oil, and to lift American's prejudice of Cuba by showing the Cuban people as they are. The filmmakers do this by having the people tell their story on film. It's a story of their dedication to independence and triumph over adversity, and a story of cooperation and hope. Several Cubans expressed the belief that living on an island, with its natural boundaries, breeds awareness that there are limits to natural resources. Everyone who has worked on the documentary hopes that, seeing this film, people will also see the world on which we live, as another, much larger, island.

Farmageddon is the story of a mom whose son healed from all allergies and asthma after consuming raw milk, and real food from farms. It depicts people all over the country who formed food co-ops and private clubs to get these foods, and how they were raided by state and local governments.

Rotten dives deep into the food production underworld to expose the corruption, waste and real dangers behind your everyday eating habits.

The world's climate is changing. Instead of showing the worst that can happen, this documentary focuses on the people suggesting solutions and their actions.

America is facing a food crisis driven by profitability and a lack of consumer education. While the window to transforming our heartland continues to shrink, passionate individuals have emerged who provide hope that the health of our nation might still remain within our grasp. Sustainable weaves together expert analysis of America's food and farming system with a powerful narrative of one extraordinary farmer who is determined to create a sustainable future for his community. Amidst the cornfields of Illinois lives the hero of the film - Marty Travis, a seventh-generation farmer who watched his land and community fall victim to the pressures of big agribusiness. Determined to create a proud legacy for his son, Marty transforms his profitless wasteland and pioneers the sustainable food movement in Chicago. The film unearths the future of agriculture - a marriage of age-old tradition and groundbreaking science. Industry pioneers from around the nation reveal the secrets behind human health and environmental protection. Woven into these stories are the foremost experts of the food industry - connecting the dots between agriculture, the environment, economics and public health. Their stories are a reminder of America's troubled past and the devastating consequences that await the country if left unchanged. Sustainable empowers audiences and gives them hope for the future - that through this food revolution, we can all save humanity.

The 14 acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles was the largest of it's kind in the United States. It was started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992. Since that time, the South Central Farmers have created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now bulldozers threaten their oasis. The Garden is an unflinching look at the struggle between these urban farmers and the City of Los Angeles and a powerful developer who want to evict them and build warehouses.

The issue of food waste is presented in light of the statistics: forty percent of food produced for human consumption in the US goes to waste; over ninety percent of this amount will end up in the landfill, where the waste produces methane gas - a greenhouse gas - in an anaerobic process as no oxygen is able to get to the material to decompose it; the cost of food waste is $1 trillion annually; and that there is still a global problem of human hunger despite the food that goes to waste. Food activists, including chefs, some of the celebrity variety, discuss the issue largely in context of the Environmental Protections Agency's (EPA) food pyramid which lists the preferred priority for the food produced (in order): that it reach humans for consumption; that it be used for animal/livestock feed; that it be converted into energy in the form of compost and/or something that can be used or converted for use, such as into electricity. They discuss the measures that some individuals, organizations and businesses have implemented, they all recognizing that problems exist all along the chain, from production, to distribution, to storage, to consumption, to disposal. Some also recognize that a large part of the problem is defining what waste is, where, for example, forty percent of the biomass of a cauliflower plant is commercially sold for human consumption while closer to one hundred percent can be consumed by humans.

SEED: The Untold Story follows passionate seed keepers protecting our 12,000 year-old food legacy. In the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. As chemical companies control the majority of our seeds, farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers fight a David and Goliath battle to defend the future of our food. In a harrowing and heartening story, these reluctant heroes rekindle a lost connection to our most treasured resource and revive a culture connected to seeds.

Drawing from ancient knowledge and cutting edge science, Symphony of the Soil is an artistic exploration of the miraculous substance soil. By understanding the elaborate relationships and mutuality between soil, water, the atmosphere, plants and animals, we come to appreciate the complex and dynamic nature of this precious resource. The film also examines our human relationship with soil, the use and misuse of soil in agriculture, deforestation and development, and the latest scientific research on soil's key role in ameliorating the most challenging environmental issues of our time. Filmed on four continents, featuring esteemed scientists and working farmers and ranchers, Symphony of the Soil is an intriguing presentation that highlights possibilities of healthy soil creating healthy plants creating healthy humans living on a healthy planet.

This is a story about clothing. It's about the clothes we wear, the people who make them, and the impact the industry is having on our world. The price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically. The True Cost is a groundbreaking documentary film that pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing?

FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet. Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur's 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm

A testament to the immense complexity of nature, The Biggest Little Farm follows two dreamers and a dog on an odyssey to bring harmony to both their lives and the land. When the barking of their beloved dog Todd leads to an eviction notice from their tiny LA apartment, John and Molly Chester make a choice that takes them out of the city and onto 200 acres in the foothills of Ventura County, naively endeavoring to build one of the most diverse farms of its kind in complete coexistence with nature. The land they've chosen, however, is utterly depleted of nutrients and suffering from a brutal drought. The film chronicles eight years of daunting work and outsize idealism as they attempt to create the utopia they seek, planting 10,000 orchard trees and over 200 different crops, and bringing in animals of every kind- including an unforgettable pig named Emma and her best friend, Greasy the rooster. When the farm's ecosystem finally begins to reawaken, so does the Chesters' hope - but as their plan to create perfect harmony takes a series of wild turns, they realize that to survive they will have to reach a far greater understanding of the intricacies and wisdom of nature, and of life itself.

The current method of raw food production is largely a response to the growth of the fast food industry since the 1950s. The production of food overall has more drastically changed since that time than the several thousand years prior. Controlled primarily by a handful of multinational corporations, the global food production business - with an emphasis on the business - has as its unwritten goals production of large quantities of food at low direct inputs (most often subsidized) resulting in enormous profits, which in turn results in greater control of the global supply of food sources within these few companies. Health and safety (of the food itself, of the animals produced themselves, of the workers on the assembly lines, and of the consumers actually eating the food) are often overlooked by the companies, and are often overlooked by government in an effort to provide cheap food regardless of these negative consequences. Many of the changes are based on advancements in science and technology, but often have negative side effects.The products made have been shown in several studies to enlarge male sexual organs and increase male breast size. The answer that the companies have come up with is to throw more science at the problems to bandage the issues but not the root causes. The global food supply may be in crisis with lack of biodiversity, but can be changed on the demand side of the equation.