One of the community organizations I belong to, the Taranaki Sustainable Living Fair, hosted regional fairs in 2008 and 2009 to bring local residents up to speed regarding all the alternative, non-corporate products, skills and concepts out there to assist people in adopting a more sustainable lifestyle. The fairs featured 50+ stalls by small businesses offering solar panels, non-chemical cleaning and beauty products, organic food and other sustainability-related products and about two dozen workshops on a variety of topics, including techniques for reducing home energy use, organic gardening and dairy farming, permaculture, food preservation, gray water systems, sustainable waste management and transport, and how to build a worm farm and chicken tractor and set up a wind turbine on your milking shed.

The workshops were by far the most popular aspect of our fairs, so this year we sponsored an environmental films series instead, in collaboration with our local Arthouse Theater. We ordered a package (half Kiwi, half American) of films from New Zealand’s Reel Earth Film Festivals. Most of the films are deliberately priced to allow people to have small film showings in their homes with their neighbors. It strikes me that people worldwide have given up on government doing anything to help us with the major lifestyle changes they need to undertake over the next few decades (owing to climate change, resource scarcity – and the virtual collapse of the world economy). However I find it really exciting that locally and regionally people all over the world have taken the challenge on themselves – just as we are doing in New Plymouth.

So far, these are my three favorites:

• Fresh: 70 minute film meant to be an answer to Food, Inc. Much of the footage documents the absolutely barbarity (and major human health problems) associated with industrial agriculture and raising chickens, pigs and cows packed into cages and feedlots (as a doctor, I wouldn’t dream of eating meat raised this way – it’s just too likely to be contaminated with disease organisms). However it also shows the incredible creativity of  small farmers who are raising food differently for their communities – and, surprisingly, making it work economically. After growing up in Milwaukee, I was most impressed by the interested in the segment on Growing Power – a national non-profit program started by former pro-basketball star Will Allen – to address the reality that many US inner cities are ‘food ghettos’, where residents are denied the luxury of purchasing fresh foods and vegetables. People can purchase Fresh to show it in their homes for $29.95 at http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5958/p/d/freshthemovie/shop/items.sjs

People can take a virtual tour of the Milwaukee Growing Power facility at http://www.growingpower.org/our_history.htm.

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• Soil in Good Heart: 15 minute short demonstrating how industrial farming – and the heavy use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides – is rapidly destroying top soil (without which food production is impossible) and the practical (low cost) steps being taken by many small organic farmers to both replenish it and produce food sustainably without depleting it. Can be downloaded free at http://views.newhope.com/organicfilm/Home/VideoPlayer/tabid/83/VideoId/44/Soil-In-Good-Heart.aspx

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• Homegrown Revolution: 15 minute short portraying a man after my own heart who dug up his lawn in a Pasadena ghetto to created an urban homestead, enabling his family to produce a majority of their own food. He has done this as basic act of rebellion (a refusal to patronize corporations) – which has extended to producing his own biofuel and using wind-up blenders, alternative transportation, etc, to minimize his patronage of oil and power companies. Trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxORRJRWKH8.

  

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