Cash Mob!Our goal is to support local family farmers by each spending $20 at the Alachua County 441 Farmers Market. Come check it out Saturday, February 4th 8:30AM to 1:00PM. Click here to see the flyer.

via Florida Organic Growers.

We had a great January candidates forum at Blue Water Bay – thanks to Shawn Sheppard and Jason Fults, as well to all of you who joined us! And now it’s time for some more fun next week…

Green Drinks (www.gogreennation.org/category/green-drinks/) will be held 6 – 8 p.m. Feb. 1 at Cafe C, 424 Northwest 8th Avenue – opening this night just for us, so please come hungry and thirsty!

The UF Office of Sustainability is sponsoring Green Drinks this month as a kick-off event of their month-long Food For Thought series highlighting sustainable and local foods. The evening will be co-hosted by Cafe C, a sustainable restaurant owned by Celebrations Catering, in celebration of our partnership with Celebrations to use their lovely Villa East (301 N. Main) as our venue for Cinema Verde (Feb. 24 – March 2).

Cinema Verde NEWS

ATTEND AND ADVERTISE: Our plans for Cinema Verde are evolving rapidly. We’ll have fairs to “Celebrate Nature” and provide “Sustainable Solutions” Feb. 24 and 25, and we invite environmental organizations and sustainable businesses to participate. We’re also creating our program and Sustainable Business Directory, which we would to be as comprehensive a resource as possible – please let us know if you’d like to be included. Details on our schedule and program opportunities are here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

CHECK OUT OUR FILMS: While we won’t be releasing our full film schedule until the end of January, we have posted links to a few films we plan to include. Directors and principals of many of these films would like to attend – please help bring them in by making a donation to cover their expenses! View the trailers for these films and donate here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

FREE TICKETS!! Wear your Cinema Verde t-shirt around town, and if we see you we’ll give you a free ticket to one of our films! We’re selling tickets online and at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, where you can get a shirt, too!

We welcome support of our 2012 festival, which is just around the corner, Feb. 24 – March 2, 2012. There will be tabling and booth opportunities for environmental organizations and businesses during our opening weekend and also during the week at individual films.

Please let us know if you’d like to let us help showcase your sustainable initiatives! Call Trish Riley: 352-327-3560… thank you!

Best,
Trish*–
Trish Riley, Director: Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival
www.CinemaVerde.org, PO Box 358711, Gainesville, FL 32635, 352.327.3560
Cinema Verde is a Florida not-for-profit corporation designated as a 501(c)(3) public charity by the IRS: Contributions are tax deductible.Thank you for your support!
Publisher: www.GoGreenNation.org

We had a great January candidates forum at Blue Water Bay – thanks to Shawn Sheppard and Jason Fults, as well to all of you who joined us! And now it’s time for some more fun next week…

Jan. 30 Sponsor Reception: Don Davis will host a reception to thank past and potential Cinema Verde sponsors at Capital City Bank, 1417 N. Main St., 5:30 – 7 p.m., please RSVP (Trish@CinemaVerde.org) if you’d like to join our circle of winners! Thank you, Don!

Green Drinks (www.gogreennation.org/category/green-drinks/) will be held 6 – 8 p.m. Feb. 1 at Cafe C, 424 Northwest 8th Avenue – opening this night just for us, so please come hungry and thirsty!

The UF Office of Sustainability is sponsoring Green Drinks this month as a kick-off event of their month-long Food For Thought series highlighting sustainable and local foods. The evening will be co-hosted by Cafe C, a sustainable restaurant owned by Celebrations Catering, in celebration of our partnership with Celebrations to use their lovely Villa East (301 N. Main) as our venue for Cinema Verde (Feb. 24 – March 2).

Cinema Verde NEWS

ATTEND AND ADVERTISE: Our plans for Cinema Verde are evolving rapidly. We’ll have fairs to “Celebrate Nature” and provide “Sustainable Solutions” Feb. 24 and 25, and we invite environmental organizations and sustainable businesses to participate. We’re also creating our program and Sustainable Business Directory, which we would to be as comprehensive a resource as possible – please let us know if you’d like to be included. Details on our schedule and program opportunities are here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

CHECK OUT OUR FILMS: While we won’t be releasing our full film schedule until the end of January, we have posted links to a few films we plan to include. Directors and principals of many of these films would like to attend – please help bring them in by making a donation to cover their expenses! View the trailers for these films and donate here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

FREE TICKETS!! Wear your Cinema Verde t-shirt around town, and if we see you we’ll give you a free ticket to one of our films! We’re selling tickets online and at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, where you can get a shirt, too!

We welcome support of our 2012 festival, which is just around the corner, Feb. 24 – March 2, 2012. There will be tabling and booth opportunities for environmental organizations and businesses during our opening weekend and also during the week at individual films.

Please let us know if you’d like to let us help showcase your sustainable initiatives! Call Trish Riley: 352-327-3560… thank you!

Best,
Trish*–
Trish Riley, Director: Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival
www.CinemaVerde.org, PO Box 358711, Gainesville, FL 32635, 352.327.3560
Cinema Verde is a Florida not-for-profit corporation designated as a 501(c)(3) public charity by the IRS: Contributions are tax deductible.Thank you for your support!
Publisher: www.GoGreenNation.org

Let’s get the New Year off to a fresh start by tackling this sickening situation. In public spaces across the country, including offices, stores, restaurants, airports, and schools, air "freshener" is being forced upon us. Daily we are subjected to known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and other toxic substances. Sounds like a horror film, but it is our scentsational reality.We’ve talked before about the hazards inherent in air fresheners. The EPA puts it quite poetically: "Air fresheners are usually highly flammable and also strong irritants to eyes, skin, and throat. Additionally, the solid fresheners usually cause death if eaten by people or pets."Yes, these household helpers — which became popular in the 1950s, along with perky smiles and perfect apple pies — contain all manner of harmful ingredients, including formaldehyde, a powerful pesticide called paradichlorobenzene, and phthalates. In short, air "fresheners" actually make our air quality much worse, polluting our space and our bodies. To quote the EPA again, "air fresheners … release pollutants more or less continuously."

via Ask Umbra: Can air fresheners make you sick? | Grist.

Speaking to voters in Iowa Monday, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania ripped the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule placing first-ever limits on the amount of mercury that coal-fired power plants can emit into the air.

The GOP presidential contender claimed the new regulations would shut down 60 coal fired power plants in America, and he charged the EPA with basing its study on a philosophy of: "We hate carbon, we hate fossil fuels, we hate blue-collar Americans who work in those areas."

He specifically took issue with the agency’s cost-benefit analysis, calling it "absolutely ridiculous" and "not based on any kind of science."

via Santorum takes on EPA over mercury limits rule | Politics – Home.

The applause was raucous, growing louder and faster as the beat accelerated.

A dozen dancers, arms stretched, torsos bare, pounded the stage in an increasing frenzy. They turned, swooped, slapped their thighs, swooped and turned again– birds hovering in the air, looking for something below – and shouting, “koburake!” or “rise up!” The audience exploded after each verse, thinking the performance over.

But the dance started up again, faster still.

The dancers had traveled more than 7,000 miles to perform for the crowd at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater. They were singing of the frigate bird – an agile flier with a seven-foot wingspan that forages across the open ocean, returning to land only to roost or breed.

The performers on stage were part of a troupe of three dozen islanders from Kiribati and two other Pacific atolls, Tokelau and Tuvalu, touring the East and West coasts this fall.

via Facing rising seas, islanders call on their music — The Daily Climate.

Japan’s nuclear crisis has turned Mizuho Nakayama into one of a small but growing number of Internet-savvy activist moms.Worried about her 2-year-old son and distrustful of government and TV reports that seemed to play down radiation risks, she scoured the Web for information and started connecting with other mothers through Twitter and Facebook, many using social media for the first time.The 41-year-old mother joined a parents group — one of dozens that have sprung up since the crisis — that petitioned local officials in June to test lunches at schools and day care centers for radiation and avoid using products from around the troubled nuclear plant.”It’s the first time for anyone in our group to be involved in this type of activism,” said Nakayama, who now carries a Geiger counter with her wherever she goes.Public dismay with the government’s response to this year’s triple disaster — earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown — is driving some Japanese to become more politically engaged, helped by social and alternative media. While still fledgling, it’s the kind of grass-roots activism that some say Japan needs to shake up a political system that has allowed the country’s problems to fester for years.

via Can Web-Savvy Activist Moms Change Japan? : NPR.

This fall at the University of California, Berkeley, a new course surveys the political, social, environmental, and gustatory stakes of modern food production. In his Edible Education 101: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement, Berkeley journalism professor and best-selling author Michael Pollan yields the spotlight to other experts: Though he appears frequently as introducer, moderator, and panelist, the classes are focused on an all-star cast of guest lecturers. Taken together, these food A-listers and innovators provide a compelling, comprehensive portrait of 21st-century eating. Each lecture is available, for free and in full, via UC Berkeley’s YouTube channel.

For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start.

“This is a very powerful lineup such has never been accumulated for a single class,” Pollan told students in his introduction to the course. If you’re already asking questions about your food, it’s likely your favorite author-activist appears. For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start.

Edible Education 101 commemorates the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant founded by chef Alice Waters, whose culinary approach — fresh food, prepared simply and sourced well — has influenced several generations of eaters. This year, Waters has rebranded her Chez Panisse Foundation as the Edible Schoolyard Project, which will seek to recreate the Foundation’s Berkeley-based teaching garden in other school systems throughout the nation. Waters thought that a Berkeley course, taught by Pollan, would be a fitting way to usher in the new era of student outreach.

Pollan found a co-teacher in Nikki Henderson, a Bay Area activist who directs The People’s Grocery, a non-profit that seeks to improve the health and wealth of West Oakland residents with locally grown food. Her focus on food education and social justice complements Pollan’s interest in the philosophy and semiotics of eating, as well as Waters’ farm-to-tastebuds culinary approach.

As they planned the course, Waters, Pollan, and Henderson decided that each weekly meeting would focus on a specific theme — lecture topics like “Nutrition, Health, and Diet-Related Disease,” “School Lunch and Edible Schoolyards,” and “Corporations and the Food Movement.” From there, they began reaching out to qualified authorities on each topic, slowly assembling a food Dream Team.

“Alice brought her years of experience and relationships to the table, which was fantastic,” Henderson told me by phone. “Michael wanted the course to be academically rigorous — a sophisticated inquiry and exploration and into some of the more difficult topics.”

“My focus,” she said, “was to make sure that justice was central — that race and class and power were concepts to be digested deeply by the audience, and by the speakers.”

In the Bay Area, Edible Education 101 has become a phenomenon. Each week, Berkeley made 300 free tickets available to the public, and, according to Henderson, tickets to the first lecture sold out within 10 minutes. But even by live stream, it was thrilling to watch the boldfaced names lecture at the university podium — Raj Patel’s wryly comic illuminations of farm economics, for instance, or Carlo Petrini’s passionately gruff exhortations on the virtues of Slow Food, the movement he founded (extemporaneously translated from the Italian by our own Corby Kummer).

We all long for a day in which human beings see themselves not as lords and masters of the earth but as good stewards of creation. To get there, the way of thinking about animals as things to be used and abused must be replaced with a model reflecting a more gentle meaning of the word “dominion.”

Contrary to the connotation of the word that has seemed to justify the tyranny of humans over animals, dominion may be interpreted as “sovereignty” as it exists in human government. A legitimate government holds the collective power of its citizens, and is thus able to exert a measure of authority that serves the best interests of all. What we think of as legitimate sovereignty in the human sphere of government does not include murder and mayhem of the sort practiced by humans against the animal kingdoms.

The concept of dominion as brutal domination is sometimes blamed on western religion, because in eastern religions there is no strict line drawn between humans and other animals, and yet in practice, animals in lands where eastern religions have flourished have been subject to the same brutal domination as in the West. The problem of animal cruelty was not caused by any particular religious mindset–though religion has often been used as a justification for mistreatment of animals…continuing even today in barbaric sacrifices practiced by animist religions as well as by some Hindus and Muslims.

The problem is that throughout human history, until very recently, cruelty to animals was simply normal.

        This letter was supposed to be mailed so that it would reach you some time before the holidays. However, I was determined that it should contain a happy message, and so in late October, I began to read a newly published 696-page book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. It took six weeks of very late nights to finish it, and so this letter is late getting to you.

It was worth the time, though, and while I believe Pinker may over-reach in applying his thesis globally, there is good and surprising news about how and why a decrease in violence, including violence to animals (not an overall decrease but a decrease relative to human population), “happened in a narrow slice of history, beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th.” This Humanitarian Revolution continued through the 19th century, when slavery was abolished in the West, but it lost momentum during the first half of the 20th century, as the world entered another tragic cycle of war and genocide, with the World Wars the last convulsions of an old order in Europe. Even between the World Wars, however, the idea of an intergovernmental entity dedicated to peace was conceived for the first time. The Humanitarian Revolution energized again in the “Rights Revolutions” that arose in democratic countries in the 1960s and ’70s, which included civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights.

Steven Pinker traces the history of violence back to proto-humans who evolved into humans living in anarchic states, who were eventually subjected to a “pacification process” when states (often in the form of monarchies) emerged. These early governments forced a degree of order on their citizens–though such order did not reduce violence between states or cruel practices within states. Reducing violence required a very long civilizing process which involved the imposition of self-control, the beginning of commerce, and the invention of the printing press in the early Renaissance. According to Pinker, “Some of the early expressions of a genuinely ethical concern for animals took place in the Renaissance. Europeans had become curious about vegetarianism when reports came back from India of entire nations that lived without meat. Several writers, including Erasmus and Montaigne, condemned the mistreatment of animals in hunting and butchery, and one of them, Leonardo da Vinci, became a vegetarian himself.”