Momenta: More than a Film

Set in the pristine wilderness and charming communities of the Pacific Northwest, Momenta shows us the potentially catastrophic future for some of America's most treasured real estate. But it also provides hope and shows that a green and sustainable future is not only possible these communities, but that it's already happening. 

Momenta tells the story of the Powder River Basin, an area that straddles the Montana and Wyoming border and is home to one of the biggest coal deposits in the world. Currently, 18 trains, all a mile-and-a-half long, haul coal from these deposits to seaports in Oregon and Washington each day, snaking through National Parks and clogging major arteries in communities throughout the region. These trains pose major environmental and health risks to the cities they pass through, with each train spilling up to 31 tons of coal and coal dust during their journey. And things could get much worse for these communities.

As the U.S. weans itself off coal-fired power plants, demand for coal in Asia continues to rise. Major coal companies are proposing to build new deepwater ports on the Pacific coast in order to reach these Asian markets, significantly increasing production in the Powder River Basin.

Andy Miller, one of Momenta's co-directors, described the pressure that U.S. coal companies face to get their product to market. "The U.S. coal market is flattening, and if they can't find international markets to ship to, it'll close." 

The construction of these seaports will dramatically effect the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, more than doubling train traffic and significantly altering the environment. The proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal in Cherry Point, Washington, one of the major seaports up for construction, would ravage pristine Washington coastline, as well as be rife for shipping disaster due to the tight turns and congested navigation required.

4 Ways to Host a Green Super Bowl Party

The Super Bowl, essentially an American holiday, is an excuse to scream at a TV and eat and drink more than the average human should. More than 100 million Americans are expected to tune in Sunday to watch the Seattle Seahawks take on the Denver Broncos. But like all large sporting events, the Super Bowl, and all the fanfare that goes along with it, carries a rather hefty environmental impact. To its credit, the National Football league has stepped up its efforts to host a greener event, making this year's event the greenest Super Bowl ever. But there are plenty of ways for those of us not privileged enough to watch the game in person to do our part as we watch at home. Here are a few ways to make sure your Super Bowl party is as green as possible.

Recycle

Start a Green Band with Sustainable Gear

Fancy yourself a musician? Then play a tune for the environment while marching to the beat of a different drum with these eco-friendly axes and drum kits.

And remember, the only thing that sounds better than saving the environment is giving a gift. So keep these eco-instruments in mind when you're shopping for that niece who just decided she wants to be a rock star when she grows up.

GREEN GUITARS AND BASSES

Mada Series
Sing the praises of the hemp revolution accompanied by a guitar or bass with a body built entirely out of organic hemp, instead of rare or endangered wood. 

The Mada Caimes and Mada Sab are Austrian-made semi-acoustic guitars and basses made of 100 percent organic hemp pulp. The pulp is processed without milling (unlike standard wood guitar production) into "hempstone" and then turned into a guitar body with a signature fluid design. They don't sound too bad either.

Photography Tips for the Outdoorsperson

For some of us, part of the excitement of trekking out into open meadows and forest wilderness is the attempt to capture the rich colors and immaculate scenery to share with friends and family.

But let's face it, it's impossible to replicate the grandeur of being present.

We do, however, have a few tips to help your photos do nature justice while making you an up-and-coming Ansel Adams among your friends.

1. Always check your light source. There are two things to be wary of: intensity and direction. Try to avoid the harsh light of the high noon sun. When trying to capture landscapes, the best light is found at dawn or dusk. When photographing friends or a subject, position the light so that it hits the subject from the front, not from behind. As a side note, overcast days are often great for outdoor photography, the clouds diffuse the light and your photos will come out rich without being over-exposed.

10 Scary Eco-Horror Films

It's time to break out the scary movies and the organic popcorn. To celebrate Halloween, we picked 10 spooky environmental films for their laughs, screams, and genuinely frightening messages. And if these eco-horror movies keep you up at night, don't say we didn't warn you.

The Birds - 1963
It's always nice to start off with a classic, and The Birds is certainly that. Revisit Alfred Hitchcock's famous horror film and its many fine feathered friends this Halloween for a nostalgic and thrilling look at nature fighting back. On that note, there are lots of movies with animals enacting revenge, so make sure to check them out as well.

 

The Day After Tomorrow - 2004
Global warming goes apocalyptic in this thrilling end-of-days scenario, where climate change brings about massive weather disturbances and ushers in a new Ice Age. Wrought with extreme ramifications for our harm to the planet, this movie shows Mother Nature dealing some serious payback.

Android Apps for Autumn

From chasing orange leaves to tasting golden brews, apps can inform your autumn adventures. And even if you're not headed to a maple forest or a beer festival, you can follow the fall remotely through the window of your phone with these cutting-edge applications for Android. (But don't forget to turn those screens off and get outside, too.)

Arboreal apps: Leaf chasers will love fall foliage apps like Peepr, which crowd sources leaf color reports. Because autumn leaves turn at slightly different times each year, foliage trackers can waste a lot of gas and time driving in search of the deciduous. On Peepr, users can file reports for the foliage in their area and view county-level data on a national map. The map shows what color the leaves are at that moment in a given location, allowing drivers to better plan their trips. North East Tree Identification helps outdoors enthusiasts identify trees year 'round, with a special focus on New England species. It walks you through visual taxonomy to help even the most amateur threehugger find precise species names in seconds. Knowing tree species and locations names will make you a more educated advocate for the environment and a more interesting hiking partner. 

John Muir's Giant Sequoia to Be Cloned

John Muir's beloved tree, a giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), is dying. The 75-foot-tall tree, infested with two regional fungal diseases, is a measly 130 years old. Under healthy conditions sequoias can live for thousands of years.

In the early 1880s, after one of his trips to Yosemite, Muir brought the tree back and planted it at his home in Martinez, California, now the John Muir National Historic Site.

In an effort to save the tree and its connection to the famous naturalist, the park is having the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive in Copemish, Michigan, clone the tree from cuttings.

Approximately 400 cuttings from the original tree were sent to Archangel in April. Since then, the staff has been hard at work trying to save this living connection to John Muir.

Keith Park, horticulturist and preservation arborist at the John Muir National Historic Site, considers this an insurance policy. "I wouldn't want to wait too long and risk losing the tree," he said. 

For now, though, they are playing the waiting game. Archangel has had the cuttings for three months, and Tom Brodhagen, propagator with Archangel, described them as "healthy looking, green with pushed growth." The challenges of this project are the age of the original tree and the diseases that came with it, Brodhagen said.

"The fungal diseases are endemic to the region but we want to clean them up so they have a fresh start," Brodhagen said. If successfully planted, the saplings would eventually likely become infected with the same fungal diseases.

"On the face of it, it seems ridiculous to plant something that is doomed," Park said. "But from a historic preservation perspective, things ought to be the same or at least resemble John Muir's time here."

Emmanuelle Chriqui Takes on Hollywood's Trash

As Sloan, she played the love interest on HBO's rabidly popular Entourage, and now she portrays Lorelei on The Mentalist. In her free time, actress Emmanuelle Chriqui is an environmental activist: She helps plant school gardens in low-income neighborhoods, takes life-changing trips to places like Africa, and, since 2007, has helped run the Environmental Media Association, which promotes eco-efforts in the entertainment industry. Read on to find out how her path toward greenness was paved with persistent throat infections and homemade apple tarts.

What made you get involved with the Environmental Media Association?

Years ago, I was shopping for a new car and was excited about the Prius. Someone put me in touch with Debbie Levin, the president of EMA. We hit it off famously. She saw my inclination toward living a natural life and asked if I'd be interested in joining. I’d already started doing stuff that was important to me on my own, but the association is amazing because it uses the media to create awareness. I was coming off Entourage, and there was sort of a lot of heat at that time, so I thought I could add something. I’ve been working with them ever since.

Movie Review: Gasland Part II

“The F-word isn’t in the dark anymore,” says Josh Fox, the director, writer, and narrator of the anti-fracking film Gasland Part II at the beginning of the deeply unsettling second installment of the Gasland series. The activist/filmmaker resides in the home his father built the year he was born. Located along the Delaware River, the area has been riddled with natural gas drilling operations, making Fox the perfect person to tell the tale of fracking and the shroud of mystery that surrounds it. His home is in the foreground of this brewing debate as it sits above the Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit, also known by the infamous nickname “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.”

The film is an eye-opening case study of towns and counties all over the country impacted by fracking and its side effects. Places like Dimock, PA, Dallas- Fortworth, TX, Pavillion, WY, and even Los Angeles take center stage as they happen to be unfortunate enough to be located over the natural gas deposits that opened the floodgates for natural gas extraction. Fox uses chilling visuals like children playing in open drill fields, notorious flaming water hoses that one resident says “never fail to light,” and laundry lists of unpronounceable chemicals that are found in these peoples water supplies. Hearing the disastrous symptoms and conditions of locals in these communities only prolongs the documentary's lasting impact on its viewers.

Medium as Message

 

One evening four years ago, Anthony Ganjou was standing on the curb outside a London pub when he noticed an advertisement on a passing bus. It was for a smoothie being billed as 100% natural. Wondering why the brand "preached the natural mantra on a dead tree," he launched Curb, a marketing firm that uses natural and organic materials to produce ads with a minimal footprint.

A striking example of Curb's work was the billboard created to promote the Warner Bros. film Contagion. Made from live bacteria and fungi, it prompted more than 100,000 Twitter and Facebook mentions and at least 560,000 YouTube views. "All we did," Ganjou says, "was deliver the title of the movie in the coolest way we could imagine."

Another sustainable marketing blitz involved stamping the logo of a British sports company onto freshly fallen snow.

Ganjou is convinced that his company's eco-messaging works better than conventional ads: "Humans have interacted with nature for hundreds of thousands of years," he says. "Billboards and screens have only been around for 100 years. Which do you think is going to be fundamentally more effective?" 

—Wendy Becktold