Wednesday, September 29 at 7:30 pm

Blue Gold:  World Water Wars

by Sam Bozzo

Wars of the future will be fought over water, as they are today over oil, as the source of all life enters the global marketplace and political arena.  Corporate giants, private investors, and corrupt governments vie for control of our dwindling fresh water supply, prompting protests, lawsuits, and revolution from citizens fighting for the right to survive.  Past civilizations have collapsed from poor water management.  Will ours too?

In every corner of the globe, we are polluting, diverting, pumping, and wasting our limited supply of fresh water at an expediential level as population and technology grows.  The rampant over-development of agriculture, housing and industry increase the demands for fresh water well beyond the finite supply, resulting in the desertification of the Earth.

Corporate giants force developing countries to privatize their water supply for profit. Wall Street investors target desalination and mass bulk water export schemes.  Corrupt governments use water for economic and political gain.  Military control of water emerges and a new geo-political map and power structure forms, setting the stage for world water wars.

This alarming film follows numerous worldwide examples of people fighting for their basic right to water, from court cases to violent revolutions to U.N. conventions to revised constitutions to local protests at grade schools.  As Maude Barlow proclaims, “This is our revolution, this is our war.”  A line is crossed as water becomes a commodity.  Will we survive?

http://bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/

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Wednesday, September 22 at 7:30 pm

Six Degrees could Change the World

by National Geographic Channel

By the year 2100, many scientists believe that the Earth’s average temperature could rise by as much as six degrees Celsius.  In a compelling investigation, National Geographic leads a degree-by-degree journey to explore what each rising — and critical — degree could mean for the future of people and the planet.  This spectacular film shows how global warming has already affected the reefs of Australia, the ice fields of Greenland, and the Amazonian rain forest.

The oceans are the critical carbon absorbing element and dead and dying coral is the “canary in the coal mine” indicator of coming disaster — dead oceans by 2050.  The Amazon is the next most critical element in global warming.  The film shows riveting views of the Amazon river drying up in 2005, and the potential scenarios of drought, fires,  and more drought in the Amazon.  All this devastation on land and in water is not to mention  the increasing destructiveness of weather — which today we are all aware of in the everyday news media.  One amazing esoteric point in the film is its spotlight on a man who figured out the total carbon footprint of the cheeseburger, to include the methane farts of the cows.

With a sobering look at the effects of our world’s insatiable appetite for energy, the film explains what’s real, what’s still controversial, and how existing technologies and remedies could help dial back the global thermometer. We are well on our way to 2-3 degrees rise in temperature right now.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/six-degrees-could-change-the-world-3188/Overview

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Wednesday, September 15 at 7:30 pm

Crude Impact

by James Jandak Wood

This amazing, eye-opening, and deeply disturbing film is simply the clearest exposition of peak oil and its far-reaching consequences.   It features interviews with leading experts in a variety of related fields.  It’s a sobering account of our dependence on ancient sunlight to power industrial civilization and the consequences we face as we top over the global oil production peak and enter the irreversible depletion phase.  The impact of peak oil has been profound.  The film focuses on the relationship between the size of the human population and the increasingly intensive extraction of resources.  The concept of peak oil itself is not fully expanded in the film until after an array of economic, political, social, and economic threads are systematically explored — then the full impact of peak oil then becomes frighteningly clear.

http://www.crudeimpact.com/

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Wednesday, September 8 at 7:30 pm

World in the Balance:

The Population Paradox

by NOVA

The staggering power of this film lies in its conceptual insights — how diverse and complex the twin problems of population growth and global warming have become.  This complexity makes the outcome near unpredictable and likely catastrophic.

Population growth is predicted to reach 9 billion by mid-century despite declining birth rates in industrial countries.  What is unexpected is the potential disastrous consequences of such declining birth rates in Europe and Japan;  the older generation vastly outnumbers the young, who will be unable to support them.  A different problem exists in Africa, where AIDS has devastated those in their prime, leaving both elderly and children uncared for.

China has a different dilemma;  it’s trapped by the rising affluence of its huge population resulting from industrialization without pollution controls, and finds it difficult to impose such controls without causing economic collapse and civil unrest.  The paradox posed here is that “backing down” the ladder of population growth is far more difficult than imagined;  as is “backing down” from industrialization or even imposing pollution controls on a nation whose population is finding new affluence.

Global warming is the other part of the dilemma;  at least significantly the result of over population and industrialization.  Global warming is no longer controversial in the financial world.  Neither population control nor pollution controls on levels significant enough to affect global warming seem likely in the near future.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/

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Sunday Meeting

Sunday, July 4 at 11:00 am

The Ecology of Crop Plants

Presented by Sterling Bunnell

Sterling’s talk this morning will cover the history and character of domestic plants.  Where and when did people start planting the food crops we know today?  How did they evolve over time and under what kind of human pressures?  What are domestic plants doing today in the world of agribusiness or organic farms?  What is their ecology today?

All of Sterling’s talks manifest his brilliant command of both theoretical explanations and historical examples: both theory and fact.  Sterling is a rare generalist, a philosopher,  freely sharing his thoughts in our world of specialists.  Hear Sterling talk, participate in the group discussion, and get the education you might have missed in the course of your life!

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Wednesday, June 30 at 7:30 pm

2012:  Time for Change

by Joao Amorim

Presented by Ashel Seasunz Eldridge

This documentary combined with animation projects a radical alternative to apocalyptic doom and gloom.  The film follows journalist Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the bestselling 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, on a quest for a new paradigm that integrates the archaic wisdom of tribal cultures with the scientific method.  As conscious agents of evolution, we can re-design post-industrial society on ecological principles to make a world that works for all.  Rather than breakdown and barbarism, this film heralds the birth of a regenerative planetary culture where collaboration replaces competition, where exploration of psyche and spirit becomes the new cutting edge, replacing the sterile materialism that has pushed our world to the brink.

This is a feature film starring major luminaries including Sting, David Lynch, and Ellen Page.  And it is an educational film inspiring people to get involved in spreading the message of 2012:  to participate in a conscious movement toward personal and social transformation and to live in harmony with our environment by following ancient and modern practices including permaculture, ecological construction, and bioremediation.

http://2012timeforchange.com/demo/index.html

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Sunday Meeting

Sunday, June 6 at 11:00 am

Ship of Fuels

Or Whatever Happened to Hyrogen?

Presented by Sterling Bunnell

Sterling’s talk this morning will cover the history of innovation and invention particularly in the car industry.  What DID happen to the electric car and is it a technology that can be carried on and mass manufactured today? The hydrogen car is a real possibility even though it’s not getting much publicity today.

All of Sterling’s talks manifest his brilliant command of both theoretical explanations and historical examples:  both theory and fact.  Hear Sterling talk, participate in the group discussion, and get the education you might have missed in the course of your life!

To learn more about Sunday Programs held

at Humanist Hall

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Wednesday, June 23 at 7:30 pm

Food, Inc.

by Robert Kenner

This documentary about food is one of the scariest films of last year.  It lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer.  And nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, in-organic popcorn at the concession stand.  The film is an informative, infuriating, unappetizing education about the Big Business of feeding, or, politically speaking, force-feeding, Americans all the fast food that multinational corporate money can buy.  It’s is a horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious, and the hungry.  It has a cheery palette but marches straight into the dark side of cutthroat, sadistic agribusiness, corporatized meat, and the greedy manipulation of both genetics and the law.  The artifice of the film’s aesthetic is always subtly emphasizing the artificiality of the food.  But there are four embodiments of conscience in the film, including the filmmaker Robert Kenner:  Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, and Joel Salatin.  The film charts how and why the villains not only outnumber mighty heroes like these, but also how and why they outbluff, outmuscle, and outspend all their opponents by billions of often government-subsidized dollars.

Divided into chapters dedicated to points along the commercial food chain, the movie looks at animal abuse in industrial food production — but its main focus is on the human cost.  It’s a cost visible in the rounded bodies of a poor family that eats cheap but filling fast-food burgers for breakfast and in the faces of farmers too frightened to go on record about Monsanto.

There’s something horribly wrong with a system in which a bag of chips costs less than a bag of carrots.  Corn is the vegetable-as-villain in this film which builds on the work of nutritionists, journalists, activists, and authors like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to show how multinationals have taken over the production of almost all food.  Corn is kept at unrealistically low prices by the government;  is fed to animals that haven’t evolved to eat it (such as the cow);  causes them to develop maladies that must be treated with antibiotics (which are passed on to consumers);  and has led to the mutation of new strains of the E.coli virus, which sickens tens of thousands each year.

Big Agribusiness, just like Big Oil, runs the very regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, the consumers.  The film delves into the case of Monsanto, which has monopolized the growing of corn by patenting the biology inside it — and has been allowed to litigate against insurgent farmers through court decisions rendered by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a onetime Monsanto lawyer.  The whole system, the film says, is fixed.

But then Joel Salatin arrives on the scene to throw some natural light onto the proceedings and illuminate just what can be done to salvage agriculture and our digestive systems.  Disturbing as it is, this film doesn’t present a doomsday scenario.  People can make a difference, it says — look what happened to Big Tobacco.

http://www.foodincmovie.com/

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Wednesday, June 16 at 7:30 pm

Processed People

by Jeff and Sabrina Nelson

This insightful documentary is extremely well put together;  the professional look and feel adds to its high credibility and value.  Also adding to these are the experts interviewed in the film:  Joel Fuhrman, Caldwell Esselstyn, Milton Mills,  Jeff Novick, Pam Popper, Jay Gordon, Jeffrey Masson, John McDougall, and John Robbins.  This film touches upon political issues, economical issues, health insurance issues, educational issues, pregnancy, baby and breast feeding issues, medical issues and of course health and nutrition issues and delivers the unforgettable message that we’re a processed people.

We Americans think that we are so advanced today.  We always hear that we are living longer than ever, that we have the the cleanest, safest, most advanced food preparation on the planet.  But instead, we are brainwashed and we’ve gotten away from our natural state of being.  Pills of every shape and color, procedures, surgeries, and countless doctor’s visits do not mean that we are living longer or better.  Colored, artificially flavored and preserved, fried, and  processed food is not technological advancement – it is a waste of our intelligence and resources.  The engineered food business is bigger than Big Oil and that kind of money buys inconceivably large amounts of propaganda, misinformation, and corrupted science.  While Americans have unprecedented access to information, food choices, and medical treatment options, our health outcomes remain dismal.  We’re both overfed and undernourished.  Over 50% of bankruptcies are caused by what has become known as “medical debt.”  Fast food, fast medicine, fast news, and fast lives have turned many Americans into a sick, uninformed, indebted, “processed” people.

The film is funny and sad too.  It’s logical and revolutionary.  And it’s ever so true!  It makes us look at where we went so wrong and how we can get back on the right path — the right path of amazing health, each day, every day, for the rest of your lives.   It’s possible to feel that good everyday, but it all begins with what we put into our mouth today.

http://www.processedpeople.com/order.htm

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Wednesday,  June  9  at 7:30 pm

A Delicate Balance: the Truth

by Aaron Scheibner

This important documentary about the meat industry, health, disease, and the Earth expounds the latest discoveries of some of the most prominent experts on nutrition in the world.  Over 50 years of research is skilfully woven into what seems like a detective story unraveling the mysteries behind the disease epidemic which has struck affluent countries with a vengeance — disease has been escalating over the last 50 years resulting in 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women being diagnosed with cancer.  What if you knew that the very foods which are being touted as promoting health are in fact damaging your bones and giving you cancer? This film dispels the myths we have been led to believe about our health, our environment, and our world.  It will help us make informed choices about these and see how to reduce our personal impact on the environment.  It challenges the misguided trust we place in the medical profession and animal agriculture propaganda.

This film reveals that we have tipped the scales in favor of our own annihilation.   The factory farming industry, the professional murderer, has become the ultimate terminator.  It’s killing the planet and it’s killing us.  The film goes further than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth by saying the only hope for the planet is if people give up meat and dairy.  The film highlights beautifully how our everyday food choices directly impact not only human health, but the environment around us. We only have one home.  If we continue to destroy it, we have nowhere else to go.

But it’s an inspirational film. It invites us to look at ourselves, our health, what we eat, and how we treat our Earth from a very conscious standpoint.  It shows more than any other film the connections between our diet, our health, our agriculture, our lifestyle, and the state of the Earth. And we have the power to change the course of our world right at the tip of our forks.

http://adelicatebalance.com.au/

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