On Friday I published a post entitled, Sustainability: Cows, Sage Grouses, and Grasslands. It included reference to a newly released environmental documentary, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret and two video interviews, one with Jeff Goebel and another with Allan Savory.  Jeff wrote me back and emphasized the relationship of cows and grasslands to the central issue he sees as “to pull carbon and water vapor back to the soils of our earth.”  Cowspiracy, like other documentaries such as Meatrix and the Lie We Tell Ourselves or Back to the Start sponsored by Chipotle drive home the costs of corporate farming to Mother Earth, her ecosystem, animals, and people.  This, however, is just one part of the story.

Here is Jeff’s message to me (and you) that deserves your attention.

Dear Ruth Ann:

The message in this film (Cowspiracy) is good, from the standpoint of the problems with the conventional system of cattle production and consumption.  Unfortunately, the message completely misses the point of the need for ungulates (hoofed animals) on grass and savanna lands, and sets up the condition “to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”  This is very serious to solving our climate change issues.

Our greatest opportunity to pull atmospheric carbon and water vapor back to the soils of our earth are through migrating ungulates.  If we still had the bison and antelope populations (and other ungulate species globally) with the associated predator behavior, we would be fine.  However, this is not the case.

Jeff Goebel

If we have 10-15 years (and I am not sure we have that), we need to throw everything that we can are reversing the issues of excess carbon in the atmosphere.  Anything that takes away from this mission is very challenging.  These massive forest fires (with carbon pouring into the atmosphere, damaged soil productivity, and lost photosynthesis abilities); massive clear cutting of forests and poor management of forest lands; poor carbon intensive cropland management; and overgrazing and over-resting of grass and savanna lands are major opportunities for us to reverse the trends to our atmosphere.

There is a very significant difference between grain-fed beef (and other livestock) and grass-fed beef.  Usually those who management for grass-fed beef are doing things that are very healthy for our landscape and our well being.  Better land management changes succession of the landscape so you end up with species that are healthier for higher life forms, like humans, and returns water back into stabilized soils.

While I agree that conventional livestock production is very destructive, there are many producers that are doing very beneficial things for the earth and the people on this earth.

With respect and gratitude,

Jeff

One action you can take is to buy grass-fed beef which if you are on a budget will mean eating less beef as it is more expensive but, on the positive side, most likely locally sourced and found increasingly in grocery stores and restaurants as part of their sustainable sourcing practices. There are programs such as Ecotrust’s Food and Farms Program as well as articles detailing potential health benefits.

Resources:

Video Interviews

Jeff Goebel, Grasslands, Carbon, and Climate Change

Allan Savory, How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change

and Capital Institute‘s John Fullerton, Grasslands and Carbon

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, July 28, 2014, Portland, Oregon.

What is the context of my curation?

We have been growing EarthSayers.tv, a specialized search engine to curated content in the service of sustainability. We focus on advancing the unfiltered voices – individuals of all ages and from all walks of life – and now there are over 1,800 videos in our collection. They are all organized using a sustainability taxonomy – a classification system that goes beyond tagging – which means those searching for information and inspiration don’t have to spend hours wading through hundreds and thousands of videos in the vast sea of information out there. One can search the collection by keyword/phrase across the categories of environmental, social/cultural, and economic using the keywords and phrases ranging from a broad issue such as climate change to Patagonia, a company name, or use our indexing system to review a special collection such as Culture and Consciousness. Our objective is to increase sustainability awareness and advance the citizens speaking on behalf of Mother Earth and her peoples.

And today I curated eleven videos and was inspired and motivated by teenagers, elders, fisherpersons, wisdomkeepers, teachers, musicians and filmmakers.

First I created a new series, The Ways: Great Lakes Native Culture and Language, making eight series to date including (1) Ray Anderson Memorial Interviews, (2) Bill Moyers and Company, (3) Sustainable Today, (4) Native Perspectives on Sustainability, (5) The Natural Way: Indigenous Voices, (6) 3BL  Media Series on CSR and (7) Peak Moment.   The Ways is on ongoing series of stories from Native communities around the central Great Lakes. The Ways supports educators in meeting the requirements of Wisconsin Act 31, seeking to expand and challenge current understanding of Native identity and communities. It is  a production of the  Wisconsin Media Lab.  All nine documentaries, produced and directed by Finn Ryan of the Wisconsin Media Lab, were reviewed, catalogued, links added to descriptions, names and organizations called out and added to the database, a format specified, and other information about the video were all added to the database.  You will note the videos address the environmental, cultural, social and economic aspects of indigenous knowledge, culture, and rights while conveying the principles of sustainability and connectedness to Mother Earth.
Spearfishing: A living History by Jason Bisonette

Lady Thunderhawks: Leading the Way by Jessica House

Hunting Deer: Sharing the harvest by Greg “Biskakone” Johnson

Lake Superior Whitefish: Carrying on a Family Tradition by the Petersons

Performance, Prayers in a Song by Tall Paul  (3:56)

Menominee Language Revitalization by Ron Corn, Jr.

PowWow Trail: Keeping the Beat by Dylan Jennings

Bringing Back the Ho-Chunk Language by Arlene Blackdeer

Clan Mother: Healing the Community by Molly Miller

Two other documentaries reviewed and added are from the folks at Storyhunter.tv, an online production network for professional video journalists and documentary filmmakers, that we more or less found by accident this morning. We will add more of their content as time goes on.

Mexican Teenagers Turn Trash Into Music by Juvenal Alvarez

The Sinkhole That’s Swallowing Louisiana by Ben Depp

I am hoping that at least one of the above titles or a name catches your eye and you take time to listen and be inspired.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, June 26, 2014, Portland, Oregon, (415) 377-1835.

Dear Sir,

This is more of an appeal, than a letter.

I have signed up for alerts on the term, sustainability, from two newspapers, yours and the Financial Times. I have been doing this for some time. Consistently I get a significant amount of alerts from the Financial Times each week that carry headlines such as:

Fossil fuel protesters blockade offices at Harvard or After 15 years at Starbucks, Ben Packard takes up protecting nature or Sharing low carbon sources for a sustainable energy union.

I get few from the New York Times and this one received today pretty much reflects the pattern of the kind of headlines I get from the New York Times:

Lobbying Push Made ‘Grown in U.S.A’ Bloom at White House Dinner
By MARIAN BURROS
American flowers, not imported ones, adorned a White House state dinner thanks to a campaign that included a chat with President Obama on Air Force One.

It’s as if sustainability has to be connected to a social page issue to be considered as sustainability. This is not just one time, but a pattern. I really would like you to reconsider your “tagging” of articles for sustainability. We created a sustainability taxonomy over seven years ago which we have used successfully to curate and catalog over 1,600 videos on the subject of sustainability, EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability. You might find it useful.

It may be that the New York Times has a very narrow definition of the term or simply does not like using it. Whatever the issue, things need to change. Your paper did cover the students, not mentioning Harvard with the largest endowment in the country in the headline, To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios. The point I want to make is climate change is a major sustainability category, along with global warming and responsible/social investment, examples of the latter found here in the special collection on EarthSayers.tv. I am hoping an argument need not be made as to why what the Financial Times is doing is to be emulated by the New York Times, that this is merely an oversight, and you agree with putting all the wood behind one arrow makes sense when it comes to integrating planet, people, and prosperity into our language, ideas, plans and ‘solutions.’

Attached, for your information is a Google ngram you might find interesting on the term sustainability (1964+) which indicates the growth of the use of the term surpassing ecology and environmentalism. By the way, there are over 1.2M searching on the term each month using Google another awareness indicator.

This past weekend had the opportunity to cover the What Is Documentary: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow conference at the University of Oregon’s Portland campus organized by Gabriela Martinez and Janet Wasko of the School of Journalism and Communication.  It was an extremely interesting two days and three evenings of presentations and, yes, film screenings that included Jim Blue’s The March (as in the 1963 March on Washington) and his A Few Notes on Our Food Problem;  David MacDougall’s film, With Morning Hearts, about children attending for the first time the prestigious Doon School in Dehradun, India  (one of five films about the children); the folklorist Sharon Sherman’s What Happened to Zolay? and Art Herbig’s in progress documentary, Public Memory & 9/11, a product of over 70 interviews conducted with volunteers, first responders, tourists and witnesses.  It was the word, witness, that taught me the most about a movement that had escaped my notice completely until Saturday morning when Kelly Matheson, Senior Program Manager, WITNESS, was the plenary speaker.

Kelly is an attorney, filmmaker and human rights advocate who previously worked with WITNESS to launch the first Video Advocacy Institute. As an attorney, she worked as a Law Fellow in Tanzania researching citizens’ rights to bring suit against their governments when governments broke their own laws. She also practiced  throughout the western United States, working on issues where environmental and human rights converge. She began creating films in 2003 as part of Montana State University’s MFA Documentary Filmmaking program. Her film projects focus on indigenous and environmental rights in Central America, the United States and the Congo Basin. Kelly returned to WITNESS after working as a Fulbright researcher in Congo-Brazzaville, where she collaborated with a video-centered outreach project to determine the effectiveness of video to change health and conservation practices.

In short, Kelly is someone who is holding people accountable for human rights violations based largely on evidence provided by videographers – professionals and citizens like you and me.  There are rules of evidence and through the website, Witness.org, her team is developing processes and tools to insure the videos provided by witnesses hold up in court.  She discussed the initiative Camera’s Everywhere a program to ensure that people turning to video for human rights use it as effectively, safely and ethically as possible and the Secure Smart Cam Project to protect the identity of citizen witnesses who are often unprepared for security and safety challenges that arise both for themselves and the people they film – including the confiscation of their devices, attack, imprisonment, revictimization, or worse.  She talked about two mobile apps under development. They are:

(1) InformaCam, intended as the first mobile app seeking to address issues of authentication for digital media. Citizen-shot media sent to newsrooms, human rights organizations and courts of law is often missing vital information that would enable them to verify the story such as who shot it, surrounding context, and a reliable source of data that can answer, “Is this for real?”

(2) ObscuraCam a mobile app that allows users to blur or obfuscate faces in photos and videos. It can be used on media taken directly with the app itself, as well as imported media to your mobile phone.s

There is an excellent TEDxTeachers College talk featuring Kelly as she shares her story about theabeginning of Witness that I recommend you watch here.   Through personal stories and videos she explains how climate change has an impact on the young lives of people all over the world and discusses our rights and that of our children to a sustainable living environment focusing on the process, atmospheric trust litigation (ATL).

I will write more about the people and content in my May blog posts including my interview with David MacDougall, ethnographic filmmaker and scholar of visual anthropology.

Ruth Ann Barrett, April 28, 2014, Portland, Oregon.

A global oceans advocacy effort may require individuals to form clusters of mutual interests separate from their business and professional affiliations, be they with non-profits, NGOs, governments or corporations. It may be that organizations providing support for oceans advocacy projects, programs, initiatives and campaigns are just too slow, too caught up in taking care of their donors and members, too under-financed and over whelmed to solve the problems brought upon us by global warming and the continued dislocation of entire countries because of war and violence.  As to those organizations involved in the making of problems, rather than solutions, it gives their employees, customers, and family members an opportunity to act as citizens in protecting the oceans and work with others who share their commitment.

Thinking about this leads me to propose a community of OceansAdvocacy that provides a communications infrastructure to support individuals to organize, collaborate, build databases, and use research as advocates without the need for an organizational affiliation. A virtual based, citizens action cluster with infrastructure support, available now as no cost services by Google, where people from all walks of life, citizens, are free to express their own views, knowledge, and vision on behalf of the oceans. And to do so emphasizing one-to-one and group conferencing, images over text, and images connected to place.

I’ve prepared a short 10 minute presentation on what OceansAdvocacy could look like modeled in part on the recently launched, Global Forest Watch; applying the work we have done as EarthSayers.tv advancing the voices of sustainability, of which Oceans and Plastic in Our Oceans are two special collections;  and bringing a sustainability perspective to building community that address planet, people, and prosperity.

If you see what I mean about the need to be free to express one’s own views, the power of the Google platform to support a virtual citizens-led movement on behalf of the oceans, then give a listen to my presentation (video here) and get back to me with comments, suggestions or recommendations. Thank you.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, March 31, 2014.