Tag Archives: Barry Heidt

Making Video Work Again and Again for Your Cause

Get on-board with Creative Commons License

It will be in the best interest of the sustainability community to adopt the practice of using a Creative Commons license to increase not only the sharing of content, but the mixing of content to seed the Web with messages to educate, inspire and motivate our citizens. Seeding increases page rankings, advances the visibility of sustainability leaders, and is critical to educating the majority of our citizens who use the Web to find information on topics of interest including the 2.1M on sustainability, 1.8M on climate change, 2.2M on Global Warming and 246,000 on pure water.

Re-purposing content and seeding the Web

Incorporating video from a download or screen capture, in whole or part, depending on the length and message, is relatively easy and can be thought of as a video quote or clip. Another way to express it: one producer’s video may be another producer’s B–roll, the supplemental or alternate footage inter-cut into another interview or documentary.Just this last week I received an email from AmazonWatch about their recently uploaded video on YouTube that is part of a petition campaign to oust the CEO of Chevron and to “Please tell the board of directors to FIRE John Watson.” This video was edited by the Amazon Watch folks and re-purposed from a January 2010 video, Message from Ecuador to Chevron CEO John Watson, part of another petition campaign.

Obtaining permission is highly recommended and nearly always granted for non-commercial purposes. However, producers are encouraged to use Creative Commons licensing to encourage and speed the process.

EXAMPLES

Here is an example of how I incorporated clips from a documentary, Screams of the Amazon, produced by Siegmund Thies and Joke Baert of Pachamama Ecuador into a radio interview, Oil over Water: Ecuador’s Indigenous Peoples Threatened by Barry Heidt. I converted the “radio” to a video having added clips and images and then posted to YouTube and here on our site, EarthSayers.tv.

This is an example of a ‘video quote’ from the same documentary that stands on its own and is posted on YouTube and Earthsayers.tv, voices of sustainability, titled as Easy Money in the Amazon – At what cost? by Patricia Gualinga.

A bit more on the Creative Commons License I used in connection with the above videos:

Selecting a License

Creative Commons offers six different content licenses. The first step to sharing your work is to select the license that’s right for you. The Creative Commons license chooser helps you select a CC license that matches the conditions you want. It also provides you with a snippet of code for your website to signal which license you’ve chosen.
Example of using Creative Commons
License work and encourage the seeding of your message:

For our work in connection with EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability, we use Creative Commons licenses. If you wish to incorporate our video work into your work, we encourage it, but only for non-commercial use. We ask you attribute the work to Ruth Ann Barrett, EarthSayers.tv and send a URL so we may see your work. For permission issues around modifications of our work, call 415-377-1385 or email ruthann@earthsayers.tv.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, May 16, 2013, Cleveland, Ohio.

Oil Over Water in Ecuador

My interview of Barry Heidt of Sustainability Action Media (SAM) about his trip to Ecuador’s Achuar Territory occurred on March 22nd so with a nod to World Water Day we talked about water. You can’t talk about water in Ecuador without talking about oil.

It will take a few minutes to read this blog post and less than an hour to take action. It will be time well spent in the service of sustainability.

Here we go.

1. Give five minutes to listen to Barry’s interview for background and motivation. He saved you the trip of going there on your own to verify that oil and water do not mix and to choose oil over water is to choose short term profits over the rights of Mother Earth and our communities.

2. Barry references a recently released documentary by the folks in Quito associated with Fundancio Pachamama entitled, Screams of the Amazon. This too is educational and in a much more dramatic way. Ecuador’s government is moving forward with the next phase of the 11th Oil Round, opening up 10 million acres of pristine rainforest to petroleum companies. It’s 11 minutes short.

We excerpted Patricia Gualinga’s interview from the video, Screams of the Amazon, and published it here as a short, short (53 seconds) entitled, “Easy Money in the Amazon, At What Cost?”

3. Raise her question by citing this short video on your LinkedIn groups to raise a frank discussion among groups with sustainability leanings ranging from climate to community engagement, to greenbiz. It really goes to the heart of sustainability and sustainable development. Help with seeding the Web by raising the question (link to the video) with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. (1/2 hour)

4. Sign a petition here to tell Ecuador’s President Correa You Stand with Indigenous Peoples for an Oil-free Amazon. (3 minutes)

5. Talk about it. Most if not all of the last of our non-renewable energy resources are in the territories of indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Voices of Sustainability

Domingo Peas

Shortly Barry will be publishing his two interviews with community leaders, Domingo Peas, Sharamentsa and Hilario Saant, Kapawi of the Achuar Territory in Ecuador. These indigenous voices of sustainability will give you the ground level perspective as the very existence of communities in the Southeast region of Ecuador are threatened.

Hope and Heart

Erick Gonzales

My motivation to call for action on this issue stems from the question raised by Erick Gonzalez of Earth Peoples United, “What gives us hope and heart to keep working on what is best for our Earth in the face of difficult changes?”

Engaging my readers in the issues around oil and water, spurred on by my colleague Barry’s strong personal commitment to the Rights of Nature movement and his journey to Ecuador, gives me hope and heart. I hope it does the same for you.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, March 25, 2013, Portland, Oregon.

*Screams of the Amazon produced by Pacha Producciones, Quito, Ecuador, 2013 and published on the FPachamama YouTube channel, March 12, 2013 is also found on EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability here.

Qualities of Sustainability Leaders: The Short List

A short list of five qualities I have found in sustainability leaders and now “findable” in abundance at EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability.

Now that I live and work in a community where there is much more support for sustainability I don’t have to spend as much time doing missionary work on the relevancy of it, but I do talk more about leaders and why sustainability leaders need to ban together and become much more visible, not just on EarthSayers.tv, but, locally in their communities.

At the same time I have been listening to leadership experts who generally don’t reference sustainability (more missionary work needed here), but who have been talking about the qualities of leadership that are lacking and, as Bill George of Harvard and a member of the Board of Exxon Mobile and Goldman Sachs observes; it is a”failure of leadership” that has put our country at risk. Of course it’s not just our country is it? Back to Professor George in a minute.

Based on what two leadership experts are talking about and my own experience reviewing hundreds of speeches and interviews, here is a short list of the qualities I have found in sustainability leaders:

(1) Givers not takers.

Sustainability leaders don’t fit the old model of leadership as detailed in a speech to the Google folks by leadership expert Bill George of Harvard University. On what basis have we been choosing our leaders? “More for charisma, than character, more for style than substance, more for their image than their integrity. Not very authentic people, smart, but not committed, takers rather than givers.” Just give a listen to B Corporation members, there are over 200 of them, as the “B” is “for benefit.” Here are three on EarthSayers, including the cofounder of B Corps, Jay Gilbert.

Jay Coen Gilbert, B Corporation; Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation; Miranda Magagnini, IceStone.

(2) Motivators

Again from Bill George: “Economists told us for many years that people only interested in money. Not motivating people. Today we want to find meaning and significance in our work.

Over 90% of the voices on EarthSayers.tv have motivated me to continue with my work and many in different ways emphasize the significance of taking the first step. I don’ think anyone says this better and more simply than Kip Ward, owner of a completely recycled motel in the beach community of Lincoln City, Oregon. Give a listen to what Kip has to say and my thanks to both Kip and filmmaker, producer Barry Heidt of Lincoln City, Oregon who understand the significance of Earthsayers.tv and produced this for EarthSayers.

(3) Different and Humble

According to Blair Sheppard, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, company recruiters are saying they need a “different kind of person. (They) need a person who is more of a leader, but humble.” I think the collection of leaders on EarthSayers demonstrates how different the sustainability leadership is, you can hear and see it for yourself. Experts and leaders such as the head of Common Cause, Bob Edgar, all say the same thing: “We are all called to be leaders.”

(4) Multi-cultured

Here’s Dean Sheppard. “If you think about the structure of the problems businesses are grappling with today, more and more of it requires that people work effectively with other people, often times from different civilizations from their own. “ It’s not just businesses is it?

Organizations such as the Ecotrust recognize the most innovative indigenous leaders for their efforts to improve conditions in their communities through award programs and public events. There is Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund For Women and then there is the The Goldman Environmental Prize, world’s largest award for grassroots environmentalists.

That’s my short list for now. It will grow as we add more and more sustainability leaders to EarthSayers.tv. Oh wait, I forgot the last one.

(5) Visible.

With the help of Chelsea Peil, community developer, and Barry Heitd we are establishing local offshoots of EarthSayers starting with the Portland Sustainability Leadership Channel and the SeaStar Sustainability Leadership Channel, an ecotourism-focused channel for Lincoln City, Oregon. This is a simple, easy- to- put- into- action model for bringing a focus on the leaders in local communities using YouTube channels and, internationally, through connection to the EarthSayers network. Robert Seireeni in his book, The Gort Cloud, references “The Invisible Force powering today’s most visible Green Brands.” Well, it’s time to get visible.