Friday Video: Truck Farm

From Truck Farm film.

This week’s video is a teaser from one of the films they showed last week at the Dig In Festival in Fayettveille, Arkansas.

Based in Brooklyn, this film chronicles the making of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the back of a 1986 truck, an effort to supply healthy, locally grown food in urban centers.  The concept has grown and there are truck farms popping up all over the nation.

Follow the project online and watch portions of the film via truckfarm.com.   Check out the film teaser below.

Would something like this work in your hometown?  Maybe you already have a truck farm.  We’d love to hear about it!

Recorded Stories from the Russellville Seed Swap

2010 Seed Swap. Photo by author.

For the last few days we’ve been posting about the organization Conserving Arkansas Agricultural Heritage.  This week’s Seed and the Story column was an overview of the organization, and this week’s Friday Video, features a trailer from the Seed Swap documentary, produced by Zachariah McCannon, about the beginning of the swaps.

Last year I attended the Russellville Seed Swap and brought along my recording equipment.  Here’s a radio essay I produced for the Ozarks at Large program featuring a few voices form the swap including new growers and those who’ve been gardening for decades.

You can listen to the story by going to the KUAF page here. Better yet, listen to the entire Friday Ozarks at Large program here. The seed swap story begins around 23:00. Or you can listen here:

CAAH Seed Swap in Logan County, Arkansas by Boiled Down Juice
Featured music includes “Ship Out On The Sea” from the Be Good Tanyas and “The Farmer is the Man,” from Fiddlin John Carson.

And if you want to see more photos and read more from last year’s swap, here’s our post from last year.  Thanks for listening/reading!

“Hand of Man” Video About Mountain Top Removal

Music for the Mountains cd. Released 2011.

The band Magnolia Mountain recently released a video for their song “Hand of Man” about the horrors of Appalachian mountaintop removal.  The song appears on the Music for the Mountains compilation cd, which was released last year (to read about that project go here).

According to the band’s web page, the video took about a year to make. It’s filled with footage detailing the destruction that comes from this form of coal mining, including reference to high cancer rates and polluted waterways.  The video takes its cues from a long history of Appalachian organizing.

From Jeff Bigger’s post in the Huffington Post:

The Hand of Man” takes the listener to White Star Holler in Kentucky, where seven generations of mountain families have struggled to defend their lives and livelihoods from the toxic fallout from coal company destruction:

White Star Holler was my home
Shared the crops that we had grown
Shared the water from our well
Shared the life we loved so well
Coal men brought the mountain down
Leaked their poison underground
Mother, neighbor, friend, and son
Cancer took them, every one  (to read the whole post go here)

The band is asking that this video be shared far and wide to spread the word about mountaintop removal.  Want to know and/or get involved?  Visit I Love Mountains.org and be sure and check out the work of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap Box Documentary

Dr. Bronner.

While scanning the Netflix streaming options last night in search for a good documentary to accompany my evening knitting, I came across Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox.  Produced by Sara Lamm in 2007, it’s both an exploration of eccentric beliefs and a profile of a social responsible company.  If you’ve already seen it I’d love to hear your take on it .

You’re probably familiar with the soap, or more so its label, a jumbled series of prophetically sounding run-on sentences about hard work, moral ABCs, and God, all culminating in the phrase, “All-one!”    A master soap maker who lost his parents in the Holocaust, Dr. Bronner escaped from a mental institution before traveling the U.S. selling his soap and, more specifically, the message printed on the bottle. His teachings were a mixture of astronomy, religion (specifically the unification of all faiths), and social commentary, specifically the belief in equality of all humankind.

The documentary centers around Bronner’s youngest son, Ralph Bronner, who travels the United States telling the story of his father and his belief in what he dubbed the “moral ABCs.”  According to the film producers, “68-year-old Ralph endured over 15 orphanages and foster homes as a child, but despite difficult memories, is his father’s most ardent fan.”

It’s a compelling film, unraveling the character of Dr. Bronner from the man himself, a flawed human who put his belief in the need to “unite spaceship earth” above his own children.  Although slow-moving at times with less than perfect footage, the film does a great job teasing out the wisdom of Dr. Bronner’s teachings from his numerous shortcomings as both a visionary and a father.

What I found most fascinating about the documentary (besides an inside look at an eccentric self-proclaimed rabbi), were the slivers of information about his descendants who run the company today.  Ralph is clearly more emotionally complex then he ever lets on, and the film follows his travels as he attempts to connect with strangers, striving to bring his father’s legacy to new generation even as he seeks out his own identity. He meets a New York subway worker and talks of the beauty of the common man. He befriends a piano player who’s caring for his dying friend. Somehow the legacy of soap continues to serve as a window to our common humanity and underlying eccentricities.  (You can read Ralph’s response to the film here).

Alongside Ralph’s bittersweet tale is a glimpse into how the company is run today, the product of Bronner’s relatives who clearly have a deep respect for the man even as they live with troubling memories.  Everything within the business is operated under Fair Trade agreements, workers are paid incredibly well, and the operation focuses on environmental, economic, and social sustainability.  The family doesn’t go around preaching Bronner’s teachings, but rather apply some of the more accessible policies of what Bronner dubbed “constructive capitalism.” According to the film, all of the Bronner descendants have “capped their salaries so that they make no more than five times that of the lowest paid employee.”

Have you seen the film?  What are your thoughts?

You can read more information from the fim’s creator here.

Also check out her interview on NPR here.

Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen: The Power of Storytelling, Vulnerability, and Community Action.

Henry Red Cloud, Yes! Magazine. Photo by Dan Bihn.

If you’re a frequent reader of the Boiled Down Juice, you know that Yes! Magazine is one of our favorite publications.  With the tag line  “powerful ideas, practical actions,” Yes! showcases and explores the concepts and people on the front lines of democracy, social innovation, and community action.  Back in November they issued their winter publication, The Breakthrough 15: The justice warriors, eco-innovators, happiness architects, and change artists who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.  

I recently picked up a copy (a little late, I know) of this special issue dedicated “to the power of the 99 percent—and to a group of people who aren’t looking for leadership from those with entrenched wealth and influence.”  The main goal of this special publication, Yes! claims, is to profile “a group of people who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.”

I especially love that the introductory essay, written by Madeline Ostrander, highlights the power of storytelling, noting that “personal stories remind us that others face the same difficulties and vulnerabilities we do. We discover our own power when we realize we aren’t alone.”  It’s this focus on difficulties and vulnerabilities I find particularly important.  Too often the media portrays activists as larger than life, endless whirlwinds of ideas and energy, when in reality they’re fragile humans who experience frustration and confusion just like anyone else.  Most importantly, their ideas and strategies have been forged within these frustrations and confusions.  We need more stories that illuminate this gray area between observation and action.

Ranging from the stories of Henry Red Cloud, the director of Lakota Solar Enterprises which provides renewable energy to poor Native American communities, to Lily Yeh, the founder of Barefoot Artists, an organization using the power of art to transform neighborhoods, the magazine is diverse collection of portraits of people recognizing and utilizing their skills in their own communities.

For the rest of the week we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the people featured and the work they’re doing.  Some of the people we’ve discussed before, such as the amazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, but some were new to us.

You can read all the profiles here on Yes!   Tell us if you’ve read this issue and what you enjoyed.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Friday Video: “I Will Be a Hummingbird” Wangari Maathai

From the Dirt webpage

Earlier this week Wanagari Maathai, founder of the Kenyan Greenbelt Movement, Nobel Laurette, and human rights advocate died at the age of seventy-one.    Quoting from the New York Times obituary,

“In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Maathai said the inspiration for her work came from growing up in rural Kenya. She reminisced about a stream running next to her home — a stream that has since dried up — and drinking fresh, clear water.

“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness,” she said, “to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”  (Read the entire piece, written by Jeffrey Gettleman, here). 

We posted another video from Maathai earlier this week, but this video in particular has been circulating a great deal this week, so we decided to share it here.  It’s taken from Dirt: The Movie, a film which strives to bring “to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has.”  This clip from Wangari Maathai reminds us of the choices we have and the decisions we can make, even amid huge challenges.

Wangari Maathai Passes Away

From Taking Root webpage

You have probably heard the news that Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and Nobel Peace Prize winner, passed away after a long battle with cancer.   Quoting from Richard Black’s tribute article for the BBC:

The Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977, has planted an estimated 45 million trees around Kenya.

The straightforward environmental benefits of that would have been important enough on their own in a country whose population has grown more than 10-fold over the last century, creating huge pressure on land and water.

But what made the movement more remarkable was that it was also conceived as a source of employment in rural areas, and a way to give new skills to women who regularly came second to men in terms of power, education, nutrition and much else.

Maathai published a wonderful book several years ago that goes into the specifics of how the movement worked, both its successes and early setbacks.   You can find this work, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and Experience by clicking here. 

In discussing her Nobel Peace Prize Richard Black points out Maathai’s holistic approach to cultural and environmental sustainability and her deep understanding of the multi-layered connection between humans and the land:

In other words, it’s not just planting trees – it’s the reasons why trees are planted, it’s the social side of how the tree-planting works, it’s the political work that goes alongside tree-planting, and it’s the vision that sees loss of forest as translating into loss of prospects for people down the track.

You can read the rest of the moving article here. 

You can read moving testimonies about her life on her facebook page here.

From the documentary Taking Root: The Vision of Wangair Maathai:

Other Links:

Taking Root:  The Vision of Wangair Maathai

The Official Site of the Green Belt Movement

Books by Wanagri Maathai 

Thank you Wangari Maathai for your life’s work. 

Friday Video: Rerelease of You Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South.

From the Milestone Films webpage.

Each Friday on our Facebook page we’ve been posting a video that we’ve come across that explores the intersection of cultural tradition and grassroots action.  It dawned on me that I should also post those videos here for folks who may not be following the blog on facebook.  (To follow The Boiled Down Juice on facebook go here and “like” the page).

I’ve been seeing several posts lately about this amazing documentary, and so this week’s video is a preview of the re-release of 1985  film You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South. The preview alone is an incredibly inspiring look at how regular people fight for justice and features the amazing work of Highlander Folk School, now known as Highlander Research and Education Center.

Here’s the opening quote from the preview which sums up participatory research and action so well. “Well no, I’m not a leader they would say.  But we say, “You know the problem.  If you know the problem, you see the problem, you know what needs to be done to solve that problem then you’re the one that have to take the ball and run with it.”"

From the Milestone webpage:

Milliarium Zero’s release in celebration of the legendary Highlander Folk School, YOU GOT TO MOVE follows a group of individuals in the process of becoming involved in grassroots social change in the South. These people have been active in some of the most significant movements in the past fifty years, from Civil Rights and labor organizing to citizens’ actions against toxic waste dumping and strip mining.

Produced by Lucy Massie Phenix Directed and edited by Lucy Massie Phenix & Veronica Selver, the film features Myles Horton, Bernice Robinson, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Bill Saunders, Rebecca Simpson, Gail & Richard Story, May Justice, MaryLee & Russell Rogers, Becky Simpson, members of the Bumpass Cove community and the Cranks Creek Survival Center of Kentucky.

You can watch a preview of the rerelease via youtube by clicking here.

And here’s an older preview that’s great too.

Something You Should See: The Natural State of America

From the film's webpage

Last week at the annual conference of the Arkansas Anthropological and Sociology Association, Dr. Bryan C. Campbell, professor of visual anthropology at the University of Central Arkansas, played a short clip from his upcoming documentary about the Newton County Wildlife Association and their ongoing fight to keep their forests free of toxic herbicides. The tiny bit of the film that we got to see was incredibly compelling. Beginning with the history of the organization’s founding in 1970, the film focuses on this highly effective and active resistance movement in the Ozarks, detailing how every day people are able to organize and fight to keep their forest safe.  Unfortunately today they face a new host of challenges.

The preview of the film is now available online, and you should really check it out. To watch the preview click here.

The film will be shown at all major film festivals in Arkansas and throughout the nation. To keep up with developments related to the film and to find a viewing location, be sure and become a fan of the film on facebook.  To do that go here.

Dr. Campbell runs Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (think I have posted about this before. If not, I should have!). They preserve agricultural folkways and engage in seed conversation and seed swaps across the state. Check out all the information by clicking here. If you are a seed saver you would love to attend these gatherings.

And, for a little extra info, Here’s a nice article about Dr. Brian Campbell and his work with the Seed Bank at UCA.

“The Gulf Between Us” Terry Tempest Williams tells stories from the gulf oil spill

Yesterday writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams was interviewed on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez regarding her recent piece about the gulf oil spill. Explaining her reasons for writing the piece she said, “And I just think it’s really important that, at this anniversary of six months, that we begin to really hear from the people on the ground. And that’s what my purpose was. You know, I have a pen. I’m a writer. I was home in Utah thinking, you know, what can I do? And I had to go. I had to see it for myself. So it was about ground truthing. It was about bearing witness. And I don’t think bearing witness is a passive act.” To hear the interview go here.

The piece, published in Orion Magazine, tells the stories of a handful of gulf residents whose lives are directly affected by the spill. Although Williams calls Utah home, she wants to call attention to the stories we are not hearing about the situation in the gulf and the familiar reality of production taking precedent to living creatures and the land that sustains us:

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