The fourth edition of the Sustainable Planet film festival was a big success. The Daily News had announced it as one of the happening events to do on Saturday…a Brazilian tv producer covered the event and several groups wrote about it on their blogs and newsletters. Another two day Sustainable Planet event is already planned in October. Contact me if you want to participate. Added is feedback made by some of the attendees
Thank you all ( sponsors: Con Edison, Sephora, Launch Squad, Harlem beers, Gusto Organics, Enclave Rising, AVI media Group, Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, Guylian Chocolates, Ethical Markets, Planet 2025, Volvic, The Artisan wines, Verdant Magazine, The Bohemian National Hall ), speakers, volunteers and participants for your help ) I could not have made it without all your energy and dedication.
Love & Light
Pamela
FEEDBACK :
Hello, Pamela. I was glad to make it to your event, even for just a few hours, as I caught two talks, the break, and the excellent movie “Burning Season”. I thought the multi-viewpoint approach to the topic was enlightening and a bit of a change from the usual blame focus, but showing instead how the process works through many varied interests and structures until finally a change can occur.
David Alexander
Opal Computing
Hi Pamela, I had a great time at your film festival. It was exciting to meet your guests and speakers. I absolutely loved “Burning Season” it was sad inspiring and infuriating all at once!
You are amazing and I cant believe you are going to put together another film festival by October! How do you do it all?
Best,
Michelle Vey
Producer
Dear Pamela, Your Saturday Sustainable Planet Documentaries were remarkable…
I hope our path will cross again very soon as we both work in the same (and for the same…) better world.
Guillaume Gauthereau
The Sequoia Lab
Hi Pamela: It was a wonderful event. Well done! Melissa UltoVideographer
Pamela, You are a beautiful pure being. Thank you for holding the center of the amazing world you create, and sharing it selflessly with everyone else.
It was such a powerful and poignant day! Many blessings on you sister!
Shelly Bomb
The Lifeline
Pamela, The event was fantastic! You did an amazing job. Thank you again. All the best,
Kimberly Slicklein
CEO & Founder Enclave Rising, LLC
I am counting the days as we are rapidly approaching the New York edition of the Sustainable Planet film festival. The date for this is Saturday, June 20.
It will be an exciting day as we are not only producing the film festival, but also the Sustainable Steward Gala.
I just locked down two new amazing speakers and the program is now complete. The two last visionary minds added to the already amazing program are:
1. the Mayor of Curitiba ( Brazil ), Dr. Jamie Lerner, a long time pioneer who transformed his city more than 20 years ago. He will also receive the Sustainable Steward award for the Lifestyle category
2. the Green Sundance tv host and bestselling author ( the Lazy environmentalist ) Josh Dorfman.
A wonderful radio interview, created by Mark Sutton is available as well and I look forward to see you all!
MORE :
Launched in 2005 as to celebrate the UNESCO decade for Sustainable Education, with whom I am a marketing team member, the festival aims to inspire the attendees (as well as global citizens through webinars) to adopt Sustainable lifestyles, have them meet several visionary minds and educate them about the alternative options they have. The movies showcase community building efforts and/or environmental care practices.
Parallel to the film festival, we are also organizing the Sustainable Steward Gala, which celebrates 8 unique sustainability personalities in the categories of art, business, lifestyle, entertainment, culinary delight, personal development, sports and eco tourism. The festival has already been produced in three different countries.
MOVIES FROM ALL AROUND THE WORLD
Films that have been entered in the Sustainable Planet film festival since 2005 come from India, Belgium, the USA, France, Haiti, Lebanon, Germany, Australia and Brazil
The movies showcase community building efforts and/or environmental care practices. The opening documentary for the 2009 edition is made by Award Winning Director Tad Fettig, whose PBS series “e2” deals with the economies of being environmentally conscious. This series will shortly be featured on the Green Sundance Channel.
VISIONARY MINDS WILL ADDRESS THE AUDIENCE
With the hard reality of declining established corporations, new economies and social values are growing and all the eyes are on the green economy. The numbers of early adopters of this new paradigm are 50 million American citizens and many questions are rising as to who is doing what, where to go and what to buy? We have therefore lined up a group of visionary minds, who will share their experience in the green market.
The audience will hear from bestselling author & Green Sundance tv host Josh Dorfman, Dr. Jaime Lerner, Mayor to Curitiba ( Brazil ), one of the greenest cities in the World, Steven Lovink, founder of Planet 2025, Hazel Henderson, CEO of Ethical Markets, Michael Ekstract, founder of Verdant magazine and Alberto Gonzalez, Pamela Lippe, founder of Earth Day New York, Founder of Gusto Organics, the first 100 % certified organic restaurant in New York, just to name a few.
YOUR UPCOMING SUSTAINABLE PLANET APPOINTMENTFor its fourth edition, we have chosen to produce the event on Saturday June 20th at the Bohemian Hall in Manhattan, located at 321 East 73rd street. A Festival access pass ( noon to 5.45 pm ) is $ 60, lunch and drinks included. Include access to the Sustainable Steward Gala ( 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ) and then the ticket price is $ 100. Tickets can be bought at http://sustainableplanet.eventbrite.com/
I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Sylvia Earle - the leading lady amongst marine biologists - earlier this week and spend an hour talking about her career, the state of the oceans and the choices that consumers can take in their daily life to lower the pressure that many sea species are undergoing.
Sylvia Earle was born in Gibbstown, New Jersey. Her parents raised her on a small farm near Camden. From the time she was very small, Sylvia loved exploring the woods near her home. She was fascinated by the creatures and plants that lived in the wild. Neither of her parents had a college education, but they too loved nature, and they taught young Sylvia to respect wild creatures and not to be afraid of the unknown. Those who have followed her adult career may wonder if she is afraid of anything.
When Sylvia was 13, the family moved to Clearwater, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, Sylvia was learning all she could about the wildlife of the Gulf and its coast. Her parents could not afford to send her to college themselves, but she was an exceptional student and won scholarships to the Florida State. Throughout her school years, she supported herself by working in college laboratories.
Here, she first learned scuba diving, determined to use this new technology to study marine life at first hand. Fascinated by all aspects of the ocean and marine life, Sylvia decided to specialize in botany. Understanding the vegetation, she believes, is the first step to understanding any ecosystem.
After earning her Master’s at Duke University, Sylvia Earle took time off to marry and start a family but remained active in marine exploration. In 1964, when her children were only two and four, she left home for six weeks to join a National Science Foundation expedition in the Indian Ocean. Throughout the mid-1960s, she struggled to balance the demands of her family with scientific expeditions that took her all over the world.
In the 1970s, scientific missions took Sylvia Earle to the Galapagos, to the water off Panama, to China and the Bahamas and, again, to the Indian Ocean. During this period she began a productive collaboration with undersea photographer Al Giddings. Together, they investigated the battleship graveyard in the Caroline Islands of the South Pacific.
In 1977 they made their first voyage following the great sperm whales. In a series of expeditions they followed the whales from Hawaii to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Bermuda and Alaska. Their journeys were recorded in the documentary film Gentle Giants of the Pacific (1980).
In 1979, Sylvia Earle walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any living human being before or since. In the so-called Jim suit, a pressurized one-atmosphere garment, she was carried by a submersible down to the depth of 1,250 feet below the ocean’s surface off of the island of Oahu. At the bottom, she detached from the vessel and explored the depths for two and a half hours with only a communication line connecting her to the submersible, and nothing at all connecting her to the world above. She described this adventure in her 1980 book: Exploring the Deep Frontier.
In the 1980s, along with engineer Graham Hawkes, she started the companies Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technologies. These ventures design and build undersea vehicles like Deep Rover and Deep Flight which are making it possible for scientists to maneuver at depths that defied all previously existing technology. In the middle of this life of adventure, Sylvia Earle has been married and raised three children, some of whom have worked side by side with her at Deep Ocean Engineering
In the early 1990s, Dr. Earle took a leave of absence from her companies to serve as Chief Scientist of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. There, among other duties, Sylvia Earle was responsible for monitoring the health of the nation’s waters. In this capacity she also reported on the environmental damage wrought by Iraq’s burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields.
Today she is explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society and my talk with her resulted in voicing out the alarming situation of overfishing.
She is currently writing a book entitled “The Deep Blue” and I’ll be looking forward to talk again with her upon its release.
In the meantime, I can guide you to a wonderful website that introduces more leading ladies that the company “smart talk” puts on for a large audience of women, and who invited me to talk to Dr. Sylvia Earle.
The radio interview will be posted shortly on the Lotus Women website and the Sustainable Styles magazine.
The curtains open……
A shadow on stage stands tall like a mountain. The audience can perceive a woman, dressed in the most dazzling white gown, which - at times - looks nearly fluorescent.
Musicians announce an eclectic performance, I am about to discover Susana Lei’Ataua.
Images of nature are projected behind her : little clouds, virgin forest, skies and water all intertwine and shed a second light upon the theme of “Breaking the Surface”. Susana, the recipient of the New Zealand Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for 2008 starts to mix tribal sounds from her native Samoa located in the Pacific. She descends from generations of story-tellers and shares hers to the audience:
Tell the truth. Be here now.
A mountain travels from the Pacific to wake this Island
that sleeps between two rivers.
The water is rising. No one is listening.
Susana Lei’ataua, weaves ancient rhythms and modern mythology together with acclaimed New Zealand composer Gareth Farr, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Pheeroan akLaff, Clark Gayton, Eddy Malave and Jay Rodriguez.
“Breaking the Surface is a ceremonial call to alms destroying the exotic to celebrate the every day. It’s a similar vibration to my “Celebrate Life, every single Moment” opening line to my “our planet” tv series.
If you haven’t heard from Susana, look her up online, as she is worth a detour. Mother Gaia speaks right through her and she found her balance between the masculine and the feminine. The result of her fine work is magnetic and you are bound to witness the purest of truth of Our Planet and its spirit that we are all a part of. I bet you’ll wake up a little bit too!
http://www.nyu-apastudies.org/gallery.php?type=air&air_id=13
Several great interviews came my way as well, but I’ll talk about media in another blog entry, as there are many new things happening in that arena.
During the course of these last couple of month, we also celebrated the arrival of a new President in the White House. With the hard reality of declining established corporations, new economies and social values are growing and all the eyes are on the green economy. The early adopters of this new paradigm have already settled into this lifestyle several decades ago, but now the rest of the world is wondering what new company to set up, how to recycle, reduce and reuse, what to buy, where to go and so on.
Green is “HOT”, and besides all the greenwashing that’s going on, I have been able to see a rise of corporations asking how to go green, attended many events that portray a growing market and met with many visionary minds who are in the business of “doing good”.
I also took a long needed break and chose for the Jungle of Honduras. It is there that a wonderful yogi by the lucious name of Wendy Green has opened up her beautiful villa that is situated in the middle of the jungle, as she had decided to trade her yoga center in Long island for the jungle in La Ceiba. No more focus on materialism, but “hello” to reconnecting with Gaia.
Imagine waking up in your own private house on the property, waking up with the sound of the river and tropical birds, doing yoga at 8.00 am witnessed by the gigantic waterfall on the other side of the mountain hill and being served a fresh fruit smoothy at 9.00am,
And this is just the beginning…..as the choices are endless. I created my own mix and managed to read EAT, PRAY and LOVE, meditate, write poetry, go out on multiple jungle hikes ( yes, that waterfal hike was unbelievable ), adventured myself to a mangrove forrest kayaking trip, inclusive of White Faced Monkeys, took hundreds of pictures of wild flowers and plants, saved a baby owl, took outdoors showers while looking at wild orchids, discover some rural villages, made some new friends AND totally indulged in raw food.
Wendy and her boyfriend are the most dedicated raw foodies and I had the pleasure of being served three meals a day. To me, being a vegetarian that means heaven and I litterally felt more vibrant every day.
I made a recording of Wendy’s Yoga practive, her property and some excursions…. So I’ll have to guide you to the Sustainable Styles magazine for a posting real soon!!
In the meantime, check out her side and try one of her raw food recipes!!!
