Thousands of Succulents, millions of dollars. a real world theft of highly prized plants that are worth BIG money.
In northern California, a Game Warden uncovers an illicit network of succulent poachers after mysterious packages containing native plants are reported, and with the help of citizens, biologists, and authorities, he races against time to halt the destruction before permanent damage is inflicted on the land.
Winner of Emerald award Coronado Film Festival 2021
✳️A note from the Filmmakers
Hi there, it all began with reading a news article in The New Yorker describing the case and Officer Freeling's big break. We decided to call him up and ask to talk on camera about it, not really knowing where it would lead but understanding it was incredibly bizarre and interesting. We self-funded the whole project and are proud of what we were able to pull off with very little money. We're very grateful to have been accepted into prominent festivals like SXSW and Doc NYC. In documentary filmmaking, finding an audience that cares about the issues in your film is crucial, so festivals are huge. Please share the video; the more people who know that plant poaching is a real issue, the better!
UPDATE⚠️: Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill (AB) 223 by Assembly member Chris Ward (D - San Diego) into law, making it unlawful to sell, or possess with the intent to sell, any Dudleya illegally taken from its natural habitat on state lands. AB 223 makes it unlawful to sell or possess with the intent to sell any Dudleya illegally taken from its natural habitat and establishes minimum penalties of $5,000 per plant for the first offense, and $40,000 per plant for any subsequent offenses.
Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. plenary last night in Katowice, Poland, condemning global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change.
"…Until you start focusing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself…"
Keith Olbermann calls on all foreign governments to overthrow President Trump, claiming we are "victims of a coup". This is a MAJOR felony: See here~~> https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385
Pound for pound, the roar of the African rain frog is every bit as fearsome as that of the lion. And you, like this bold little warrior, should remember to never stop squeaking up for yourself!
Special thanks to Dean Boshoff for the awesome footage.
Don't want to miss the latest videos, news and opportunities to take action from the Center for Biological Diversity? Join our e-network today: http://ow.ly/6DqK303X5qV
Hear the message of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Honor tribal sovereignty and the Earth we inhabit by telling President Obama to deny the easement by calling 202-456-1111. We need every person to call Obama this week before Dec. 5th. Please share. For more information visit standwithstandingrock.net #NoDAPL #StandwithStandingRock #standingrock #bankexit
Tell President Obama to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect water for 17 million people and our planet for future generations: SIGN THE PETITION at PEOPLESCLIMATEMUSIC.COM
Hip Hop Caucus, creator of People’s Climate Music, has partnered with Taboo, solo Hip Hop artist and member of the Grammy Award-winning pop group Black Eyed Peas, to debut “Stand Up/Stand N Rock”. This song and video were created in support of the Standing Rock Reservation and the Sioux Tribe, as they lead a peaceful, powerful, and diverse movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).
Song produced by Printz Board.
Video directed and edited by Johnny Lee, filmed by Baxter Stapelton and includes actress and Divergent series star Shailene Woodley; artists: TABOO of Black Eyed Peas, Tony Duncan (flute), Perry Cheevers (intro/native chant), PJ Vegas (hook), Kahara Hodges (hook), Emcee One (2nd verse), Drezus (2nd verse/pos-hook), Supaman (bridge) Gerald Danforth (bridge), Spencer Battiest (last verse), Doc Battiest (last verse), and MC My (verse), Martin Sensmeier, Bethany Yellowtail, Lehi Thunder Voice Eagle, Shalene Joseph, Temryss Lane, Gina Tiger, and Indigenous Enterprise. Additional footage provided by Heather Rae, BEN, and Cody Lucich - Thank u all for Standing Up 4 Standing Rock.
While Democracy Now! was covering the Standing Rock standoff earlier this month, we spoke to Winona LaDuke, longtime Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She spent years successfully fighting the Sandpiper pipeline, a pipeline similar to Dakota Access. We met her right outside the Red Warrior Camp, where she has set up her tipi. Red Warrior is one of the encampments where thousands of Native Americans representing hundreds of tribes from across the U.S. and Canada are currently resisting the pipeline’s construction
As we reported on Monday, Sept. 12, 2016 – In other Dakota Access pipeline news, last Thursday, Morton County, North Dakota, issued an arrest warrant for Amy Goodman. The charge: criminal trespass, a misdemeanor offense. The case, State of North Dakota v. Amy Goodman, stems from Democracy Now!’s coverage in North Dakota over the Labor Day weekend of the Native American-led protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. On Saturday, September 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the Dakota Access pipeline company using dogs and pepper spray to attack protesters.
Friday afternoon brought a roller coaster of emotions for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and supporters in the battle to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) near the tribe's North Dakota reservation. Shortly after a federal judge rejected the tribe's emergency legal challenge, a joint statement by three federal agencies effectively stopped work on the pipeline until significant questions are answered about potential environmental and cultural impacts.
A GRAIN OF SALT "Here’s the real story: This fight has neither been won nor lost."
Erased By False Victory: Obama Hasn’t Stopped DAPL
All Native struggles in the United States are a struggle against erasure. The poisoning of our land, the theft of our children, the state violence committed against us — we are forced to not only live in opposition to these ills, but also to live in opposition to the fact that they are often erased from public view and public discourse, outside of Indian Country. The truth of our history and our struggle does not match the myth of American exceptionalism, and thus, we are frequently boxed out of the narrative.
The struggle at Standing Rock, North Dakota, has been no exception, with Water Protectors fighting tooth and nail for visibility, ever since the Sacred Stone prayer encampment began on April 1.
For months, major news outlets have ignored what’s become the largest convergence of Native peoples in more than a century. But with growing social media amplification and independent news coverage, the corporate media had finally begun to take notice. National attention was paid. Solidarity protests were announced in cities around the country. The National Guard was activated in North Dakota.
The old chant, “The whole world is watching!” seemed on the verge of accuracy in Standing Rock.
And then came today’s ruling, with a federal judge finding against the Standing Rock Sioux, and declaring that construction of the pipeline could legally continue. It was the ruling I expected, but it still stung. I felt the sadness, anger and disappointment that rattled many of us as we received the news. But then something happened. Headlines like, “Obama administration orders ND pipeline construction to stop” and “The Obama Administration Steps In to Block the Dakota Access Pipeline” began to fill my newsfeed, with comments like, “Thank God for Obama!” attached to them.
Clearly, a major plot twist has occurred. But it’s not the one that’s being sold.
To understand that this isn’t the victory it’s being billed as, you have to read the fine print in the presently lauded joint statement from the Department of Justice, the Department of the Army and the Department of the Interior...
On September 3, the Dakota Access pipeline company attacked Native Americans with dogs and pepper spray as they protested against the $3.8 billion pipeline's construction. If completed, the pipeline would carry about 500,000 barrels of crude per day from North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield to Illinois. The project has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and members of nearly 100 more tribes from across the U.S. and Canada.
This 60 second Cougar TV PSA raises awareness about these remarkable cats and their important role in maintaining healthy ecosystems, while providing important safety tips for those living and recreating in cougar country. Funded by WildFutures and produced by Tri-Film Productions.
This visualisation, comprised of imagery from the geostationary satellites of EUMETSAT, NOAA and the JMA, shows an entire year of weather across the globe during 2015, with audio commentary from Mark Higgins, Training Manager at EUMETSAT.
The visualisation has been produced by EUMETSAT's data visualisation team and is composed of a satellite infrared data layer superimposed over NASA's 'Blue Marble Next Generation' ground maps, which change with the seasons.
Negotiators from 195 countries at the United Nations climate summit have approved draft text for what they hope will form an accord to curb global carbon emissions by the end of this week. Among the issues still under discussion is whether the deal will mention indigenous rights. On Sunday, indigenous people from around the world took to the waters here in Paris to defend their rights and the environment. "We’re very, very concerned about the fact that reference to indigenous rights and human rights have been moved into an annex in the Paris text," Cree activist Clayton Thomas-Muller says. "It means that they’ve been put aside to be discussed after the weekend."
Democracynow.org - Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,300+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9am ET: http://democracynow.org
"Ever wondered what radiation looks like? If you have, I bet you didn’t think it would look as cool as this. This is a small piece of uranium mineral sitting in a cloud chamber, which means you can see the process of decay and radiation emission..."
A sealed glass container contains liquid alcohol at the top. Emanating alcohol vapors fill the whole volume of the container until they reach the bottom of the chamber maintained to a very cold temperature (-40°C). Most of the vapour condenses on the glass surface creating a mist, but a small fraction of it stays in vapour form above the cold condenser. This creates a layer of unstable sursaturated vapour which can condense at any moment. When a charged particle crosses this vapor, it can knock electrons off the molecules forming ions. It causes the unstable alcohol vapor to condense around ions left behind by the travelling ionizing particle : the path of the particle in the matter is then revealed by a track composed of thousands droplets of alcohol...
Unless you’re a science geek who routinely trawls YouTube for entertainment, you probably haven’t seen this fascinating clip that observes a small pellet of uranium as it just sits sealed in a lighted cloud chamber infused with vaporized alcohol.
To the strains of a Strauss waltz, puffy little trails begin to erupt from the uranium in staccato straight lines, shooting through the alcohol cloud and radiating in all directions like soft white fireworks. It’s a mesmerizing sight to behold.
It is also a sobering one, because what we are enabled to observe through that cloud of alcohol is the behavior of one of the most aggressive toxins on earth: radioactive decay.
This is the stuff that gives nuclear weapons their destructive energy; the instability that, in the course of things, has been somewhat inefficiently harnessed to generate simple electricity.
It takes a whole lot of uranium, a relatively low energy source of radiation, to produce a little bit of weapons-grade plutonium. Between the mine and the battlefield, turning uranium into reactor fuel is a convenient first step on the way to enabling nuclear weapons, which is a major reason so many countries want “nuclear power”.
The dependent relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear power stations provides one of the biggest bones of contention in the world today.
Setting that aside for others to consider, and returning to the simple lesson that is so vividly illustrated by the video, one cannot ignore the fact that even the tiniest particle of uranium is alive with radioactive potential.
Imagine the environmental hazards associated with every stage of uranium processing, from extraction to waste disposal, when every tiny particle is literally bristling with projectile energy.
While uranium in minute amounts is a common enough component of rock and soils available almost everywhere, there are relatively few places on earth where concentrations of uranium rich mineral deposits are great enough to represent opportunities for cost-efficient mining.
The danger to mine workers is not so much from the uranium ore, which has low concentrations of pure uranium relative to the mass in which it is sequestered. The real danger lies in the fine particulates and radon gas that are released from the rock in the course of mechanical extraction.
This hazard threatens the surrounding environment and population as well, since slurry and waste from the mining operation find their way into groundwater and may be redistributed through the air as well.
Even decades after uranium mines have been exhausted for all practical purposes, surrounding populations must endure the continuing threat posed by tailings, a waste byproduct of uranium mining. For example, hundreds of residents of the Navajo communities of North Church Rock and Quivera, New Mexico, where two nearby uranium mines ceased to be profitable and were abandoned at the close of the Cold War have suffered enormous health risks due to the mountainous piles of waste that the uranium mines simply left behind.
Ever since these New Mexico mines closed, corporate owners of the two lethal stacks have been feuding with the federal government over who is responsible for the cleanup.
At least one of the waste piles is scheduled to move down the road to a tailings dump, which will distance it somewhat from the local population, if not from the greater environment.
That move in itself raises another point of contamination in the uranium fuel chain: transportation. To transfer the waste to a less objectionable location, it is estimated that 38 open dump trucks will be required. Loading the trucks will stir up so much harmful particulate matter that the government will relocate residents for up to five years following the move in order to allow the dust to settle again, and to monitor the grounds for remaining contamination.
Just imagine each of those tiny particles being energized like that uranium pellet in the cloud chamber, and small enough to be inhaled… Now imagine what happens on a cellular level when all that bristling energy lodges deep in the human lung and continues to radiate indefinitely.
As those loaded dump trucks wheel through the environment to their ultimate destination, it isn’t difficult to imagine that they will be seeding the air with radioactive dust and particulates, endangering all who live and work along the way.
These same hazardous scenarios play out on a daily basis around active uranium mines, and at the processing plants where uranium ore is refined into nuclear fuel. I would guess that the concentration of harmful radiation in millings and tailings might be even greater as the uranium undergoes further refinement in the fuel production process.
Even if none of the collateral contaminants distributed by mining are considered, when nuclear energy production is viewed strictly from the perspective of fuel sourcing, it is clearly far, far from a “clean” energy source.
Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock in the Star Trek television series and movies, died in February at the age of 83. We speak to his Star Trek co-star, George Takei, who said, "Leonard played an alien, but he was the most human individual I ever met."
You’ve seen the signs and social media posts: “I am not a science experiment.”
But you are. We all are. And this new documentary, out on April 17, explains why.
From actor Sean Penn and Emmy award-winning journalists Dana Nachman and Don Hardy comes a new documentary, "The Human Experiment." The film examines the personal stories of people who believe their lives have been affected by chemicals.
“The Human Experiment” suggests that it’s not the big chemical spill we should be afraid of, but the insidious, much-lower levels of exposure to toxic chemicals, inflicted over generations and affecting every person on the planet.
The Human Experiment' lifts the veil on this shocking reality—where untested chemicals are ubiquitous in our products and the health of future generations is on the line. The film follows a band of unlikely activists who are fighting back. What will it take to stop this vast human experiment before it’s too late?
african music, dance & drumming • art & photos by robert cherwink • balinese music & dance • hurdy gurdy • indian music (hindustani classical) • jew's harp • music • nuclear • various • watch this • zen
Posts
