Category Archives: 08. on bio-piracy & guerrilla gardening

a. Richard Fleischer, Soylent Green

SOYLENT GREEN

Richard Fleischer, USA
1973, 3 min 21 sec

Soylent Green is an American science fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. The film overlays the police procedural and science fiction genres as it depicts the investigation into the murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including soylent green.

b. Britta Riley: A Garden in My Apartment

A GARDEN IN MY APARTMENT:
WINDOW FARMS

Britta Riley, TEDxManhattan; New York, USA
2011, 7 min 53 sec

Window farms consist of vertical hydroponic platforms for growing food in city windows. Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food in her tiny apartment. So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles — researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.

Instead of perfecting and patenting the invention, Britta Riley created a social media site where she published the design for free, and even pointed out the flaws, designed in conjunction with an online citizen science web platform, with over 18,000 community members worldwide sharing ideas and contributing to perfecting the Window Farm techniques.

c. Sam Van Aken, Tree of 40 Fruits

TREE OF 40 FRUITS

National Geographic, Syracuse University, USA
2015, 4 min 5 sec

Sam Van Aken, an artist and professor at Syracuse University, uses “chip grafting” to create trees that each bear 40 different varieties of stone fruits, or fruits with pits. Van Aken says it’s both a work of art and a time line of the varieties’ blossoming and fruiting. He’s created more than a dozen of the trees that have been planted at sites such as museums around the U.S., which he sees as a way to spread diversity on a small scale.

d. Vandana Shiva, Seeding Deep Democracy

SEEDING DEEP DEMOCRACY

Vandana Shiva, Ecological Options Network, India
2008, 5 min 59 sec

Scientist, activist and author, Vandana Shiva, talks about the importance of saving non-GMO seeds and her concept of Earth Democracy. “The desire to save seeds comes from an ethical urge to defend life’s evolution”, says Vandana Shiva. “In India 150.000 farmers have committed suicide in areas where they have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto at a very high cost.” In response to this, community seed banks were created to collect, multiply and distribute seeds according to the farmers’ needs. She explains what Earth Democracy entails: “It’s a democracy that is related to the earth. It’s practiced best close to the earth, where you live, in your everyday life. We are first citizens of the earth.

e. Richard Reynolds, Seed Bomb

MAKE YOUR OWN SEED BOMB

Richard Reynolds, Planet Green, USA
2008, 2 min 25 sec

The guerrilla gardner strikes again. This time he demonstrates how to make a seed bomb in his quest to attack urban blight. Careful, as this is explosive homework: the wrong seeds at the wrong place can create the wrong biotope.

f. Suzanne Simard, How trees talk to each other

HOW TREES TALK TO EACH OTHER

Suzanne Simard, TEDSummit, USA
2016, 18 min, 10 sec

“A forest is much more than what you see,” says ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her 30 years of research in Canadian forests have led to an astounding discovery — trees talk, often and over vast distances. Learn more about the harmonious yet complicated social lives of trees and prepare to see the natural world with new eyes.

g. Rebecca Solnit, If Gardens are the Answer, What is the Question?

IF GARDENS ARE THE ANWSER, WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

Rebecca Solnit, Townsend Center for the Humanities
2015, 53 min 48 sec

Rebecca Solnit is the best-selling author of numerous books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; Hope in the Dark; and Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. A contributing editor to Harper’s, columnist for Orion, and frequent contributor Tomdispatch.com, she often writes on topics of the environment, politics, place, and art. Labeled “indispensible” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Solnit’s work has frequently been compared to the writing of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, the Wired Rave Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

h. Erna Buffie, what plants talk about

WHAT PLANTS TALK ABOUT

PBS Erna Buffie, USA
2013, 1 min 10 sec

When we think about plants, we don’t often associate a term like “behaviour” with them, but experimental plant ecologist JC Cahill wants to change that. The University of Alberta professor maintains that plants do behave and lead anything but solitary and sedentary lives.

Full version

j. Biocultural Community Protocols

BIOCULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS:
ARTICULATING AND ASSERTING STEWARDSHIP

Sanjay Barnela, Philadelphia, USA
2012, 13 min 1 Sec

Different groups of people that are skilled in breeding and taking care of animals, such as the Raika People from Rajasthan – India, help a great deal to maintain the biodiversity of the environment they live in. Across the world there are innumerable such examples of  communities with animals that live in a landscape that supports and is supported by them.

k. Bruce Pascoe, Maintaining a Culture over Millenia

ABORIGINAL AGRICULTURE:
MAINTAINING A CULTURE OVER MILLENIA

Bruce Pascoe, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Australia
2016, 53 min 32 sec

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Reconciliation Seminar Series 1 June 2016 Mr Bruce Pascoe http://www.wehi.edu.au

Bruce Pascoe (born 1947) is an Aboriginal Australian writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children’s literature. As well as his own name, Pascoe has written under the pen names Murray Gray and Leopold Glass. Since August 2020, he has been Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne.

Pascoe is best known for his work Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (2014), which reexamines colonial accounts of Aboriginal people in Australia and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.