There’s a new film by Andrew Garrison from UT Austin. It looks great. Here’s some info from the site:

“Third Ward TX is a one-hour documentary about a group of artists finding inspiration in the remnants of a besieged black neighborhood’s storied past.

House by house, they worked alongside residents and local volunteers to craft a stunning new vision of what could be. In the process, these artists-turned-activists transformed lives - starting with their own. Third Ward TX is a revealing look at a community’s struggle to survive - from segregation to the limited promise of integration, from drug wars to the economic challenges of gentrification. It is a story of imagination and hope, passed along person to person.”

The film is in the SXSW film festival this year. Congrats to Andrew & his team!

A pair of graduate students at the University of Florida’s Documentary Institute have made a film about suburban lawns called Gimme Green.

This is from their Facts page:

• If present consumption patterns continue, two out of every three people on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025.
• On average, Americans use 40 to 60 percent of their water on their landscapes.

And its always been amazing to me how freely and without question we dose our lawns (and food and everything else) with synthetic chemicals we do not understand. The Gimme Green site mentions these stats:

• Of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 19 are linked with cancer
  or carcinogencity, 13 are linked with birth defects, 21 with
  reproductive effects, 26 with liver or kidney damage, 15 with
  neurotoxicity, and 11 with disruption of the endocrine (hormonal) system.
• Of those same 30 lawn pesticides, 17 are detected in groundwater,
  23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources,
  24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to our
  ecosystem, 11 are toxic to bees, and 16 are toxic to birds.

Makes you just want to lay out on the lawn and soak up the carcinogens, doesn’t it?