Conservationist

Hey the names Chelsea Lathrop and I attend Unity College in Maine for Conservation Law Enforcement. My whole life I have dreamed of working with the outdoors as part of my career, and therefore my paths have led me to Unity. I live for fishing, photography and nature. And without them my life would be incomplete.

[clathrop2616]

Environmental Justice for Utah

This week at the Unity College Centre for Performing Arts we watched the documentary film, Bidder 70. This film was about a young gentleman named Tim DeChristopher who made a distinguished act that changed his life. DeChristopher attended an illegal auction that was being held to sell off parcels of land surrounding the Canyonlands National Park in Utah. The buyers of this land, BLM oil companies. They wanted to buy the land and then turn it into oil drilling facilities that would wreck the Canyonlands. So what did Tim DeChristopher do? As he was sitting there watching all the parcels being sold off he started to bid, buying up pieces of land and racking up 22,000 acres of land that was worth $1.7 million dollars. In my personal opinion DeChristopher did all of us a favor, not just those in Utah but anyone who has ever dreamed of seeing the canyons and rock plateaus of the west. After the auction DeChristopher had to go through a trial that kept getting put off and put off over a span of two years. SPOILER ALERT, the trial resulted in Tim being found guilty and sentenced two years in jail with 750,000 worth of fines. Through the two years of the trial DeChristopher founded Peaceful Uprising, a group that empowers and defends the American people through non-violent actions. Because the auction wasn’t legal in the first place Tim DeChristopher should never have faced prison time rather fines and a hefty amount of community service project that helped the environment. I think that the purpose of this film was to get the awareness out of the truth behind the story and also get others thinking about how we need to start standing up against these big industries that think it is okay to take what isn’t theirs and just destroy it for future users. Though I can honestly say, I didn’t really like this film. Compared to the other documentaries we have seen this semester I couldn’t fathom why you needed to stretch the story so long to take up 73 minutes. It seemed to drag on much longer than needed. Not to mention there wasn’t a real good plot. I mean yes it was basically a biography of this kids actions but it just didn’t get anyone interested enough. We were interested and moved, but not enough. I think if I were the film maker I would definitely shorten it up some, and maybe get a little more of the court story, add the oil companies plans and story? Perhaps interview some folks that were there at the auction. But overall personal opinions aside the film was about a 6.

[clathrop2616]

Back to the Roots

This week at my science documentary series we watched movie called Eating Alabama. At first I was like awesome a movie about food. But you know what after a few pre-viewing shorts, such as A Greene Generation, Who Keeps the Beekeepers? and The Gift I was feeling almost excited to watch this movie. These were about 10ish minutes worth of film and they all told a story that nobody really knew about. For example A Greene Generation is a film about how one family has started a self-sufficient farm in which they get enough food for themselves but with the extra food the farm pays for itself. This ties into the actual documentary that we focused on last night. The film maker, Andrew Beck Grace, set out with his wife to search for their farmer roots back in Alabama. Their goal: to eat only locally grown food for an entire year. However they found it to be incredibly hard, because throughout the film Andrew continues to find more and more that the farms he once remembered were no longer there to be found you had to search far and wide to get everything you needed to survive. Not to mention the amount of effort you put in to such things as making flour and corn meal, was far more strenuous than the actual nutritional value. I think that perhaps we don’t have that issue here in Maine. I think that our agricultural heritage has stayed relatively strong even though it might not be as popular as it once was. Or maybe that is just because I was born and raised on a farm. But I think here we are closer to our roots than what poor Andrew was; however once he got into the groove of things their Alabama grown lifestyle became easy. Personally if I were the director I don’t think I would have changed much he really was able to portray a really good point. He started out on a very specific track and then in the end realized that maybe the problem wasn’t with farming itself but maybe it was that these farms try to get to big. The healthier you want to be means the smaller you have to go. We have to reverse the chain of procession. Instead of industrial farms providing millions of pounds of flour or millions of gallons of milk and processed everything, we focus on small farming where maybe your area where one farm feeds a few families or such. Overall I think this scientific documentary and even the pre-viewing shorts were definitely my favorite so far. I would definitely rate the evening a 9 out of 10. The only way to get a 10 would have been the usual skype session but understandable that the film maker was too busy for us.

[clathrop2616]

Beach-Wrecked

So I’m taking this course called Sustainable Science Documentary Series and we keep watching documentaries every first Thursday of the month and the last film we watched was called Shored Up. It was a documentary about a touchy subject. I mean maybe not for all folks, but definitely for the men and women in the movie. The film was about how the shores of the United States are disappearing at an incredibly alarming rate! The people that have been living in these beach towns like Long Beach Island, New Jersey and the Outer Banks of North Carolina are extremely upset about losing their hometown and they will do anything to help protect it. But then there are millionaires who are coming in and buying up beach front property and building multi-million dollar homes which add value to the land and are helping the communities get funding for a “rebuild.” However in the long run why would you be stupid enough to continue building on land that inevitably is going to just be washed away, especially when you are told specifically before you even start the build that you have at most 5 years of living there before you have to worry about the whole damn thing falling into the ocean. Throughout the film you get to see the efforts put forth to actually rebuild the beaches on Long Beach Island. They are actually drudging up sand from the ocean and bringing it in to make properties beach front again rather than ocean front. However recently a classmate of mine took a trip there and there was no evidence of beaches there. She said that the efforts to replenish the sand is all but gone which is extremely say considering the movie was made in 2013. If I was the director of this particular film I think I would have made a stronger case maybe gotten a little bit more of a perspective instead of just using the Long Island Beach and the Outer Banks. I think I would have tried to find more cases in which this “rebuilding” process was actually implemented. Because according to what my classmate has seen, it clearly was millions of dollars thrown into the ocean, literally.

[clathrop2616]

Your Welfare or Your Bank Account: Which would you choose?

I cannot say that I have ever been into documentaries however lately I have been okay with watching them and I have to say that Uranium Drive-In was one of the better ones I have seen. In this film we learned about the struggles that Nucla, Colorado has faced with the pros and cons of a proposed new Uranium Mill. The director, Susan Beraza, made the film relatively unbiased in my opinion because by the end of the movie you weren’t really sure whether you wanted the Uranium mill for the folks who needed jobs or if you didn’t want it in order to protect the environment and the personal wellbeing of the town folk of Nucla. I believe that because the director was unbiased that you are able to better understand the issue at hand and make your own beliefs about the situation.