Into Eternity: A Few Hours to See a Hidden Place
Dont Miss This!
You have a matter of hours to see this film live-streamed for free.
See a place that has been carefully hidden from most of us,
along with the frightening realities it hides.
This may perhaps be the longest-lasting monument to our civilisation, and what will it say about us?
Watch it Live while it is available…here…
INTO ETERNITY is a multi award-winning documentary film about long-term safety issues in nuclear energy production. The film is set at ’Onkalo’ the world’s first permanent storage site for nuclear waste, which is under construction in Finland. However, all countries with nuclear energy facilities have to deal with nuclear waste for at least 100 000 years.
With the Fukushima disaster, Japan now has additional nuclear waste. Onkalo is an underground facility, but Fukushima is above ground, vulnerable to natural disasters, war, and economic crisis. The reactors, that suffered full or partial meltdown, will have to be permanently controlled and maintained for millenia on end.
THE EVENT
The radioactive evacuation zone is now uninhabitable. It has become a blind spot in the middle of
Japan, a symbol of the dangers of blindness in thinking about safety. We cannot secure ourselves
against things we cannot – or will not – see.
A TOTAL OF 150 837 PEOPLE ARE DISPLACED AS A RESULT OF THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER.
A window of 150 837 seconds of free on-line streaming of the documentary
INTO ETERNITY has now opened.
WHEN
March 3rd, 2012 at 7.32 am (CET): The window opens
March 5th, 2012 at 1.26 am (CET): The window closes
AWARDS:
Wild & Scenic Film Festival, January 2012, California, USA
Best of Festival
FilmAmbiente – International Environmental Film Festival, November 2011, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Best International Feature Film
Baikal International Festival of Documentary, October 2011, Irkutsk, Russia
Grand Prix
Antenna International Documentary Film Festival, October 2011, Sydney, Australia
Best International Film
International Uranium Film Festival, May 2011, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Jury Award: Best Feature Documentary
Cinemaplaneta, March 2011, MEXICO
Award for: “the most innovative approach to an environmental issue”
Documentary New Zealand Trust, February 2011
Best international editing
Special Mention: Best International Feature Doc
FIFE, Paris, France, November 2010
Grand Prix
IDFA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 28th 2010
IDFA Green Screen Award
Sheffield, UK, November 7th 2010
Special mention Sheffield Green award
Festival des Libertes, Brussels, Belgium, October 30th 2010
Lichtpunt Prize
CineEcoJúri Internacional, 25 October 2010, Portugal
GRANDE PRÉMIO CINE’ECO 2010
Youth Jury Award
Nordisk Panorama – 5 Cities Film Festival, Bergen Norway, September 29th, 2010
Nordic Documentary Award
Docufest, Prizren, Kosova, August 8th 2010
Special Mention
Planete Doc Review, May 17th 2010, Warsaw Poland
Green Award
Vision Du Reel, Nyon, Suisse, April 13th 2010
Grand Prix
CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 16th 2009
Audience award
IN ADDITION MICHAEL MADSEN AS DIRECTOR HAS RECEIVED:
CPH:DOX, November 2010, Denmark
Reel Talent 2010 Award
The Danish Arts Foundation, The Committee for Film and Theatre, spring 2010
Award for Into Eternity
Read MoreJason Silva: To Understand is to Perceive Patterns
“True comprehension comes when the dots are revealed and you get Steven Johnson’s Long View…put simply: Everything is connected… Chance favours the connected mind…”
These are some of the ideas film maker Jason Silva shares with his usual enthusiasm on the fastest growing network in TV history – “Current TV”.
INSPIRATION:
The Imaginary Foundation says “To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns”…
Albert-László Barabási, author of LINKED, wants you to think about NETWORKS:
Networks are Everywhere
“Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties.
On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species. And networks pervade technology: the Internet, power grids and transportation systems are but a few examples.
Even the language we are using to convey these thoughts to you is a network, made up of words connected by syntactic relationships.”
‘For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together. In the past decade, an avalanche of research has shown that many real networks, independent of their age, function, and scope, converge to similar architectures, a universality that allowed researchers from different disciplines to embrace network theory as a common paradigm.’
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and liquid networks:
The Cities of the Seas
“Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and part of the argument is that we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities.
These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up… when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents”
Patrick Pittman from Dumbo Feather adds:
Everything is Connected
“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.
“…Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.”
James Gleick, author of THE INFORMATION, has written how the cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding and how Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.. (Its an ECO-SYSTEM, an EVOLVING NETWORK)
“If you want to understand life,” Wrote Richard Dawkins, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” (AND THINK ABOUT NETWORKS!!)
Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute, also believes in the pivotal role of NETWORKS:
Network Systems Can Sustain Life at All Scales
“…Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city…. If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient.”
Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure.
To understand is to perceive patterns
An article in Reality Sandwich called Google a psychedelically informed superpowered network, a manifestation of the mycelial archetype:
Chance Favours the Connected Mind
“Recognizing this super-connectivity and conductivity is often accompanied by blissful mindbody states and the cognitive ecstasy of multiple “aha’s!” when the patterns in the mycelium are revealed.
That Googling that has become a prime noetic technology (How can we recognize a pattern and connect more and more, faster and faster?: superconnectivity and superconductivity) mirrors the increased speed of connection of thought-forms from cannabis highs on up.
The whole process is driven by desire not only for these blissful states in and of themselves, but also as the cognitive resource they represent.The devices of desire are those that connect,” because as Johnson says “CHANCE FAVORS THE CONNECTED MIND”.
Geoffrey WEST on The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations:
http://blog.ted.com/2011/07/26/qa-with-geoffrey-west/
Stephen Johnson’s LONG VIEW
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html?pagewanted=all
http://dumbofeather.com/blog/post/on-slime-molds-and-sewage-steven-johnson-s-origin-of-the-idea/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/19/steven-johnson-good-ideas?cat=science&type=article
BARABASI’s Scale Free Networks:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scale-free-networks
Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity:
visualcomplexity.com
Paul Stammets Myceilum is everywhere:
http://www.realitysandwich.com/google_and_myceliation_consciousness
***********
A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating:
/Aaron Koblin
/entpm
/Andrea Tseng
/Genki Ito
/ItoWorld
/Dominic
/Cheryl Colan
/TheNightElfik
/Paulskiart
/Grant Kayl
/blyon
/resonance
/gtAlumniMag
/Katie Armstrong
/Page Stephenson
/Jesse Kanda
/Jared Raab
/Angela Palmer
/elliottsellers
/flight404
/Pedro Miguel Cruz
/Takuya Hosogane
/kimpimmel
/Rob Whitwort
**and some original animations from Tiffany Shlain’s film CONNECTED: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology
****
By @jason_silva and @notthisbody – Follow us on Twitter!
Our other videos:
Beginning of Infinity – http://vimeo.com/29938326
You are a RCVR – http://vimeo.com/27671433
****
Jason Silva
Jason Silva is a Venezuelan-American television personality, filmmaker and journalist who is the founding producer/host for “Current TV” the Emmy winning youth-oriented lifestyle cable network started by former US Vice President Al Gore.
“Current TV” is now the fastest growing network in TV history.
Silva was born in Caracas, Venezuela and now lives in Los Angeles, California.
Jason Silva earned a degree in film and philosophy from the University of Miami, Florida. Along with best friend, Max Lugavere, he produced and starred in a video documentary/performance piece called “Textures of Selfhood”.
“Max and Jason” have become a prolific hosting and producing duo on Current TV. Silva produced and directed a short documentary film “the Immortalists” which profiled scientists on the subject of merging technology and biology in ways to overcome our biological limitations.
This film was based the quote: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Pangea Day
Pangea Day was created by filmmaker Jehane Noujaim and TED curator Chris Anderson, with the goal of using film to unite the people of the world through the power of film.
Jason Silva along with his co-host on Current TV, Max Lugavere hosted the first annual Pangea Day on May 10, 2008, a 4 hour program of film, music and speakers that was broadcast worldwide to over 150 countries with a projected audience of over 500 million people.
Read MoreBritta Riley: A Garden in my Apartment
Britta Riley is an artist, exhibition designer, and social entrepreneur
who works with social media to create mass participation in solving
environmental problems.
Her artwork has been featured at MoMA NY,
the Whitney, the Venice Biennial, Ars Electronica, on the Discovery
Channel’s Planet Green, Good Morning America,NPR and hundreds of
other press venues.
In this video of her presentation at TEDtalks, she makes a very interesting point in contrasting what is proving to be the new enlightened way of shared world-community living, with the outdated and often damaging “bully boy takes all” mentality that seemed to have seeped into the essence of giant multinational corporate thinking, which has apparently lost sight of humanity in its haste to try to monopolise all things, at any cost.
“I like many of you am one of the two billion people on earth who live in cities, and there are days when I palpably feel that I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life and some days that can even be a little scary.
SOS: (Open) Source Of Solutions
But what I’m here to talk to you about today is how that same inter-dependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source colaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Collins in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment.
Now at the time that I was reading this it was in the middle of the winter, and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment, so I was basically willing to settle for just reading the next wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Collins was making in this article, that its precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all of these things over specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.
NASA’s Food for Starships
So, I happen to know a little from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space and that you can actually get optimal nutritional yields by running a kind of high quality liquid soil over plants root sytems.
Now, to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space but I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.
Fast forward two years later.
We now have window farms which are vertical hydroponic platforms for food growing indoors, and the way it works is that there’s a pump at the bottom which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through the plant’s root systems, which are suspended in clay pellets, so there’s no dirt involved.
A Creative Alternative to Corporate Intellectual Property
Light and temperature vary with each window’s microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to grow in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
Back at the time that the window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing and I really wanted to be an open project because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States now, and could possibly become like Monsanto where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people’s food.
Artist Britta Riley's practical demonstration of the power of shared creativity in her open-source Window Farming project
So, I decided that instead of creating a product, I was going to open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers. The first few systems that we created kinda worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window and we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff.
But the first few systems were these leaky, loud, power guzzlers that Martha Steward would definitely never have approved. So, to bring on more co-developers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now with us on this website we have 18,000 people and we have window farms all over the world.
R&D-I-Y
What we’re doing is what NASA or large corporations would call R&D or Research and Development, but what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or Research and Develop It Yourself. So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps, instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments like lots of other window farmers, and he’s been able to actually get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients.
And window farmers in Finland have been customising their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED growlights that they are now making open-source and part of the project. So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software and with every open-source project the real benefit is the interplay between people customising the systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concern.
Free to Anyone, Anywhere
So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that actually benefit everyone, and we’re able to look out for the needs of newcomers, so for DIYers we provide free, very well tested instructions so that anyone anywhere around the world can build one of these systems for free, and there’s a patent pending on these systems as well that’s held by the community and to fund the project, we create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don’t have time to build their own systems.
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture it is better to be a tester who supports someone else’s idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new lightbulbs. But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this which is the actual joy of collaboration. She expresses here what it is actually like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing.
We Need to “Do” More Than “Consume”
If we really want to see the wide consumer behaviour change that we’re all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term “consumer” and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own what we’re seeing is that R&DIY has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems 7:20 and we’re building apon innovations of generations who went before us, and we’re looking ahead at generations who really need us to re-tool our lives now.
So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united and to declare that we are all still pioneers.”
For more information on window farming, see http://www.windowfarms.org/
Britta Riley’s own website: http:// brittariley.carbonmade.com
Citarum River: the Pollution of Paradise
Once a peaceful waterway rich in fish and waterside wildlife, where local villagers caught fish and used its waters to irrigate rice paddies, the Citarum River in West Java in Indonesia is a living (or dying) example of how much damage humans seem to be willing to cause to their environment.
Today it has the reputation of being one of the most polluted river in the world, and villagers who can no longer catch fish in it, pick through the pollution that carpets it, to try to earn a living.
25 million people in western Java rely on the river for drinking water and irrigation as the Citarum River traverses its 269 kilometers, passing through nine regencies and three cities. Of the 25 million people who depend on the river, 10 million live along its banks, split more or less evenly between urban and rural residents
Pollution to the river escalated with the rapid industrialisation of this area in the 1980’s, but many factories had been pouring toxic waste into its waters for generations before that.
One of the companies polluting the river,the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory dumped industrial wastewater containing methyl mercury, into the river from 1932 to 1968. Toxins built up in fish which were a mainstay of the local diet.
The damaging effects on humans from rivers polluted by heavy metals can sometimes take years to manifest. Symptoms include numbness in hands and feet, general muscle weakness, narrowing of the field of vision and damage to hearing and speech.
In some cases insanity, paralysis, coma and death follow within weeks of the onset of symptoms.
“By March 2001, 2,265 victims had been officially recognized with 1,784 fatalities,and over 10,000 receiving financial compensation from the company. By 2004, the company had paid US$86 million in compensation, and in the same year was ordered to clean up its contamination.”
— one of the disturbing elements of the above story taken from the Jackarta Post, is that the company appears to have only been told to clean up its act in 2004 after paying out millions in compensation and after more than 70 years of poisoning the river.
Read MoreWangari Maathai – the Tree Lady of Africa leaves a legacy that will benefit millions.
Wangari Muta Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011)
The Tree Lady of Africa
Wangari Maathai the Tree Lady of Africa, founder of the Green Belt Movement
Kenya has declared two days of mourning in honour of Wangari Maathai, Africa’s first woman Nobel peace laureate, who died on Sunday of cancer. President Mwai Kibaki also announced that Maathai will be accorded a state funeral.
Messages of condolence have been pouring in from across the world in honour of this dynamic woman who inspired so many and was to become known as “the Tree Lady of Africa”.
Maathai was the driving force behind the pioneering Green Belt Movement that organised rural women in Kenya to plant trees, teaching them that not only would this combat deforestation and soil erosion but it would also help generate local income, education and resources.
Since 1977 more than 40 million trees have been planted.
Environmental and Political Activist
Environmental and political activist Wangari Maathai was born in Ihithe, a village in the Central Highlands of Kenya in 1940, where she began her education. She later studied as a boarder at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri, becoming fluent in English. Completing her education there with the highest grades in her class, she was granted admission to the only Catholic high school for girls in Kenya, Loreto Girls’ High School in Limuru.
Airlift Africa
She was one of about three hundred Kenyans chosen to study at American Universities, in September 1960 under a program funded by the then United States Senator, John F. Kennedy through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. This initiative was to become known as the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa.
She studied in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, where she first experienced environmental restoration as environmentalists in the city were pushing to end the city’s air pollution.
Having completed her studies in America, she returned to Kenya to a job as research assistant to a professor of zoology at University College of Nairobi.
She arrived to find her post had been given to somebody else, something she believes was because of gender and tribal bias.
After a job search of two months, Professor Reinhold Hofmann, from the University of Giessen in Germany, offered her a job as a research assistant in the micro anatomy section at University College of Nairobi.
In 1967, Hofmann encouraged her to study further in Germany, in pursuit of her doctorate. She studied both at the University of Giessen and the University of Munich
First East African Woman to Receive PH. D.
In 1971 when she was granted a Doctorate of Anatomy at the University College of Nairobe, she became the first East African woman to receive a Ph.D.
During the 70s she became involved in various civic organizations including the Kenya Red Cross Society, the Kenya Association of University Women, the Environment Liaison Centre and the National Council of Women of Kenya.
Through her experience with these various voluntary organizations she realized that the root of most of Kenya’s problems was environmental degradation.
The Green Belt Movement is Born
On June 5, Maathai led a procession of the National Council of Women in Kenya (NCWK) from Kenyatta International Conference Center in downtown Nairobe to Kamukunji Park on the outskirts of the city where they planted seven trees in honour of community leaders. This was the first “Green Belt” of what was to become the “Green Belt Movement”, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights.
2004: First Environmentalist to Win the Nobel Peace Prize
In 2004 she became the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for: “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced:
“Maathai stood up courageously against the former oppressive regime in Kenya. Her unique forms of action have contributed to drawing attention to political oppression – nationally and internationally. She has served as inspiration for many in the fight for democratic rights and has especially encouraged women to better their situation.”
