The Chaikuni Institute, a Peruvian non profit organization, integrates design, education, experimentation and community outreach to promote regenerative development in the Amazon Rainforest.

By coupling ancestral knowledge with modern innovation, they are forming a network that embodies self-reliance, resilience, and resurgence while promoting local, ecological economies.

For more information, please visit www.chaikuni.org

Director: Safiya Randera
Camera: Veronique Cabois, Safiya Randera, Debbie Rivett, Marc Silver
Editor: Veronique Cabois
Music:
Adham Shaikh (Melancholy Mystic / Return To Light)
Aqualactica (Fractal Nativo / Siete Espacios)
Debbie Rivett and Kyo (Dreams)
Yuin Huzami and Lachlan Mitchell (Ikaro Del Mar)

[ Episode #51 // Culture of Dying ] **Editor’s pick**

In Extraenvironmentalist #51 we speak with Stephen Jenkinson about our cultural difficulty with death. Stephen draws on lessons learned from decades of working with death to describe how we can frame our civilization’s trajectory. We ask how to find sanity in a time of alienation and if we can be a human in difficult circumstances. Stephen describes the distinct jobs given to us as our family members die. Also, John Michael Greer joins us briefly to talk about the death of Western culture.The globally dominant culture is suffering from an economic, ecological and social crisis that has deeper roots than failing budgets and environmental degradation. Do we have a role to play if our culture is headed towards its eventual death? Though our economic system has trained us to be needy, can we approach these challenges as if we were needed?

[ Episode #54 // Love + Marriage ]

Our cultural institutions face such immense challenges from economic and environmental factors that even our assumptions about love and marriage on the table. What does recent research into early human sexuality say about our ideas of love as practiced by our early ancestors? In hard times, did our predecessors practice fierce egalitarianism to ensure group survival?

In Extraenvironmentalist #54 Chris Ryan joins us to talk about evidence of prehistoric sexuality in the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality co-written withCacilda Jetha. Chris discusses his research into why so many marriages fail. We try to develop a conversation about sex and love between all guys without turning it into a boys club. Is that even possible? Examples are given of rituals from ancient societies that bypassed jealousy to defeat feelings of scarcity amongst hunter-gatherer bands.

[ Episode #68 // Better Than Normal ]

Society dramatically underestimates human potential, placing our imagination within a limited range of possibilities. What are the psychological limits of our species? Is there reliable scientific evidence of supernormal human capabilities? What areas of scientific study could replace the failing aims of a materialist scientific paradigm? Would compelling evidence for special abilities change our beliefs and institutions?

In Extraenvironmentalist #68 we speak with Dean Radin about his new book Supernormaland his decades of research into telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance for our 2013 Halloween Special. We ask Dr. Radin if the stories of ancient yogis were exaggerated superstitions or if they may have some basis in reality. Dean describes his process for studying controversial phenomena and how he is working to build a reliable non-materialist scientific process.

Terence McKenna: Extra-enviromentalism

Watch the long video:

Energy-related economic, security, and environmental threats are intensifying the national conversation about how to regain energy leadership and competitiveness, restore jobs and prosperity, and build a secure and climate-safe energy system.

Yet America lacks a comprehensive vision of how a market economy can achieve these transformational goals.

RMI has that vision, and is now building its detailed roadmap, which we call Reinventing Fire™. This strategy will bring together RMIs 28 years of innovation and engage the world in our most ambitious and important work yet—using whole-system thinking and integrative design to move the U.S. off fossil fuels by 2050, led by business for profit.

Buy the book

With such a Wal-Mart aisle of causes and concerns to choose from, why did I decide to make a film about human population growth and consumption?  More specifically, why a feature documentary about the interrelation of those environmental factors with our own psychology?

When I started out two and a half years ago, I had what I would describe as the Bill Hicks/George Carlin attitude towards human population: too many people doing too much humping and eating.  We’ve all seen Doug Stanhope’s take on what the proper reaction to a Prius with a baby seat in the back should be (1:30 in the video I linked to).  That was me, circa early 2010.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the finish line.  As I made the film, I learned a lot more about the context in which we live, the cultural history, evolution and social programming we’re subjected to, and in the process my opinions on the matter shifted.  I suppose you could say that ideological bias doesn’t stand the challenge of evidence and exposure to complexity.  And nothing is more complex than the issue of human population growth.

The UN counts October 31st, 2011 as the “Day of 7 Billion”, on which the seven-billionth human joined us on this wonderful Spaceship Earth.  We have critical challenges facing us now and in the immediate future in social equity, economic parity, food distribution and eventually food production, energy, water, the list goes on and on.  The population issue has wrapped up within it all of the meat of the environmental movement, but also a great deal of our social and psychological landscape as well.  After all, how can one effectively separate the statistical proofs of environmental degradation from the deeper socio-psychological dynamics of the human societies doing the degrading?

That’s why I didn’t make a film about numbers.  I got into filmmaking for the same reason I have such a keen interest in anthropology – I’m fascinated by people and I want to understand them.  So the key dropped in my lap when I found out about the rodent experiments of John B. Calhoun, performed at the National Institute of Mental Health over a matter of decades in the mid-twentieth century.  The story of the rats and mice was so compelling, and in so many ways similar to our own, that I realised I could tell their story and from there I would have a jumping-off point to the myriad complexities of the human population story.

Personally, I avoid using the term ‘overpopulation’, as it implies that there are too many people.  Once you say there are too many, you imply that some of them should go, and by extension that means that someone has to decide who goes.  From that simple word, we are a hop, skip and a jump from the depredations of the Chinese one-child policy, the sterilisation of poor men in Indira Gandhi’s India, the catalogue of eugenic operations performed in the US, Europe and Scandinavia right up to recent times (the last forced sterilisation in the US was in Oregon in 1981).

Terrible things have been done under the pretence that we will save society by stopping ‘over-breeding’ or preventing the ‘unfit’ from reproducing.  Those actions and the logic that tried to justify them are indefensible, and ironically these attempts to save society end up frequently turning society into something that isn’t worth saving.  The environmental and conservation movement has some roots in the eugenic origins of the population movement of the early twentieth century, and there is no point denying or avoiding this.  It must be dragged into the daylight and shown for the horror that it was.  But we are here and now, and the fact that in the past unsavoury people have done things which they defended by cloaking themselves in similar concerns does not mean that there is no reason to have a conversation about these things now.

So no, I don’t think that saying there are ‘too many people’ is the right way to frame the conversation.  What I do think is that it’s high time that we had a real, honest conversation about ourselves, about the ways in which we interact with and affect one another, the things we do to one another and to our planet and how we can do a better job of looking after ourselves and this beautiful spaceship of ours.  That conversation has to begin somewhere, and my hope is that the film I have made can help us make a start.

Critical Mass trailer from Mike Freedman on Vimeo.

Mike Freedman is a filmmaker and writer based in London. Over the past two years, he has interviewed 60 of the world’s leading scientists, authors and academics on the issues of population, water,   food, peak oil, economics and sustainability for his debut feature documentary, Critical Mass, which is about the impact of human population growth and consumption on our planet and on our psychology. In addition to his film work, he is an occasional guest   lecturer at Bournemouth University and also gives presentations on the subject of population growth around the UK.  His writing has been published by Stakeholder Forum’s Outreach Magazine, The Daly News and Transition Voice.  He is currently raising money to distribute the film.

This is the Official Online (Youtube) Release of “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward” by Peter Joseph.

On Jan. 15th, 2011, “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward” was released theatrically to sold out crowds in 60 countries; 31 languages; 295 cities and 341 Venues. It has been noted as the largest non-profit independent film release in history.

This is a non-commercial work and is available online for free viewing and no restrictions apply to uploading/download/posting/linking – as long as no money is exchanged.

A Free DVD Torrent of the full 2 hr and 42 min film in 30 languages is also made available through the main website [below], with instructions on how one can download and burn the movie to DVD themselves. His other films are also freely available in this format.

Websites:
www.zeitgeistmovingforward.com
www.zeitgeistmovie.com
www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

More at www.newdream.org
Produced by the Center for a New American Dream

This fun animation provides a vision of what a post-consumer society could look like, with people working fewer hours and pursuing re-skilling, homesteading, and small-scale enterprises that can help reduce the overall size and impact of the consumer economy. Narrated by economist and best-selling author Juliet Schor (http://www.julietschor.org).

Animation by Squid and Beard: www.squidandbeard.com

Learn more at www.newdream.org