Write, film and edit a film in 48 hours. It requires spontaneity, creativity, teamwork, project management and willpower all in one. What a fantastic way to begin the New Year!

That’s the opportunity offered by the 48-Hour Film Project. (Intro below but read details at host site)

We think that 48HFP filmmakers, the boldest and most creative in the world, are the best people to draw attention to the environmental challenges the world faces. To that end, we have created a new 48HFP competition: the 48 Go Green!

Just like the 48HFP, the 48 Go Green challenges you to make a narrative short film in only 48 hours, writing, shooting, and editing it. But, to mix things up, this challenge has some slightly different rules than the 48HFP.

• Environmental Themes. You will be randomly assigned a theme for your film which has to do with the environment. The themes are: animals, energy, the environment in general, forests, the next generation, the planet, the sea, and water.
• No genre assignment. You get to pick your own genre–just notify us which one you picked when you turn in your film.

Elements. We will still provide you with a character, prop, and a line of dialogue which must appear in your film.

Here is an amazing turnaround story of Hiware Bazar, a village in Maharashtra that must be read in its entirety at thesolutionsjournal.com

All it took was one man Popatrao Pawar, to inspire the people in his village, create a self-sustaining plan with watershed development at its core, and smartly utilize Government funded programs.

Excerpt below:

Watershed management worked in Hiware because the village plan was a well thought out, integrated ecological plan. It first treated the forests, the catchments for the village wells. Then it addressed water conservation, and soil conservation followed this [...]

Today, the number of wells is 217, up from 97. Courtesy of the watershed works, grass production went up from 100 metric tons in 2000 to 6,000 metric tons in 2004. According to a household survey conducted in 1995, 168 families out of 180 were below the poverty line (BPL); the number of BPL families had shrunk to 53 in the survey conducted in 1998. There are now only three BPL families in Hiware Bazar out of 216. The state government spent a total of about 4,200,000 rupees (about $90,000) on EGS in the village. Treating 2,471 acres of land, the per-acre cost of treatment was about 17,000 rupees ($370). But in terms of raising village residents’ incomes, the cost benefits were phenomenal.

The Toronto Environmental Alliance is supporting Yeh Hai Life’s benefit concert for AidIndia. We are humbled and honored by their support. We couldn’t have found a more fitting partner for what we are trying to do.

‘We’re all in it together’ as they say. The Toronto Environmental Alliance campaigns passionately for a “green, healthy and equitable city with economic activity that sustains our environment.” Their success in Toronto crosses over the human made boundaries into where we live in the US.

And what we do here in the US helps a farmer all the way out in India.

Small steps, small gesture, by hundreds and thousands of us around the world add up to ONE BIG DIFFERENCE!

See you at the concert September 11th! Gaze on over to your right and buy your tickets to one amazing show.

We’re digging, drilling, fishing, rerouting water, damming rivers, packing the atmosphere with pollutants, and wiping out forests to make way for our lifestyles. We’re leaving no stone unturned, no ocean, river, mountain untapped. But we need more. More. More of everything. And we won’t rest till every last one of us is turned into a consuming machine.

Michael Moyer and Carina Storrs take a sobering look of what we have left, and what we have given up in the Scientific American article – 20 years of silver, 19 years of gold, 40 years of oil and even more sobering stats on what we’ve already done to make fish and mammalian species go extinct.

If the 20th century was an expansive era seemingly without boundaries—a time of jet planes, space travel and the Internet—the early years of the 21st have showed us the limits of our small world. Regional blackouts remind us that the flow of energy we used to take for granted may be in tight supply. The once mighty Colorado River, tapped by thirsty metropolises of the desert West, no longer reaches the ocean. Oil is so hard to find that new wells extend many kilometers underneath the seafloor. The boundless atmosphere is now reeling from two centuries’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions. Even life itself seems to be running out, as biologists warn that we are in the midst of a global extinction event comparable to the last throes of the dinosaurs.

We’re hoping to see the day in our lifetimes when we won’t have cars powered by oil. For now every one of these is a moment of celebration of the possibility of that day in the nearer future.

(Via WessexWater) The Bio-Bug runs on methane gas generated during the sewage treatment process.

Waste flushed down the toilets of just 70 homes in Bristol is enough to power the Bio-Bug for a year, based on an annual mileage of 10,000 miles.

With support from the South West Regional Development Agency, GENeco, a Wessex Water-owned company, imported specialist equipment to treat gas generated at Bristol sewage treatment works in Avonmouth to power the VW Beetle in a way that doesn’t affect its performance.