August 27, 2010 by Mark.

I just have to stop and take a moment to thank the Conscious Media Network for their work–a massive site filled with eco and spiritually enlightening videos. The site is run by Regina and Scott Meredith, who have given up their house and hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to keep the site alive and kicking, with frequent interview updates and a treasure trove of information. They have also posted the Solar Roadways: Prototype video to their site here, sending over 280,000 views to the video to-date. That’s more than half of the 470,000 views we’ve received so far. Take a moment and check out the site if you’re inclined: Conscious Media Network.

Peace.

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August 26, 2010 by Mark.

SO much fun. This is my new favorite environmental video. Puppets. Humor. Good fun family-style humor, but powerful nonetheless. Give it a minute and enjoy!

Ben and I sang in a group at Stanford called “Fleet Street” and this is a newer, younger member of the group, sharing his talents with a planet in need! I’m delighted!

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August 11, 2010 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

It has been quite a while since our last update, but we have lots of exciting news to report! Read on for the details…

• YERT to present at 2010 Bioneers in CA
• YERT featured on radio shows
• Recent presentations
• Plan a YERT presentation this fall
• Seeking finishing funds
• Vote for Solar Roadways in GE Ecomagination contest
• Climate bill needs your help

YERT to present at 2010 Bioneers in CA

We recently found out that we will be presenting the YERT feature film in its near-finished state at the 2010 Bioneers Conference in California, Oct. 15-17. We’ll be screening at 7pm on Friday the 15th as part of their 2010 Moving Image Festival. If you haven’t heard about the Bioneers Conference, we highly recommended you check it out! We found many ideas for YERT destinations through the event, and both Ben and Mark are actively involved in bringing Bioneers to their respective communities in Louisville and Pittsburgh (find one near you here). Van Jones (Green for All) and Annie Leonard (Story of Stuff) presented at Bioneers several years before breaking out into the mainstream. It is an honor to present at the same event!

YERT featured on radio shows
Ben and Mark talked about the upcoming YERT film and the state of our environmental world during a couple of recent radio interviews. Chris Moore, a talk show host on KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, PA, invited us on his show on June 27 to share adventures and solutions we encountered during our road trip. He paired our interview with an hour-long segment featuring Scott Brusaw and his Solar Roadways! Then on July 22 we were interviewed for the premier episode of Live a Damn radio– created by Michael Parrish DuDell (EcoRazzi.com and VEGdaily.com). Want to hear about these interviews BEFORE they happen? Join the YERT Facebook Fan Page!

Recent presentations

One of the most powerful ways we have found to reach out to the community AND support our filmmaking efforts has been to give YERT presentations–at schools, universities, and now government and business audiences! Mark was invited by the Allegheny County Department of Special Events to share the YERT story as part of their “Summer Concerts and Events” series on July 10. Then, on July 13, we were invited to give a presentation to the employees of Centria. (This company makes LEED and “Cradle to Cradle” certified wall panel systems just outside of Pittsburgh.) Here’s a quote from one of the audience members: “Mark, Ben, and Julie have an intense curiosity about the world……..the videos demonstrate their child-like enthusiasm and genuine love of discovery. To a large degree, that’s what makes their investigation of sustainability far more compelling than any other one that I’ve seen; their adventures sparked a great deal of conversation among everyone who attended the presentation.”

Greenify your peeps! Plan a YERT presentation this fall

We are planning up a storm for YERT presentations in the fall to help us fund our YERTy work. Do you know a church, school, or business that might like to invite us? Do they want to join the ranks of previous hosts like Sony Pictures, YALE University, USC, NYU, All Saints Church in Pasadena, and dozens of other planet-minded organizations? Let us know! We can do partial “pre-screenings” of our film along with the best videos, stories, and good times from our adventure. We can also tailor the presentation to the audience, like when we created a business version for green MBA students at Duquesne, or a spirituality-oriented version for the Sustainable Brands conference on Monterey. We currently have a trip planned to Boston around Nov. 10, and trips to Los Angeles and San Francisco planned for September and October, respectively. We’re looking to fill our schedule with events at several colleges and communities, so please let us know if you’d like us to present for you (and bring a little YERTy motivation to your community). Just write to mark@yert.com. We’re also happy to offer a Skype-assisted presentation, where we send some videos to you and then Skype/videoconference into the venue anywhere around the world (Ben just did this for the Dutch Environmental Film Festival and it worked out great!). This saves CO2 AND reduces our speaking fee. Very YERTy. For more information and testimonials about YERT presentations visit: http://yert.com/presentations.php.

Seeking film finishing funds

After years of progress on the film, we can definitely say that our latest push for donations can be categorized as a hunt for “finishing” funds. Ben and Mark are actively bunkered down in Louisville, KY to push through some plot-related knotholes and key narration elements in the film. We have begun to work with a talented, fun narrator, not to mention a spectacular composer to score the film. And we continue to uncover great songs from brilliant, YERTy musicians around the country. Here’s the bottom line: every dollar donated to the project helps us get the film and videos out faster. We take odd jobs to make ends meet and keep the YERT machine running, but that pulls us away from the creative work of filmmaking. So, for the sake of the planet–one that doesn’t have much time–please consider making a tax deductible donation and joining a long list of noble supporters at http://www.yert.com/donate.php .

Vote for Solar Roadways in GE Ecomagination contest

YERT recently released our most popular video ever. By an order of magnitude. “Solar Roadways: The Prototype” has exploded into the blogosphere with over 250,000 views since it was launched on June 2. And now Scott Brusaw has an opportunity to take his idea even further. His project is currently ranked 1st out of over 800 entries in the GE Ecomagination “Powering the Grid” contest (and he is using YERT’s video in his application!). Please take five minutes to vote for him by visiting this page.

Climate bill needs your help

The YERT team recognizes climate change as one of the most profound challenges ever faced by our civilization, and some recent facts shared by 350.org underscore the dangers we face:

• According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.
• A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.
• Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.

We see glimpses of what a climate changed world might be like when we look at the catastrophic floods in Pakistan or the toxic smoke from fires in Russia. It isn’t pretty. What does look pretty to us is a world powered by clean and renewable energy that doesn’t run out or become more difficult and dangerous to extract with time. In fact, just the opposite is true. The longer we work with renewables, the easier it is to harvest energy from them. Climate change legislation is one critical brick on the path to clean energy. Please call your senators and demand that they do their part and enact strong climate change legislation. All future generations of every species on earth are counting on you. No pressure.

Peace,
Ben, Julie, and Mark
team@yert.com

http://www.yert.com

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August 10, 2010 by Mark.

During my visit to Solar Roadways HQ in Idaho, Scott Brusaw and I decided that the climate-helping missions of 350.org and Solar Roadways were so similar that we ought to literally put them together! And so this photo was born: 350.org on the Solar Roadways prototype.

And if you haven’t yet watched the Solar Roadways Prototype video, definitely check it out here:

Oh, and if you haven’t heart just yet, 350.org founder Bill McKibben wants us all to get mad and then get busy about climate change. His latest article is a must-read: “This is f-cked up — it’s time to get mad, then get busy.“

Posted in YERTpoll, Video | 1 Comment »

June 2, 2010 by Mark.

Lots to share in this update…

• Exclusive New YERT Video– Solar Roadways: The Prototype
• YERT Featured Tomorrow at Dutch Environmental Film Festival
• Ben Performs in “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire” in New York City
• YERT to Interview Janine Benyus in Bar Harbor, Maine (and Mark needs a place to stay!)

Solar Roadways: The Prototype
A few months back we heard that Scott Brusaw was busy building a prototype of his solar roads, and we just had to see it for ourselves– so we visited him in Idaho to give you an exclusive sneak peek.

For the first time ever on video, check out Solar Roadways: The Prototype

While building the prototype, Scott quickly realized several opportunities for improvements to the design, and he discusses a few of them in the video. Our favorite is to laminate glass panes together to effectively “sandwich” the solar panels and LEDs inside the road surface. This adds both strength, solar panel surface area, and improved visibility to the design. Scott also has plans to set the glass panels on a sturdy mixture that includes plastic garbage pulled from the oceans. Quite an upgrade from traditional asphalt– power-generating glass roads that use up garbage from the ocean!

This video also features Dr. Carlo Pantano, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Director of the Materials Research Institute at Penn State University. Finally, we also meet Scott’s wife and co-founder of Solar Roadways, Julie Brusaw.

YERT Featured Tomorrow at Dutch Environmental Film Festival
Ben has assembled a fresh collection of YERT shorts and chapters from our feature film for screening on opening night (June 3) at the Dutch Environmental Film Festival in Amsterdam. This isn’t the final YERT film, but it is a very significant “walk” in the “crawl, walk, run” path to film completion. If you have friends in Amsterdam, tell them to swing on by for a great time! We’ll be sitting in good company, as the festival will also be featuring Josh Dorfman a.k.a. “The Lazy Environmentalist,” “Carbon Nation,” “No Impact Man,” “Dive!,” and “Sweet Crude,” to name a few familiar TV and film faces.

Ben Performs in “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire” in New York City
Ben is visiting his pre-YERT hometown of NYC for all sorts of excitement. First, he is performing with Jeff Biggers (HuffPo blogger/author) and Stephanie Pitello in “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire,” an original multimedia play about mountaintop removal mining. The show opens on Friday, June 4 at 9pm and goes for a week. Find more information here. Ben is also hunting for connections to help get the YERT film out into the world when the time is right. And if you’re in the mood for a YERT presentation while he’s in town, he’s game– particularly if you’re a college or high school. Send him a note at ben@yert.com to discuss details!

YERT to Interview Janine Benyus in Bar Harbor, Maine (and Mark needs a place to stay!)
That’s right, we’ll be interviewing internationally acclaimed biomimicry guru Janine Benyus for the YERT feature film. To save every penny, Mark is looking for a free place to stay in that town. If you have a friend up there, he’ll need floor space for two on the evening of 6/15 and 6/16. Thanks for helping out!

That’s all for today– thanks for reading!

Peace,
Mark, Ben, and Julie
team@yert.com

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May 21, 2010 by Mark.

(Just pasting in a message from Dr. Volz about this upcoming event. Please spread the news widely!)

On Saturday June 5th at the Byham Theater (at approximately 6th and Fort Duquesne Blvd.) at 7pm the award winning documentary Gasland will be shown. Doors will be open by around 6pm—-I am sending the email out with a poster so that each of you can also send information to your networks, members and friends about this important event. There will be a panel discussion following the film that will be facilitated by the filmmaker Josh Fox and will include Myron Arnowitt (Clean Water Action); John Stoltz (Duquesne University); Dave Levdansky (State House Rep); Ned Mulcahy (Three Rivers Waterkeeper) and me –Dan Volz (Center for Healthy Environments and Communities).. If you are a group and can donate a small amount of money—even 1-200 dollars would be helpful-please contact Steve—Myron listed in the cc group from Clean Water Action. Here are their email addresses since this is such a long list—Steve Hvozdovich shvozdovich@cleanwater.org - Myron Arnowitt Marnowitt@cleanwater.org

What we most need is for all of you to as actively as possible promote this event in your newspapers—through your listserves and memberships—to friends and colleagues-etc and for YOU to ATTEND. So I have attached a flier on the film from CWA that you can resend and if you are interested in donating attached are the associated costs for your review. Hope to see you on the 5th of June in the Byham before 7—lets try to fill it up—also for those colleagues who have students—and collaborating faculty—could you please send this to student –faculty listserves at your institutions—Thanks Dan

Conrad (Dan) Volz, DrPH, MPH
Bridgeside Point
100 Technology Drive
Suite 564, BRIDG
Pittsburgh, PA 15219-3130
office phone; 412-648-8541

Cell phone; 724-316-5408

Fax; 412-624-3040

University of Pittsburgh email address; cdv5@pitt.edu

Assistant Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health: http://www.pitt.edu/~cdv5/

Director-Principal Investigator - Center for Healthy Environments and Communities (CHEC): http://www.chec.pitt.edu/

Director, Environmental Health Risk Assessment Certificate Program http://www.publichealth.pitt.edu/interior.php?pageID=82

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April 20, 2010 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

During the YERT adventure we heard about but never actually visited anybody involved with the Transition movement. Once the trip ended, however, Ben, Julie and Mark all became involved, seeing it as a powerful path to address climate change and peak oil with an uplifting community response. This Earth Day, YERT would like to introduce you to Tina Clarke, from TransitionUS, who gives a detailed presentation all about the global Transition movement. It is surprisingly refreshing, sane, effective, and YERTy– not to mention growing like a wildfire, with well over 1000 chapters worldwide.

Click here or on the picture below to watch The Transition Movement - An Introduction (62 minutes)…

It is difficult to explain it in a short paragraph, so we hope you take the time this Earth Day to watch the informative presentation from start to finish. For more information, and to find a Transition community near you, please visit http://www.transitionnetwork.org . You can also watch the film “In Transition” for free online here: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/about/publications/transition-movie .

This presentation was recorded by YERT at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture Conference (PASA) in February 2010.

Peace,
Ben, Julie, and Mark
team@yert.com

http://www.yert.com

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March 19, 2010 by Mark.

We received this urgent request from our friends at 1Sky, and hope that you can help encourage key power players to stick up for the clean air act. Thanks in advance for your help!! ~Mark

From 1Sky:

Big Oil and Dirty Coal are on the move, and they may succeed in inserting a dangerous rollback of the Clean Air Act into a Senate climate bill outline next week! We can’t allow this giveaway to big polluters to happen — take five minutes today to call key Senate and White House leaders before 5 pm EST and urge them to protect the Clean Air Act:
· Senator John Kerry (D-MA): (202) 224-2742
· Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV): (202) 224-3542
· Carol Browner, Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy: (202) 456-1414

After you call, use this link to report on how your calls went: http://action.1sky.org/signUp.jsp?key=1916. Thanks for standing up for the Clean Air Act!

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January 20, 2010 by Mark.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that nature’s the source of our existence, and the source of life, connection, love, and peace. It comes out in this video, from our friends at PrAna.

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January 18, 2010 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

Thanks to you and dozens like you, YERT received just over $20,000 in donations during December. This is an extraordinary breath of fresh air into the film– one that we plan to use very wisely. We have news about this and more in this latest YERT update!

In This Update:
• EVENT: YERT featured on FireDogLake TONIGHT, 8pm EST
• EVENT: Coal Free Future Project and YERT film preview on 2/11 in Pittsburgh
• Mark & Ben featured on “The Wall” by Repower America
• Film Festival Update
• Marketing Survey Results + ChicoBag Winners!
• How YERT raised $20,000

EVENT: YERT featured on FireDogLake TONIGHT, 8pm EST
YERT was recently asked to appear on FireDogLake.com– our second appearance on that site. FireDogLake has a regular “movie night” event, and tonight, Monday 9/18, they’ll be featuring three YERT short films with Ben, Julie, and Mark available for Q&A in chat form. Come join us! http://firedoglake.com/booksalon/ . Oh, and here are the three films for discussion:

• YERTpod30: Perennial Good Food in Kansas
• Wes Jackson’s most important challenge for us humans
• YERTpod31: An Epiphany of Three Wise Men in Missouri

EVENT: Coal Free Future Project and YERT film preview on 2/11 in Pittsburgh
We have a very special event coming up in Pittsburgh– Ben is a key performer in and has created short film “faux-mercials” and visuals for the Coal Free Future Project’s presentation of “Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of Coal,” an original multimedia play by Jeff Biggers, American Book Award winner and frequent contributor to Huffington Post and The Nation. From the Coal Free Future Project’s website: “The performance draws attention to the national scandal of mountaintop removal mining, and the grave health impacts of coal mining and coal-fired plants, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate destabilization triggered by CO2 emissions.” In addition to Jeff and Ben, the play features and is directed by Appalachian Voices National Field Coordinator and actress Stephanie Pistello, and is set to songs by some of coal country’s finest songwriters. After the performance, we’ll be screening selected “sneak peek” chapters of the YERT feature film– chapters featuring Joel Salatin, Wes Jackson, and other favorite personalities from the trip. We’re eager to get your honest feedback to help shape the creation of the film!

<-- Here's a picture from "Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of Coal," courtesy of the Coal Free Future Project.

The event happens from 8-10pm on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 at the Union Project Great Hall, 801 N. Negley Ave., Pittsburgh, PA. Contact mark@yert.com for more details. For more information about the Coal Free Future Project and additional events around the country in Louisville, KY, Asheville, NC, Washington DC, Columbus, OH, Lexington, KY, and NYC, visit http://CoalFreeFutureProject.org.

Mark & Ben featured on “The Wall” by Repower America
Through a bit of magic performed by our friends at Repower America, Mark and Ben have been given exclusive “big boxes” to highlight the videos posted on “The Wall,” a collection of countless videos by activists sharing their views about the need for action on climate change. Ben and Mark created videos sharing our views, and our small squares were upgraded to more easy to see “large squares.” Browse around here and then click on the picture of Mark or Ben to listen to our messages! Here’s The Wall. Or if you want to cheat and go right to our video messages (with, oddly, small squares for us), click for Mark’s message and Ben’s Message.

Film Festival Update
Scott and Ben have been working their tails off on the latest cut of the YERT film, with our most recent film submission going into the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC. The next big entry date is the Mountain Film Festival in Telluride, CO. We’re still waiting for results from the South By Southwest entry. In the meantime, we’re working to get the time of our film down to 90 minutes, with the next big developments likely to be the addition of additional narration and some motion graphics to move the story along more effectively. After that we’ll drop in some custom music. We are currently trying to get the film fully baked by the summer of 2010.

Marketing Survey Results + ChicoBag Winners!
Thank you all for the excellent feedback that you contributed through the marketing survey that we released in December. It was extremely helpful to our planning and marketing efforts– so much so that I’d like to share it with you and put the knowledge into the public domain to help other filmmakers out there. You can check out the data about pricing and demographics here. And there were some wonderful suggestions for marketing an environmental feature film in our open-ended question, with the top 99 suggestions collected in our blog here.

And, as promised, we’ll be shipping out a YERT ChicoBag to five special survey participants, chosen at random (via random number generator in Excel). Congratulation to the winners, specifically…

• Joan Hare
• David Buscher
• Callie Williams
• Aaron Meyers
• Ellie Gordon

How YERT raised $20,000
We are thrilled and a little stunned by the incredible flow of donations from YERT supporters all around the world. We received contributions from over 30 brand new donors in December, bringing the total number of donors to 119, raising just over $20,000 in December. We blew away the matching donation of $3,000, and apparently that got the ball rolling with people coming out in waves to support the project. Most (95%) of the money came through checks written to Pittsburgh Filmmakers, with 5% coming through PayPal.

We were wondering how we were going to find the funds to finish the film, and this round of support lets us worry much less about that and focus on finishing the film. We still need more money to do it right, but this keeps the core team in gear for the foreseeable future. It also gives us more options for marketing and distribution when that time comes around– increasing the impact of the YERT film even more.

We can’t thank you enough for all of your incredible support. May you have a happy, GREEN new year, and please keep in touch.

Peace,
Ben, Julie, and Mark
team@yert.com

http://www.yert.com

Posted in Events, Ben, Mark, Uncategorized | No Comments »