This new video by rap artist Odub and singer/songwriter Misty Murphy celebrates the life and enduring legacy of the late climber Todd Skinner

“Float” -Odub and Misty Murphy from Kris Hampton on Vimeo.

At high elevations in the northern Rockies, mountain pine beetles are killing countless whitebark pine trees, a major source of food for wildlife including grizzly bears.

photo by Dominic Gill

Adventure filmmaker Dominic Gill is making more movies from his cutting room floor. As his award-winning bicycle travel pic “Take a Seat” is on world tour with the Banff Mountain Film Festival, Dom is creating a series of shorts based on the non-cycling portions of his 20,000-mile tandem trek from Alaska to Argentina.

In this first installment called Rich Mountain the biking Britain pulls over in Bolivia long enough to tour one of the infamous Potosi silver mines. Here, since the time of the Inca, more than 8 million people have died over the past 500 years.

“I had seen hardship, lots of it, in other parts of my journey but this was one of the few times when I actually ‘injected myself’ albeit briefly into their world while not just traveling slowly through it,” Dom said in a Facebook exchange on online. “I was there for 4 hours and for at least a week after i had black mucous streaming out of my nose and ears….it was stressful for me, let alone those in there day in day out.”

Rich Mountain is brief but compelling look in to the lives of the people who still make their living extracting minerals from the ground. Our own experience of the tragic mining deaths in West Virginia earlier this month is testament to this hazardous profession that offers low wages and few benefits.

Though Dom’s objective was to ride his tandem bicycle across two continents to the tip of South America, his primary mission was to meet and encounter as many people as possible along the way. In this film Dom demonstrates that travel offers an amazing opportunity to experience life from a point of view unique to many of us but all too common to millions around the world.

You can learn more about Dominic Gill online at :www.dominicgill.me
Also check out his book “Take A Seat” available at Amazon.com

Or find him on Facebook: Inclusive Adventure

Washington State prison inmates pay their debt to society by helping to create a sustainable environment. A new film produced by Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele illustrates an initiative that teaches the incarcerated science and common practices for life upon their release in a better world.

Jeff Muse, manager of the Sustainable Prisons Project at The Evergreen State College, said this partnership with the department of corrections helps not only to cut down on institutional waste but teaches convicts that they can contribute to wildlife preservation even behind bars. “There’s no reason to think that someone who’s in prison for making a wrong decision in life can’t still play a role in being a steward for the planet,” Muse said in the film.

Winners of the 2009 Grant 4 Change prize offered by the sustainable apparel brand Nau, Drummond and Steele use still photographs and video to tell the stories of proactive efforts to protect the environment in their community. Through an on-going documentary project the two media producers raise awareness for successful programs that are making a difference in the fight to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Click to play

Building captive colonies for eventual re-introduction to the wild, scientists from Atlanta rescue endangered frogs and other amphibians threatened with extinction by a fatal fungus spreading through South American forests.

Saving Amphibians from deadly fungus from Assignment Earth on Vimeo.

In the shadow of the Canyonlands of Eastern Utah, a site has been proposed for the state’s first nuclear power plant. Located outside the town of Green River, the plant would generate electricity for three million homes and provide a much need economic boost to the community. But the project would depend on huge amounts of water from the Green River itself, raising questions about its capacity to support this new development and other claims to its shrinking supply, not mention the impact on fish and other wildlife

“Whether it be oil shale, coal gasification plants, nuclear power plants and so, quite frankly there’s not enough water to support all these things,” said John Weisheit, the conservation director of Living Rivers in Moab. “In a river system such as this, even a small incremental drop can strand endangered fish habitat.”

In the edition of Assignment Earth we weigh the balance between energy generation and environmental protection.

This visually graceful film is a short depiction of grounded flight. Yogaslacker Adi Carter demonstrates the poses that can be achieved using the new eLine from Trango. This low-stretch slackline offers a quick and easy setup for creating a yoga flow station that’s kind on trees and reduces wear on anchors. Slackasana may well be a up and coming form of practice for climbers and yogies alike.

This poignant short film by Sean Mullens is a portrait of humanity’s struggle toward our inherent excellence. One man’s daily challenge to overcome his disability and indulge a desire for ecstatic play models for the rest of us the joy that can be achieved in perseverance.

“You can transcend,” the film’s star Michael says. “You can get to a place where you’re sort of free, to be able to dance, to be able to be fluid, to be able to be so in the moment, to just be natural…to be what you were meant to be.”

BIRTHRIGHT from Sean Mullens on Vimeo.

Music by The Album Leaf - Into the Blue Again – Broken Arrow
Sub Pop Records 2006

For 10 years, the Ski Area Citizens Coalition has published its ski area environmental report card, a rating system that grades ski resports across the west according to their impact on the natural environment.

Paul Joyce, a conservation assoicate at the environmental protection group Colorado Wild, says a ski resort’s grade depends on how well it plays in its own backyard.

“When a ski area expands into the back country, expands into habitat, affects wildlife, affects vegetation, thereby affecting water, watersheds, water quality,” Joyce said, “those things weigh really heavy with the report card.”

Resorts owned by the Aspen Skiing Company dominate the highest rated resorts in the west.

“People listen to us in part because we’re an interesting news story, but also because we’re business people.,” Auden Schendler, environmental affairs director at Aspen Skiing. “Ultimately we’re not environmentalists. We’re business people. And we see climate changes as an existential threat to business.

In this edition of This American Land we explore ski resorts that employ environmentally sustainable practices to protect natural areas that surround their slopes.

Researcher Aly Courtemanch starts her work day on skis. That’s how she gets around on the alpine terrain where she studies the Teton Range bighorn sheep herd. Using GPS devices and trail counters, Courtemanch a scientist at the Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Wyoming, tracks the movemnts of both sheep and skiers.

“We really want to get a better sense of how bighorn sheep survive in the Tetons, both summer and winter,” she said. “We don’t know very much about this bighorn sheep herd, it’s really small and really hard to study because they’re so remote and hard to observe.”

While other wild sheep move down to more moderate terrain, this herd winteres at some of the highest elevations in Wyoming. But they’ve stopped migrating about 60 years ago due to human development, firs suppression and other factors. In this edition of This American Land researchers take a look at this species on the brink of extinction.