Product Description
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DIRT! THE MOVIE is an astonishing, humorous and
substantial look at the glorious and unappreciated ground beneath
our feet.
Dirt feeds us and gives us shelter. Dirt holds and cleans our
water. Dirt heals us and makes us beautiful. Dirt regulates the
earth s climate. Why do we humans ignore, abuse, and destroy our
most precious living natural resource? Consider the results of
such behavior: Mass starvation, drought, floods and global
warming.
Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, DIRT! THE MOVIE tells the story of
humans trying to re-connect to dirt the living skin of the earth.
Traveling from the vineyards of California to the plains of
Kenya, DIRT! reveals how repairing our relationship with dirt can
create new possibilities for all life on earth.
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We're talking dirt! Not soil, not earth, not loam, not
dust, just plain old dirt, which this lively and enlightening
documentary asserts is the planet's protective skin that contains
all those other things, but also a whole bunch more. In fact,
Dirt! The Movie was inspired by Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the
Earth by William Bryant Logan, a book whose title pretty much
describes the movie's narrative course in explaining how the dirt
we use for good or ill, whether in the service of spoilage or
manipulation, is a much more delicate and essential bio-resource
than many of us thought. There's a lot of information about dirt
that gets tossed about, and it's bagged together with some lovely
animation segments that are explanatory or allegorical.
Unfortunately there's one animated misstep in the form of a
cutesy little cartoon lump meant to anthropomorphize dirt as a
whole and as its uncountable individual molecules too. But
ignoring the doe-eyed dirt glob, the people and issues that are
humanized with interview segments from a variety of folks who
really know their dirt are truly revealing. Dirt! is a
globetrotter too. We visit locations from Africa and India, to
Los Angeles, Brazil, and the South Bronx. The gist is to show the
bad ways we can and are destroying dirt, from strip-mining and
aintop removal, to deforestation and continuing the
agri-killing practice of monoculture--growing only one crop over
and over again across huge areas of land (dirt). The evidence
that monoculture caused the dust has only vaguely been taken
to heart, and the message that dirt heals the earth is still
widely ignored. A couple in Brazil talk about the correlation
between human degradation and environmental degradation, which
the film glaringly documents in other places like India, where
farmer suicides occur regularly because the dirt is going away.
There's also Andy Lipkis, celebrity dirt lover and founder of the
environmental organization TreePeople, who explains how the same
dirt has been around since forever and it's the only dirt we're
ever going to have. To demonstrate dirt's critical function on
all levels, even as purifier of our ancient and similarly
endangered water supply, Lipkis takes a sip and says, "I just
drank dinosaur pee." Dirt! The Movie is similarly forthright and
illuminating about why we shouldn't just kick dirt around
anymore. --Ted Fry