Environmental Education Media Project

(52 min) Covering an area that is the size of France, the Loess Plateau is home to more than 50 million very poor farmers who have suffered centuries of severe soil erosion, leading to massive environmental degradation and poverty.

The film documents a remarkable paradigm shift: the rebirth of a self-sustaining ecosystem in the dry and remote Loess Plateau region of China, and identifies why and how a World Bank/government joint project has completely changed the landscape of the region.

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(25 min) In Alashan, a remote region of grassland or steppe in the Mongolian Autonomous Region of China, the desert is growing by 1000 square kilometers per year. Fifty years ago there were 50 springs in the area, three rivers and 800 small lakes.

Today, sand dunes roll across the plain and the springs, rivers and most of the lakes are gone. This Earth Report film travels to Alashan to find out what has gone so drastically wrong over so short a time, and to see what the Chinese authorities and development agencies are doing to draw a line in the sand.

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(15 min) Changes in biodiversity have been greater in the last 50 years than at any point of human history. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report is the first comprehensive investigation on the status of all terrestrial and ocean ecosystems on a global scale -- and the results are alarming. Wealth could be achieved for more human beings than ever, but at the same time all natural systems have been negatively affected and altered. Ecosystems are under stress and the life-support functions of our planet at risk. Scientific reports can help to ensure that the best possible decisions are made based upon valid analysis but ultimately the survival of ecosystems will be determined by society as a whole. And it is only an informed public that can wisely decide.

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(8 min) Even if our knowledge about earth is incomplete and our concepts are far from being coherent – one disturbing trend is becoming increasingly obvious: biodiversity, the richness of animal and plants, is currently being lost at unprecedented rates. Direct human impacts are the main cause. More species have become extinct in the last 150 years than in all recorded history. Today almost 30% of all species are threatened with extinction and probably less than 1% of all human beings are aware of that. The world as we know it might never have existed.

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(6 min) Leaf cutter ants march to the sounds of Vivaldi through the untouched tropical underbrush, themselves like notes on a sheet of music following a rigid order to compose rhythmical succession. They carry their self-carved leaf cuttings over collapsed "tree giants" and across cliff-like gaps in the red tropical soil. The camera seems to be carried along by their constant movement, and yet despite the harmony we cannot ignore the impacts humans are having on such increasingly rare and fragile global ecosystems.

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