Free documentary film about building healthy houses out of earth. All content below from the First Earth website.
FIRST EARTH is a documentary about the movement towards a massive paradigm shift for shelter — building healthy houses in the old ways, out of the very earth itself, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages. It is a sprawling film, shot on location from the West Coast to West Africa. An audiovisual manifesto filmed over the course of 4 years and 4 continents, FIRST EARTH makes the case that earthen homes are the healthiest housing in the world; and that since it still takes a village to raise a healthy child, it is incumbent upon us to transform our suburban sprawl into eco-villages, a new North American dream.
Chocking up over 300,000 hits on YouTube even before its official release, FIRST EARTH is not a how-to film; rather, it’s a why-to film. It establishes the appropriateness of earthen building in every cultural context, under all socio-economic conditions, from third-world communities to first-world countrysides, from Arabian deserts to American urban jungles. In the age of environmental and economic collapse, peak oil and other converging emergencies, the solution to many of our ills might just be getting back to basics, focusing on food, clothes, and shelter. We need to think differently about house and home, for material and for spiritual reasons, both the personal and the political.
Image credit: DavidSheen.com
Special thanks to Jeff Bousquet for finding this gem.
I agree with you Owen about the gap in showing various technologies related to Earthen Building. I do think the movie does a good job promoting Earth as the most ubiquitous and sustainable building material. I read on the website that he is producing a DVD that apparently will have more professional production values. I wonder, do you have a full length video in the works?
Do I have a full length video in the works? Oh no. I’m just doing short educational video clips to demonstrate good building techniques. A full length video on earthbag is one of the things needed to help propel the movement forward, along with more testing and more books.
I just watched all 12 First Earth videos. Hmm, what can I say? They’re quite good and I still recommend them, but at the same time I have to say they fall short of my expectations. Twelve videos and not one mention of earthbag building… or rammed earth… or earthships. That’s a huge gap, a blind spot when you’re talking about earthen building. And the sound quality was not up to professional standards.