Spring Urban Gardening and Plant Fest 2024!

Introduction and Q & A by Bill McKibben, climate activist, and founder of Third Act.

Feature Film: Plant This Movie

Meet WFMU DJs and Wake Weatherman RB !

• $20 ticket price includes the movie, Q and A, and a free plant!
• Plants will include basil, oregano, and mint, suitable for your favorite sandwich, pasta dish or tea. Also, NJ native flowers and grasses, perfect for a windowsill or garden.
• 100% of the ticket sales straight to WFMU!
• See how city spaces have been transformed by urban gardening
• Student farms, community gardens, CSAs, around the world

Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice.

His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.

McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.

Plant This Movie presents a comprehensive look at the evolution and growing impact of the international urban agriculture movement -- from cities across the United States to diverse countries around the world.
Featuring leading urban farming advocates, the film explores the inspiring success story of Cuba, and travels globally to communities of urban farmers in Shanghai, Calcutta, Addis Ababa, London, and Lima.
In the US, the film visits innovative projects in New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Philadelphia and Portland – including the largest rooftop garden in the world, blighted areas transformed into urban farms, student-run gardens and CSA, and other projects that show the explosion of creative local efforts.
The film begins by tracing the evolution of the household yard in America from a necessary source for food to the ubiquitous lawn, now the # 1 irrigated urban crop. After the highly productive Victory Gardens of WWII, the country moved rapidly to a more centralized food system, and people became divorced from the source of their food.
As Plant This Movie vividly illustrates, the ingredients for scaling up urban farming and reconnecting people to the food we eat are now all around us. The movement provides hope that people across the nation and the world will once again have access to healthier, locally grown food, using the land near where they live as a primary source.

NARRATED BY DARRYL HANNAH

83 minutes

Host or Publisher WFMU