Shot at the first Earth Day in 1970, this new release features Allen Ginsberg…
Circuit Earth
- Description
- Reviews
- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
CIRCUIT EARTH was produced in honor of the first Earth Day in 1970. Shot throughout Philadelphia during Earth Week in the lead up to festival, and at the festival itself, the film features community groups, citizens, and celebrities-all reflecting on the crisis facing the planet at the end of the 60s. The structure of the film reflects the thinking of anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist and systems theorist, Gregory Bateson (An Ecology Of Mind).
Amongst those appearing are Allen Ginsberg, Senator Ed Muskie, Paul Ehrlich, George Wald, the Broadway cast of HAIR, Jerry Rubin, Alan Watts, Ralph Nader, Redbone and Ed Sanders of The Fugs.
Citation
Main credits
Abrahall, John (filmmaker)
Bamford, Christopher (filmmaker)
Feldman, Robert (filmmaker)
Katz, Michael (filmmaker)
Krotoczynski, Peter (filmmaker)
Lapp, Ralph E. (on-screen participant)
Ehrlich, Paul R. (on-screen participant)
Ginsberg, Allen (on-screen participant)
Wald, George (on-screen participant)
Muskie, Edmund S. (on-screen participant)
Rubin, Jerry (on-screen participant)
Watts, Alan (on-screen participant)
Sanders, Ed (on-screen participant)
Distributor subjects
Activism; American Studies; Anthropology; Ecology; Environment; Environmental Ethics; History; Social Psychology; Sociology; Urban Studies; War and PeaceKeywords
WEBVTT
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- [Narrator] In late June 1946, a pig bearing the number 311
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was stationed on an old warship off Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
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He was one of a group of 6,000 test animals
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deployed on and around the Atoll to test the effects of nuclear radiation
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on living organisms.
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Two bombs were exploded.
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After the last, as soon as it became safe,
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search parties entered the target area to assess the damage.
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All the other animals were either dead or dying
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but a thorough examination revealed pick 311 miraculously unharmed.
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He lived for a long time and procreated in a completely normal manner.
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(choir music playing)
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- And in my opinion all time
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has been bisected into pre-atomic and atomic eras.
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The lesson for humanity is that it must avoid the use
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of nuclear weapons in war, because to do so will be
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to unleash the supreme pollutant, radioactive fallout
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on soil for which we dependf for our livelihood.
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An attack, for example, upon our minuteman basis west
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of the Mississippi by the mighty Soviet SS9 warheads,
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if it word sufficient power to clobber these bases,
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Could rain down a minimum of 5,000 megatons, five billion tons
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of TNT equivalent of which fallout would constitute enough
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to coat four million square miles.
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We wouldn\'t call it the United States uniformly.
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It could be an overlapping pattern stretching depending upon winds,
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from Missouri, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota
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stretching over the Great Lakes stretching through the heartland
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of America and on up to the Northeast.
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- We only wanna eliminate all this eye sore here
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because we have rodents.
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Children set fire in these buildings, and we fear for our lives
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because if one of these houses will go up the whole block would go up.
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We only want them to be torn down.
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That\'s all we ask so we could live right.
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Thank you, Elizabeth.
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You know Joe it\'s the truth, though.
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You know, what we got this condition here,
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(man speaking off mic)
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but look at it, look at it, old dilapidated. it deteriorating, right...
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...Harry?
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What do you think?
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- Well, I think this these communities should get together
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and try to get all these homes knocked down.
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- Sure, look, hey, itt\'s Mabel.
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Hi, Mae, how are you?
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How you doing?
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- Well yes, because I don\'t like the look out my front door
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and see those beautiful sites across the street there
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and it looks like I live on Skid Row over here.
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And I feel like a cop over here.
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I chase teenagers away from over there that sit out there and smoke.
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They tell you to mind your own business and you don\'t own this property,
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who are you to chase me and yet you fight and everything else
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around here, just over these houses.
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- Well, we\'re getting something done now, you can count on it.
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That\'s the truth, we will.
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- At the moment, the planet is cooling off because we have put
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so much crud into the atmosphere.
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The warming trend that the CO2 addition caused up from 1940
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has been overpowered.
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The turbidity of the atmosphere over the Central Pacific as increased 30%
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in the last decade.
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According to Reed Bryson, the meteorologist at the
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University of Wisconsin who is tracking this most closely,
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we are beginning to revert to a weather pattern in this country
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which we saw in the early 1800s.
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If we do that, our agricultural productivity will suffer a great deal
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because agriculture is tremendously dependent on the weather,
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- You know, the paint they used had lead in them.
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But they say now the paint, they have this lead-free paint, you know,
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get off the arm of the chair.
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They have the lead-free paint and I don\'t know,
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they came out here a couple of months ago and they burned the paint
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off the wood.
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And they were supposed to come back and fix, you know, re-paint it,
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scrape it I think and re-paint it, which they never did.
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And plus, right in my back bedroom, when it rains it just pours
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from the ceiling and it\'s a lot of things that yet still wrong
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with the house and I don\'t know.
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I can\'t say anymore.
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I haven\'t got on, I didn\'t call the real estate.
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They get, sometime to get a little nasty with me and everything.
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And like my rent right now, it\'s like a month, you know, behind
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and I know they\'re ready to put me in constable and what not.
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But like I am trying to do the best I can, you know.
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And I don\'t know, just like I hope probably one day I wouldn\'t
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have to worry about any of this here.
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I hope probably one day, Mr. Reed and I, you know, should get married,
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we won\'t have to worry about unfit places.
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Maybe he can get a decent job.
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I could work because I love doing hair and I wants to be a model.
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You might not believe it, but I would like to be a model
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and probably one day he\'ll be able to you know, get a trade
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and then I can open up a beauty parlor and then if part time I can model
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and maybe we can get everything together, you know.
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- Now all the people in the so-called underdeveloped countries
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have rising expectations.
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They know what we have, they would like to live the kind of life
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that we lead.
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They wanna be industrialized.
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The smallest bit of simple arithmetic will show you
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that although they have rising expectations, they also have
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plummeting prospects.
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Our standard of living will continue to decline.
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Their\'s will be decline faster.
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The gap between the rich nations and the poor nations
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will continue to grow as it has continually since the Second World War.
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- [Man] Okay, so we\'re talking about guns.
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- [Man] Is there any reason why, you\'re just looking at one point.
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(multiple people talking at the same time)
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- But I don\'t live in the whole world, I live right here.
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I\'m trying to better myself.
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(multiple people speaking at the same time)
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You know what, look, I believe in brotherhood
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but there comes a time where you got to think of yourself.
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I mean that may sound selfish but.
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- [Man] You gotta think as a the whole.
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- All right, as a whole.
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Everybody\'s gotta come together.
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There\'s no certain age where it says you\'ve, well,
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now what he said, and what are you going to do?
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It\'s not you and it\'s not you, it\'s us.
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Not just because you\'re over a certain age
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or I\'m under a certain age, that don\'t make me better than you,
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that don\'t make you better than me.
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In other words don\'t say, what are you\'s gonna do?
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It\'s what are we all in general gonna do?
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Don\'t say you, me, I, it, this, that, bullshit.
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(two people talking at the same time)
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- Tied up in knots because they know that singly you can\'t
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do anything anymore.
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I mean we\'re disinherited as far as our liberties go.
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Unless we form a mob and break windows, nobody will pay attention to us.
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And breaking windows never really accomplishes anything.
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So we feel stimied in every possible direction.
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We can only do it through our antiquated legislatures.
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I think it\'s a worldwide dilemma already
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about the DDT for instance that they even know enough now
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to know it\'s got to be banned.
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They give us a two-year leeway to be sure does its worst.
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But one of their dilemmas is at the Orient will think
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that we\'ve taken it away from them to be mean because we sold it
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to them as the way to get rid of insects and have better crops.
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So will never, they\'ll never believe us that we\'re taking it away
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because we discovered we made a god-awful mistake.
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Nobody believes the truth anymore.
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They just believe the propaganda.
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Distributor: Bullfrog Films
Length: 43 minutes
Date: 1971
Genre: Expository
Language: Not available
Grade: 10 - 12, College, Adults
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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