Kanopy Videos
On-demand streaming video for over 16,000 films including content from the BBC, PBS, and Critereon Collection. Public performance rights for educational use are included.
These videos are searchable via the Cerritos College Catalog or directly through Cerritos.kanopystreaming.com
Is a living rainforest of greater economic value than one that has been cut down? The international marketing of foods, cosmetics, and crafts derived from tropical forests may provide native inhabitants with the economic means to protect their vanishing lands. Rainforests:Proving Their Worth explores this promising movement to market sustainably collected forest products. Several hopeful developments are presented: new groves of peach palms in Costa Rica, bustling markets on the Amazon, and environmentally conscious American companies successfully using renewable forest products. But obstacles remain: Brazil nut collectors aren't getting fair prices, and the trees that once sustained them are being burned for charcoal. Some forest inhabitants are concerned that outsiders will bring unwelcome change to traditional ways. Rainforests: Proving Their Worth provides a provocative look at a crucial effort to save the rainforests.
1990 24 mins
The Sacred Science is a groundbreaking documentary that captures an unprecedented glimpse into the ancient healing practices of the Amazon rainforest's medicine men, or shamans, whose unique knowledge of indigenous plants and rituals is threatened by deforestation, modernization and ecotourism. The region's traditional healers have knowledge of a vast catalogue of natural plant medicines and practices that have been time-tested for centuries, but are little-known outside the rainforests and may soon be lost forever.
A large number of the synthetic medicines we know today were discovered in these rainforests. However, less than 5% of Amazonian plants have been examined for their healing potential. The Sacred Science follows eight people from the developed world with a variety of common and serious ailments who embark on a challenging, one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle.
Working with a handful of shamans experienced in the harvesting and preparation of traditional plant medicines, as well as ritual exercises, these men and women seek to overcome Parkinson's disease, cancer, alcoholism, diabetes and depression. Ultimately, five of the patients return with measurable improvements, exceeding the expectations of many. Never before has such a candid, in-depth account of these traditional practices been caught on film. The Sacred Science is a provocative call both to look deeper into these traditional methods and their potential benefit to humankind, as well as to preserve the forests and ancient cultures for the treasures and knowledge they possess.
2011 77 mins
The Stump Makers delivers an indictment of the wasteful forestry practices and ecological devastation caused by the major logging companies operating in California and Oregon in the 1960s. Using some of the same footage as Wasted Woods, this film documents the impact of clear cutting on the environment and the logging communities reliant upon the industry. Traveling on logging roads into the coastal mountains of California and Oregon, Richards followed the logging crews into the last great stands of old growth redwoods and documented their complete annihilation under the tracks of bulldozers, chainsaws and giant log loaders. When the crews finished their work, they left mountain sides denuded, the rich deep soils, built up over millennia, pushed into creeks and scarred with deep gullies. Corporate policies took no notice and assumed no responsibility for the ecological destruction of the forests. When the profits dried up, the corporations abandoned the mills, the logging towns and the clear cut mountains, leaving the local populations and environments to suffer the consequences.
1963 23 mins
Timber Tigers resulted from a national tour of forest areas that Richards made in 1970-71. The film contains footage of seldom seen giant forest-cutting machinery that harvested and hauled trees of all sizes across the country....