Earth Day Audiovisual Resources: April 22, 1970-April 22, 2025

by Michael Pasqualoni, Newhouse School Librarian

Here are selections of Earth Day related video and films drawn from Syracuse University Libraries collection.

From Television News Archive (Vanderbilt U.) database

• NBC Evening News April 22, 1970
  “Day of” coverage for the first ever Earth Day in the United States; Chet Huntley, news anchor
• NBC Evening News April 23, 1970
  “Day after” coverage of the first ever Earth Day in the United States, including concerns voiced about intersections between the event, race relations and anti-poverty efforts in the U.S., as well as highlighting of notable urban vs. rural differences

From Kanopy database – Documentary Films

• All That Breathes - Shaunak Sen’s ALL THAT BREATHES reinvents the environmental documentary by portraying, in incisive yet lyrical fashion, the reciprocal influence of animals and humans. For more than a year, Sen followed New Delhi brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad as they rescued birds of prey from the increasingly destructive effects of urban pollution. [2022, 1 hr. 38 mins]
• Stewards of the Land: Serán las dueñas de la tierra - Stephanie, Ian and Alfredo are landless ecological farmers striving to produce healthy food for local consumption in Puerto Rico. In this economically depressed U.S.-territory, which is highly dependent on food imports and a frequent target for hurricanes, producing food locally is urgent. [2022, 1 hr. 31 mins]
• Trees and Other Entanglements - Filmmaker Irene Taylor crafts a poetic meditation on nature, mortality, and the passage of time in her exploration of our symbiotic nexus with trees. Weaving together several stories of arboreal adoration, TREES AND OTHER ENTANGLEMENTS unfolds as a deeply human tale of our connection to the natural world and to one another. [2023 – 1 hr. 54 mins]
• Earth Days - Director Robert Stone ("Oswald's Ghost," "Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst") traces the origins of the modern environmental movement through the eyes of nine Americans who propelled the movement from its beginnings in the 1950s to its moment of triumph in 1970 with the original Earth Day and to its status as a major political force in America. [2010 – 1 hr. 43 mins]
• I am the River, the River is Me - The Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand is the first river in the world to be recognized as a legal person, as a living and indivisible being. Māori river guardian Ned Tapa invites a First Nations Elder from Australia and his daughter, who are activists dedicated to saving their own dying river back home, on a five-day canoe trip down this sacred river. Made over a three-year period, in close collaboration with the Whanganui Māori, the film is a positive, urgent call to action for the rights of nature: now the fastest growing legal movement in the world.
• Canary - Witness the extraordinary life of Dr. Lonnie Thompson, an explorer who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what is possible. Daring to seek Earth’s history contained in glaciers atop the tallest mountains in the world, Lonnie found himself on the frontlines of climate change—his life’s work evolving into a salvage mission to recover these priceless historical records before they disappear forever. [2023, 1 hr. 44 mins]
• Three Ocean Advocates - Our oceans cover 70% of the earth and are the largest habitat on our planet. They provide over 50% of the oxygen we breathe, absorb heat and carbon dioxide and are brimming with an amazing array of biodiversity that not only provides food for 3 billion people on the planet, but also supports a myriad of recreational activities. The ocean is in trouble, we know the causes, we have solutions, and we can take actions to restore the health of the oceans. The ocean advocates featured in this film share their stories and a glimpse into the challenges the ocean is currently facing. [2021, 28 mins]

American Library Association, Film & Media Round Table [FMRT]
Pasqualoni is current national chair of FMRT and past chair of that group’s Notable Films for Adults Committee; he shares these climate and Earth-related documentary films honored in the recent past.

• Grit (2018, dir. Sasha Friedlander and Cynthia Wade) 1 hr. 21 minutes
  When Dian was six years old, she heard a deep rumble and turned to see a tsunami of mud barreling towards her village. She remembers her mother scooping her up to save her from the boiling mud. Her neighbors ran for their lives. Sixteen villages, including Dian's, were wiped away. A decade later, nearly 60,000 people have been displaced from what was once a thriving industrial and residential area in East Java, located just 20 kilometers from Indonesia's second largest city. Dozens of factories, schools and mosques are submerged 60 feet under a moonscape of cracked mud. The majority of international scientists believe that Lapindo, a multinational company that was drilling for natural gas in 2006, accidentally struck an underground mud volcano and unleashed a violent flow of hot sludge from the earth's depths.
• How to Change the World: The Story of Greenpeace (2015, dir. Jerry Rothwell) 1 hr. 50 minutes
  Chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers - Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists and American draft dodgers - who set out to stop Richard Nixon's atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement.
• Great Invisible (2014, dir. Margaret Brown) 92 minutes
  On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. It killed 11 workers and caused the worst oil spill in American history. GREAT INVISIBLE is the first documentary feature to go beyond the media coverage to examine the crisis in depth through the eyes of oil executives, survivors and Gulf Coast residents who experienced it first-hand.
• Salt of the Earth (2015, dirs. Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado) 1 hr. 50 minutes
  For the last 40 years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed some of the major events of our recent history -- international conflicts, starvation and exodus.
• Flow: For the Love of Water (2008, dir. Irina Salina) 1 hr. 24 minutes
  Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - the World Water Crisis.

A Frame [Digital Magazine of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences) offers this list of [climate related] documentary films to stream: https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/earth-day-documentaries-to-stream

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