Greening the Middle East (2009) - Geoff Lawton

The first five minutes or so of this is one of my all-time favorite youtube video - the original "Greening the Middle East". It's mostly images with voice-over describing the amazing 3-year experience these guys had basically turning hell into heaven in the Jordan desert.

After the original, a patchwork of additional footage was appended showing the project site years later and how it had degraded in the time since the project ended. Then at about 19 minutes in, the scene shifts to their "sequel", The Jordan Valley Permaculture Project and several other locations in the general area. It goes on with personal accounts and video imagery. There are some cool points from time to time, which I'll try to list under "Notes" (below) when I watch it again.

Note:

19:00 - The Jordan Valley Permaculture Project

32:50 - Geoff starts a cool little speech about permaculture spreading

Tom Shadyac at Tower of Youth

This link to Tom Shadyac at Tower of Youth opens a new tab starting just after the introduction.

Quotes:

The human body is a cooperative. Nothing in the human body takes more than it needs. If it does, we have a term for it - it's called cancer. A cancer is something that just takes and grows without limit, and then it will eventually kill the host and the body will die. Our economy is based on a cancerous philosophy.

When the Berlin wall came down, nobody saw it coming... Just ideas had accumulated and mounted up behind that wall and created a pressure - an energetic pressure - and one day that wall fell.

What's A Rigged Economy?

Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom - 323 eps!