Event

Dear Governor Cuomo

In Person:
Filmmaker JON BOWERMASTER
PATTI WOOD, Grassroots Environmental Education
Co-presented by Food & Water Watch

On a rainy night in May, a unique coalition of musicians, scientists and activists gathered in Albany on the governor's front door step, calling for a ban on hydraulic-fracturing. With the news that Governor Andrew Cuomo might lift the moratorium on fracking in New York any day, the event was assembled in less than a month. Two rehearsals in twenty-four hours, and it was show time. The goal of the extremely varied participants, many of whom had never met before this night, was to explain in clear terms the threats of fracking and to motivate people to rise up against the practice using song. The cord that bound them all was that they were first and foremost New Yorkers. New Yorkers Against Fracking, the film that resulted from the night, a unique blend of The Last Waltz and An Inconvenient Truth, was written and directed by
Jon Bowermaster and filmed under the direction of Academy Award winning documentary film maker Alex Gibney. Under the musical direction of Natalie Merchant, the film features actors Mark Ruffalo and Melissa Leo, environmental biologist Sandra Steingraber and musicians ranging from Joan Osborne and Citizen Cope to Medeski Martin and Wood and The Felice Brothers. (USA, 2012, 75 min., color, Blu-ray)
Award-winning writer and filmmaker Jon Bowermaster's ten-year-long OCEANS 8 project took him and his teams around the world by sea kayak during the past ten years. Recently named one of a dozen Ocean Heroes by the National Geographic Society, Jon's most recent documentaries are Terra Antarctica, Rediscovering the Seventh Continent, What Would Darwin Think? Man v. Nature in the Galapagos and the prize-winning SoLa, Louisiana Water Stories. He spent January 2012 in Antarctica producing the first 3D film about the seventh continent, to be distributed through museums and science institutions around the world beginning Spring 2013. Author of a dozen books, Bowermaster lives in New York's Hudson Valley.