Vote early, vote often and spread the word. I’m not kidding about vote often — everyone is allowed to vote once a day until the contest closes August 25th.

Local Anxiety (aka Mark Leiren-Young and Kevin Crofton) have been writing eco-comedy tunes since the early ’90s — before Al Gore invented the environment.

We wanted to come up with something fun to sing at Earth Day rallies and green events. We wanted something with a little more oomph than “heigh-ho, heigh-ho, fill-in the blank has got to go.” We realized that everybody — even kids — knows at least one thing we’re supposed to be doing to create a better planet, we just don’t always do it.

Kevin asked a teacher at an elementary school in Gibsons, BC, if their kids would like to be part of a song. They loved the idea. But we still wanted someone special to introduce them. Years ago David Suzuki had agreed to guest star in our TV special, Greenpieces. He played God. Okay, he played my personal God. I worshipped at the altar of Saint Suzuki. He agreed to let us record him intro’ing the kids…

I hope you enjoy the song and please, please, please feel free to add your own simple thing to our list!

And yes, that’s Mark Leiren-Young and Kevin Crofton singing on a real life green chain for our new recording of The Green Chain song — now available on our CD, Greenpieces and via iTunes

And just a reminder — The Green Chain DVD is now available at a DVD store near you. And if it isn’t… go kick their butt and tell them to order it already!

Here’s the official letter Playlist from the Planet suggest we send out…

Hi,

How can you help me out, enjoy yourself, and get closer to nature in just a few clicks of the mouse?

I recently entered my song to be part of David Suzuki’s Playlist for the Planet songwriting contest.

You can listen to and vote for the song that I wrote on the CBC Radio 3 website. You are allowed to vote once per day, and must logged in to vote.

http://radio3.cbc.ca/planet/vote.aspx

Voting for my song could also get me closer to getting on the Playlist for the Planet CD, and winning a Melody Maker Gibson guitar from Long and McQuade.

What’s in it for you? Just voting for my song can get you a chance to win a super cool Playlist for the Planet t-shirt.

Twitter—Whatever you do, make sure you add this hashtag to your tweet– #P4Planet. We’ll be watching, and giving the most prolific and creative twitterphiles a Playlist for the Planet t-shirt.

Facebook—When you share it on Facebook, make sure you grab the Playlist for the Planet image when you add the link to the page.

Mahalo

Mark Leiren-Young

And remember, this disc is loaded with special features and extras — writer/director commentary; a behind the scenes doc about the loggers on our shoot; a behind the scenes doc with some of our team (including Tricia Helfer, August Schellenberg, Scott McNeil, Donna Wong-Juliani and Jillian Fargey); two music videos by Local Anxiety (aka Mark Leiren-Young and Kevin Crofton) and a whole bunch of interviews with people talking trees.

We’ve also got a special educational kit for anyone who wants to teach this in schools. Be sure to contact Kinosmith for special classroom deals!

Are we there yet? Are we there now? Now are we there? Now?

For the last few years every time there was something new to do on The Green Chain I felt like a little kid on a road trip, with a bladder full of cola. Every time we turned another corner I kept thinking we have to be there NOW. But there was always something hiding around the corner — the colour correction, the blow-up to film, the post production for the DVD, the DVD extras that needed cutting and, in the case of The Green Chain Song music video, shooting, and, of course, tweaking the interviews for the podcast series. Then there was the completely unexpected spin-off… The Green Chain book.

Sometime last millennium, a husband and wife producing team optioned my screenplay, Blueprints from Space, and told me how special the project was to them. They explained that maybe, if they were lucky, they’d get to make a half dozen movies in their lives. They explained that movies don’t happen quickly and that they will always. always take more time than you could possibly imagine. Even though the movie was never made (and I am working on changing that), that conversation always stuck with me.

The script for The Green Chain was finished in 2004 and in the six years since Tony Wosk, Donna Wong-Juliani and I said, “hey, it’s only monologues, how hard can it be to shoot” my life — all our lives — have turned upside down and inside out.

But finally… finally… with the release of the DVD on June 8th… we’re there.

The wild thing is that I know the ride isn’t really over and hopefully never will be. The movie is still showing on TMN and Movie Central. We’re still waiting to find out if the movie sells to non-pay TV stations in Canada (tell your fave TV station they need us now), it’ll be on iTunes any second now and with luck it’ll show up on (legal) DVD and on other TV stations in the US and around the world. And every few weeks I get an email from somebody who has seen the movie, heard a podcast, or read the book talking about wanting to do their part to save our forests.

But I’m thinking that my work on The Green Chain is finally done until we have the budget to digitally revise it so that Greedo shoots first, Jabba enslaves Tricia Helfer and we replace all the chainsaws with cell phones.

The thing is… because I am getting those emails on a regular basis… and because the whole plan for this movie was to spark conversations about our forests… I’m going to try to post updates and calls for help about forestry and environmental issues from some of the groups that I think are making a difference. I’ll also keep you posted on my next big green projects — and there are a few in the works…

I’ll also keep you up to speed on Local Anxiety’s new cd, Greenpieces — featuring Tree Farm (closing song from The Green Chain) and our version of the opening tune, The Green Chain song. It’s already available on iTunes and through cdbaby.com.

And if other green team members want to send me updates on their adventures I’ll try to plug those here too.

If you’d like to stay tuned to any and all updates about the movie — and our forests — please click the RSS feed option on the blog site or join The Green Chain Gang on Facebook and to stay tuned to what I’m up to beyond my green life please join my new fan page on Facebook.

Yes, we are finally there and thank you all for sharing this unforgettable — and apparently neverending — ride.

The Green Chain Cast & Crew Screening

And because of their active comments section, I think that’s probably a better place to read it. Here’s how it starts…

Babz Chula was not my first choice for the role of “the protester” in The Green Chain.

I first met Babz when I interviewed her a lifetime ago. We met at her place in Kitsilano. I think she spent most of our visit advising me on the responsibilities she felt came with my job as a theatre critic. I recall her telling me that when she was growing up a neighbour named the Barbie doll after her. That doesn’t seem to be true, but I believed it. Wouldn’t you?

For the rest of the story, visit The Tyee...

Gaeil Farrar photo

In the Spring of 1985 I was working as a reporter for the Williams Lake Tribune and I was sent into the bush to interview a logger about his “beautiful new machine” that he described as, “a mill on wheels.” After telling me how many jobs his danglehead processor did, and how many men it used to take to do these jobs, he blamed “the damn environmentalists” for putting his friends out of work.
That conversation was the seed for the movie, The Green Chain, and on Feb 6., 2010 — almost 25 years later — a few hundred people have shown up at the Williams Lake Community Centre on an impossibly sunny Saturday afternoon to see what kind of stories a former reporter for the Tribune is telling about them on-screen.
I wasn’t this nervous about the audience at the world premiere. I remember from my time in Williams Lake that this is a crowd that will tell you exactly what they think and they’re more than capable of interrupting the movie to heckle it if it doesn’t ring true.
Almost as soon as the lights went down, it was clear the audience was tuned into every word. They laughed at every joke the movie’s logger told — the idea of building houses “out of baby seals and whale bones” was a big hit. And there were a lot of knowing chuckles when our logger, played by Scott McNeil, made his crack about loggers with missing fingers.
Eighty-seven minutes later there was a wide-ranging forty minute Q&A session about the movie and about Williams Lake.
Part of the discussion was about how realistic the movie seemed. Some audience members thought The Green Chain was a documentary, others claimed they knew the actors were actors throughout the film, but my favourite response was from a man who worked in forestry who said he went back and forth on whether it was a doc or a drama and finally realized it didn’t matter and he was going to stop worrying about that and enjoy the ride.
I should note that this conversation has been a staple of almost every festival the movie has played and the only times I’ve seen the film when audience members haven’t ended up debating whether it was fact or fiction were at a handful of screenings where the person introducing the movie made a point of mentioning it’s fiction. On a few occasions programmers have accidentally slotted this as a documentary.
But the idea that people in the town that was a huge part of the inspiration for the unnamed town in the movie believed the characters rang true was a bigger thrill than the ecoforester who told me he liked The Green Chain better than Avatar (you think maybe the sequel can feature seven monologues about logging on Pandora?)
One woman who’d grown up in Haida Gwaii territory thanked me for getting across the anger people felt when logger Grant Hadwin chopped down “the Golden Spruce.” She told us the story of the albino raven that appeared not long after the Spruce died and how that gave people hope too – until the raven was electrocuted.
Passions ran high about the issues and the stories definitely pushed buttons. One audience member who works in a mill didn’t want to cut the tree sitter’s tree down, but he did want to shoot him with a paintball or two.
After the screening it seemed like everyone in the audience lined up to buy either a copy of The Green Chain — Nothing is Ever Clear Cut (my new book that collects both the movie’s screenplay and 22 interviews on the real life issues facing our forests) or Never Shoot a Stampede Queen – the memoir about my adventures as a cub reporter at The Tribune. But mostly they wanted to share their own stories about working in the woods, horror stories about the bark beetles gnawing their way through the Cariboo and the fights to keep the logging industry — and their community — alive.
Special thanks to the Williams Lake Film Festival – aka the tireless Krista Wiebe — for her determination to bring the movie home to Williams Lake and for her efforts to raise money to help children with learning disabilities.