Date: October 16th.
Time: Doors open at 5:45 pm for drinks and conversation; screening from 6:30 to 8:30.
The audience is invited to stay for a panel discussion about regenerative agriculture immediately following the screening.
Sponsored by Zero Waste Sonoma.
Admission: FREE, no ticket or reservation required.
Common Ground is a rousing and uplifting feature-length documentary featuring some of Hollywood’s most climate conscious stars, including Laura Dern, Jason Momoa, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Ian Somerhalder, and Donald Glover. The film chronicles the struggles and triumphs of a politically and culturally diverse group of farmers, ranchers, scientists, and advocates who all share one thing in common: they believe in a way of ecological farming that builds soil.
The film’s protagonist is Gabe Brown, a farmer and rancher whose name has become synonymous with profitable, large-scale regenerative farming. From his 4,500-acre farm in Bismarck, South Dakota, Gabe explains how tilling the fields, (a practice that’s been done for thousands of years to eliminate weeds and plant seeds), is the primary cause of planetary erosion and soil loss.
Using awe-inspiring 3D animations and stunning multilayer scans of the soil, the film takes viewers into the never-before-seen world beneath our feet. The film shows how fungi and other soil life pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it into the soil. According to the Rodale Institute (the pioneers of the Certified Organic movement), by converting all the world’s farm and ranch land (about 10 billion acres) to regenerative agriculture, our soil could sequester the totality of carbon dioxide that humanity emits each year. This would bring global carbon emissions to “Net 0,” the point at which no more carbon is entering the atmosphere (and the threshold the United Nations has thus far struggled to achieve). The film shows that, in the fight against climate change, humanity’s most effective tool to draw carbon down out of the atmosphere is quite likely the soil.