These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America

Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.

10. The Great Invisible

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ

9. If You Build It

Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240

8. The Kill Team

An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.

7. Starfish Throwers

Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.

6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story

A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.

4. True Son

A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”

3. The Hand That Feeds

After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.

2. Rich Hill

Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
 

1. The Overnighters

Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
 

Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.

Helping Veterans Is As Easy As Drinking This Beer. Seriously.

In the summertime, the most exertion many of us are willing to commit involves turning over some hamburgers on the barbecue. But a new brewery with a special mission is making helping veterans as easy as cracking open a bottle of beer.
Navy veteran Paul Jenkins and Marine Corps veteran Mike Danzer founded the Veteran Beer Company in 2012 with the goal of easing the veteran employment crunch by creating a company that would employ veterans and generate profits that could be donated to charities that help veterans. They began selling their two varieties—Blonde Bomber and The Veteran—on Veteran’s Day in 2013, and the company has been expanding ever since.
“We only anticipated to sell about 2,000 cases our first year,” Josh Ray, regional director of Veteran Brewing Company told Nicole Johnson of Valley News Live. “After four months, we did over 30,000 cases, and we’re pretty close to approaching 60,000 cases right now.”
Beer drinkers can now find Veteran Beer Company’s brews for sale in Indiana, Illinois, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ten percent of the profits go to veterans’ charities, and the rest is channeled back into the company. Veteran Beer Company, which brews its beer in Cold Spring, Minnesota, employs only veterans, and plans to hire more vets as it continues to expand.
“Some of the things that veterans are promised aren’t really always followed through on,” Ray said. “With this, it’s really our opportunity to give back.” And anyone planning to buy a six pack to celebrate a lazy summer afternoon can give back too.
MORE: When This Marine Couldn’t Find A Job, He Started A Business To Help Other Returning Vets

Meet A Disabled Veteran Jump Starting Soldiers’ Cars — and Their Lives

A little help can go a long way for those in need — especially if they’re veterans struggling to find jobs and readjust to civilian life.
Which is exactly why North Dakota Air Force veteran Larry Mendivil is offering free car repairs to any soldier who needs them. Mendivil knows his way around a socket wrench — he served as a senior airman with the 319th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, and now he’s applying the fix-it skills he developed there to four-wheeled vehicles.
Last year, he started the Miracles for Vets out of his home’s garage. The nonprofit raises money to fund car repairs and collects donated parts and tools, while several professional car mechanics offer their time and skills to make repairs.
What inspired Mendivil to help other vets? He suffered a disability related to a refueling accident, so after he returned from Iraq in 2007 unable to reenlist, he set out to help other service members — following the Air Force motto of “Service Before Self.” “Even as a disabled veteran everyone has a chance to make a difference,” Mendivil told Xavier Navarro of 319th Air Base Wing Public Affairs.
Over the next two weeks, Mendivil and his crew of volunteer gearheads are rotating to different garages in Harrisburg, North Dakota that have agreed to let him use their space and tools.
Mike Lewis, the owner of Ducks Auto Repair — where the Miracles crew was based last week — was glad to help the cause. “The veterans deserve to have some kind of positive reinforcement when they get back. They’re struggling to readjust from being overseas, they need somebody to help them out,” he told Eames Yates of Fox 43.
Mendivil told Austin Ashlock of the Grand Forks Herald that after he left the service, “I struggled a long time until Veterans Affairs was able to help me out. I was actually homeless for a little while.”
Making it even more special that the first thing that Mendivil did after getting back on his feet was help others.
MORE: Savvy Mechanics Help Disabled Veterans Hit the Open Road

How North Dakota Made Its Incredible Economic Comeback

States scrambling to lower unemployment and boost their economies can count on a new role model: North Dakota, which is recovering from the recent financial collapse better than the rest of its peers, according to the Washington Post.
According to writer Reid Wilson, who’s been chronicling the country’s best states in an ongoing series, North Dakota has a lot to be proud of: A rise in oil production has helped the state’s unemployment rate drop from 4.1 percent to 2.6 percent since 2009, while the median income increased 4 percent and median home price increased a whopping 16 percent. Elsewhere, booming oil production has also provided a fiscal boost to states like Wyoming, Texas and West Virginia.
In naming North Dakota the winner in economic recovery, Wilson used three factors: The drop in a state’s unemployment rate between 2009 and this April; the difference in median income in 2009 and in 2012; and the difference in median home prices before and after the recession, which Wilson says he estimated using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Trulia.com (a real estate website).
As Wilson writes: “Other states deserve credit for making a comeback: The unemployment rates in South Carolina, Vermont and Utah have fallen by more than half since the worst of the recession…But no state has pumped up more in all three categories than North Dakota.”
MORE: North Dakota on Fire—One Man’s Quest to Turn Wasted Gas Into Power

His Family Lost Its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate

Farmers can’t take sick leave, so when an emergency comes up, they’re sometimes in danger of losing a year’s crop, putting their entire livelihood in jeopardy. That’s when Farm Rescue steps in. Farm Rescue’s founder Bill Gross worked as a pilot before returning home to North Dakota, where his family had lost the farm he grew up on after a financial setback. In 2005 he started the nonprofit to provide help to farmer’s struggling with illness or natural disaster.
Farm Rescue has helped 250 families in North Dakota, South Dakota, eastern Montana, Minnesota and Iowa. The non-profit provides donated equipment and organizes its over 700 volunteers to make use of the seed, fertilizer, and fuel the families provide. Families can contact Farm Rescue for help, but half of the time concerned farmers hear about a neighbor’s troubles and anonymously recommend them for help. “We provide the equipment and manpower, and we get it done for them,” Goss told David Karas of the Christian Science Monitor. “We are basically a big, mobile farming operation.”
“We are helping to make it more likely for future generations of family farms to be able to continue,” Goss told Karas. “That is what I actually find the most satisfying.”
MORE: This Partnership Encourages Vets to Become Farmers

North Dakota on Fire: One Man’s Quest to Turn Wasted Gas Into Power

In a quiet corner of North Dakota, farmers Wanda and Frank Leppell gaze out their front window at an oil well that sits 750 feet from their house. Above the hypnotic bobbing of the oil well head, they watch a flare that’s burning off natural gas into the atmosphere. “It sounds like a blowtorch,” says Wanda, who’s been pushing state legislators to set oil wells farther from homes. “When you go to bed tonight, put a blowtorch in your bedroom, crank it up, and see how well you sleep.”
They’re not the only ones up at night. In North Dakota’s oil country, a region that’s seen a 600 percent increase in oil production in the last five years, drivers can see dozens of flares from the highway after dark, some burning 20 feet into the air, releasing excess natural gas from the oil rigs. A satellite image of the United States at night shows rural North Dakota lit up like a city. The state is, quite literally, on fire.
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And the flames won’t go out anytime soon. Ever since oil companies figured out they could tap the 170 billion barrels of crude oil underground with the new technology known as fracking, they’ve been digging wells as fast as they can, producing a modern-day black gold rush. The boom, which began in 2007, has attracted thousands of workers, lured by word that 22-year-olds with no previous job experience to speak of were suddenly raking in $100,000 a year. Temporary camps were hastily assembled to house the newcomers. As the rest of the country wrestled with recession, North Dakota’s unemployment rate dropped to 3 percent—the lowest in the nation. The cost of living shot up. Crime soared. But as long as the ground keeps gushing, there’s no incentive to slow down. Today, there are more than 8,800 active wells in the state, producing 783,000 barrels of oil a day. Local officials estimate they’ll drill 42,000 more wells in coming years, and there could be a roaring natural gas flare on every one.
The problem is, the drilling releases thousands of cubic feet of natural gas. Oil companies burn off one-third of the natural gas they’re extracting, according to a recent study—which in May 2013 amounted to over 266,000 thousand cubic feet spewing into the air every day, a number that has nearly tripled since 2011. (In comparison, Texas flares less than 1 percent of its natural gas.) By failing to capture the gas, companies in North Dakota are essentially burning away more than $100 million every month. The state’s boom has happened so quickly, companies simply haven’t had time to build the pipelines needed to capture the gas. The flares carry toxins; they emit as much carbon dioxide as a million cars do every year. More than 60 types of pollutants have been identified downwind from flaring operations—many of which are known to cause cancer and other diseases with prolonged exposure. The fact that oil’s market value is currently 30 times that of natural gas may have slowed the search for a solution.
But a native son may have found one—and figured out a way to convert the gas waste into power to heat homes and fuel factories.
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Mark Wald, born in Dickinson, N.D., had returned home to visit family at the dawn of the boom when he first began to ponder the problem. “You didn’t have to drive far to see flares everywhere,” he says. “Everybody looks at it and scratches their head, and I thought, there’s got to be a better way. What can we do with it?”
Like a lot of young men of his generation, Wald had left the state after graduating from college (North Dakota University, with degrees in aviation and business); there was little opportunity at the time. He liked to hunt pheasant and fish, but he wanted a career, and he craved the excitement of a big city. He eventually moved to Seattle, and spent 23 years in telecommunications. But the sight of the night flares lured him home.
Amazed at the amount of natural gas being wasted, he began brainstorming with his brother—equally new to the subject, after years in pharmaceutical sales. Nobody seemed to have the answer, so they left their jobs out west and moved back to start Blaise Energy in 2008. They hired an engineer and started talking to everyone they could. Wald applied for grants, and received $375,000 in state research funds in December 2009. An idea emerged: to use a mobile generator at each oil well site that could capture the natural gas, convert it to electricity and sell it back to the power grid. According to their calculations, each well could power about 40 homes this way.
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At a well, the drilling process brings up oil, frack water (the chemical- and sand-infused salt water used in the fracking process) and natural gas from the ground. A treatment device separates each of them, and the oil and water are sent to tanks that are trucked off site, while the gas is flared. Wald figured they could intercept the gas, run it through their customized generator, and deliver the electricity to the grid. To build the generator, they first looked at different types of turbines, but ultimately decided to go with a reciprocating engine piston, similar to a car, which was cheaper and more readily available than the alternatives. Soon he got the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy, and received a $2 million Recovery Act award. “We didn’t invent the engine,” says Wald, “but what didn’t exist was taking natural gas at a flare location and delivering it back to the grid.”
Wald’s next challenge was convincing oil companies to adopt the device. “They’d ask, ‘have you done this before?’ No. ‘Is it proven?’ No. ‘Call us back when you have multiple sites up.’ They didn’t want a science project on their $10 million well site,” says Wald. “It’s dangerous, and gas is explosive. But then we got one, then two, then three, and then it got easier.”
Two years into the project, he almost gave up. The equipment arrived at their first test site in January 2010—in the middle of North Dakota’s brutal winter. “It’s cold as hell, the wind is blowing, and we’re out in freezing North Dakota, and we couldn’t get the generator to run on the gas. We had to pay consultants and vendors to come out, and anyone that goes out in the middle of nowhere North Dakota to troubleshoot a problem is very expensive. We spent weeks in a motel trying to get people on the phone, but we had horrible cell phone coverage. I thought, why am I doing this?”
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Wald succeeded in connecting the generators to power lines and selling electricity back to the grid. But it wasn’t economically feasible. North Dakota has some of the lowest power prices in the country, about one-third of California’s—but they were not low enough to offset the cost of implementing and maintaining the generator. And there are no government subsidies for natural gas to tap into, as there are for other forms of energy, like solar and wind. So he stopped trying to sell to the grid to power homes, and began selling directly to oil companies and the local gas plant.
Currently, most drilling rigs are powered by diesel generators, which burn through about 10 gallons of diesel an hour, adding up to some $20,000 of diesel every month. With Wald’s generators, oil companies can eliminate that bill while reducing the size of the flare. He also figured out a way to separate the heavier natural gas elements like propane and butane from the lighter ones to liquidate the gas and truck it off site to be sold on the market. Wald now has 23 generators and 11 sites, and he’s working with an engineering firm to make a more efficient liquid gas converter.
Brent Brannan, director of the oil and gas research program at the North Dakota Industrial Commission, was involved in the decision to give Blaise Energy their initial $375,000 grant. He supported Wald’s idea because while other proposals were discussing building more pipelines, Wald was looking at capturing natural gas in remote areas where pipelines may never go. “[Wald] is now figuring out ways to be more economically feasible and capture the gas more efficiently. He’s been a good partner to have for the state.” After Wald’s idea was funded, Brannan’s seen applications from a number of companies with their own ideas to solve flaring, and the field has become more competitive—an ideal situation for more innovation to occur.
“Because there is so much flaring, it’s going to take new technology, new ideas and new methods to tackle the issue,” says Wald. “Rather than complain, let’s do something about it.”
MORE: This Bizarre Bacteria Could Clean Up the Oil Business

What If Your Hometown Became Rich Overnight?

Gene Veeder, 57, is a simple man with curly gray hair, and tanned, soft wrinkles around his eyes. It’s not uncommon to find him riding horses on his 3,000-acre ranch that his grandparents homesteaded in 1918, tending to his cattle or playing in his country band, Lonesome Willy. Veeder grew up in quaint Watford City, N.D., a town with a population of 1,200 where the most excitement revolved around who was attending the annual rodeo dance, and every year he’d watch more long-term residents pack up and leave, searching for opportunity elsewhere.
Today, life has become more complicated for Veeder. As the executive director of the McKenzie County Job Development Authority and Tourism Board—a post he’s held for nearly two decades—he’s in charge of economic development for his hometown, a place that’s in the midst of a massive oil boom. In the past three years, thousands of workers from all over the United States have poured into town looking for jobs in the oil field. Watford City has seen the population multiply by 500 percent since 2010, ballooning to a town of more than 8,700, and the growth isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon (it’s projected to reach 16,800 by 2020). The kindergarten class of the local school went from around 18 to 113, and some 20,000 cars now drive through the town’s two-lane main street every day. Continue reading “What If Your Hometown Became Rich Overnight?”