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[Editor's Note: We asked our good friends at SnagFilms to provide us with some good viewing for Earth Day, and boy did they deliver. Not only are these documentaries provocative and educational, but they are also FREE. So here you are, Mother Nature groupees, ten required Earth Day-inspired documentaries.]

Dear Urlesque: This week, over a billion people will celebrate the 39th annual Earth Day, the largest secular civic event in the world. To celebrate, SnagFilms presents Earth Day 2009: Going Green, a specially curated collection of films that highlight the impact we all have on the environment, and the responsibilities we bear for the planet's future.
Happy Earth Day! -- Rick Allen, CEO SnagFilms

Click through the below widget to watch each film, or find a direct link below:




  • Art from the Arctic: British artist and filmmaker David Buckland organized three sailing expeditions to the High Arctic as part of a series of collaborations between artists, educators and scientists, designed to create public awareness of global climate change.
  • Blind Spot: Blind Spot is a documentary film that illustrates the current oil and energy crisis that our world is facing. Whatever measures of ignorance, greed, wishful thinking, we have put ourselves at a crossroad, which offers two paths with dire consequences. If we continue to burn fossil fuels we will choke the life out of the planet and if we don't our way of life will collapse.
  • Design: e2 - China: From Red to Green: The series moves to China, whose soaring population and rapid industrialization have created a boom in urbanization that is unprecedented in human history. In an attempt to tackle this global issue, the episode explores design solutions in both theory and practice, including Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid Project, which when completed will be the largest residential, geothermal heating/cooling and greywater recycling system in the world.
  • Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars: From the outset FIGHTING GOLIATH: TEXAS COAL WARS was intended to serve as a tool for raising awareness, inspiring action, and creating a meaningful dialogue about how to overcome one of the greatest threats to public health contributors to global warming faced by the U.S. -- conventional coal-fired power plants.
  • Greasy Rider: Picture a cross-country road trip powered by vegetable oil in a 1981 Mercedes-Benz. Greasy Rider follows the two filmmakers, Joey Carey and JJ Beck, as they meet with fellow Greasecar drivers, friends, and critics.
  • Great Wall Across the Yangtze: To China's leaders, the Three Gorges Dam is the most significant engineering feat since the construction of the Great Wall, but to its critics worldwide, it is a social and environmental disaster.
  • Human Footprint: In a playful, surprising and thought-provoking portrait of our time on earth, National Geographic demonstrates, in a series of remarkable visuals, what makes up an average human life today and how everything we do has impact on the world around us.
  • Off the Grid: Life On The Mesa: Twenty-Five miles from town, a million miles from mainstream society, a loose-knit community of eco-pioneers, teenage runaways, war veterans and drop-outs, live on the fringe and off the grid...
  • The Future of Food: This well-researched documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, the widow of the legendary Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, takes an in-depth look at the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decades.
  • The Hudson Riverkeepers: THE HUDSON RIVERKEEPERS tells the stirring and dramatic story of how two generations of Hudson River fishermen and environmental activists fought a decades-long battle to protect one of the nation's great rivers, the Hudson.