After 30 years of working out of my bedroom, my basement, a garage converted office, the cabin out back, and the house next door, the Sacred Land Film Project has moved into the wonderful, new, green David Brower Center in Berkeley. When gasoline hit $4 per gallon I knew it was just going to get harder and harder to ask creative, young people to drive to La Honda, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, to work with me on documentaries — no matter how compelling and important the content.

I now look out of my new office window and see a giant redwood grove on Strawberry Creek at the southwest corner of the U.C. Berkeley campus. Just upstream, 27 years ago, Glenn Switkes and I edited The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area?, our masters thesis film at the Graduate School of Journalism. So, I feel like I have come home.

With the invaluable help of Jessica Abbe, Marlo McKenzie, Vicki Engel and Quinn Costello, we moved the film project into the Brower Center on April 13, as sheetrock dust swirled and workers hustled to put the finishing touches on a remarkable work of art. We were the first tenants to move into the building and have watched it come to life as our colleagues from Earth Island Institute moved in, then International Rivers, then the Center for Ecoliteracy… Though some offices are still awaiting their tenants, the building is 100% leased, and will soon receive a coveted and well-earned Platinum LEED rating — the first in the city of Berkeley.

Over the last year, as the building went up and we designed our new space, our architect, Hope Mitnick, urged me to appreciate the huge concrete wall in my office-to-be (the back of the elevator shaft). Concrete is in, Hope assured me, it’s beautiful. I have since learned that the concrete in the Brower Center is 50% slag from steel smelters in China, waste that would have been left to pollute land and water but was instead shipped across the Pacific on a barge. This brilliant, novel, recycled substitute ingredient reduced the building’s carbon footprint by 40%. I love my concrete wall!

The Brower Center is composed of 53% recycled materials. Light streams into giant windows. Sunrays are captured by solar panels that provide one third of the building’s electricity and heat water flowing through floors and ceilings to warm our offices. Rainwater falling on the roof is captured and stored in a 5,600-gallon cistern in the basement and used to flush toilets and irrigate plants. Local artists crafted a rock garden in the courtyard, painted a wall with soil in the reception area, and converted brass artillery shells (found on eBay) into door handles at the front entrance.

Seven years ago, when Earth Island Institute invited me to a “vision meeting” in Berkeley to discuss ideas for a building that would honor the memory of David Brower, I was happy to attend and found myself urging the building’s founder and main proponent, Peter Buckley, not to drop plans for an auditorium. Apparently, it was going to take up too much space and cost too much. As a filmmaker, I argued that the auditorium would be the building’s most powerful educational gathering place, where the force of image, music and word — tools that David Brower understood well and used to maximum effect — could be marshaled to inspire audiences to take action to protect the Earth. Thanks to Peter’s vision (and a generous donation from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation) we now have a fantastic theater, where films are already moving audiences and inspiring dialogues are reaching for the new ideas we desperately need to get our species back on a sane path.

Now that the move is “over” we return full time to filmmaking — with the first task to select a new Associate Producer from an incredible field of applicants. As I write this, into the office flows news of death in Peru, resistance in Tibet, a court ruling on the San Francisco Peaks and a lawsuit filing by the Winnemem Wintu. Filmmaking will have to wait until next week. It’s time for an e-mail alert to the Sacred Land Defense Team!