"A Chemical Reaction" Movie Screening

NATIONAL ACTIVIST BRINGS MOVIE TO PUGET SOUND REGION
Northwest Premiere of A Chemical Reaction

On the heels of sellout premieres at the World Film Festival in Montreal and across the United States, the inspirational, yet controversial documentary, A Chemical Reaction, is making its Pacific Northwest premiere on Saturday, February 20th. 

The Coalition of Organic Landscape Professionals (C.O.O.L) and Seattle Tilth are co-hosting the screening of the documentary as part of an afternoon event at Lake Washington Technical College in Kirkland.   The event will also feature keynote speaker Paul Tukey, the nationally-known gardening host who is the executive producer and narrator of the film. 

Tukey is also the founder of the regional gardening magazine "People, Places & Plants", author of best-seller ”The Organic Lawn Care Manual”, and founder of SafeLawns.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting natural lawn care and grounds maintenance.   The event will feature displays and resources from The Garden Hotline and several other environmental organizations, books for sale, refreshments, and a question-and-answer session and book-signing with Paul Tukey after the movie screening.

A feature-length film by director Brett Plymale, A Chemical Reaction was described as “rousing” and awarded four stars by the film critics of the Montreal Gazette.  The film has also drawn the ire of representatives from the billion-dollar chemical lawn care industry, who called Paul Tukey an “enviro-maniac” in a widespread email campaign launched last fall.

Tukey appears frequently on screen during A Chemical Reaction while interviewing key figures in the anti-pesticide movement in Canada and the U.S. He said his goal in making the film is to create awareness of the health hazards and environmental degradation associated with lawn care chemicals. He began this pursuit when he was a lawn care worker with a rash.

“Canadian doctors and the Canadian courts have looked at the toxicity associated with chemical lawn care and have banned these products in much of that nation,” said Tukey, a Maine native who went on to become America’s Horticultural Communicator of the Year in 2006. “Our hope is that people watch the movie and say, ‘Canada has banned these products, why do we still use them in the United States?” This issue is particularly relevant in the Puget Sound region, where chemical fertilizers and pesticides run off into our lakes, rivers, streams, and the sound during each rainfall.

Much of the movie’s story focuses on Dr. June Irwin, a dermatologist who spurred the first town in Canada to ban lawn and garden chemicals pesticides in 1991. When Hudson, Quebec, told the lawn care giant then known as ChemLawn that it couldn’t apply its synthetic chemical products within town borders, it set off a chain of high-profile court cases that culminated in the Canadian Supreme Court in 2001. The town won the case in a landmark 9-0 decision, and the chemical ban soon spread to the entire province of Quebec. Ontario enacted lawn chemical restrictions on Earth Day 2009, and hundreds of other Canadian municipalities have also passed legislation.

For the past several years, Tukey has traveled across the United States and Canada in a relentless quest to tell the Hudson story and urge municipalities to follow suit. “I had a professor, the late Brooks Hamilton, who told us in 1980 that if we were going to look for the truth in journalism, we would make a lot of enemies,” said Tukey. “The chemical lawn care industry sees me as their enemy. But really, I’m just trying to show people a different, sustainable, way of caring for the American landscape”.

ABOUT COOL: The Coalition of Organic Landscape Professionals is a local non-profit organization comprised of arborists, designers, educators, horticulturists, gardeners, and others who are committed to organic, sustainable garden care and design, and dedicated to educating other professionals and the public. For more information, visit www.organiclandscapers.org 

ABOUT SAFELAWNS.ORG: SafeLawns.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to reduction in the use of lawn and garden pesticides and synthetic chemical fertilizers. It has produced a series of high-profile campaigns since its inception in 2006.  For more information, visit www.safelawns.org

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE MOVIE EVENT:
Contact C.O.O.L at info@organiclandscapers.org. or (206) 362-8947. To view a movie trailer, visit www.ChemicalReactionMovie.com.

TICKETS
Tickets are $10.00 in advance from http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/96419  or $15.00 at the door. Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to SafeLawns.org

DIRECTIONS
Free parking is in the south or west parking lots (follow the sandwich board signs) . See a campus map and driving directions: www.lwtc.edu/about/maps/campus.