The Tales of Planet Earth film festival kicked off Friday evening with more than 1,200 people pressed into the Wisconsin Union Theater for the keynote address, seven short student films and a showing of "Trouble the Water," a film about portraying the devastating lack of aid for residents of New Orleans' 9th Ward during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Keynote speaker Majora Carter, a MacArthur Genius Grant winner and pioneer of a green-collar job training and placement program in the South Bronx, artfully showed how issues of poverty, environment and health are inextricably interwoven.

Carter has firsthand experience of this reality. Energetic and positive, she grew up in a violence- and rubble-filled neighborhood in South Bronx, also the home to sewage and wastewater treatment plants that handled 40 percent of New York city's waste. And when she returned to her parents' home as an adult, she learned more about the connections between air pollution and asthma, environmental degradation and poverty.

What really jump-started her environmental and social justice movement was when the city made plans to put a new sewage facility in her South Bronx neighborhood. Not only was the plant intended for handling others' waste, but such plants are horribly inefficient, she said.

"If we built waste facilities in rich neighborhoods, the world would have had clean and green waste treatment a long time ago," said Carter, eliciting a hearty applause from the audience.

Instead of waiting for that to happen, Carter actively worked to green her community. She raised money to turn an abandoned dump on the Bronx River into a vibrant city park, with trees and water fountains and benches for gathering.

"It's the coolest things to help the community understand they deserve something this beautiful, to know this is theirs, to take ownership," she said.

Carter didn't stop there. She also started a program that took community members, most of whom had been incarcerated and were on some form of public assistance, and trained them to do green jobs like wetland restoration, contamination cleanup and building green roofs.

"I do believe environmental justice is basic civil rights," said Carter.

And that is the theme of this year's festival.

The fest's one- to two-minute student short films tackled the issue of environmental justice from a variety of angles. Far from being doom and gloom, the shorts had the audience laughing.

Liese Dart's film told about how Millie Zantow, 86, a resident of North Freedom, Wis., pioneered the plastics recycling movement. Another short by Kevin Gibbons opened with a 1950s dairy industry ad evoking the all-American virtues of milk, soon followed by scenes from a modern dairy farm staffed with good-natured, hard-working employees, who are all Latino. A third film initially seemed like a more familiar, classic take on conservation, but took a sweet turn toward love: Maggie Flamingo's film about a wildlife rehabilitation specialist told the tale of one hawk that was tangled in barbed wire and was rescued, healed and released, ultimately reuniting with its mate in a scene that tugged the heartstrings like a romance novel.

These opening acts were followed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's "Trouble the Water," which, despite four years having passed since Hurricane Katrina, made the event seem fresh and raw. The film included original footage from family members trapped in their attic during the whole storm and followed a husband and wife who survived the storm and struggled to help their community and, ultimately, to rebuild.

The film showed how already poor people were ravished by the natural disaster and echoed themes of environmental justice raised by keynote speaker Carter: "This country can be green for all, not just those who can afford it. A healthy environment gives us healthy people."

The Tales of Planet Earth festival continues Saturday and Sunday, showing the 1- to 2-minute student shorts and more than 30 environmental films. The festival hopes to engage movie-watchers to get involved: Following many of the movies are a series of community events such as a cooking demo at Troy Gardens, a meet-and-greet with wildlife rehabilitators and a tasting of local foods produced by formerly homeless workers.

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