Charlotte Brody is the program director of Oakland's Green for All, a national organization advocating a green economy that addresses global warming while creating jobs and opportunities in disadvantaged communities.

Jugology is an East Bay band specializing in old-timey and American roots music. Come early and hear them perform Depression-era songs that will make you believe our times are not so tough.

In 1933, FDR's New Deal created the Tennessee Valley Authority to check the deadly flooding of the Tennessee River and bring electricity to an impoverished region. Elia Kazan's rustic portrait of the process begins midstream, with a dam already in place but not yet inundating the countryside. Chuck Glover (an uncomfortably intense Montgomery Clift) arrives, yet another optimistic TVA man sent from Washington to convince the Garth family, last of the holdouts, to abandon their river island. Their lives and livelihood will be submerged by the dam's rising waters. What surfaces is a clash of wills as the Garth matriarch (Jo Van Fleet), intransigent in her pride, can find little of value in Glover's appeal to modernity. In the midst of this roiling dilemma, Glover falls for a bucolic beauty played by Lee Remick; she becomes the bridge between tradition and the mainstream. Kazan's rural drama is colored by a subtle sorrow, perhaps knowing that when the floodgates of progress are opened they wash away the good along with the bad.