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It's tricky for the documentary filmmaker to put himself/herself onto screen, making the documentarian a focus of the film. Michael Moore has done it successfully. Dave Gardner tries it now, taking on the role of not just documentarian but "Growthbuster" in his crusade against too much growth.

"Growthbusters" plays on the name and trappings of the popular 1984 film, "Ghostbusters," with documentary filmmaker Dave Gardner as the lead "Growthbuster." Yes, it's a hook that's a little goofy and a little hokey, but when you're dealing with "the greatest failing of humankind," as Gardner describes our addiction to unsustainable growth, adding a little cornball humor helps us bear the extreme weightiness of the topic.

And not only are we acting unsustainably, Gardner says, "The proof is out there that we are in overshoot." The scale of human enterprise—population, consumption and the size of economies—has outgrown the planet. Yet humankind continues behaving as though there are no limits. He believes it's largely cultural reasons that keep us from seeing we're at the limits, and through "Growthbusters," he's spotlighting the roadblocks.

Gardner uses his hometown of Colorado Springs as a poster child for growth addiction. In the depiction of this south-central Colorado town, the viewer will quickly recognize most any town in the U.S.A.—one of urban sprawl, big box stores, other familiar chain stores of smaller size and massive parking lots to accommodate our car culture. Anchoring the story in his home base helps create the film's narrative, as Gardner takes on the issue as the "no-growth" candidate in his bid for a city council seat and explores the sacrifices we make based on the blind faith that growth will solve a community's problems and make it better.

The film features a wealth of interviews with the leading thinkers about sustainability, overpopulation and the impacts of too much growth. There's Robert Engelman of Worldwatch Institute and Eben Fodor, author of "Better, Not Bigger." Gardner also features anthropologist/primatologist Jane Goodall, former Colorado governor and populationist Dick Lamm, population ecologist William Rees, Bill Ryerson of the Population Institute and Madeline Weld of the Population Institute of Canada, among many others.

Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich, author of the seminal work, "The Population Bomb," makes one of the most important connections to consumption and population—particularly for those who beat the drum primarily about the consumption side of the growth equation. "If you manage, somehow, to half each person's consumption, on average," he says, "but you allow population size to double, you haven't gained at all, because, if you have half as much consumption, but twice as many persons, you're right where you started."

If you are someone who follows these issues, this is a film you will want to see. You can say, "This is what I've been talking about; thank you Gardner for framing this discussion!"

And if growth and overpopulation aren't something you consider as a problem, this is for you too. "Growthbusters" lays out the challenges and starts the discussion on solutions—something about which we all should be concerned.

In recent years documentaries including "The 11th Hour" and "An Inconvenient Truth" have been visually provocative wake-up calls about our impacts on the environment. Add "Vanishing of the Bees" to the list of very important "call to action" documentaries about our environment. Will we listen to the bees?

Honeybees from just one hive can visit more than 100,000 flowers in a single day ... thus the line, "Busy as a bee!" Honeybees collect pollen full of proteins, sugars, carbs, enzymes, minerals and vitamins for food and to make honey. They also have one of the most important jobs in nature—pollination. There's no manmade alternative to pollination; without the honeybee, our food sources would be much more limited.

In recent years, this dance with nature has been stressed for reasons still unclear. From Argentina, China, France and Italy to the U.S., bees literally have been disappearing without a trace (no worker bees in the colony, and no dead bees to be seen anywhere in the area) in something that has come to be known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Bees have been "managed" in the pollination process for ages—bees were even floated down the Nile to pollinate crops. But today the process is like nothing before it. Hives are transported across the country thousands of miles to pollinate apple orchards, almond groves, pumpkin patches and blueberry fields and are responsible for $15 billion in U.S. crops.

The impacts of CCD have been so bad that to pollinate almond trees in California, bees were flown in on a 747 from Sydney to San Francisco in something that could only be described as unsustainable. The stories abound. One former commercial beekeeper from Yuma, Arizona, lost all of his bees in just two months, and the world's largest beekeeper (50,000 hives) lost 40,000 bee hives in just a few weeks.

Documentary filmmakers Maryam Henein and George Langworthy in "Vanishing of the Bees" investigate the story of how bees began disappearing around the planet and look at possible suspects, including what are called systemic pesticides.

Narrated by actress Ellen Page ("Juno" and "Inception"), the documentary follows two committed beekeepers, David Hackenburg and David Mendes. Hackenburg, who manages 3,000 hives in Pennsylvania, sounded the alarm in 2006 of huge bee losses. Mendes, a Floridian with 7,000 hives, joined Hackenburg in the search for answers to CCD, including a trip to France to meet with beekeepers.

France had problems beginning in 1994 when farmers began using a systemic pesticide, Gaucho, made by Bayer. French beekeepers banded together and protested Bayer. Ultimately, the French agriculture secretary banned the use of Gaucho, and French bees appear to have had a comeback.

Besides systemic pesticides, the filmmakers look at other potential culprits for the massive collapse, including corporate farming approaches which create vast monocultures that contradict natural order.

Food activist and author Michael Pollan lends an important voice to "Vanishing of the Bees." He says, "In one sense, it's a mystery, but in the larger sense we know exactly what's responsible—these huge monocultures that are making bees' lives very difficult and creating conditions where they're vulnerable to disease and exposed to pesticides. My take on colony collapse is that it is one of the signs—one of the really unmistakable signs—that our food system is unsustainable."

Besides building tremendous awareness of the problem, "Vanishing of the Bees" offers some practical choices that individuals can make to help save the bees. Among them are supporting organic farmers and shopping at organic farmers' markets, not using toxic chemicals in gardens and yards, growing your own gardens, replacing lawns with flowering plants and advocating for food systems that will better support bees.

"Population growth and human consumption are the major factors in our ongoing environmental crisis."

We've reached the unfortunate state in America of polarization on most issues. Polls conducted on many topics bear that out. The issue of overpopulation certainly fits in this category – if it's talked about at all. Add to this that it's nearly impossible to talk about overpopulation without also discussing immigration, since immigration drives most of the population growth in the United States. And immigration has been nothing but super-polarized.

So it's most refreshing to see the topic of overpopulation addressed in a very accessible, very human manner with an extreme amount of pathos in a way that offers a positive, hopeful message. That's what the documentary film, "Mother – Caring for 7 Billion," does.

The filmmakers, who have made other environmental films, said they made "Mother" because they couldn't "make another film on sustainability without dealing with the subject of human population. Too much is at stake to keep ignoring that issue.

"It's misunderstood and highly stigmatized, and we felt the need to produce a comprehensive film to help bring the issue back into the public conversation. It doesn't have to be the elephant in the room anymore."

"Mother" does an excellent job of telling the story of population growth. In a visually and verbally effective manner at film opening, we see that for hundreds of thousands of years, women probably had four to six children, with half dying before they could reproduce. So for most of history, most women had two children who lived – or we'd have had a population explosion before now.

With the advent of fixed agriculture and, more recently, proper sanitation, vaccination, famine relief, basic levels of health care and the addition of fossil fuels to agricultural processes to increase yield have come the "unintended consequence of our best intentions" – vast human population. Just even from the first Earth Day in 1970, when world population was 3.7 billion, growth has rocketed on to the current population of more than 7 billion.

The creators of the film make terrific use of numerous experts respected in their fields. Among the many great voices are environmental writer John Feeney; Paul Ehrlich, the population studies professor at Stanford University who early sounded the overpopulation alarm; Mathis Wackernagel, economist and co-creator of the environmental footprint; Lyuba Zarsky, economist and associate professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Bill Ryerson, president of the Population Media Center.

Enhancing the narrative are the very personal and moving stories of two women. One is an American, Beth Osnes, who comes from a family of ten children. She shares her parents' story, and how she and her husband, who had strong views on family size, chose to have two children and adopt one child. The other story is that of Zinet, the oldest girl in an Ethiopian family of 12 living in poverty. At an early age, she refused to marry; instead choosing school, which helped break a cycle of poverty and early pregnancy. In the film, Osnes travels to Ethiopia and meets Zinet, learning her story first-hand.

The information, presented so brilliantly in "Mother," is so clear on how empowering women can make all the difference in how our world evolves. According to the United Nations Population Fund, if women's needs were met for family planning, population growth would be reduced by 28 percent, plus lives would be saved and advances would be made in human rights.

Dr. Martha Campbell, an international public health and reproductive rights policy expert, says in the film, "It's difficult or impossible to achieve economic development as long as birth rates are very high in the least developed countries – education and health cannot keep up, and poverty goes right along with this." And Esraa Bani of Population Action International says, "If you think that this is an isolated problem, and it's only Africa's problem, think again." (Africa has one of the highest fertility rates in the world.) The loss of land around the world to commercial interests (thus pushing out local farmers), increasing food prices due to growing markets and increasing demand, and climate change are just three reasons (three very big reasons) the filmmakers cite for why everyone should be concerned about overpopulation.

One of the most powerful commentaries in the film comes from Rev. Peter S. Sawtell, executive director for Eco-Justice Ministries. He says, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. It's time for us to recognize that that be one Biblical commandment where you can say, 'Check, we've done that … what else should we do?' I don't see how we can look at the devastation that's happening to the planet and the poor quality of life that many people have and still say that basic levels of birth control and family planning are inappropriate. I find that a morally very confusing stance."

If there's a film that can break through the polarization on the topic of overpopulation, "Mother" may be it!