Saturday 5 December 2020

Climate Crisis Film Festival

A few members of Leicester Friends of the Earth signed up for the online Climate Crisis Film Festival in November and we’ve written brief reviews of the films we watched in case you are looking for an environmental film to show to your community group.

 

Zero Waste Living

This was a very short upbeat film. It was about a guy who was a ‘dyslexic school drop-out’ (his words), who went to work in the food industry and realised that it had some major problems with food waste.

He went on to open his own restaurant, which was to be a zero-waste restaurant – he didn’t even have a bin!

He said the early years of setting up ‘Zilo’, his restaurant, was the hardest thing he had ever done. He began by having a failure, then another failure, then another failure – for three years he wondered if he had been crazy to even begin.

But then the fog began to clear, he had a success, then another, then another – he got some recipes sorted and began to get lots of customers – who loved his idealistic approach to food and waste management.

Today, ‘Zilo’ is Britain’s most ethical restaurant – he opened it in Brighton – creating change and he is now opening a restaurant in London.

The amazing quote from the film was ‘Waste is a failure of the imagination’.

Well worth watching!

 

Just Eat

This film was about food wastage.  Apparently 40% of our food is wasted.

A couple on the film set themselves a challenge:  To only eat food that would otherwise be wasted. So, they collected food from supermarkets.  Food that the supermarkets were going to throw away – this was usually vegetables and fruit that was the wrong shape. The couple were amazed at how much food is wasted.

People look for food that is aesthetically appealing. Farmers say that a lot of good crops won’t sell as they are the wrong shape. Consumers drive waste into the system by wanting to buy only perfect vegetables.

Supermarkets usually state the standards which they want and won’t even take food that is the wrong shape or size. This waste is as high as 70% of fruit and vegetables that is thrown away – perfectly good fruit but there is no market for it.

It showed celery being cut in the field and being chopped down in size before it even leaves the field as it is too big to fit in the supermarket bag.

The film showed the journey of food – to grow the food, you begin with the soil, sunlight, water – energy needed to produce the crop. Then it is picked, sorted and packed and (if it is the right size and shape) it is transported to the supermarket. Then it is bought but still not always eaten.  They discussed the energy of the production but sometimes it is just wasted when the food goes mouldy and is thrown away.

All rich countries are wasting food. This is causing huge environmental problems. If you look at the Earth from the sky you can see a huge number of fields producing food. This is where we are having a massive impact on the world.  We produce too much and waste too much.

Preventing food waste is a good way to fight climate change.

The film ended by saying: ‘Buy what you need. Make meals with what you buy. Just eat it!’

 

The Need to Grow

This film began with information about soil that will be familiar to many of us. We have an estimated 60 years of farmable soil left on the planet and the extraction mentality of industrial agriculture is leading to dramatic soil loss. Vandana Shiva refers to industrial agriculture as a ‘war against the Earth’.

We then follow the stories of a child food activist petitioning Girl Scouts to remove GMOs from their cookies, an urban farmer trying to re-localise the food system and an inventor who creates a system for rapidly rebuilding soil using algae and biochar. Each faces setbacks and in the middle of the film, their efforts to change a destructive system all felt a little futile. However, things start to improve and they all make some progress in what they are trying to do. The final image, with the child activist now a teenager, standing looking over the inventor’s pool of algae, left me with a feeling of hope that we will be able to learn how to grow food without destroying our environment.

 

How We Live: A Journey Towards a Just Transition

This short film is freely available on Vimeo and it is well worth 7 minutes of your time. It explains what an economy actually is (which is something that has always puzzled me!) and how it needs to change in the face of climate change. Go and watch it now!


System Error

I think this is the film that I struggled with most during the film festival – the inner workings of capitalism are pretty nightmarish.

An economics professor starts by pointing out that we recognise all growth has limits until we get to economic growth and we somehow expect that to be different. The only type of growth that does not have limits invariably ends up killing its host. The Club of Rome recognised the limits of economic growth in the 1970s but their revelation that growth was destroying the planet was promptly dismissed as fearmongering.

We move on to those pushing for more economic growth. Farmers in the Amazon basin surrounded by endless fields of soy or tightly packed cows, pigs and chickens are lobbying to reduce environmental laws that protect the forest.  A young Donald Trump in the early 80s explains how he is making money by buying derelict apartment buildings and getting tax breaks to do them up – he says he has never found a limit to growth but he hopes he will know when he reaches his limits (ha!) The director of Airbus in China boasts that 15 – 20 new airports are built in the country every year and there is an enormous ‘opportunity’ in the expansion of air travel.

However, at the core of all this economic activity seems to be a lie that I couldn’t quite understand. The trading centres in New York are now mostly empty as the financial markets are run by algorithms rather than people. Share prices are no longer linked to companies’ profits. In 2010, there was a ‘flash crash’ caused by a positive feedback loop in the algorithms that had to be resolved by shutting down computers. Robots now seem to be creating economic growth with little input from humans.

The film ends with the economics professor instructing us that optimism is a choice that we have to make. However, I just wanted to retreat to my allotment and get really good at growing my own food after seeing behind that particular curtain!

 

Anthropocene

This film reminded me of Home, which I saw years ago at the Phoenix. It presents the impact that humans are having on the planet without judging or offering solutions.

Geologists say that we have now entered a new geological age, in which the impact of humans on the Earth outweighs that of natural systems. We see a pile of elephant tusks in Kenya, rescued from the black market, the iron smelting factory in Norilsk, the most polluted city in Russia, Lithium mining in the Atacama desert in Chile, which supplies a battery plant in the USA. In Germany, a town called Immerath is being destroyed to make way for a coal mine. We watch as a bulldozer crunches up a church and hear that two towns have already been destroyed for the mine and four more are in its path.

85% of the Earth’s forests have been cleared, fragmented or degraded for human use and we see deforestation in British Colombia in Canada and Lagos in Nigeria. On their days off, the Nigerian workers attend a church like a warehouse, built to hold 1 million people. In Gudong in China, workers build a sea wall to protect an oil refinery from the rising sea levels.

Off the shores of Indonesia and Australia, the coral reefs are bleaching. In London Zoo, the highly endangered species are highlighted to the public with signs: tigers, gibbons, okapi, oryx a strange-looking fish and a tiny frog. Back in Kenya, they burn the ivory. A woman conservation worker says that she could not save the elephants but at least she can save their tusks from degradation.

I felt like I was acting as witness to a crime.

 

How to Let Go of the World and Love all the Things Climate Can’t Change

This was part of the ‘Fear and Hope’ theme at the festival, alongside a short film and a talk on climate anxiety by a member of Extinction Rebellion. If you ever suffer from despair about climate change (and I imagine most activists do), I really recommend this film. It won’t tell you that everything is going to be okay (because everything is already not okay), but it might show you a way through the despair that makes it possible to keep campaigning for change.

It starts with the director dancing as the Delaware River Basin in New York state is protected from fracking in 2011 after a long campaign. He then retreats to his local woods to enjoy the victory and discovers that a Hemlock tree he planted as a boy is dying – the victim of a parasite that spreads farther north every year with the warmer winters. He had helped prevent oil and gas extraction on his doorstep but he was still losing what he loved to climate change. Hiding in the woods was not going to be possible.

We are then taken on a journey through the effects of climate change and fossil fuel extraction and we meet those trying to stop it. We see the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in New York city in 2012, an oil spill in the Amazon that is poisoning the fish and the indigenous people who eat the fish, Pacific climate warriors blockading an Australian coal port, chanting ‘We are not drowning, we are fighting’, people in Beijing trapped in their apartments by the thick air pollution outside. Climate scientists recite facts and the director repeats, ‘Overwhelmed’. That feeling was entirely familiar to me.

But then we start to hear how others are dealing with this despair. An activist in the USA, arrested for disrupting an auction of federal lands (and later sentenced to two years in prison) tells us that there is no point in trying to avoid despair – we must learn to carry it with us. He explains that carrying a heavy weight in stormy times can help to keep you anchored. A woman in China trying to set up solar cooperatives asks ‘What do you want from your own humanity?’ and talks about ‘moral imagination’ that leads people to try and create a different world. In Vanuatu, communities discuss climate change at their daily council and dance together as a way of supporting community links. Perhaps the most moving for me was the climate warrior in Samoa who goes to visit the tree under which his father’s placenta was buried (a tradition to anchor people to the land) and discovers that it has been claimed by the sea. He stands and cries for a few minutes, totally overcome. But then he wipes his eyes, smiles and tells the director that he is not depressed because ‘we have a choice’.

These people completely inspired me. If they can make peace with their despair and keep going, surely those of us less immediately affected by climate change can do the same. The film ends with two girls brought together by the Hurricane Sandy devastation, now best friends, practising their ballet together on a beach as the director dances between them.