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!’
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!
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!
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’.
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