Recently I have been to see two films that have genuinely had an impact on my lifestyle.
The first was The Age Of Stupid, which has Pete Postlethwaite as the sole survivor of a world lost to climate change in 2055. He looks back at footage from 2008 and asks why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? It’s a very clever way of weaving the various stories of climate change together; from a campaigner fighting to build wind farms, to an elderly guide in the French alps who watches in amazement as lorries take milk from France into Italy to be turned into yogurt that is then sold in France. The film shows the stark reality of what will happen if we don’t make drastic changes. It makes you realise just how serious climate change is, and how the timescales of devastation really are within our lifetimes.
Now I knew that climate change was a problem, but watching this film really shocked me into thinking about it much more carefully, and in every aspect of my life. The film encourages the audience not only to talk about the film, but get others to watch it, and use it as a platform for lobbying politicians to take serious action on climate change. In addition you are encouraged to take simple steps in your own life to cut your own carbon emissions. It’s not good enough just to recycle wine bottles- I need to take a whole look at the way I use energy. So I’ve started by ordering a stack of books (starting with George Monbiot’s Heat) because I don’t want to just talk about the issues in the film, I want to be more informed about climate change in general.
The other thing we did was switch to a green energy package for our flat and have an amazing electricity monitor which shows us exactly how much electricity we’re using. Once you start monitoring your energy usage it makes you want to sit in the dark! But a few less drastic changes include; never using the tumbledryer feature on our washing machine, unplugging things like phone chargers and the microwave that aren’t used all the time and having much shorter showers… Not very glamourous but these small steps do make a difference.
The Age of Stupid was released using ‘Indie Screenings’ (which is a whole other blog post about how that democratises cinema!) and so I hope that I can arrange another screening in Birmingham soon with some equally greenified friends.
And if I didn’t have enough to worry about, last night I went to see another film about another serious issue; The End of the Line; about the effects of overfishing.
Again, this is another issue I was aware of but had continued to eat fish without too many pangs of guilt. However scientists now predict that we will have overfished so much that there will be no fish left at all in 2048. Considering that one billion people in the world rely on fish as their main source of protein, this is clearly a serious problem.
Like The Age of Stupid, this film has a campaigning element- you are encouraged to sign up and claim your own piece of the ocean and take 3 steps: Ask before you buy- only buy sustainable fish; Tell politicians- to respect the science, cut the fishing fleet; Join the campaign- for marine protected areas and responsible fishing.
I find it interesting that these films have had such an impact on me and my friends (where maybe books or articles previously hadn’t prompted me enough). But I think that says a lot about the power of visuals to really shock you- once you’ve seen an impression of what the sea will look like when it’s empty, or what the world looks like when the ice caps melt, it’s hard to ignore the issues.
So please if you read this, go watch these films. Take a look at the websites and reading lists. And don’t expect a brightly lit fish supper at our flat any time soon!
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