Film Festival
DC Environmental Film Festival
March 12-22
The DC Environmental Film Festival was scheduled for March 12-22. Due to Covid-19, it has gone online. You can view these original films and support the artists who created them, while practicing social distancing! Over 60 films are available to stream, mostly for free!
TED Talks (YouTube)
How Empowering Women Can Help Stop Global Warming
Katherine Wilkenson, writer and environmentalist
November 2018, 14 minutes
If we really want to address climate change, we need to make gender equity a reality, says writer and environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson. As part of Project Drawdown, Wilkinson has helped scour humanity's wisdom for solutions to draw down heat-trapping, climate-changing emissions: obvious things like renewable energy and sustainable diets and not so obvious ones, like the education and empowerment of women. In this informative, bold talk, she shares three key ways that equity for women and girls can help stop global warming. "Drawing down emissions depends on rising up," Wilkinson says.
Why Climate Change is a Threat to Human Rights
Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN commissioner for Human Rights
2015, 21 minutes
Climate change is unfair. While rich countries can fight against rising oceans and dying farm fields, poor people around the world are already having their lives upended -- and their human rights threatened -- by killer storms, starvation and the loss of their own lands. Mary Robinson asks us to join the movement for worldwide climate justice.
Can Clouds Buy us More Time To Solve Climate Change?
Kate Marvel, Climate Scientist
2017, 13 minutes
Climate change is real, case closed. But there's still a lot we don't understand about it, and the more we know the better chance we have to slow it down. One still-unknown factor: How might clouds play a part? There's a small hope that they could buy us some time to fix things ... or they could make global warming worse. Climate scientist Kate Marvel takes us through the science of clouds and what it might take for Earth to break its own fever.
Why Covid-19 is hitting us now and how to prepare for the next one
Alanna Shaikh, Global Health Consultant
March 2020, 16 minutes
Where did the new coronavirus originate, how did it spread so fast -- and what's next? Sharing insights from the outbreak, global health expert and TED Fellow Alanna Shaikh traces the spread of COVID-19, discusses why travel restrictions aren't effective and highlights the medical changes needed worldwide to prepare for the next pandemic. "We need to make sure that every country in the world has the capacity to identify new diseases and treat them," she says. What is the climate change connection?
20 Climate, Nature and Environment Documentaries for 2020 (euronews)
Streaming culture has given rise to a new generation of documentary lovers. Better informed than ever with more films available than ever before, it can be difficult navigating the sea of choice.
But with climate change chief among concerns for the Netflix generation, it can be difficult choosing which eco-themed documentaries to watch without coming down with a case of eco-anxiety.
Here we list some of the best picks to get a rounded view on the problems of today as well as potential solutions.
Documentary, 1h47 minutes
It is happening all across America-rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground-a hydraulic drilling process called "fracking"-and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.
Documentary, 1h50 minutes
In 1971 a small group of activists set sail from Vancouver, Canada in an old fishing boat. Their mission was to stop Nixon’s atomic test bomb in Amchitka, Alaska. Chronicling this untold story at the birth of the modern environmental movement and with access to dramatic archive footage unseen for over 40 years, the film centres on eco-hero Robert Hunter and his part in the creation of the global organization we now know as Greenpeace.
Alongside a group of like-minded and idealistic young friends in the ‘70s, Hunter would be instrumental in altering the way we look at the world and our place within it. These early pioneers captured their daring and sometimes jaw-dropping actions on film and from this director Jerry Rothwell has made a thrilling, sometimes terrifying film. A prizewinner at the Sundance Film Festival it is one of the must-see documentaries of 2015.
Documentary, 1h29 minutes
Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. A team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.
Short film, 12 minutes
Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday; or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons; or that dancing around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? Why are these solutions not sufficient? But most importantly, what can be done instead to actually stop the murder of the planet?
Documentary, 30 minutes