Environment Threatened Despite Award-Winning ‘Green’ Shows, International TV Festival Hears
Posted June 28, 2010 in Featured Post
Oscar-award winning filmmaker, Louis Psihoyos, and EnviroLine Editor, Elona Malterre, Banff: Photo by Sharon Szmolyan
The environment is under threat world-wide, say an award-winning Canadian broadcaster and an Oscar-winning American film maker.
“We’re heading right over the cliff. And I just don’t see that we’re going to be able to confront that reality through conventional television,” David Suzuki, host of CBC-TV’s The Nature of Things, Canada’s longest-running documentary series, told the Banff World Television Festival-nextMEDIA Banff conference in mid-June.
There is an irony to televised green programming, Louis Psihoyos, a former National Geographic photographer and director of the Oscar-winning (Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature) The Cove, said at the same sparsely attended morning session. “We’re locked in our houses. We’re watching TV. We’re trying to find out about the environment by sheltering ourselves from it,” Psihoyos said.
Suzuki noted that “the one element nature needs to reveal her secrets is time, and television has no tolerance for dead space . . .The message of conservation is you’ve got to think holistically. You’ve got to see the whole big picture. . . . you have to use things sparingly.”
“What’s the basic message of television – even television like The Nature of Things? It fragments the world. You don’t see anything like the context – it’s instant,” Suzuki said. “(TV programming) has got nothing to do with longevity, and the fundamental message of television is ‘buy, buy, buy.’ It’s exactly the opposite of what the conservation message is.”
Suzuki, co-founder of the Vancouver-based David Suzuki Foundation, spoke at a 9 a.m. session on “The Future of Green Programming in Television.” He lamented the turnout at the session – given, he noted, that climate change is the No. 1 crisis facing civilization.
“I’m astounded that in view of the Gulf (offshore oil rig) accident that this room isn’t packed,” he told about two dozen people. “It shows that (‘green’ programming) is ghetto programming.”
Suzuki, who acknowledged that his view of humanity’s future is bleak, said: “We face a fundamental crisis now. When the Royal astronomer of England is asked, ‘What are the chances the human species will survive until the end of this century?”’ And the Royal astronomer Martin Rees answers: ‘Maybe one out of three,’ I would’ve thought people would be dropping their drawers!”
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that it is more than 95 per cent sure the planet is entering a massive period of climate change, “and yet I live in a country in which our government for four years has denied this issue because (they say) it’ll ruin the economy,” Suzuki said.
“Most people who watch green programming on TV think, ‘Well if I just change all my light bulbs for compact fluorescents, I buy a Prius and I kick in a reusable shopping bag, everything’ll be fine,” he said.
“So I worry about the context in which television is made, and I think that green programming is just a tip of the hat to the current fad,” he added.
Recent climate change negotiations in Copenhagen were doomed to fail because participants from the 192 countries were trying to save the entire planet by looking at the problems from within national and political borders, Suzuki said. “We’re heading straight at a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and everybody in the car is arguing about where they want to sit.”
Psihoyos told conference delegates that about five years ago, he clipped off the ends of his television cable because his children were watching too much TV. Then he made The Cove – his first movie – and his children began questioning him. If you’re going to make a movie that’s compelling, “put something on TV that you’re going to be proud of,” he said.
The Banff World Television Festival awarded its Green Grand Prize to Psihoyos for The Cove, a 2009 American documentary film about the annual killing of dolphins in a national park at Taiji, Wakayama, in Japan. Making The Cove changed his life, he said, because he started asking himself some fundamental questions, including: How do you make a television show that encourages people to turn off the TV, so they actually become physically connected to the environment?
“When I was a kid, you went outside into the woods. You played. You hung out in nature,” Psihoyos said. But now young people spend nearly a third of their day in front of various electronic media.
Scientists say there have been five major extinctions on the planet, he said. The next extinction “is going to be as big as any of the previous ones, with 90 per cent of the species going extinct – maybe half (that number) by the end of (this) century.”
Human beings, including him, are part of the problem, he added. “We’re the cause of it, (including) the way I flew up here – the way we get around . . . “We’re doing what no wild animal would do. We’re fouling our own nest.”
While The Cove is a movie about killing dolphins, “it’s fully about how we’re killing the environment,” Psihoyos said. Two years into the production of his film, he calculated that all the activity associated with the production put 646 tonnes of carbon into the environment. “I found the worst thing you could do to the environment was to make a movie about it.”
However, the experience also changed the way his family obtains and uses its energy, he noted. “I live in Colorado, the ‘Saudi Arabia of alternative energy.’”
Psihoyos installed 120 solar panels on the roof of his home, a system that generates “140 per cent” of the energy required by his family. “We have two electric cars . . . the license plate say VUS – ‘Vehicle Using Sun.’ It’s the opposite of SUV.”
The Banff WorldTelevision Festival-nextMEDIA Banff conference played host to over 1600 international delegates.
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