Water
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So, first night of the tour went really well. Close to 300 people in attendence. The films looked great on the big screen and a really good Q&A session followed.
Was interesting to note that there were very different types of people coming out to this, the student activists who frequent Cinema Politica, the senior members of the Council of Canadians, and lots of concerned citizens who just want to get involved… but if there is one issue that will bring us together, WATER is it!
Looking forwards to hearing about tonight’s Toronto screening!
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I watched The Chances of the World Changing by Eric Daniel Metzgar (2006) - www.thechancesoftheworldchanging.com and thought the film was powerful, yet filled with sorrow at the rate at which we are consuming the planet.
I think the world has not yet decided what is necessary as a need, and what is greed. The Chances of the World Changing is a good example of how we are still unable to come to terms with the things we need vs. what we want. Obviously in Asia - China mostly - the demand for turtles for food (specialized food I think) has caused the extinction of various species of turtles. These water creatures are clearly no longer safe from being taken from wild waters and left alone to exist and recreate. It seems not enough that any animal in the wild can exist without some negative relationship to humans. If we are not polluting the water, we are mining the water for anything that we can consume from the water — be it the shell of the turtle or its body for food. Humanity at this level of consumption is out of balance and will destroy the delicate relationship humans have with nature — a specific harmony that has been created over thousands of years. As we consume massive amounts of energy and the human population increases as a result of the current unfettered human availability to energy, we tilt the balanced relationship that humans have had with our environment to such an extreme that the entropy of a balance is disrupted to conclusion– the environment dies completely without any reaction to the imbalance. The result is simple stoppage. It will not be long after such a stoppage of nature that humans will most certainly perish.
Does humanity not have the insight to control our own aggression towards relatively harmless and helpless creatures of nature?
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Water has an energy value. When it is clean, it has a higher energy value because it requires no further energy input to be functionally valuable to life.
When Tantoo Cardinal says, ‘there is no energy more powerful than the life force’, she implies, I think, in scientific terms, that when water is clean and purified through nature itself, we have been given the gift of clean water without having to input further human energy expenditure to make water consumable for human life.
To purify water requires a great deal of energy and effort. It requires filtering, pumping, boiling, etc. These efforts all require energy. When we discuss comparative fractions such as, ‘it take four barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil in the Alberta tarsands’, we mean that four barrels of water become contaminated to the point of uselessness to life—human, plant, animal, insect, etc. The water of course does not disappear, but becomes contaminated. For us to recuperate those four barrels of water, a great deal of energy must be expended to rectify that water, to process that water to a form that is functional again to human/life consumption. And in this sense, we are lowering the quotient of energy input to energy output– or as some have defined, Energy Returned on Energy Invested: http://www.eroei.com.
The essence of all energy gathering is scientifically reliant on this equation. When we walk into the forest to pick fruit from a tree, the body expends a certain amount of calories to walk through the forest, seek the fruit, pick the fruit and eat the fruit. For a human body to stay alive, the energy consumed in the fruit must be greater than the energy expended to go through the process, start to finish, of acquiring the fruit in the forest. All energy gathering, whether eating fruit or acquiring petroleum energy, follow the same equation.
Keep in mind, that the universe has a few static laws. The laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, and when energy is transferred or transformed from one form (fruit) to another (human life) there is always some form of waste. Even in the case of human life, we breathe CO2– a greenhouse gas emission. This is the result of our bodies using food energy to pump blood, breath, chew, etc. Now extrapolate this same equation to the world writ large and you can see how the world is in the process of rapidly changing because the waste that is created by so much energy use has no where to go. Globally, we have expended massive amounts of petroleum energy in a short period of time. It should be noted that petroleum energy is just a reflection of stored energy—energy that, for the most part, is from the sun… energy that is a direct result of the sun´s rays hitting the earth thousands of years ago. Our waste, because the Earth is essentially a hermetically sealed globe floating in a consistent and specific pattern through space, is entirely contained. And the Earth is quite small in comparison to the amount of energy expended and transformed over the course of the 20th Century. So in a sense, humanity is attempting to thrive in the waste product of energy expenditure. At some point, the poison of energy expenditure waste will shift the Earth´s life balance and cause significant changes that we as humans may not be able to withstand or cope with.
There are many kinds of ‘waste’ products in energy conversion: sound, heat, light, etc. All of these elements of energy must be considered and the ultimate goal in this equation relative to human life on planet Earth is to reach a stasis between the energy that human life requires and the energy the Earth has to offer; it is to ensure that our energy quotient remains somewhat in balance– or one to one. If humanity only took what it was provided and/or needed, we would not have a planet suffering from exhaustion– suffering from a net loss of energy and net increase in toxins that are contrary to all life on Earth.
If water has an energy value, it is much higher than the price that a bottle of bottled water would lead you to believe.
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“Of all the social and natural crises we humans face, the water crisis is the one that lies at the heart of our survival and that of our planet Earth.” -UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura, 2006
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Water
CITIZENShift will be launching Water in honour of World Water Day, March 22, 2007.
There will be an online component as well as a screening/dialogue series across Canada.
We are currently seeking submissions of films, audio recordings, photos, and texts. We welcome materials on the topic of water under the themes of: conservation, pollution, water-related disasters, climate change, accessibility, diversion, privatization and conflicts. The focus is on the Canadian perspective of water problems and solutions, on the local and global level.
CITIZENShift (http://citizen.nfb.ca) is the National Film Board of Canada’s social issues website. It is an interactive platform for community-driven films, photography, articles, blogs and podcasts. Focusing on a new theme every month, CITIZENShift is a space for activists and artists to share media and ideas and to engage with one another.
CITIZENShift is inspired by Challenge for Change, a 1960s´ experimental National Film Board initiative that involved communities in their own documentary-filmmaking process. Over forty years later, CITIZENShift embraces new technology and offers a unique online platform that gives users a forum to debate social issues and encourages social change through media.
If you are passionate about using media to engage with others on the issue of water and would like to use CITIZENShift as a platform, send us a description of your material with notes about format and content.
Deadline: January 19, 2007
Hadas Levy Water Coordinator
CITIZENShift >> http://citizen.nfb.ca
National Film Board of Canada
Tel.: 604.666.9739 h.levy@nfb.ca
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CITIZENShift is looking for a curator / project coordinator for the upcoming Water dossier.
Scheduled to launch mid-March, the curator for the Water dossier will gather films photos, texts, and web sites on issues surrounding Water. They will also be heavily involved in planning a cross-Canada tour of screenings and discussions with actively engaged communities and organizations.
If you are passionate about Water issues, outraged by pollution, concerned about privatization and connected to communities; you may be the perfect person to coordinate this dossier.
This is a part-time contract position, starting immediately, ending 31 March, 2007. You can be located anywhere in Canada.
If you are interested, please send your CV and a cover letter to citizen@nfb.ca by November 24th.
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REFLECTIONS ON WATER
A call for submissions!: Send films, videos or media art projects with your analysis, musings and/or artistic interpretations reflecting what water means to you.
Presented by Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society and ParaDocs Productions, Reflections on Water will take place in the second year of The UN Water for Life Decade. The first screening will also coincide with the World Urban Forum and the World Peace Forum taking place in Vancouver Canada, in June, 2006.
Selected works will be invited to be part of a travelling media program and also part of the National Film Board’s social issues website called CITIZENShift: http://www.citizen.nfb.ca
We encourage work that deals with people’s memories, personal stories and feelings about water that deals with cultural, spiritual, environmental, and/or political issues surrounding water created by filmmakers, artists, activists, scientists, concerned citizens, people of all ages from a variety of media art disciplines including documentary, experimental, drama and new media
- Deadline for Submissions is May 1st, 2006.
- No entry fees required and artist fees will be paid for selected works.
- Length can be anywhere between 30 seconds and 60 minutes.
To have your submission returned to you, please include an envelope with the required postage. Please send DVD or VHS submissions (NTSC/PAL/All Regions) to:
Reflections on Water c/o Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society,
Suite 300-1131 Howe St. Vancouver, BC V6Z 2L7, Canada
Reflections on Water is conceived and curated by Hadas Levy of ParaDocs Productions. Hadas is an activist and documentary filmmaker interested in using video and film to inspire dialogue and action for positive environmental and social change.
‘Today, we are on the threshold of a global water crisis. By 2025, worldwide demand for water will outstrip supply of water by an estimated 56 percent. The twin realities of growing freshwater shortages combined with deeply inequitable access pose the greatest ecological and human rights threats of our time…
The growing number of citizens and groups who belong to the water justice movement and the global justice movement at large who are fighting for a water secure future, believe in the beauty of this dream: that the global water crisis will become the source of global peace; that humanity will bow before Nature and learn to cooperate with the limits that Nature gives us and with each other ‘
- Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Recipients of The Right Livelihood Award, 2005
For more information please contact Sarah Muff at: sarahmuff@cineworks.ca
604-685-3841 or visit our website http://www.cineworks.ca
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