Why make a film?

Why Make An Island Freshwater Stewardship Film?

How do our island’s freshwater systems work, and what IS a delicate water balance? How do we protect our freshwater systems for our community and our natural systems? Attempting to answer these questions, and adequately expressing the value of education and outreach in gaining community support, IS a challenge.

We need to share and make accessible our island’s developing freshwater science and how our watershed stewardship group efforts contribute to maintaining balance.   Shared here is an eloquent description on the value of education and outreach, from Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her thoughts are relevant to our film-making effort, giving both a First Nations and Mayan perspective.

“The very facts of the world… Aren’t these stories we should all know?

Who is it who holds them? In long-ago times, it was the elders who carried them. In the twenty-first century, it is often scientists who first hear them. The stories … belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsibility for conveying their stories to the world.

And yet scientists mostly convey these stories in a language that exclude readers. Conventions for efficiency and precision make reading scientific papers very difficult for the rest of the world, and if the truth be known, for us as well. This has serious consequences for pubic dialogue about the environment and therefore about real democracy, especially the democracy of all species. For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else…

It is not more data that we need for our transformation… but more wisdom.

… I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an indigenous world view - stories which matter and spirit are both given voice.”  Extracts from Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013),

The above quote, and the expression of seeing-with-two-eyes, is something that we strived for in our Freshwater Saltspring film-short, and will strive for in the planned new film. More is needed in this vein to move our island's community more into a collaborative place.