Every year, the Goldman Environmental Prize is awarded to grassroots environmental heroes who work to protect the world’s natural resources. Green21 Cinematographer Vicente Franco went to Suriname to film the story of 2009 award recipients Wanze Eduards and S. Hugo Jabini. Members of a Maroon community originally established by freed African slaves in the 1700s, Eduards and Jabini successfully organized their communities against logging on their traditional lands. (learn more)
Vicente Franco also filmed and co-directed Daughter from Danang andSummer of Love, and shot Thirst, The Judge and the General, and many other documentary films. He was also Director of Photography for a documentary which was recently broadcast on PBS, based on Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World.
In the Brazilian Amazon, there are hundreds of indigenous tribes that have lived sustainably for thousands of years. The rainforest sustains them, and their way of life has sustained and preserved the forest. The Surui is one of these tribes.
First contact with the Surui was made in 1969 by government agents when a road was built right through their territory. Over the next 40 years this road brought hundreds of thousands of people to Western Amazon. In 1987, I first went to the Amazon to assist on some documentaries. During the next three years, I went back and forth several times, and visited the Surui and Negarote indigenous communities. I also met the rubber tappers, including Chico Mendes. The rubber tappers came from other regions of Brazil to harvest latex from the wild rubber trees, and they had joined with the indigenous people to protect the forest. And now, 40 years later, their way of life and the forest in which they had lived was being destroyed. There was this explosion of logging, ranching, farming and mining, industries that were consuming the forest with little or no control.
I returned to the Amazon 15 years later. This is the subject of my film “Children of the Amazon.” During this time I met Chief Almir of the Surui tribe. I was amazed at how quickly the forest was disappearing, but I was also inspired by how people in the indigenous communities were fighting to preserve it, and to find a voice in the complex society that they were becoming part of. Not long afterwards, Chief Almir discovered Google Earth at an internet cafe near his village, and contacted Google to see if they could help him raise visibility for his tribe. Google agreed to help Chief Almir and to train his people to use computer technology to protect Surui lands, preserve their culture, and empower their people.
Over these 40 years, the tribes of the Surui and Negarote have gone from complete self sufficiency to being part of a complex economy. Unfortunately that economy is not always sustainable, but rather based on removing resources, old growth trees, even fruit trees, and burning the land to create pasture for animals. The economic pressure to exploit the forest is very strong. The murder of Chico Mendes by ranchers in 1988 drew international attention to these issues, but even in the time since then, indigenous leaders are threatened and sometimes killed.
Many of the indigenous peoples of Brazil have recognized that education, knowledge and communication are key to their survival. As you can see in the clip, part of their work with Google has been the creation of a “ethno-cultural map,” recording their knowledge and history of the forest, medicinal plants, the site of first contact. Recognizing that they must have income that doesn’t destroy their land, Chief Almir has created a 50 year plan of sustainable development based on education, reforestation, and gaining access to the international carbon offset markets. I am inspired by their continuous work on behalf of this planet which we all must figure out how best to share.
If you are interested in getting involved, you can start by learning about sustainable practices and fair trade products in your area. For example, the more you understand about fair trade coffee, tea and lumber, the more you can make informed decisions. If you are buying hardwood floors and furniture, you can find out where the lumber is from and how it is certified. Local choices are always more sustainable than commodities shipped from far away, but if you are using Brazilian wood products, look closely at the certification. Making informed choices on what you purchase is one of the ways you can help increase the incentive for sustainable development.
My name is Denise Zmekhol. I am a filmmaker and photographer. I’m excited about the opportunity to produce and direct Green21, a series which addresses climate change and sustainability from a global perspective.
My latest film is Children of the Amazon, a co-production with ITVS. The clip above is about Forest Time – tempo de floresta in Portuguese – the time before the settlers came to the Amazon.
GELLERMAN: This is the sound of the Amazon rainforest. It’s one of the richest places on the planet for plants and wildlife and home to scores of remote indigenous tribes. The forest is also one of the most important places in the world for regulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
[CHAIN SAWS AND TREE FALLS]
GELLERMAN: This too is the sound of the Amazon. Chainsaws and bulldozers have been carving away at the rainforest for decades clearing land for highways, cattle ranches and soybean plantations. It’s estimated that nearly 20 percent of the Amazon has been cleared, including an area almost the size of New Hampshire just last year.
Much of the destruction of the Amazon forest has taken place on the territory of indigenous tribes. In just a few brief years, members of many of these isolated societies were wrenched from the stone age into the space age… some driven nearly to extinction by their first contact with the outside world.
Almost 20 years ago, Denise Zmekhol traveled deep into the Amazon to photograph and document their struggles. She recently returned with a film crew to examine the changes the people of the rainforest have gone through since her first visit. Her new film is called “Children of the Amazon.”
It focuses on one tribe in particular: the Surui. Denise Zmekhol says the Surui never had contact with the outside world until the roads we built.
ZMEKHOL: The first official contact happened in 1969 when they were still living in what I call in the film “forest time.” It’s a very recent contact and I think they had to learn a lot about our society and our world in such a small time. So for thousands of years they were living in one way and just 39 years ago everything changed for them. [click here to continue…]
My Green21 partner, Jennifer Thompson, wrote a great blog entry about the film Slumdog Millionaire. If we go back exactly 30 years ago, the film Prophecy forewarned of how humankind’s abuse of our natural resources have horrible effects on the environment. My Dad took me to see this bit of bio-horror when it came out in the theatres in 1979, I was 11 years old at the time. Directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Talia Shire and Robert Foxworth, Prophecy is about how a lumber company’s pulp mill plant used a chemical process in which methyl mercury was dumped in a lake to process the cut lumber. The eating of the fish in this lake caused mutations in the birth of all the local wildlife and even the Native Americans who live in this Maine wilderness. The upshot of this is that a mutant bear kills a lot of people when trappers kill one of its mutated cubs in a net and the surviving cub is rescued by our protagonists (that is until it bites Talia Shires’ neck in a chase scene across a lake).
Seeing this film brought an awareness of environmental issues to me for the first time. Even though the film is a B-movie rip off of Jaws, it has some unique messages about how nature can go very wrong when it is disturbed by our destructive activities. This film had a lasting impact on my impressionable years and it unfortunately really serves as a “prophecy” of sorts to us 30 years later, our abuses have consequences that will ultimately hurt us.
Green21’s first episode, Welcome to the 21st Century, includes an interview with Dr. Susanne Moser, co-author of Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, where she discusses how difficult it is to communicate to the public about climate change issues because people feel fear and guilt about being part of the cause, they are not able to focus on empowering themselves and the planet with solutions. They become paralyzed with fear. That kind of reminds me of the victims in the film Prophecy.
One thing that is really fascinating about Propehcy is that it is based on a real incident in Minamata, Japan, it was called the Minamata Disease and it was caused by methyl mercury dumping.
Please write a post if you remember Prophecy or know of other bio-horror films.
This weekend I saw “Slumdog Millionaire.” It’s an amazing movie that’s often hard to watch but has a happy ending. However, what struck me the most was the trash. I mean the actual trash on the ground, the trash in the background and the enormous trash heaps. I loved that the film didn’t pause the storyline to talk about trash – the filmmakers wove it into fabric of the characters’ lives. One of the best examples was when the main character, a homeless orphan, talked to his brother as he filled a discarded plastic water bottle with tap water and resealed it for resale. The film treated this act just like brushing teeth, part of an everyday routine.
The visuals in “Slumdog” startled me because I thought I knew trash. In 1994, I spend a year in Asia as a college student and as an intern for a film about Vietnam. During that time, I often talked to people about trash because there was no place to put it. I would carry it around with me, and every so often I would ask someone what to do with it. Once in Nepal, when I was living with a family, I asked the father what I should do with some old candybar wrappers and fax papers. He authoritatively took these bits of wrappers and paper, walked to the other end of the house, opened the window and threw them across the Himalayas. I froze. I waited several weeks before asking the next person what to do with the various scraps of debris I had accumulated. Now, fifteen years later, the trash in “Slumdog” still caught me off guard. Maybe my memory of trash has faded, or maybe there’s actually visibly more trash.
Working on Green21, I’ve realized that our understanding of trash has evolved and become more systemic. We’ve gone from focusing on the visible symptoms of waste to looking at “lifecycles” as detailed in Cradle to Cradle. Now it seems we need to move beyond exploring waste management systems to trying to understand our need to consume. The Story of Stuff is a great place to start.
Green21 is a media project that I’ve been developing for the past two years. My goal is to bring a narrative to the environmental, sustainable and social justice movement. Green21 started out as an idea for a public television series, and my business partner Cynthia Zeiden has secured broadcast distribution with American Public Television.
In the process of developing the content for the 13-part broadcast series, I needed input from experts. I contacted a number of people and finally got a meeting with Dr. Stephen Schneider at Stanford University. When I first met with Dr. Schneider, he said Green21 is an ambitious project — and that’s why he agreed to get involved. He introduced me to a number of our board members including Ralph Cavanagh of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and Richard Moss of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
While the content of the series was being vetted by scientists and thought-leaders, Green21’s online and social media strategy took off. With the help of Kevin Kanarek, Michael Holzer, Ken Ikeda and Andy Volk, we developed a multi-platform media initiative which bridges broadcast television and Web 2.0 — and all its implications such as geotagging, Creative Commons licensing, Twitter and YouTube. Thank you to everyone who has worked to get Green21 to this stage, especially our graphic designer Frank Dufay.
We welcome your suggestions and comments regarding the project or content proposed in the series. Currently we’re in the fundraising stage and hope to start filming in the Summer of 2009.
