Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
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“Climate Refugees” shows human face of climate change
“Climate Refugees” investigates the migration people are forced to make in the wake of floods, mudslides, droughts, sea level rise and other climate related disasters.
Governor Bill Ritter and the film’s director, Michael Nash, introduced the film to a full audience that included Alec Baldwin on Sunday afternoon at the Boulder International Film Festival.
“This film says that we need to stop the debate about climate change and puts a human element to the issue,” Ritter said. “The face of climate change is the climate refugee.”
In an interview with the Camera before the screening, Nash said that “Climate Refugees” speaks to a climate problem that doesn’t get enough attention:
The human face of climate change really is an untold story and the very reason I felt the need to investigate. When I started this journey three years ago, there was very little data on climatic migration. There seemed to be a vast amount of spin on both sides of the climate change issue. I wanted to move beyond the politics and dig into the truth of whether our climate was really changing and if it was, how was it affecting humans? What I found was mass climatic migration. Victims forced to relocate, unable to live on the land, either from short-term or long-term climatic changes. Our changing climate seems to be all about water: too much in some areas and too little in others.
The screening at the Boulder Theatre was the film’s fifth showing. It was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. A small crew and often, just Nash alone, traveled for 18 months filming in Bangladesh, the Tuvalu islands in the South Pacific, India, Texas, China, New Orleans, Sudan and Chad.
The film "Climate Refugees" was screened at BIFF on Sunday
There are about 25 million people considered to be “climate refugees,” – a number greater than both political and religious refugees – according to the UN. These refugees are defined as climate refugees because they have had to leave their homelands due to a lack of natural resources.
Nash narrates the documentary beginning it with a question: How long is man going to survive on this planet?
Answering this question is the purpose to Nash’s journey to places facing resource related pressures and documenting why people must migrate to neighboring countries or larger cities to survive. The planting of 20,000 trees offset the carbon emission from all of the air travel required for filming.
The head of the IPCC, Dr. Pachauri, is among the many interviewees in the film that include Lester Brown, the author of “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” and President of the Earth Policy Institute; Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior; Madeleen Helmer, director of Red Cross; and Newt Gingrich, R-Ga, former Speaker of the House.
“We are really one family,” Dr. Pachauri said in the film. “Something that happens to someone else in our family is really a slap in our face.”
The next step for Nash and fellow producer Justin Hogan is to secure a distributor or financial backing to distribute the film themselves.
The idea for the documentary “Climate Refugees” was born in Colorado and primarily funded by Coloradoans.
Portraits of suffering people who shared their stories in the film fill the screen at the end, leaving an emotional stamp on the audience.
“It was moving. It shows you the humanity and not just the argument,” said Kimberly Baldwin, a Boulder resident who was at the screening. “It shows that we have to do something.”
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[...] to Big Green Boulder, Nash and his crew traveled for 18 months filming in Bangladesh, the Tuvalu islands in the South [...]
[...] to Big Green Boulder, Nash and his crew traveled for 18 months filming in Bangladesh, the Tuvalu islands in the South [...]