This weekend, the third annual Richmond Environmental Film Festival was held down at the Byrd Theater, an event I’ve been looking forward to for a few weeks now. This was my first project as an intern at the Sierra Club, so I was extremely nervous going into it. Though my part in the event was extremely minor (organize volunteers to man the Sierra Club table/get petitions signed) I found the experience extremely rewarding. For the past few weeks, I’ve been in contact with the organizers of the film festival, seeing if the Sierra Club could even have a table, when set-up would be, who would be tabling, who would train the volunteers and and where the materials would go at the end of each day. The festival went smoothly as far as the Sierra Club table was concerned, and we got a LOT of petitions signed.
My hours there were spent outside the Byrd, clipboard in hand and a welcoming smile on my face. I found it amazing how many passer-bys were simply unaware that a free environmental film festival was taking place, and how many immediately turned and entered the theater upon hearing this. I got to catch a few minutes of a film called Chasing Ice when signing was slow, and was amazed by the bit I got to see. It was about a photographer that documented glacial melting in Greenland and Alaska, who installed cameras in various locations to show global warming’s effects in progress. In the part that I saw, he was pointing out the pockets of black carbon in glaciers caused by coal-fired power plants that create a positive-feedback loop and cause further melting. The black pockets of carbon in the glaciers absorb heat and speed up the process of glacial melting. I had no idea.
I’m adding Chasing Ice and a few other of the films shown at the film festival this weekend to my list of movies to watch, because seeing the faces on the people leaving the theater showed how moving and important they are.