Transcript: Podship Earth Episode 028: Gone Fishing
JARED BLUMENFELD: Welcome to Podship Earth. This is your host, Jared Blumenfeld. This week, Friday Apaliski and I went to the San Francisco Green Film Festival and saw a ton of amazing movies. We're going to review four of them for this week's episode. The movies that we saw were: “Into the Okavango”
FRIDAY APALISKI: “Symphony for Nature”
JARED BLUMENFELD: “Complicit”
FRIDAY APALISKI: “Inventing Tomorrow”
JARED BLUMENFELD: “That Rich”
FRIDAY APALISKI: “Warrior Women”
JARED BLUMENFELD: “The Human Element”
FRIDAY APALISKI: “Wasted: The Story of Food Waste”
JARED BLUMENFELD: “Nail House”
FRIDAY APALISKI: “Youth Unstoppable: The Rise of the Global Climate Youth Movement”
JARED BLUMENFELD: “Point of No Return”
FRIDAY APALISKI: “Youth Versus Gov”
JARED BLUMENFELD: And that was it. That was a lot.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Yeah, it’s a lot.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It was fun watching them with you.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Totally. These films are wasted if you don't have someone to talk to about them. They just marinate in your head and cause all kinds of problems.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I really want to thank all the people, Rachel Kaplan and everyone with the Green Film Festival. We got to sit down with, in many cases, both the director and the people in the movies so you're going to get a behind the scenes look at these movies. You're also going to hear some clips of the movies that we saw. So, the first movie we're going to review is called “Warrior Women.” I loved this movie. I thought it was amazing. And the characters are just so compelling.
CLIP FROM “WARRIOR WOMEN”: Countries built on the bones of our ancestors. We have our culture, we have our language. What we're trying to do is retain it, retain our right as a people to be. It was truly an empowering free time. Watching the women, it’s amazing how they handled everything, protecting our people and our children's future and fighting, being warriors in that way. The press, they just automatically gravitated to the men and who really knew what was going on, who was really running the show, were the women. We were a movement of families. Being the daughter of Madonna. She definitely had a reputation of being strong. And when someone went to her for help, she did what she had to do to make a difference.
JARED BLUMENFELD: The main woman is Madonna Thunder Hawk and her daughter Marcy Gilbert, and they do an incredible job. I was just like, floored by it.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Absolutely. I totally agree with you about the characters. I really enjoyed the parts of the film where they're all sitting together and reflecting on all these actions that they've taken that I think any of us would feel like one of them was a defining moment in your life and they have a whole lifetime of just really incredible, like go out there, get this done. Their voices are amazing and their stories were very powerful. You could do three hours on this woman. She's clearly a force of nature.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Yeah, let's hear from her right now and her daughter Marcy. I started by asking Madonna Thunder Hawk what it was like when Trump rubber stamped the Dakota access pipeline.
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK: Well, to us, it's not that big of a surprise because it's ongoing because we are land based people. This is constant. Each generation has to pick up the fight. the struggle. Yeah, it's just an ongoing thing with the younger generations in this country, realizing that, as indigenous people, we're not standing alone, that this is something that's affecting everybody. And then when we were up there at the camp in 2016 and then November comes rolling around and Trump gets in, you know, it shocked everybody. And literally because we were there watching elders supporting all the young people that were there.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Marcy, what does it mean in 2018 to be indigenous in this country?
MARCY GILBERT: When we have a corporate monstrosity that's killing the air and killing the water and killing the land and killing the natural, you know, the natural relatives, you know, all the animals and plants and everything, it definitely has a different meaning now. And so those issues are real for everybody.
JARED BLUMENFELD: There's a very strong sense in the movie of your identity. You knowing who you are, where you came from, how you fit into the landscape, your role. Whereas I think many people feel adrift. You feel very in the movie and right now, very grounded.
MARCY GILBERT: Growing up in an activist family, you learn where you come from, where you, where you come from, what your responsibilities are, what direction you should be going in, and then learning the tools to move forward in a meaningful way. So, it's not a clear easy path, but it's worth it because you do, when you get through all that, you do have a sense of identity. Who you are and what your responsibilities are and how all these gifts that you got from your experiences. How do we use those to move forward as indigenous people? We have the right to be here.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, Madonna, one of the things I was just completely shocked by my own experience when I visited Indian country was how openly racist white communities that adjoin the reservation are.
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK: It's what I call a “frontier mentality.” Because for many reasons, and one of the main ones is that this country does not have any culture of its own, has no honorable history of its own. So, what do you do? You look around, you got to put someone else down and it might be out of envy. Who knows why the white border towns have this frontier mentality and feed it to their young? Why? That's their problem. That's who they are because they don't belong anywhere. We know who we are, and all of our problems of colonization, we still are who we are. It’s corporate dominance of the planet. America was so busy patting themselves on the back for decades, centuries. Look, look at, look at the joke it is now. And the corporate world is in control and the only ones really left standing with any kind of stability and basis are indigenous people.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Tell us about the role that you feel your ancestors play for you.
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK: Well, I think it's really simple. I'm here and I'm able to say and what I want to because my ancestors, they fought and died so I could be here. So, it's my obligation and everybody has one. And that's the thing with our people. You want to sell out, you want to be colonized, you want to go in and be an American go have at it. But there's those of us that understand and choose, choose to remain who we are and, and, and pick up the struggle, you know. Our ancestors did that for us so it's our obligation.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Did you ever see Forrest Gump, Madonna? Like when I saw the movie, I was like, how could she be at everything? Like there's Mount Rushmore. Oh, Madonna was there. There's the Black Hills Campaign against Human Carbide. Oh, Madonna was there. There's Alcatraz, Madonna was there. All the way through history. And then the Dakota Access Pipeline. Oh, Madonna was there. You were everywhere.
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK: I know. I was everywhere.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I was like, how are you always in the thick of the trouble?
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK: Because someone had to do the work. So, who do you call? The women.
JARED BLUMENFELD: The cool thing about the movie, I really, really appreciated was that you're focusing on a place that sacred or a place that's in danger.
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK: This is nothing new that Trump's in there and just devastating everything. I mean, that's what we've had to put up with since they started the whole tribal government thing in the United States government. I mean, come on. We've dealt with this kind of stuff for centuries, so nothing is new to us. It's just we have to constantly- We're always in flux. We're constantly adapting. Our people have never had any downtime. We’re place based culture and were placed based spirituality and it's all ties in so we're always looking standing.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Cool thing about that clip is that we really kind of heard her story even more than we did in the movie.
FRIDAY APALISKI: I just kept thinking, I can't imagine living in this way where you feel like you have to go to survival school. Right? Where every day is somewhat of a fight.
JARED BLUMENFELD: They're a nation within a nation.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Right, and yet each one of these women were able to find their center and their grounding. I mean, they seemed so connected to nature in a way that calmed them, that you don't see from other leaders.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I think everyone should watch this movie.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Everybody should watch it.
JARED BLUMENFELD: This movie is amazing. This is the perspective of the director. So, Beth, how did this project come to you?
DIRECTOR ELIZABETH CASTLE: The film started as an idea 20 years ago. From the beginning it was a struggle. I first interviewed Madonna and just realized the story was a lot bigger than me and was just thinking about how am I going to share it? And then I just hung with it and fought and worked all these years so that the film that came out really did represent our own timeline. Expressed the issues because we could have been very historical at every detail, but all of that's going to be part of it. The film festivals are awesome and it's fun to be celebrated a bit, but you know, when we come out, all of us are so busy because if you do this kind of work, you know, you don't have a steady job and we're just always trying to figure out, you know, what the hustle is and how we can raise the money to keep doing this work. So, the film is built on this incredible historical record of a really accountably done project working with community. And so, you know, we have this oral history collection of, you know, of 60 different interviews varying from an hour to 15 hours of women who are the big expanse of all the activists involved.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And what do you need now?
DIRECTOR ELIZABETH CASTLE: We are trying to raise the gas money to get grandmothers to an action to preserve and keep children in the tribe and you know, building the survival school, making sure that we can do an impact campaign with this film where we are able to go to the places that really need to see the film.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I think she did an amazing job, and this was like a 20-year odyssey. The whole team is awesome. See the movie.
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JARED BLUMENFELD: Now back to this week's episode with Friday. The next movie we review is called “Complicit.”
CLIP FROM “COMPLICIT”: In China, every year, over $12 million teenagers leave home to find work. They are part of 200 million Chinese who must travel far from home just to make a living. My work day started at 8:00 AM and ended at 11. There were no holidays. I only had one night off a month. We sat there all day, cleaning phone chips and using calculators. There was an Apple screen and a Nokia screen. When I wasn't eating or sleeping, I would be wiping something. It was the only thing I did. There was no other ventilation, no windows. The smell was horrible at first, but I eventually got used to it.
He jumped off the building. He ultimately chose to end his own life. He couldn't take the struggle any longer. The pressure of dealing with this illness, the factory, and the benzene poisoning. I propose that we all stand up and hold a sign of the tribune for Ming. We're all benzene patients. For those of us who are alive, we need to fight for our rights for justice and live on.
FRIDAY APALISKI: So, you follow this main character who has gotten leukemia presumably from working in one of these factories.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And the factories have like one thing that I never knew, like 30,000 people in them.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Oh yeah, they're crammed in there like sardines. And this incredible person is gathering up all of these other people who have also been poisoned. They've been poisoned too. You're exactly right. And trying to find them and organize them and get some benefit.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It’s about so many things. I mean, really, we all have cell phones, right? And most of them are made in China. We often spend a lot of time thinking about where stuff ends up at the end of life. Like is it recycled, is incinerated, is it in a landfill. But this kind of opened my eyes to holy crap that people, as you said, are slammed into this factory like sardines 30,000 at a time. They don't sleep, they don't have weekends off.
FRIDAY APALISKI: There's no windows. Did you notice in the film, there weren't even any bright colors? I mean everything was very gray. The sky was gray and it's just not how you would wish anybody to live, right? You wouldn't wish this on anybody. And then to think that your part of that. Oof.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I wish that movie was a little bit more about what we could do because it was very, very focused on how shit life is for people who are poisoned, which I kind of got after about 20 minutes. So how does it make you feel about your phone?
FRIDAY APALISKI: Well, can I tell you this? My phone is kind of on the fritz right now and my husband keeps saying, Friday, just buy a new one. And I can't, like I can't. I don't. This is how it is right now in this moment. I'm like, Oh God, I don't want to go buy a new one, but this one is definitely not working.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, here's Heather White, the director of the movie, talking a little bit about the journey.
HEATHER WHITE: I went to China in January of 2013 to research a book, checking out clinics in China that had been created to take care of teenagers who had been paralyzed and were in comas from exposure to toxic chemicals. What we found out on our first few days there, they're walking through the hospitals, was that they were all connected to smartphone production.
JARED BLUMENFELD: How did you even get access in the first place to a hospital? I've been to China. It's not very open to foreigners walking around hospital wards.
HEATHER WHITE: Well, we snuck in everywhere we went, and we got chased out of quite a few places. All of the NGOs operating in China had been shut down by the government by the time we got there, one of the wonderful activists that was going to be one of the main characters in the film disappeared on his way to work while we were there and we never found him again and nobody's ever saw him again because there's so much repression going on in China right now.
FRIDAY APALISKI: After seeing it, of course you think about the title and nobody wants to be complicit in this story that you've told, so what is it that you want the viewers of your film to take away to do, to feel after the at the end? Then what?
HEATHER WHITE: Well, I love the title of the film too, but I'm not sending a message to consumers and to the average individuals that they are complicit or that they are to blame in any way. Because for me, having worked on many sweatshop issues for 20 years before I even made this film, I feel very strongly that those who are complicit are the companies, the factories, the brands, and even the governments who allow this to go on. Despite corporate social responsibility initiatives that we keep hearing about and greening of the corporate supply chain, it's just not happening. From what we saw in making the film, there was no sign of any type of monitoring or ethical trade initiatives in place. I'm on the ground with the subcontractors who have these huge electronics brands.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Which is just kind of stunning, right?
HEATHER WHITE: When Apple banned benzene and hexane in their suppliers, after our trailer came out, they didn't announce a price increase. So, that showed us that in fact the price of these chemicals is completely inconsequential to the price of the goods.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, the how did it feel when as a result of your film, when Apple took that action?
HEATHER WHITE: To have Apple take that step initially was very satisfying and I applaud them for it and I urged them to extend the ban to all of their subcontractors as well. Because two thirds of the production of the smart phones and the iPads in China are made by their subcontractors who are not subject to any of their supplier responsibility clauses and their oversight.
FRIDAY APALISKI: though I think of myself as like a go green warrior, like when I come to watch a film like this, I don't have the same context that she has. So, I appreciate it being kind of dumbed down, if you will, for me. And I think that her narration and her description afterwards was really critical to my understanding of the film. Music was definitely the theme I think of the last couple of weeks and it was kind of great to see how it pulls you into things and brings your emotions up. Perfect tee up for our next film, which is “Symphony for Nature.”
CLIP FROM “SYMPHONY FOR NATURE”: That piece is called natural history. And so much of the piece really is actually about nature and it's about our relationship to the natural world. And in a way that I didn't realize it would be quite as philosophical. And I think it starts with the tribe because their relationship to nature and their way of celebrating nature through music is so deeply spiritual for them. Because Crater Lake is in our aboriginal territories, the Klamath tribes was asked to be a part of this celebration for the centennial. We don't go up there very often because it is a spiritual place and we're told by our elders and it's not a place to go and mess around that. It's a place to come for ceremony or power or if you need something.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It was a symphony for nature.
FRIDAY APALISKI: And kind of nature and in nature. It was great.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Have you been to Crater Lake?
FRIDAY APALISKI: I have not.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Oh my God. You have to go.
FRIDAY APALISKI: The visuals were amazing, and I really liked in this film had they put together not just the current visuals of the lake, but also these
pioneers.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Incredible.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Totally incredible.
JARED BLUMENFELD: The guy with 200 pounds of photo equipment.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Oh my God.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Who waited three days in the rain with his son to take the first picture in like 1874 is incredible.
FRIDAY APALISKI: But because of him, that's why we have it a national park now.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I love the drumming and the way that they infuse like they had corals thing is, and then they had the Klamath tribes drumming and then they had like trumpets and all kinds of sounds and that and then filming that and the lake and being on the lake. It was just stunning. And it's really an atmospheric piece.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Absolutely.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, we sat down with the director.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Anne Flatté.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And she was very cool. Let's listen to what she has to say.
ANNE FLATTÉ: I always say the star of the film is Crater Lake. And the story that we follow is about this amazing concert at the edge of the lake that took place that brought together classical musicians and drummers from the Klamath tribes as well as other community musicians and choir. And it all came together because the Brit Music and Arts Festival wanted to do something in honor of the centennial of the National Park Service. And they commissioned Michael Gordon, who is a composer from New York, to write a piece in honor of the lake that would be inspired by the lake and be performed at the edge of the lake. And when I heard that there was going to be a concert at the edge of a spectacular natural wonder, I thought this was a great opportunity to make a film that expresses some of the ideas that we'd been working with for many years. I wanted to show Crater Lake, not just now, but also convey the timelessness of the place and also the, the human interaction with Crater Lake over thousands of years. My hope is that the audience, the way that the film is made, that they will connect with their own meaning about what nature means to them. And, contemplate that.
JARED BLUMENFELD: How did that adventure or time of being on the lake influence how you made the film?
ANNE FLATTÉ: The music itself is an attempt to convey the symphony of Crater Lake, as Michael Gordon says, it's happening all the time and we're just adding our voices to it.
JARED BLUMENFELD: For me, the music is the bridge between us and nature.
ANNE FLATTÉ: It tries to create space to allow you to watch these people, you know, doing their creative endeavor. In this, in this place, in honor of the lake, and then to allow a space for silence or other natural sounds of the lake.
FRIDAY APALISKI: And last but not least, “The Point of No Return.”
CIP FROM “POINT OF NO RETURN”: First sunrise over a sea of clouds. That's the sunrise I would remember all my life. Energy management, being as energy efficient as possible during the night to reach the next sunrise and continue. That's a beautiful metaphor of how we have to behave with energy and nature if we want to survive on this planet. Andre would take all the risks. Me, from the engineering, we want to reduce as much as we can to make his life safe, but he is a risky guy.
Now we have passed the 21st of June and it's going to be worse and worse in terms of energy. We are not on the safe side if we wait. All of us were very lucky to have the pilot back, but when this decision came up that Andre Bertram would continue to hurt us in the soul that somebody decided against us.
It was fully in opposition to Andre and PEPCO. Andre is pushing. We always had these discussions and fights. Why do you tend to go beyond limits all the time? Engineers try to set reasonable limits that you survive and you, your target is always to sort of prove us that we set the limits too narrow.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I loved this movie.
FRIDAY APALISKI: I did too.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It was uplifting.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Yes. Literally.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, it's this journey of these, this whole team, right?
FRIDAY APALISKI: Oh my gosh, can we just have a moment for how many people were working on this team?
JARED BLUMENFELD: Incredible. It was like the moon mission. They had their whole operations base in an old places. And like, it wasn't Cape Canaveral, it was Monaco. They build this plane, it was the first solar powered plane called impulse Solar Impulse. So, it has the wingspan of a jumbo jet and the weight of a car, a passenger car.
FRIDAY APALISKI: I mean, they literally have to hold it down. The people do. I mean it is very Wright Brothers like, just totally incredible feat of engineering.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And they couldn't fly if it was windy, if there are cumulus clouds, if you know, 500 different things.
FRIDAY APALISKI: It was a Cinderella airplane.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It was an adventure though, because there's real risk, right, so the name of the movie is based after this point of no return when they're going out over the Pacific, which is the longest flight and they kept having all these issues and I don't know, I found the back and forth between the engineers and the adventurers and the pilots really fun.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Oh, totally fun. I mean, one of the best parts about this film is that it has a real like traditional story arc, right? There's the beginning and the problem and then they get to this climax where they're really frustrated with each other and then you know, then you come down to the
resolution which made it really easy to watch it.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And actual, real drama.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Totally.
JARED BLUMENFELD: We got to sit down with Bertrand Piccard, whose father was an explorer.
FRIDAY APALISKI: A long history of family exploration.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And his grandfather was an explorer and his grandfather's brother was Captain Piccard. That's how they named the Star Trek, Piccard. Here he is.
BERTRAND PICCARD: When I was a child, I was very much inspired by, of course, my grandfather, who was the first man in the stratosphere, and my father, who made the first dive to the marina trench, the deepest spot on earth, but also by all the astronauts that I met, thanks to my father. I was living close to Cape Kennedy during the Apollo Space missions. So, I met people who just showed me how interesting life can be if we explore it, if we get out of our habits, out of our certitudes, out of our comfort zone. And they really gave me the wish to be an explorer. So, what happened is that afterward I started to have like, like a capacity in the head with a needle showing the unknown instead of showing the north, showing everything that has not yet been done. So each time that it was a new opportunity of something completely impossible, I was thinking, let's make it possible.
JARED BLUMENFELD: How did you maintain kind of the goal and the focus to, to actually get it done? Something that no one had ever done before?
BERTRAND PICCARD: I think it's the purpose. When you know why you are wanting to do it, then it gives you the energy to reach it. If it's only for beating world records, I don't think it's enough. If you want to spread the message, you want to show people that the impossible is possible, that you can protect the environment with new technologies, that we can fly around the world with the forces of nature.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Bertrand, in the movie, it looks like being in the air was much more fun than being on the ground.
BERTRAND PICCARD: It was much more difficult on the ground preparing the mission than in the air. In the air, it was paradise. It was fantastic. It was a fairytale. But on the ground, there was so many problems and crises that I had to remind myself that if it was easy, somebody else would have done it before. It was fantastic to live up there and just to be like on the magic carpet, having the impression that you don't move, but that the rest of the world is moving below you. And going always straight ahead. And sometimes the wind was pushing us too far to the south. So we had to change altitude, adapt to keep the good wind and a good direction. And getting back to the place where we started.
JARED BLUMENFELD: How do you encourage people to think about adventure in their lives?
BERTRAND PICCARD: To observe, which is the paradigm, it means to believe, the certitude that prevents us from reaching our dreams, reaching our goals. And give you an example, for Solar Impulse, the world of aviation thought it was impossible because the wings had to be too big and nobody had built a plane that was doing span of a jumbo jet for the weight of a car. So we turned to someone who did not know it was impossible. It was a shipyard and the shipyard build the plane with carbon fiber that was light enough. And now you have a lot of people in the world of aviation who are starting to use carbon fiber for their own construction of airplanes. But in the beginning it was considered to be impossible. So Solar Impulse opened a way by changing a paradigm.
JARED BLUMENFELD: You're a very unique person and have a very unique perspective on the planet, and you were in the atmosphere for a very long time seeing the entire globe. How did it change your view of the planet?
BERTRAND PICCARD: What changed my life was the psychological understanding that you have to speak the language of the people you want to convince. So, if I was coming back from these adventures saying the earth is beautiful, we have to protect it, it's not enough. This message is not enough to convince politicians and industrial people and finance people to change. No, you have to speak their language.
JARED BLUMENFELD: The weight of a plane above an ocean, powered by the sun. What did it feel like?
BERTRAND PICCARD: I felt like being pushed into the future. Like in a science fiction movie. I was thinking I'm in the future, and then I realized that not at all, I was only in the present and in what would the technologies of today allow us to do today? And then I realized how much the rest of the world is in the past. The rest of the world is in the past. We're still using devices and systems and so-called technologies that were invented in 1880, in the beginning, beginning of the old era, the combustion engine, the badly insulated houses, the incandescent light bulbs, production and distribution and consumption of energy. All this is outdated, so we need to be as demanding for energy systems as we are with the latest APP on a smartphone.
JARED BLUMENFELD: We all lead such rushed lives, but even though you are racing, you still managed to do it much slower than a regular plane.
BERTRAND PICCARD: Yes. You know, I felt like I was really at the beginning of something new because Solar Impulse was flying at the same speed as the Wright Brothers Flyer in 1903. And there was also a single pilot, no passengers, only flying in good weather, and I was thinking we have a complete to complete cycle with aviation from the Wright brothers going to the moon, flying supersonic, flying 500 people across the world with the
commercial airplanes. Now we're starting a new cycle. No fuel, no pollution.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I felt so pained compared to these guys. They're just like, they had this vision, if they were going push it, they can get there.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Right. I went back and forth in my head about thinking like, oh my gosh, these guys and they're giant egos. Right? And they're like trying to push this thing forward and they're totally reckless and on the other hand I'm like, yeah, but that's kind of the only way that things get done. I kind of love that. They wear their emotions on their sleeves too. You can see every bit of this, which is I think something that, you know, if these were an American team, you might not see that same way.
JARED BLUMENFELD: No, like the, the head of mission control is a young, I guess German guy. He looked like 25 or something and about five or six times in the movie he's crying for different reasons either because joy or mainly frustration with the two pilots.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Right?
JARED BLUMENFELD: Like, we're not going to take off yet again.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Right.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It was amazing.
FRIDAY APALISKI: You'd never see that.
JARED BLUMENFELD: No.
FRIDAY APALISKI: You would never said that. They said right at the end, was how everybody had to do their thing and that this was his thing to build this and do this journey, but that we all have to do something when it comes to this idea of climate change, this necessity and that some people do it in art and some people do it in films and some people do it in music and some people do it in science and this is how he's doing it, but we all have to do something. And I just felt like that was kind of the perfect wrap on this “bananas” two weeks we've had.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Absolutely. Every movie that we saw expanded my horizons, made me feel like either I wanted to go to that place or in the case of China, I never wanted to go there.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Everybody has to do something and even if it's just watching a film that's going to change your action. So, if watching a film helps make you change, then that's a big act. It's an important one.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Thanks so much.
FRIDAY APALISKI: Oh my gosh, this is so good to have a partner in crime here because otherwise, you know, I spin myself out of control.
JARED BLUMENFELD: That's not always a bad thing. Thanks to Friday Apaliski, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Marcy Gilbert, Elizabeth Castle, Anne Flatté, Bertrand Piccard, Rachel Kaplan who runs the San Francisco Green Film Festival, and Sarah Flores, who helped me meet with all the directors. It was a real adventure delving into the world of Environmental Cinema. The movies all took years to make and involved bringing communities of creative people together to bring the vision to the screen. My horizons were stretched, and I traveled on an emotional and visual rollercoaster with Warrior Women, Complicit, Symphony for Nature, and Point of No Return. I can't wait for next year's festival. Next week, I examine plastic microfiber pollution, which is being found in lakes and in more than 80 percent of drinking water around the world. In order to continue to make the show viable, we need to reach 50,000 weekly listeners. If you could recommend Podship Earth to just one or two of your friends or family, that would be amazing. Thank you so much for being part of the Podship Earth journey. From the entire Podship Earth crew, sound engineer Rob Spate, producer Nancy Ferranti, executive producer David Kahn, and this week's cohost, Friday Apaliski, and me, Jared Blumenfeld, have a fabulous week and try and watch one of the movies that we reviewed in this week’s show because they were amazing.