Our online lives leave invisible footprints. Every email, photo upload, and streamed episode consumes electricity somewhere in a server farm — electricity often generated by fossil fuels. The good news? You can shrink your digital carbon footprint without giving up technology. By making mindful changes at home and at work, you’ll use devices, data, and energy more efficiently.
Digital habits feel invisible, but they carry real environmental weight. Every streamed video, stored file, and unused device quietly draws energy from data centers, power grids, and manufacturing supply chains. The good news is that small, deliberate changes at home and at work can measurably reduce your carbon footprint without sacrificing convenience or productivity. What follows is a practical path from awareness to action.
Good evening. Happy Earth Day! On behalf of our Board of Directors, staff, and festival planning team, I want to welcome you to the 15th annual One Earth Film Festival Opening Night Screening & Reception!
Tonight, we join “all together now” as GenerationWe.
We do this in the face of our climate crisis, when more and more folks are – and will be endangered; I use this term intentionally, to refer to the current administration’s recent repeal of the Endangerment Finding, an important 2009 EPA determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
We come together as GenWe also in the spirit of hope and determination that was embodied by pioneering conservationist, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and hero-in-our-times, Dr. Jane Goodall, who passed just last fall.
As we stand all together now, I invite us to – ourselves – embody 3 things:
Embodying the notion that the voices, experiences, and solutions of the most vulnerable among us must be centered – this especially means young people, and those who will feel (are already feeling) climate change’s impacts most disproportionately
Embodying the understanding that seeing our way to a more just, resilient planet will take different modalities – not only science and facts and research and data (all very important), but also stories and creativity and connections and reflection and compassion and community
Embodying the resolve to enable the kinds of cultural and mindset shifts that are required to practice and bring about new worlds. As author Arundhati Roy wrote: Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
So, as you hang onto your cocktail cups, in all of your patience (thank you!) I would like to invoke Dr. Jane Goodall’s own words as we make an interactive, collective toast. She said: “Hope is (not) simply passive wishful thinking; real hope . . .requires action and engagement.” So please turn to someone next to you, preferably someone you do not already know, and complete this sentence: I toast to . . . then complete the sentence with an action you want to take on environmental issues. Let’s take a minute to do that. I toast to . . . (Call everyone back.) Wonderful! Now let’s wrap up all of that action + engagement, raise our glasses, and toast to HOPE!
Film Poster for Whose Water? & Kate Levy
Water is life, but who controls it? Who gets access? And who is left behind? Whose Water? takes audiences inside frontline communities across the U.S. fighting for safe affordable water and exposes the systems that determine who has the power, and who doesn’t.
One Earth (OE): Water access is becoming one of the defining environmental issues of our time. What motivated you to explore this story in Whose Water?
Kate Levy (KL): In 2014, I began working with Flint activists to help expose high levels of lead in their water… residents were being labeled as pariahs. At the same time, I was documenting mass water shutoffs in Detroit. A few years later, advocates working toward federal legislation for the human right to water asked me to help tell stories from across the country. Because I had been documenting water issues alongside activists, I was able to explore how these crises are part of a larger system.
OE: How does Whose Water? reveal the intersection of environmental justice, community rights, and water policy?
KL: When the state displaced Flint’s locally elected officials and switched to a corrosive water source to cut costs, it showed how deeply water systems are tied to democratic power. That became the lens for the film: a community’s ability to govern itself is directly connected to its access to water. You see this play out in every location we visit. If you live in a city, ask: does your community have a water affordability program? If not, who’s working on it? In rural areas, look into who is protecting groundwater from pollution or industrial expansion. Across the country, communities are organizing through testing, legal action, and grassroots advocacy.
James Parker
One Earth(OE): What inspired the story behind In Our Nature?
James Parker(JP): This film journey began about a year and a half ago, when my co-producer Juliet Grable and I started paying attention to two trends we found hard to ignore. First, that kids were spending upwards of seven hours a day on screens - in some cases much more - and less than five minutes outside. And second, that nature and environmental education were increasingly being pulled into partisan debates.
That led us to a bigger question: what does the future look like if those trends continue? What happens in five, ten, fifty years if children are less connected to nature and, in turn, less connected to each other and to the systems that support life?
That question set us on an inquiry to better understand environmental education across the country and how different communities are working to expand access to it. What we found, pretty quickly, was something hopeful. That nature, and especially environmental education, can be one of our most powerful bridge builders and forces for community.
Yes, parts of this work intersect with complicated and sometimes polarized issues. But it’s also one of the few tools we have left that consistently brings people into shared space, shared understanding, and a shared sense of responsibility.
OE:How does the film show the relationship between people and the ecosystems they live in?
JP: One thing the film tries to do is move away from the idea that nature is something separate from us - or that it only looks a certain way, or is meant for a certain kind of person.
Instead, the film shows how closely tied our well-being is to the environments we’re part of, whether that’s in cities, rural communities, or somewhere in between. You see it in how access to nature impacts mental health, education, and opportunity. But you also see it in more personal ways, like how being outside can create space for reflection, for healing, and for connection. And what becomes clear is that this relationship is reciprocal. When people feel more connected to the places they live, they tend to care for them differently. That’s really where environmental education comes in - it helps build that connection, and with it, a deeper sense of responsibility.
OE: What does the concept of GenWe(intergenerational community working together) mean in the context of restoring nature?
JP: The environmental and social challenges we face are long-term and span generations. So restoring nature isn’t just about a single effort or a single group. It’s about creating spaces where knowledge, experience, and perspective can be shared across generations. Especially at a time when algorithms can sometimes get in the way of that kind of knowledge transfer and connection. Ultimately, restoring nature is also about restoring relationships - between people, between generations, and between people and the natural world.
