It’s an uphill battle getting the world to take notice of your cause. What happens to those with causes that are time sensitive, or those backing pressing issues, the realities of which haven’t necessarily made it into the forefront of mainstream political-economic dialogue?
Matt Briggs is on that side of things but has chosen to project his own voice and cause through his documentary film “Deep Green,” which will be screened at the Hult Center in conjunction with a post-screening talk.
Briggs, a University graduate, is a mycologist — a biologist who studies fungi — living in Portland. After retrofitting his house in 2007 to make it more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, he went about making a movie depicting just how easy it was to make energy-saving changes in the home.
“This started as a little green building thing of what one person could do in a house,” Briggs said. “You can see where that’s still in there — then it went wider after we went to China and had all this access; then we had to go to Europe to seven countries. We had to make it a big movie.”
After a series of events and chance encounters, what was once a simple in-home tutorial blew up into a full-on environmental documentary covering issues from China across to Europe. Briggs did this in an effort to broaden the scope of the audience and invite everyone, regardless of environmental savvy, into the dialogue.
“You have to match the size of the solution with the size of the problem. Otherwise you’re just fooling yourself,” Briggs said. “You have to figure out a language that can actually change people. Did we want to go more radical and pointed and say what is the best way to go, or did we want to go wide and simplify, simplify, simplify and build bridges and introduce people to the broad concepts?”
Briggs’ interviews of notable individuals in the energy technology industry, journalists and authors, government officials from Oregon, China and several European states all contribute to information-rich portions of the film. But this films explores economically beneficial ways of mending rifts instead of proposing more radical, society-altering solutions that might cut to the core. For instance, Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, comments at one point during the film that:
“The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, a Republican, has put together a plan identifying the richest wind sites in Texas for building transmission lines to link those wind sites with the major cities … there will be enough electricity from wind farms to satisfy 60 percent of the residential needs of the 22 million people living in Texas. And this is in a matter of years — we’re not talking decades.”
The film tends to shy away from partisan confrontation and instead lets people express themselves and their opinions. One portion that exemplifies this is in Briggs’ capturing of citizen attitudes in a small German town as they leave a city hall meeting on the environment. Nearly all the short interviews had the citizens snubbing any changes that might occur in an effort to make their town more sustainable.
At its core, Briggs’ approach is on a local level, and it’s one that he finds most effective and successful.
“So the action is at the city level — a few states — but mostly the city level, and that’s why we’re coming to Eugene, and that’s why we’re concentrating on city-by-city rollout,” Briggs said.
However, in the long run, Briggs understands his desired rejuvenation of our human-nature relations will take more than just being more environmentally savvy or energy efficient. He realizes that it will take a fundamental dismantling of the current system to replace it with a more equitable and ecologically intelligent one.
“Where I’m coming to now is that really this is just a piece of a larger reorganization where we’re going to unplug from all of these monopoly and dangerous systems to us — whether it’s industrial agriculture or a utility system that’s against our will,” Briggs said.
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