The Greening of Gavin

Eco Documentaries That Changed My World View

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Eco Documentaries - An Inconvenient TruthEco documentary directors and producers want to change the world, or at least their little part of it.  The only trouble is that they must have an audience willing to watch them.

The good news is that I love watching eco documentaries, and many have influenced my thinking.  In fact, I have watched so many of them, that I want to share a few of my favourites that influenced us the most.  I have only posted the trailers of each documentary, but I am sure with a bit of searching you could find the full version on-line, or source the DVD at your local library.

An Inconvenient Truth

This was the doco that blew me away.  It was life changing for me and my family.  It was during this documentary that I had my well-known green epiphany, and vowed that I would no longer be part of the problem, but be part of the solution to tackling climate change.

The End of Suburbia

This doco opened my eyes to the way our suburban living arrangement is heavily dependant on resources that are dwindling, for example oil and natural gas.   It has an US focus, but very relevant to the unsustainable sprawl of suburbia that we have here in Australian cities.

The End of The Line

A good friend (Hi Sim!) recommended this documentary to me in early 2009.  It is about how we are overfishing the oceans.  After I had watched this, I wrote a series of posts about overfishing, and what we can do to prevent the further collapse of our fisheries.  It changed the way I look at fish on my plate, and we now look for sustainable seafood options only.

The Economy of Happiness

This particularly good documentary opened my mind to the effects of mindful consumption and localization as an alternative to the consumer culture and globalisation.  It is very enlightening.

Garbage Warrior

This doco is brilliant. I have met Mike Reynolds who stars in this tale, and he is just like he is in real life. It is a story of his struggle to build sustainable housing in the US, and create a model of architecture that could be followed the world over. Enter the Earth ship!

What Would Jesus Buy?

If you want to have a laugh at today’s consumer culture, then this is the doco for you. I couldn’t stop laughing at some of the antics that Rev Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (a bunch of activists) got up to, just to prove a point. They are on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt). It really makes you think about your consumption habits.

Age of Stupid

What if you could look back at today from a point in the future and ask “why didn’t they do something”. Well this doco does exactly that. I saw this one with friends at the Australian premier held by the Climate Action Network Australia. It was hard-hitting, and made me even more determined to spread the benefits of living a more sustainable lifestyle.

Food Inc.

After watching this, you will never look at food in the same way again, unless you grow your own of course. Shocking, hard-hitting, and eye-opening, this is the documentary that inspired me to get my own chickens, and double my food production here at home. This movie is the one that brought Joel Salatin into the spotlight for his common sense farming methods.

 

Well that is about it. There are a few others, but these eight eco documentaries had the biggest impact upon Kim and me.

We realised that the truth is out there, we just had to open our eyes and see.

Has your world view been influenced by any of these, or can you add another to the list?  I think you can embed video into the comments if you like, or just paste in the YouTube link if you can find it.

Solutions for a Troubled World

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When I wrote about Slavery in Disguise and How We Broke the Debt Cycle, I mentioned that our current economic system works in such a way that it needs growth to survive.  This is not a sustainable system and we are drawing down on our natural resources rapidly, without thought for the future.

That economic growth could be good or bad and it is all counted towards Gross Domestic Product or GDP.  GDP is the economic indicator that economists and governments use to work out if we have growth.  Negative GDP is seen as bad and positive GDP is apparently good.

However, not all is as it seems.  Things like increased weapons production, coal mining, building fossil fuel power plants, more prisons are all counted towards GDP among other things.  So as you can see from my simplistic example, GDP is not a very good indicator of societal health or happiness.

So what about solutions?  Well I found some good examples in video form.

Firstly, The Story of Solutions.  This video was made by the same people who brought us The Story of Stuff, and presented by Annie Leonard.  It talks about a better way of living, without measuring it with GDP and the power of people when they engage for the greater good.


The other is the documentary The Economics of Happiness presented by Helena Norberg-Hodge.  It really opens your eyes to what business as usual, globalisation, and our economic system really provides us.  You can guess that it is not happiness!

Here is the trailer;



It too, is eye opening and inspirational.  If you want to see the full movie you can find it here as an ondemand video http://vimeo.com/ondemand/theeconomicsofhappiness

If you don’t want to fork out for the full doco, you can checkout Helena talking at TED, and get basically the same message.  She urges for a fundamental change in our economy to solve many problems we are now facing.  She has a great message to share.



Hopefully I have given you lots to think about.

Lets change the world for the better.  After all, it is the only one we have.

Slavery In Disguise and How We Broke The Debt Cycle

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Here is a bold statement. I believe that debt equals slavery, in another guise. 

Let me ask you this question. If you had no debt, would you work at the employer you have now?  Would you downshift and work less?  Would you seek to be creative in something you really enjoy regardless of the pay packet?

I don’t know about you, but I would rather choose what I want to do with my day, rather than someone else telling me what to do. If you think that self-employment is the way to break this bond of slavery, then you may be sadly mistaken.

Until you pay off all of your outstanding debt that you borrow to service your company, you are still chained to working until it is paid off.  Debt is a contract that you enter into with a financial institution that you must honour, by law. It is a burden that must be repaid one way or another and are shackled to whomever you owe the debt to.

So, to be truly free, we must become debt free and not owe anything to anyone in the form of loans that bear interest. Therefore, no debt equals freedom, in my mind.

What We Have Done!

To that end, we have been paying down our personal debt as quickly as possible with a view to being free! At the start of our sustainable living journey, we took out a personal loan to pay for the Solar PV system over the term of 4 years. We paid it off in one and a half years! This saved us about $1500 in interest. How did we do it? Well we used the saving achieved on our electricity bills over the term of the loan to pay down extra off the principle. The beauty is that renewable energy is the only investment I know that pays for itself! So now that this debt is paid out, we basically have free electricity. Same goes for the solar hot water which is free for eight months of the year, as does all the cheap, organic food we grow.

With the surplus funds that we gained after paying off this personal loan, we are then paying down our remaining mortgage quickly. We now have about two and a half years to go and the house is ours. We are putting every spare cent we can into this debt reduction.  We do have a credit card, but it is paid off monthly, within the free interest period.

With no other outstanding debt, that will make me a free man! What about other expenses, I hear you say? As I have a military pension that will cover off basic expenses, I will only need a part time job, with the choice being mine alone on what I do and how many hours I work. I am very excited by this notion. We plan to ramp up our Little Green Workshops business and spread the work near and far around Greater Melbourne!  Yay.

Knowing that our frugal lifestyle and low expenses have gone a very long way to achieving this goal, I am so glad I had my green epiphany when I did.

Little did I realise that by reducing consumption I was actually lowering my environmental footprint, and in the process, lowering my craving for debt. With all things being equal, I will be 52’ish when I semi-retire.  Not bad for a born again middle aged hippy!

Economic Woes

However, in our current economic system, if everyone in the world paid off their debt and sought no additional lending, our current economic system would collapse;

“The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn’t have on things he doesn’t need — we’re done for.” – Bill Bonner

Our entire society has a foundation of money = debt, and we rely on growth at all costs to continue funding this lifestyle. I have mentioned before, this is not sustainable in the foreseeable future, and we need Degrowth now. Growth at all costs means having unlimited resources, which is something our planet is not able to provide us with. We live in a finite world that has boundaries and thresholds, many of which we have already crossed to the detriment of other species who co-exist with us on Earth.

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding, economist

Crash Course

For a better understanding of how money is created, check out Chris Martenson’s Crash Course which is free and will give you a better understanding of how our economy works and why it relies on growth at all costs.  The course will take you a bit of time, but it is well worth it.  I refer back to it regularly.

It is partly because of the way our current economic system works, that our world leaders failed to act on climate change at a global level.

This may be because they do not have the courage to change the very system that got us into this mess, as they realise that by curbing growth, the system as it stands, would collapse. Growth at all costs would have to be curtailed and the wealthier citizens of the world would have to stop shopping until they dropped to reduce excessive carbon emissions.

As the current economic reality is that money equals debt and the abundance of cheap oil has kept our economy growing, which is coming to an end, then greenhouse gas reduction is looking like a slim prospect indeed without collapse because we will not be able to afford the actions required.  Either that or a collapse just stops us from polluting anyway.

“We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.” ~ David Suzuki, Elder.

Whilst I will be personally very happy not to have any debt, I still worry that our society is still geared as if we are partying like it is 1999!

No Real Answers
I don’t know the answers to this issue but I do know we are in for a bumpy ride, very quickly, if we don’t change something.  Something like, oh let me think, living within our means.  Sustainable living, if you like.

I believe that the economic issues of the year 2008 was only a small glimpse of what may confront us in the near future as resources deplete (e.g. oil, food, minerals) and growth stops and hits reverse gear.

Do you have any practical solutions to pay off your debt, before the economy tanks?  I think it would help everyone in this community to learn as many tricks and tips as we can!  Comment away.