Sunday, June 12, 2011

Ecofilming - environmental advocacy

While tidying up the house, I found this old book in one of the old cupboards. whose book was it? It is mine now.

When I first saw it the title just leaped out at me because I used to teach a course called by the same name, "man and environment", at the university, but we used different textbooks. This one is much older and so it interests me in a "historical" kind of way. It consists of mostly words and this copy was published by Penguin in 1973. Almost as old as me!

Quickly I flipped through it (as I would normally do with any book I just come across). In this book, there are several supplements and one in particular is interesting - "Films and the environment". I need to share it with my friend Yasmin (founder & president of Ecoknights.org) who in 2008 organized, what is perhaps, the first environmentally-themed film festival in Malaysia. Below I share with you an excerpt:

"Film can inform people in an entertaining and dramatic way about the realities of the physical world. It can help us to understand and to respond to natural processes and the rhythm of the seasons and to appreciate the primitive drives and instincts which man has inherited but which now need to be set within our cultural environment..."