Green Film Festival in Buenos Aires

This weekend the Cinemark movie theatre which is a block away from my apartment in Buenos Aires is hosting the "Green Film Festival" [literally...they don't translate it]. It's an international film festival consisting of ten environmentally-conscious movies.

I love the environment, so I watched all of the trailers and decided I wanted to see the French documentary "Home," and went with three of my friends last night.

The trailer was in English, so I was kind of expecting the movie to be in English with subtitles, although I though it was strange that it was French movie with an English trailer. Turns out, since the whole movie was narrated footage with no actual actors, it was entirely in Spanish. I was able to understand almost everything, but I had to concentrate really hard and hang on every word, and then I would forget what they had said before, and in the end I got the main idea but definitely not every detail.

It was overall a very interesting experience; the cinematography alone was excellent. They used the technique of re-touching the original footage of natural landscapes and city scenes to make the colors more vivid and bring out certain details, so at times it looked almost animated. They really overdid a lot of the colors to emphasize their point, like the color red in scenes that showed land degradation, as if the land was bleeding. The movie talked about all of the problems with resource depletion and overuse, the pollution and resources used in big cities, and in general all of the bad things people are doing to the environment. It was actually rather depressing at times, especially when they flashed depressing statistics on the screen. But of course, at the end they tried to brighten the mood by saying all each individual person needs to do is be environmentally conscious in everyday life, and after the movie everybody got an "Urbana & Orgánica" flyer about different eco-friendly places to shop in Buenos Aires. Nice.

One of the points of the movie was that the vast majority of people in the world live in big coastal cities, and that 20% of the world's population uses 80% of the resources. And that we should all stop consuming resources unnecessarily and buying cars. Which led to this thought process of mine:

I live in Buenos Aires, the biggest city in Argentina, thus I do not have a car. I am just one more person on the Subte, or one more person on the colectivo, every day. My transportation-related carbon impact is almost nothing; the same pollution is generated whether I'm there or not.

There are many people living in poverty in Buenos Aires. The unemployment rate is 21%. One thing all of these unemployed people do (approximately 35,000 of them) is walk the streets of BA at night sorting through trash, looking for recyclables. They're called "cartoneros" and they separate the recyclables and bring them to recycling facilities for a refund; that's how they make money (gracias á mi clase de Tradiciones y Culturas Argentinas para la información).

The people of Buenos Aires don't recycle, but the cartoneros do it for them. It's a strange but functional process. If the people of BA recycled, the cartoneros wouldn't have a way to make money; they'd just be more worthless unemployed people. Thus more people have a way to make money and the city is more eco-friendly because the people with money are not eco-friendly. How oxymoronic.

So what is more eco-friendly: living in a big, polluted, trashy city where public transportation is a part of every person's daily life and everybody rides an Omnibus (long-distance bus) when they want to travel to a different part of the country, or living in a nice, small town where you can ride your bike everywhere if you're motivated, but if it's too cold or just a bit too far you drive in your car, and when you want to go to a different town you road trip in your personal car, or fly in a plane? Obviously the small town is more healthy, if you actually bike most of the time, but the driving is going to happen. And of course, when it comes down to it I choose Bozeman, not Buenos Aires.

Being perfect is just not possible...but I am thankful for the bus to Big Sky for this reason, because that cuts down on the majority of my winter driving, and really it's easy to be eco-friendly in Bozeman because you can bike, walk, or take the free Streamline bus anywhere, and shop at Town & Country or the Co-op.

Basically, I can't wait to go back to Bozeman, but I appreciate Buenos Aires more every day.