Spotlight: Top Sustainability Documentaries

The must-watch environment documentaries

Whether you are looking for a way to procrastinate, something to watch on a Friday night or to further educate yourself on global sustainability issues from a variety of perspectives, consider watching one of these eye-opening documentaries for your next movie night.

What is your favourite documentary on sustainability?

• Our Land: Solution to Pollution
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Education for a Sustainable Future?
• Perma Kultcha
• After Winter, Spring
• Atomic Africa: Clean Energy's Dirty Secrets

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Our Land: Solution to Pollution (2012-Present)

This ongoing documentary series of short films aims to celebrate and interpret intervention, both by individuals and communities, to shift the food and farm economy in America.  The episodes are quick and informative and each one addresses a major issue of the “old food economy”. Issues such as toxicity, monoculture, monopoly, inequity, exploitation, drought, vulnerability to climate change etc. are tackled and explained to educate audiences no matter what their prior knowledge of sustainability is.

 

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

 

Director Davis Guggenheim created this documentary in 2006 to shed light on former United States Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to educate and inspire American citizens to take and interest and be more proactive about global warming and climate change.  The documentary has generated worldwide attention and has generated tremendous environmental movement as well as debate in the United States. It has been also credited with initiating activism within a variety of demographics, age groups and cultures across America, such as the Inconvenient Youth, a teenage activist group initiative that was launched in 2010.

Education For a Sustainable Future (2012)

Education For a Sustainable Future shows how current practices in schools are becoming increasingly unsustainable. By analyzing a more socially and sustainably relevant curriculum for students, this film demonstrates how we can all make a different to be more sustainable in our own lives. The film is free to watch online, which reinforces its mantra that knowledge should be made available to everyone and that an education in sustainability is essential for our future.

 

Perma Kultcha (2010)

This quick, 30-minute documentary focuses on Permaculture and Organic Farming in South Africa and it’s ability to transform society, and that one person truly can make a difference. Initially conceived from a grass roots level, this movement propelled and shows how it was able to successfully impact and create long lasting sustainable changes in the of lives of individuals, and communities and South Africa as a whole. The documentary aims to educate the youth of South Africa to be take a more inspiring as well as proactive stance on the crucial importance of food security and introduces an all encompassing approach to utilize natural resources.

AFTER WINTER, SPRING (2013)

In today’s fast-paced economy, the rapid expansion of mega-farms, suburban landscapes and new European Union rules and reductions of agricultural subsidies are creating tension within the industry. As a result, the farmers in the Périgord region of southwest France are forced to deal with challenges that compromise the very livelihood of their small family-run farms. From the director’s own person perspective as well as the farmers, this poignant film explores farming life and how it is dramatically changed over the last 60 years. A humanistic approach is shown and is emphasized, specifically when discussing and debating how the next few decades will continue to deliver a dramatic shift within the farming industry.

ATOMIC AFRICA: CLEAN ENERGY’S DIRTY SECRETS (2013)

This documentary provides an alarming investigation into the nuclear industry and its actions in Africa. By examining its power needs and the consequences of using nuclear energy, it shows how Africa’s development is stagnant due to poor infrastructure and undersized power plants in relation to consumption needs. With the example of Uganda, that can produce only a quarter of the energy needed, this film shows how this leads to daily power cuts and in turn results in negative impacts on growth, infrastructure as well as the economy. It also sheds light on the potential solutions and what is actually viable from country to country. New nuclear power plants will be not only costly, but they will translate into increased uranium mining, a process that contaminates and damages the environment as well as local populations.