Fighting climate angst with agency at the Eugene Environmental Film Festival

The Eugene Environmental Film Festival kicked off this week not with a glitzy cocktail party, but rather a group cleanup of the D Street Boat Ramp in Springfield off the Willamette River.

The seven-day festival, which starts Oct. 13 and runs through Oct. 19, pairs film lineups with Days of Action, partnerships with local nonprofits to get festival attendees out into the world doing something actionable, be it a trash cleanup, a field trip or a petition-signing campaign. 

While this year’s festival is a week long, a typical EEFF runs for 10 days. (Next year’s festival is expected to be 10 days again.) The organizers say a dedicated stretch of time is an opportunity to kick-start people’s involvement in the causes around them. 

“Ten days is half the time it takes to build a habit, a new neural network,” festival co-founder Ana McAbee said. “We’re giving people these really easy access opportunities to be about a better way. Even if it’s a tiny little change that they’re able to make, it makes them feel better. The ripple effect of these little choices is trying to create opportunities for the little choices to become ways of being.”

McAbee founded the festival in 2017 after moving to Eugene four years earlier. McAbee was in graduate school at Pacific University to become a licensed clinical social worker, now her day job. She worked with a professor, Michele Eggers, who had been toying with the idea of using social work for something more community-oriented instead of a direct patient-practitioner relationship.

Programming actionable work during the festival, she said, is an effort to build more direct relationships between people who care about environmental causes and people who are doing concrete work to change things.

“If you were to go and hold a sign-out and ask for signatures for a petition for any particular environmental bill, I guarantee that you would have success with signatures,” McAbee said. “If you were to go around and ask people to go on a field trip on that same initiative because we need boots on the ground, it would be a lot less successful.”

Programming beyond the climate crisis

Eight years after the festival’s early organizing days, the lineup offers a variety of approaches to talking about the environment.

There are straightforward documentaries that are what you’d expect from an ecology-focused festival, like “A Dream of the Earth,” about a coastal Hawaiian group trying to build a sustainable farm community, or “Salmon Restoration on Penobscot River,” about, well, restoring salmon populations on Maine’s Penobscot River. 

Some films are Oregon based, like “Guardians of the Waters,” about the Chinook Indian Nation working to restore the Necanicum watershed from Oregon-based filmmaker Amiran White, or “Accessible, Inclusive Travel on the Oregon Coast,” a short documentary about wheelchair-friendly beaches and accessible hiking trails.

There are personal stories, like a rock climber reflecting on his climbing in the North Cascades in “One Inch From Flying,” or a father talking to his son about what “forever” looks like in an ecologically threatened world in “A Little Story About Forever.”

Films for children also feature heavily, including the needle-felted stop-motion animated “Five Little Frogs” and the 2D-animated “Kāinga Tupu (Homeland),” a Maori-language film about the New Zealand’s endangered forest parrot, the kākāpō. 

McAbee said she’s been to other environmental-specific film festivals that were focused on wildlife or strictly on sustainability and climate change. But she felt that because peoples’ relationship to the environment is so holistic, including on a spiritual level, or about relationships to nature outside of crisis, the festival required a more rounded approach in programming beyond documentary work. 

She pointed to one film shot in southern Oregon, “The Motherground,” about a woman stuck in traffic as her daughter scrolls through social media. The woman then finds herself reconnecting with the earth through improvisational dancing in nature.

“That, to me, relates just as much as this film on sorting trash in one of the countries in Africa that we’re going to screen before the waste management panel,” McAbee said. 

How to ‘be about it’

As a social worker and therapist, McAbee said she’s dealt with patient anxiety about climate change frequently. The most helpful thing, she said, is to “be about it,” filling the gap between interest and action. The festival’s action-focused events are to “spoon-feed” people those opportunities, to feel a little less helpless in the face of an existential issue. 

The days of action include a field trip to Elijah Bristow State Park for a walkthrough to learn about local flora and fauna as well as restoration efforts, a trip to Bulk Handling Systems to see advanced recycling machinery, a guided walk on Goodman Creek Trail, a conversation with Elakha Alliance on its work restoring coastal Oregon otter populations, a song workshop, a group tree walk and more. 

She knows that these smaller community efforts aren’t going to impact global change. (“I don’t think one person picking up a piece of garbage at the river is going to solve floods in Mozambique,” she said. “I’m 100% aware.”) 

But she said that empowering people to process their feelings around the environment through some form of direct action, even as small as not getting plastic straws or not supporting companies involved in lithium mining, can help people feel less misery around climate issues. 

“I think for me, it feels really f—ing depressing to be knowing about all of these horrific environmental issues with no follow-through, with no plan, and then you just go home and you know about it,” she said. “That’s not the point to me.”