"Looks like Madison was ready to have an environmental film festival," declares Gregg Mitman to an overflowing crowd at the Orpheum Theatre on Friday night. The entire lower level of the auditorium is filled for the kickoff of Tales from Planet Earth, a free showcase of nearly two dozen movies that tell stories about the environment and how humanity interacts with and depicts our shared world. In fact, hundreds of people stand outside in a line running down State Street, waiting for a chance to get in for a talk by writer , a documentary about the political battle over global warming.
The festival is the inaugural public project by the Mitman is followed at the podium by Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. "It's moments like this that I am so proud to be mayor of Madison," he says, noting that this event unites the environmental movement and film, both prominent in the city's cultural and political life. He in turn introduces UW history professor Bill Cronon, who welcomes the night's keynote speaker, Bill McKibben, the Vermont-based author who introduced climate change to the public and political vernacular in the late '80s and has since remained busy as a writer and activist focusing on this issue. As evidenced the crowd at the Orpheum, global warming is drawing increasing interest. Both the increasing attention to and tempo of weather-related disasters affecting American cities -- from Katrina two year ago to this autumn's California wildfires and drought in the Southeast -- as well as the undeniable role fossil fuels play in U.S. foreign policy are making climate change an increasingly major political issue. And just in time explains McKibben. Urgency is the tone underscoring the entire speech. Major environmental changes are "much bigger and coming at us much faster" than originally forecast, says McKibben, noting how this summer's rate of Arctic ice melt blew away that of 2005, previously the lowest level since the cap's size has been recorded. Or for that matter, there's the increasing focus on the fate of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is increasingly calving icebergs and birthing melt ponds, a potential major source of meltwater to the global sea level. Befitting his early warnings in the late '80s, McKibben discusses the two decade long political struggle over climate change, and the growing recent acceptance of it as a serious challenge faced by governments, corporations, and NGOs around the world."If we started 20 years ago when we first learned of this problem, there was room for politics as usual that we usually take on," he says. "We no longer have that freedom, we waited too long and now we have to act." McKibben also focuses on the Turning away from the direct issue of climate change and the political battle that surrounds it, McKibben closes with the concept of community. Cheap energy, he says, "has eroded community in ways we're only beginning to understand." This makes a popular movement to address the problem more difficult, he continues, but like global warming itself something that can pick up steam if enough people get things rolling. The thing is, McKibben concludes, there is no longer any luxury of time. As the environmental author is speaking, there are more than two hundred people waiting in the cool evening air on State Street hoping to attend the event. They ultimately miss McKibben, but the doors opened again and this new round of people is directed to sit in the previously closed balcony. The balance of the festival kickoff is dominated by two screenings. The first is a series of eight Wisconsin-themed short films created by UW students enrolled in one of a pair of new classes combining film and environmentalism offered through the center. Called trailers, all are very brief and mostly focus on the agricultural heritage and lifestyle of rural Wisconsin, focusing on dairy cows, turkeys, invasive weeds, and the fish fry as well as bicycling and the not-so-humble badger. The night closes with a screening of artist in residence with the UW-Madison Arts Institute, a primary sponsor of the festival (along with Isthmus, among others). A 60-minute version of the film is also screening in some 100 cities around the nation the same evening as part of Step It Up. Helfand hosts a Q&A session following the screening, which not only kicks off Tales from Planet Earth but is also a prelude to a Step It Up demonstration at the UW coal plant on Charter Street. "Over 100 people rallied outside of this ugly little eye sore of a coal plant, conveniently located in the heart of the University campus," writes Maia Donohue in a report on the Saturday afternoon rally. "People wrote a whole lot of postcards to the board of regents, the Chancellor, and the Governor, urging them to take action." Tom Yoshikami, who stepped down as the UW Cinematheque programmer over the summer and helped organize Tales from Planet Earth, estimates that at least 1100 people attended the Friday night kickoff. "We didn't expect anything near that amount," he says. Mitman is similarly impressed by the turnout. "It's just phenomenal," he says. "We have seen a great resurgence of interest in the environment, particularly around the issues of energy and global warming, and particularly among young people. It's encouraging to se the amount of enthusiasm. I think people are hungry to find stories that can inspire us to action rather than just lead us down a path of despair. I think film can do that."
