Heidi Beagley
Fall 2015
General Psychology, Professor Ingle
This Changes Everything
“What can one person do?” Germaine Anderson, a member of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, asks as she sits across from Crystal Lameman. This question is so powerful and sums up the film, and some of the psychology behind the devastation that is climate change. As Crystal begs her to keep fighting for the earth, the reality that one person can help lead change feels…powerful? Hopeful? Lonely? Years of denial and complacency have landed us where we are currently. As a society we have allowed our addiction to comfort and money, well more the things that money can buy, drive us. We live our day to day lives with no thought of the future and only stop to think about the devastation our lives are causing when the air becomes so filthy that it lingers on us even when we are indoors. So how do we trade our addiction to capitalism for an addiction to clean, sustainable living? This film addressed that well.
I love how the film highlights the “commodity colonies” as one person put it, and addresses the fact that we are basically willing to sacrifice the land of the few for the wants of the many. It seems like the ignorance around climate change is a bad habit, it’s almost like America’s got a heroin addiction that she can’t quit. She doesn’t care that she’s hurting people who love her, over and over again. America is a drug addict on a runaway train to that next big score, only instead of heroin, its oil and it doesn’t matter who stands in the way, America will get her next fix. But a few people are working to educate the many and finding ways to make them listen.
Vanessa Braidedhair really inspired me through this film. I admire the way the Cheyenne Nation is working to make life sustainable. I love their ideology that everything follows the sun. I love the idea that renewable energy is our way back to a better relationship with the earth. “You take what you need and then you put back into the land. What in the end will save this place in not the hatred of the coal companies or anger, but love will save this place.” Vanessa put it so well. We need to get passed our hatred, move beyond the labels we put on each other of liberal, conservative, left, right and just get down to a solution. We need to care about our future, and our planets future, enough to treat the earth as our equal. We have the ability and the resources at our hands, we just need to take a stand the way the people of Greece and India did in the film and use that as inspiration.
The idea that Earth is a machine and we are the levers needs to be revised. The film talks about humans dominating the Earth rather than treating it as our equal. When we start to treat the Earth as our equal we will be rewarded many times over, if we ignore our deepest thoughts and the truth that we know is there, if we focus simply on that next score, we will regret it deeply and our future generations will have to attempt to overcome what I fear will be an insurmountable task of reversing 400 years of addiction to progress in the wrong direction. So what can one person do? One person can make a film to speak to the mainstream public. One person can educate the world and the world can choose to make a difference.