The Sustainability Series hosted at The Athena Cinema educates and provides awareness for environmental issues and solutions through the screenings of six documentaries.
Daniel Telek, a junior studying English, has always been invested in sustainability and environmental issues.
“It’s really important because I don’t think we are very cognizant of what we are doing to the planet because it almost seems like environmentalism is a politicized issue,” Telek said. “But really it’s kind of like it’s an issue of whether we survive as a species or as a collective life form.”
For some students, environmental sustainability is not at the forefront of their worries, but Telek said it should be now more than ever.
The Spring Sustainability Series at The Athena Cinema, 20 S. Court St., allows students, faculty and Athens residents to gain awareness of the issue through documentaries focusing on topics such as the environment and sustainability. Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic will be screened Wednesday.
“The environment is a really important aspect of the learning process for students. It’s closely related to economic development and economics issues, social justice issues,” Loraine McCosker, common outreach coordinator for sustainability, said. “We really believe that this kind of education does not have to happen in the classroom. It shouldn’t only be restricted to science, or sociology majors or … geography.”
The series screens six films during Spring Semester on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. and offers a discussion panel afterward, which includes a faculty member, a student and an Athens resident and allows the audience to participate, McCosker said.
Telek believes that students should be proactive in their awareness and prevention of harm to the environment because they are going to be the ones that have to live in whatever future it may hold.
“People who we listen to speak about climate are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and they’re going to be dead in like 20 years, 30 years,” Telek said. “Then we’ll be their age and we’ll be wondering why we didn’t do anything about it in the last 20 or 30 years and we’ll be thinking, ‘We could have been doing something this whole time, but instead we were not, we were just told that climate change is a made up thing.’ ”
One of the films that Telek said he is looking forward to in the series is called Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective, which will be screened on March 9. The film is about permaculture farming in rural, suburban and urban areas throughout the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States.
Admission to all of these films is free and is hosted by the Common Experience Project.
The first film shown, This Changes Everything, had a total of 184 attendees and the attendance has significantly increased since the formation of the Sustainability Series in 2013, McCosker said.
“I think (the films are) significant to any area, but for the Ohio University campus, it’s just another teaching and learning tool about sustainability and the environment,” McCosker said.
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Telek said he thinks that a local community, such as Athens, can gradually influence the surrounding communities and eventually the world if it is invested enough.
“That kind of stuff starts here, it starts locally, it starts in your community and once in the community it builds up,” he said. “It can affect more people, it’s just you have to kind of be like a virus essentially.”
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