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Telling Tales of Complex Connections

On March 24 we hosted the DC Environmental Film Festival to screen two new documentaries, each telling local stories of global trends. SPSS Blog, the weekly blog of the Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy journal, came to the Wilson Center to cover the event.

Policy wonks and academics produce voluminous tomes on sustainability issues, but how to get these before a larger audience? One wonkish think tank hard at work on this problem, the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, is producing a series of short films to tell the stories that move these concerns toward a wider audience. The idea is to take complex, interacting factors and show how they affect real people.

Global Trends, Local Stories, a recent forum in Washington, DC, discussed one such nexus, population, health, and the environment, or PHE, as featured in a trio of short films on the New Security Beat website. These films “tell stories that capture the voice of communities,” explained Roger-Mark De Souza, director of Population, Environmental Security and Resilience for the Woodrow Wilson Center. The films share something with Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg principle” in briefly showing what’s on the surface, implying the vast richness beneath it. In Hemingway’s case this is the emotional life of his characters. In these films, the substrate is an economic, environmental, and social complex that shapes people’s lives in complex ways. The stories are thus a way to begin thinking about a vast underground maze of factors affecting all of our lives, yet focusing on impoverished and stressed regions.

Continue reading over at SPSS Blog.

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Environmental Change and Security Program

The Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) explores the connections between environmental change, health, and population dynamics and their links to conflict, human insecurity, and foreign policy.  Read more