This weekend I’ve been watching a first edition of the Shift Your World Film Festival online. They are showing 10 films, and some of them you can find for free on Netflix or Amazon.

The idea is to show films that give hope for the future. When we talk about climate change or health issues, it is easy to get overwhelmed and hopeless. That puts us in the state of paralyze and we feel unmotivated to do anything. That is why we need more films with the positive message. And ‘Kiss the Ground’ and ‘Artifishal’ are both that kind of films.

‘Kiss the Ground”, narrated by Woody Harrelson, talks about regeneration. Starting by explaining how the soil works and what to do to keep it healthy, together with dedemonizing of carbon, necessary for the soil, and moving on to the history of pesticides that originated in Nazi Germany and were used in concentration camps. They degradate the soil because they kill not only insects but everything else. So our food has no nutrition and more and more toxic chemicals ends up in it and in our waters. And that causes more and more health issues like cancer or allergies. It also has a negative impact on our environment.

Ok, so far this is all quite depressing. So where is the hope? In regeneration of the soil. It means diversification of plants and animals on our farms. This way we can harvest all year long because when one thing stops growing, the other one starts. And animals move from one place to another, letting the soil to rest and regenerate. That helps with the carbon cycle and local rainfalls. It is all connected and we just need to go back to the natural way of farming. And if we do that, the Earth will change once again into the garden of Eden.

The second film I want to mention here is ‘Artifishal’ about salmon hatcheries and artificial propagation. Here the idea was also simple — because the dams stopped salmon from traveling up the rivers, we started to raise salmon artificially and then returning it into the river. The problem is that whenever we destroy the thin balance in nature, we destroy ecosystems and everything starts to fall apart. So the problem is in our colonial mindset.

The fish from the salmon hatcheries were supposed to assure the high amount of salmon but the opposite followed. The hatchery fish started to endangered the wild population of salmon even though they are weaker and inferior to them. Human raised and fed fish would also sometimes escape to the waters they weren’t supposed to and cause the imbalance. But nobody talked about it because of the politics and money involved. Fortunately people start to understand now that hatcheries don’t work but are harmful.

What we eat has a big impact on our health so more about holistic approach to life next week!