About 20 people attended a forum last night where they watched the final installment of the Wasted Energy film series and discussed sustainability.
Wasted Energy, a four part video series put on by Bernhard Debatin, aired at every Wednesday evening in May in Bentley. The movies focused mainly on the idea of renewable energy. The co-sponsors for the series include the Office of Sustainability, the Sierra Club of Athens, Beyond Coal and Service Living, a volunteer organization.
Debatin, an associate professor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, said that he got the inspiration for the film series from his students.
The issue had come up of energy use and wasteful energy use
and also wouldn't it be nice to look at these things from more of a general perspective Debatin said. It's not very often the case that people try to look at things in a more sort of comprehensive way so that was part of the idea to look at these issues in a more comprehensive way.
The fourth movie in the series titled Trashed dealt a more with landfills in the United States and how people should reduce their waste and learn to be more efficient.
Chuck Overby, an engineering professor emeritus at OU, spoke afterward about how he dealt with similar issues while working in Washington, D.C., during the 1970s.
The film relived for me my entire year and a half experience in Washington in 1977 because we dealt with these same issues. We published a big thick volume and it just died. It just died until the next crisis came along Overby said. I hope they become somewhat radicalized by seeing ... how vastly awful it is - the way we consume and dump all of these resources into the ground.
Also among the crowd was Heidi Kauffman, a resident of Good Earth Farm located at 10011 Armitage Road in Athens, which tries to reduce waste by producing as much of their own food that they can. Kauffman said that residents of the farm have realized how much is wasted just in the packaging and transportation in the food industry alone.
It might not be sustainable but we're moving in that direction. We're realizing that there is a lot of injustice caught up in the food system
Kauffman said. The choices that we're making impact people in the future
just like the poor choices people in the past have made impact us.
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