Sustainability for Everyone: Re-Thinking Piedmont Ideas about Green, Living and Local won 2nd Place Prize at UNCG’s Sustainability Film Shorts competition in March 2012.
IN THIS VIDEO I collaborated with Montagnard youth, asking them what sustainability meant to themselves, traditional people, refugees, populations in transition and the poor working class. I wanted the kids to discover through our project that their perspective was equally valid compared to the aspirational, intellectual, mostly White, middle- to upper middle class ideas of “green”, “local”, “sustainable”, etc.
Piedmont sustainability cannot go very far if it doesn't engage people beyond its privileged circle of followers. A certain degree of humility and genuine openness has to accompany it. Stripped of its “cool factor” — all the esoterica and hipness that goes into being a locavore, a foodie, a hipster — you get people who are often severely challenged to try foods they’re not familiar with, accept alternate views about the Piedmont, or enter neighborhoods dotted with run-down strip malls and talk to people of color.
How hard is this? At the farmer's market I witnessed one insistent trendsetter, way too cool and hip to be told otherwise, who wanted the greens removed from the organic beets he’d just purchased. So the farmer hacked them off. The next week he asked the same treatment for his daikon radish. The idea of eating the greens was not just new to him, it was repellant to his sense of style. Now there are ways to reach Mr. Hipster, for example, if we elevate refugee recipes and shopping places (like Super G) to a level of trendiness that he can’t resist (think Anthony Bourdain), but does this really help connect refugees and newcomers to the information, resources and people who can help them?
For Piedmont refugees and immigrants, culture runs deep. They don’t have problems identifying who they are. Ask Piedmonters to define the region’s culture and who they are and they’ll be left scratching their heads. We’re talking about a huge gap between communities that should be talking to one another, but for which Piedmont culture provides few precedents, few options and little imagination. Unless we can bridge that gap and do it quickly, we’re in deep doo-doo. Dwelling in the Piedmont default mode — that is, to do nothing until forced to react — to racial and social injustice, to global economic forces, to a worsening economy, to crime and violence — is not the way a diverse, multicultural Piedmont can survive or thrive.
At least three of the kids in the film are going to college. As they make their way through the American narrative, they need to be prepared to value the differences between their views and those around them, the majority of whom either aspire to unrealistic, unsustainable lifestyles or have been raised in them. The lavish coddling of its students by a local private college (“Pizza made on campus delivered to your dorm room!,” said our guide) needs to be named for what it is. The inherent prejudices of a high school that schedules all its American-born seniors to meet with guidance counselors early in the school year and refugee kids last, when it’s too late to apply for scholarships, needs to called what it is. If refugee students aren’t shown the value of their backgrounds, native languages, traditions and former lives, aren’t dissuaded from indulging in American consumerism, and aren’t educated about systemic racism, then they will come to believe our Piedmont ideas about living are normal, where you need to fit in, and where passive acceptance of crummy conditions is the embodiment of the American ideal.
