It's the little things that will save the world.
"My belief is that we need to show people how our small impact and small choices on a daily basis can make a big impact on the world and that it's not that difficult to make a different choice on a daily basis," said environmental activist and filmmaker Jeff Barrie. "It's really difficult to motivate people to conserve energy, and I think the most powerful way is to show them a film about what's going on, what the problems are and what the solutions are."
Barrie, European studies professor Florence Faucher-King, and earth and environmental science professor Brendan Bream spoke on a panel Monday evening following a showing of Barrie's film, "Kilowatt Ours."
Barrie said in the movie he tried to make environmental problems more imaginable to the average person. At one point in the film, for example, Barrie explained that one kilowatt-hour, the amount of electricity needed to power about 10 light bulbs for an hour, takes roughly a pound of coal.
"That was my motivation for making this film the way I did," Barrie said, "looking at the unseen costs of energy production in America today and what we can do about it, how we can turn that around."
But other doomsday films, Barrie's sought to show that environmental problems, while great, are not intractable.
"I didn't just want to make another film about the problems, but I wanted to focus on solutions to those as well," Barrie said.
Moreover, Barrie showed that using energy-efficient devices like special light bulbs and geothermal heating is pragmatic since people save people can save money with them.
Barrie was invited to campus by Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Recycling, a student-led environmental group, that is participating in Focus the Nation, a nationwide program educating elementary to university age students about global warming and the importance of clean energy.
Freshman Matt Irwin said he was inspired by an idea Barrie presented about ways to reduce the use of energy at Vanderbilt.
"During the discussion we hit upon the point of potentially getting an energy audit done at Vanderbilt," Irwin said, referring to Barrie's idea of bringing in a third party to evaluate ways Vanderbilt could reduce its energy usage.
"I'd like to tell his point to SPEAR and to Net Impact to see what we can do to get the administrators here to do an energy audit," Irwin said, "to turn off the lights in buildings that aren't used at night, turn down the heat in buildings that aren't used at night, such as Stevenson and Featheringill Hall, and just begin to eliminate some of the waste and some of the cost we are facing that we don't need to be facing."
