Each year, St. Thomas University’s Sustainability Club hosts a weeklong film festival event with guest speakers to help promote eco-friendly lifestyles. The Boost Your ECO festival is set to start on Monday, March 24th, and ends on Thursday, March 27th, with all events starting at 6pm.
This year, the events will be co-hosted by the Conservation Council, and the Maritime-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network.
This year’s president, second-year student Frida Guerrero, has worked hard to bring in prominent speakers from several disciplines to help students understand what it truly means to Boost Your ECO.
For Guerrero this film festival is “a great way to spread knowledge and awareness of environmental issues in Canada and around the world … some of them can encourage students to reduce their ecological footprint.”
To kick off the film fest, Monday’s guest speaker is STU’s very own Professor Matthew Hayes from the sociology department. He will discuss ways in which we, as members of a global society, can transition from high consumer to low consumer lifestyles.
Tuesday’s guest speaker is Professor Robert Krausz who recently returned to Canada from New Zealand. His lecture and film will remind all that the “lines between conservation and environmental pollution are sometimes very blurred.”
Adding to this year’s strong international presence is speaker Celeste Gutíerrez who hails from Santa Rosa, Guatemala. Gutíerrez is a community organizer who along with others resists the Candian-owned Tahoe Resources silver mining. She will argue for justice in Canada.
The most anticipated filming for many will be of Gasland 2, the follow up to 2010’s Gasland. Both films work to expose the ways in which communities across the USA are negatively affected by slickwater fracking.
All speakers and films have an important view on what needs to be done to make the globe more eco-friendly. They will bring to light the problems, and the possible solutions, to the problems we face as a global society.
For more information about the Boost Your ECO film fest, click here!