The Shore Line: An interactive documentary for a sustainable future
by Elizabeth Miller (Liz), Concordia University
The Shore Line is an interactive documentary (idoc) about the dramatic changes playing out along our global coasts. I was drawn to the coast as a subject, but also as a metaphor and even a method — as a way to challenge boundaries and narratives in addressing climate-disasters — an invitation to think beyond disciplines or even species.
In what ways could an idoc visualize and connect human and non-human communities that survive and adapt in one of the most dynamic places on the planet?
The surge of coastal tourism, the increased dumping of industrial waste, and the unsustainable growth of fossil fuels are threatening the very ecosystems that protect us from increasingly frequent storms and sea level rise. But rather than dwell on disaster, I wanted to emphasize stories of creative adaptation and resistance, of individuals enacting change along the coast. Writer and activist adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy, argues that what we practice on a small scale sets patterns for larger systems. An interactive documentary seemed an ideal way to profile individuals and groups enacting models of slow but powerful resilience along our coasts.
Over three years and in collaboration with students and filmmakers from around the world we curated a collection of 43 video profiles, of people confronting the threats of unsustainable development and extreme weather. We feature a sustainability architect in Bangladesh who designs floating schools and gardens, a sand artist in New Zealand whose work reminds us of the ephemeral nature of the coast, an Indigenous community organizer in Panama who is coordinating the migration of his village from a low-lying island to the mainland, a science fiction writer from Canada writing resilience into storylines and more.
When starting this project, I had some burning questions about the intended audience and the efficacy of an environmental idoc. Every environmentalist I know emphasizes the critical role of education in addressing climate change, so why not start there? What kinds of new models of engagement could happen by prioritizing teachers, students, schools, and community educators as co-creators in outreach and curriculum design? How could we represent collective responses to climate disruption that take into account complex power dynamics connected to colonialism, capitalism, class, race, age, and gender? And how might we point to both the affordances and the limitations of new media? Aren’t the very screens used to communicate about climate change also part of the problem?
Selecting my co-creators and target audience as students and educators was no coincidence. For the last ten years I have taught media courses and made films about food sustainability, environmental justice and climate change at Concordia University in Montreal. The more you know, the more depressing it becomes. “So what can we do about this?” is the sometimes desperate refrain I hear in classes. Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, has coined the term, solastalgia to describe the profound sadness we feel knowing that the landscapes that we love are under attack. And grieving in class is real. I wanted this project to speak to a need for students to see achievable ways to engage with the places and issues they care about. I wanted to create a resource that would encourage dialogue about how place, traditions, gender, race, age and economic circumstances inform local methods of resistance or resilience.
Below are a few ways I approached the challenge of creating an interactive that would be relevant to the larger public but also useful in a classroom.
1. Identify teachers to profile: With teachers as the target audience, I needed to profile exceptional teachers. We have five profiles of educators from India, the U.S, and Canada who are helping their students feel connected to the environments around them and who are helping students initiate actions and campaigns. We also feature youth educators (ages 13 to 23) who with the support of mentors are holding workshops with adults, planting mangroves in sinking communities, and learning about laws and treaties in order to defend their land.
2. Create a pilot site: Early on we developed a temporary website in WordPress that we used as a public sketch pad. This permitted us to share the videos with our partners and get their feedback on how we were framing their story. Importantly, our sketch pad also permitted us to explore emergent aesthetics, themes, and connections between the people and communities we were meeting and profiling. This was a critical step in understanding the material as a living archive and helped us to see threads and themes that influenced how to develop interactive components such as dynamic maps, and data visualizations. We have now repurposed this site as a sketch pad for public engagement and a tool to connect teachers, http://educators.theshorelineproject.org
3. Create integrated toolkits and resources: A seasoned educational trainer explained that most educators spend about 2-minutes reviewing a new resource and so we developed one-page workshop sheets for easy use in the classroom. I asked graduate students, environmental experts and experienced teachers to author one-page workshop sheets and to design questions, activities, and resources that we could feature in our online “Strategy-toolkits.”
4.Test the project in classrooms: An early first-step was to test out the project with my students. For a graduate seminar on media and the environment, I had the students watch four short videos each week paired with articles we were reading. I asked them to write weekly responses on a website we developed for the class. The best part of this exercise was the ritual of writing and the challenge of synthesizing dense articles with the short videos. With my under graduate production class, I sent eight production teams to different shoreline sites around the island of Montreal as part of a place-based observational exercise. By visiting, observing, and documenting their own shoreline, the students had a more informed starting point for analyzing the site and the challenges of other shoreline communities. I also convened a small advisory board of teachers I respect who offered advice at different stages of the project.
5. Design the project to reach across platforms and cultures: It is no secret that designing a project that would work in classrooms from Bangladesh to Canada is an enormous challenge, so there have been numerous decisions in an attempt to balance the excitement of what we could do with reminder that most teachers work with very real technological constraints.
The project is online and we are planning our French launch to coincide with Earth Day this April. I have been working with teachers at different levels and I can already see how critical it is to offer a guided tour of the site. Despite my best intentions to develop toolkits and resources, every teacher has a different screen, a different platform and a different relationship to technology. There is a lot more to figure out to make this interactive matter in classrooms and beyond. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the project does not get lost in an over-crowded mediasphere. An interactive might be free and accessible on-line but getting the project to teachers and organizers requires time and imagination. The production of the site is finished but making this documentary matter is a work in progress, an ongoing rough draft.
For more information or to help us make this project more effective contact us: theshorelineproject(at)gmail.com
