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BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published February 25, 2010

The film crew of Gary Null & Associates, a New York based company that makes documentaries, held closed interviews with members of the college community involved in environmental activism last Thursday for several of its upcoming projects.

The material will mainly be used in an environmentalism documentary titled “Tipping Points,” but may also be used in documentaries covering a range of issues, including healthcare. The documentaries are anticipated to air nationally during PBS pledge drive programming sometime in the late summer or early fall.

“The project about the environment is meant as a wake-up call to those of us who are concerned about the overuse and pollution of our shared resources but not really sure what we can do,” said Rachel Spratt ’90, a member of the film crew.

“Tipping Points” will focus on small changes that everyone can put into practice to use or reuse common resources more efficiently. Spratt said that though these may seem like trivial changes, they are capable of having an impact on a wider scale.

Among those interviewed were engineering professor and co-chair of the college’s sustainability committee Carr Everbach, economics professor Stephen Golub and Yaeir Heber ’11 and Emily Dolson ’13, two members of Earthlust.

“I feel that student activism is where the heart of the green movement is and that real change will come from the green engineers, biologists and forward thinking humanitarians and mathematicians that come from a place like Swarthmore,” Spratt said.

Since participants were informed of the opportunity the day before it was set to occur, all those who were interviewed had minimal knowledge of the details of the documentaries for which they were being filmed.

Several interviewees said they were unsure of the exact issues that the film crew wanted them to tackle in the interview.

“They said that they just wanted us to talk for a long time and they’d take whatever excerpts they found useful,” Dolson said.

The film crew asked those who were interviewed to provide their own perspectives on the environmental movement both on Swarthmore’s campus and on a larger scale beyond the community, but no detailed questions were forced upon interviewees.

“I sat in a chair and he asked me questions, but they weren’t specific questions. They were very general questions,” Everbach said. “They were just ‘what do you think about environmental activism these days?’ and ‘what do you think the prospects are for avoiding global climate change?’ Things basically to get me talking.”

Though Spratt primarily publicized the filming to members of Earthlust, the two students who were interviewed had the freedom to talk about any issues related to environmentalism, not just about Earthlust.

“I kind of gave him a simplified version of [my thesis], saying it has been made clear to us by the current generation of power that they are not really going to solve the sustainability problem for us, but rather it is all going to fall on our shoulders,” Heber said. “If that task is on me, I want to do it right, not just through extrinsic policy [and] economic and technical changes, but to affect deeply rooted change that will make sustainability intrinsic.”

Dolson, on the other hand, touched upon her decision to become a vegetarian, something that Spratt said impressed her.

“One of the students who spoke was very eloquent in that she spoke about how making a personal change like becoming a vegetarian can help the environment because it can ultimately lower our carbon footprint,” Spratt said.

Procedural complications occurred before the film crew set foot on campus that most interviewees did not even know about. In order to film on campus, members of Gary Null & Associates needed to follow a procedure before getting started, including the completion of a filming request. However, Nancy Nicely, director of communications, said these requirements were never fulfilled.

“I never heard back from Rachel,” Nicely said in an e-mail. “Last Wednesday [the day before the shoot], colleagues around campus began to e-mail me asking if I knew that this company was coming to film, etc.

“Since we did not know this, I reached out to Rachel, via phone and e-mail, to ask that she contact me at her earliest convenience so that we could ensure all was in place before filming began. She did not respond to my messages until after filming was complete.”

Spratt still has not provided the filming request or proper proof of insurance, Nicely said. “My understanding is that they hope to return to campus in the spring to interview additional faculty members and possibly more students.”

Nicely said in an e-mail that she expected everything would be resolved shortly.

As is the case with most media, whatever was filmed on video for the documentaries has the possibility of being manipulated, Everbach said. Since the film crew did not divulge many details regarding these documentaries, all of the interviewees are unsure of how their quotes will be incorporated into a film.

“I hope it’s going to be used for a good purpose, and I expect that it will,” Everbach said.

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