The Earthshot Report (TEP Trading Corporation, BBC, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 18) I watched a couple of documentaries on PBS (three, actually, though the third, a French TV production from 2022 or 2023 called Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace, I’d already seen on its previous go-round in February 2024: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/paris-mystery-of-lost-palace-copa-films.html). One was a show called The Earthshot Report, made in 2024 and aimed at giving information on positive programs to help the environment and avoid the climate crisis. Given that I’d already been sure that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will almost certainly spell the end for the survival of the human species, with his “drill, baby, drill” dedication to continuing and expanding America’s addiction to fossil fuels and his utter contempt for any programs to make earth’s environment more sustainable, I wondered what programs there could be to make me think that humans can counteract what they’ve done to the environment and keep the earth a habitable place for our species. One welcome (albeit not especially important, giving the relative powerlessness of the modern British monarchy) aspect was that the on-screen host was Prince William Windsor, son of King Charles and the late Princess Diana and the heir to the British throne (and, given that King Charles is 75 years old and has already been diagnosed with cancer, William may become king sooner than you’d think). The show was actually MC’d by British actress Hannah Waddingham, and the program was based on a series of awards that’s been given since 2021 called the “Earthshot Awards” for individuals, organizations and corporations pursuing ideas to make the world more sustainable.

The people profiled on last night’s show include Byron Komizek, a Colorado farmer who’s worked out a way to put up solar panels across his farm and thereby generate photovoltaic electricity and grow crops on the same parcel of land. He calls it “agrovoltaics” and says some crops (including lettuce) actually do better with the shade from the solar panels than they would in full sunlight. The show also featured a Native from the Alhuac tribe in Ecuador named Uynkumr Domingo (though the first name is a guess and might be wrong) and London-based researchers Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia. They’ve founded a company called NOTPLA – as in “not plastic” – that aims to use seaweed as a substitute for plastic, especially in the inner linings of food containers. The show explained that plastic is one of the most environmentally destructive inventions of all time, and the hope of Paslier and Garcia is to create food containers that are totally biodegradable. Their initial invention was a small packet of seaweed-derived faux plastic that contains water – and they said you could actually eat the whole thing since your stomach would digest the container as well as absorbing the water within. The program also profiled a woman named Dr. Carmen Hinosa from the Philippines, who’s latched on to an old Filipino technique of making cloth from the leaves of pineapple plants. She began as a leather-goods maker but became appalled at the environmentally destructive aspects of leather (including all the chemicals involved in tanning it and making it waterproof), looked for a substitute and found it in piña, an old Philippine technique for making fine cloth from the strands of pineapple leaves, which are usually discarded and either left to rot or burned after the pineapples themselves are harvested.

Another person profiled was Dr. Alan Friedlander of Pristine Seas, who’s invented elaborate camera equipment to make documentaries of the ocean and encourage national governments to extend protection to more and more of the ocean. He was shown working in the south-west islands of Palau and shooting footage of almost unearthly beauty. A Kenyan woman named Lumbi Macha won an Earthshot award for founding ROAM, a company in Nairobi that makes electric motorcycles for a country in which most people don’t have either the money or the access to roads needed for full-sized cars. ROAM makes not only the motorcycles themselves but also portable charging stations with which to recharge them (though that still begs the question of electric vehicles generally: where does the electricity to recharge them come from? It doesn’t help the environment that much if the power still ultimately comes from fossil fuels). Perhaps the most interesting awardee was another Kenyan woman, Charlot Magayi, who got pregnant at age 16 and two years later almost lost her daughter when a cookstove fell on top of her and nearly burned her to death. So she decided to invent a new, improved cookstove (remember this is an African Third World country where most people don’t have access to modern stoves and the gas or electricity that run them) that would be more stable and would be made out of recycled metal. She’s also invented a new sort of briquet made out of agricultural waste to fuel the stove, pointing out that these new briquets deliver more even heat and therefore make cooking easier. All the people profiled in The Earthshot Report are “thinking outside the box,” as the saying goes, and implementing programs on a small scale that may not single-handedly solve the sustainability problem but can only help, and they’re doing them basically by ignoring most of the capitalist infrastructure that says, “You can’t do that,” to virtually all large-scale programs to forestall the impending doom of Earth’s human population from human-caused climate change.