This is the first-ever environmental film festival being held at MSU and about 30 films will be shown. It will take place Thursday through Sunday in the Communication Arts and Sciences Building.

“My ultimate goal is to bring films that will inform and enlighten and entertain and encourage discourse on environmental issues that are so pressing in today’s world,” said Susan Woods, director and programmer of the environmental film festival. Woods also is the director of the East Lansing Film Festival.

“It’s been very exciting,” Woods said. “But a little daunting because there are so many issues and there are so many good films out there to present.”

Tickets cost $3 for one film, $6 for three films and $15 for a pass to the entire festival. Any profit will benefit the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism endowment fund.

The film topics range from alternative energy, freshwater resources, agriculture and biodiversity. While many films are documentaries, the festival also will feature funny films and even a film based off a play, Woods said.

“We hope that there’s a lot of participating in just discussing these issues and thinking of ideas of how we can solve issues that at first seem extremely daunting but I think they have solutions,” Cimitile said.

The art of organizing

About half of Cimitile’s work week this semester has been devoted to organizing the film festival — much of it being hours on end answering e-mails regarding volunteering or information about the festival.

“I have a bunch of fliers so … I’m going to be posting them up throughout campus, going to dorms, classrooms, getting them out,” Cimitile said last week. “We are starting to get the word out to the high schools now too — East Lansing High School and all the communities around the town.”

Jim Detjen, director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, said some volunteers are still needed and there are different perks to volunteering for the film festival.

For instance, if someone volunteers for a four-hour shift, they get a pass to see a free film. If they volunteer for two four-hour shifts, they receive a pass for the entire weekend.

“Matt is working as a graduate assistant for the Knight Center this current year and Matt is doing an excellent job so far,” Detjen said. “He is working for us 20 hours a week and he is doing a variety of tasks and a key one is helping us to organize this environmental film festival and fair, but he also is helping with our Web site, developing our Web site and putting material up there and he probably will be assisting us on EJ Magazine and other projects that we do.”

For Cimitile, planning the environmental film festival has been something new to him, but the hard work is paying off.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s almost like a class,” he said. “You are getting an education on organizing and what makes a good movie for a film fest and things like that, and how you target an audience so you can get a good crowd coming in, a good mix of people. I would say it’s equal to taking a good class at school, it’s certainly a pretty cool learning experience.”

Eco-friendly writing

As an environmental journalism student, Cimitile has taken on the challenge of taking very complex, often controversial environmental issues, and making them relevant to everyday people.

And through writing, that’s not always the easiest thing to do.

But Cimitile has written for multiple on-campus publications on environmental issues and has a few tricks up his sleeve for how to make people understand and, more importantly, care.

One, he said, is to make sure to find the relevance and relay that message.

“I think (the issues) are pretty controversial still in the public, especially when you get into like climate change, which has become very political, and they are very complex as well,” he said. “People don’t generally have a great understanding of what climate change is or what it means and so you have to go about finding a way to how it directly impacts a person. You can talk a lot about ice melting and polar bears going extinct but most people aren’t going to see polar bears and they aren’t going to relate to it.

“But if you say something like climate change increases the spread of diseases because mosquitoes are able to move north toward warmer climates which will bring malaria and West Nile, people are more receptive of a message like that and they can see how that directly impacts them.”

Another way to help people understand is to provide examples, he said.

Once, Cimitile was working on a story about particle physics and the Cyclotron — and the topic was as intimidating to him as a writer as it would be to many as a reader.

While talking to the director of the Cyclotron, Konrad Gelbke, Cimitile asked about the process of what happens when a particle is shot off and hits its target point.

He was told to think about it as a beam of light hitting a prism — once it hits the prism, the beam of light goes off one side and on the other side, the rainbow effect occurs.

“That was just a perfect description and I think people can really understand when you give an example,” Cimitile said. “Examples are key in my mind in science and environmental issues because people can understand examples and (it’s) just showing it in a different way without using those jargon words.”

Despite writing and learning about today’s environmental concerns, Cimitile tries to practice what he preaches in his own life as well. In addition to recycling, he also uses his bike as a primary mode of transportation and has fluorescent energy-saving light bulbs in his home.

“The thing is, all these things that I do, they don’t cost me any money. In the end, they save me money,” he said. “I’m not buying gas because I’m riding my bike most of the time, the fluorescent light bulbs will last me way more longer than the regular ones and the recycling doesn’t cost me any money — it’s free to do.”

After Cimitile learned of deforestation in the Amazon and that the primary cause was cattle ranching and the global demand for beef, he decided to stop eating beef for a while.

“After that I just stopped for a while, I’d say three to six months and then I think I had a burger and I didn’t even like the taste anymore. So from there I just haven’t eaten any beef,” he said.

“I don’t miss it, I don’t even think about. And I’ve had friends who were like, ‘Oh, that’s not going to change anything,’ and it’s like yeah, but if you keep doing it isn’t going to change anything either. I think individuals can change a lot of things if they really want to.”