A film festival organized by the environment group Ottawa Riverkeeper is set to raise funds for a project that will help local residents monitor water quality in the river themselves rather than wait for information from city authorities.
“Ottawa gets its drinking water from the Ottawa River,” says Meredith Brown, the executive director of the group. “(There should be) this sense of pride that this is their river. The river belongs to them, and they have a right to swim in that river without getting sick and eat the fish from the river.”
Brown says the City of Ottawa conducts water quality tests on the river in the spring and summer months, but this information is released annually and is not easy to read for the average resident who does not have expertise in environmental monitoring.
She says the Riverkeeper’s program will release information in real time and include volunteers drawn from communities along the river and its tributaries.
Ottawa Riverkeeper hopes to raise funds for at least 10 new water quality test kits, which will be used by volunteers to check water quality periodically.
The Riverkeeper has selected seven films for its fundraiser – the “Wild and Scenic Film Festival” – which was to be held on Feb. 21 at Library and Archives Canada. The theme is “fresh water.”
“(The films) all have an environmental focus,” says Ashley Brasfield, an organizer for the festival, ahead of the event.
“They highlight individual communities coming together to protect their local ecology,” says Brasfield.
Films include White Water, Black Gold, by filmmaker David Lavallee, who travelled across Western Canada to trace the source of the oil sands’ water supply from pristine glaciers to the less attractive oilfields in Alberta. Another movie saw photographer Pete McBride follow the stressed Colorado River as it flows into the sea.
The film festival will be followed by a visit by David Suzuki to Ottawa. The renowned environmentalist will be talking about sustainability with economist Jeff Rubin at the Centretown United Church on Feb. 26.
“It’s bringing together potentially unlikely people,” says Ben Saifer, who works for Octopus Books, the organizer of the event. “(They will) be talking about how they can have sustainable ecology and economics.”
The current economic and environmental model does not work, according to Saifer.
He says he hopes that event will start a conversation on the alternatives.