Policy Approaches to Green Film Practices: Local Solutions for a Planetary Problem

Abstract

This chapter lays out the historical emergence of green production practices and studies, delves into illustrative case studies from around the world, and identifies promising collaborations between academia, industry, and policy development, according to a range of potential localized and regional stakeholder coalitions and policy formations that offer models for resisting the status quo maintenance wrapped in green packaging by the larger institutions of global media culture. I argue for future strategies to mitigate screen media production’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel and other natural resource exploitation, and ecosystem disruption. More specifically, I argue for targeting mobile productions and incentive programs to leverage such initiatives, as these production culture dynamics both tend to pose heightened environmental risks and, historically, to have underestimated the potential for leveraging financial and aesthetic appeal for sustainability and preservation demands. I set out to explore the following questions: What have proven to be successful strategies that might be scalable and transposable to diverse film cultures and political economies? How might stakeholders beyond the screen media sector be included in broader and more widely beneficial green initiatives? What are the contexts outside of large studio productions that might be leveraged and incentivized to develop and enforce green practices, and how might these be communicated across the sector, between the industry and other sectors, and to local communities in ways that entice collective support through principles of local cultural values, social norms, and environmental specificity? Based on the underlying premise that in order to generate global change in this sector we must acknowledge the localized cultural specificities, political economy, and climate challenges of diverse locales. I look at locales of mobile production as part of a two-sided coin, at once bearing the traumatized cultural and environmental scars of invasive screen industry colonization while also perhaps holding the key to systemic mitigation of screen culture’s environmental footprint. Finally, I argue for more substantial scholarly and industry attention to organization and communication between local stakeholders to operationalize green production on local scales.