Whitehorse filmmaker Paul Davis put the Georgia Straight on hold to diligently transfer his laundry's grey water to his toilet so he could flush eco-sensitively. The winner of the best Canadian short award at Toronto's 2007 Planet in Focus International Environmental Film and Video Festival is pioneering a whole new level of green filmmaking. No rows of cube vans idling. No one-use props. Reuse of everything–even water.

Rather than a feel-good experiment, it's his alarmed reaction to the global warming he witnesses every day.

"My film is called -40 Degrees Celsius," Davis told the Straight. "It's about cycling to work in minus-40 [as he does]. The problem is, though, we only had three days of minus-40 here this year. It used to be two weeks....The rest of Canada is still in denial about climate change. People don't understand that global warming is here, and it's happening."

Davis, who used to work in Ontario, remarked that the southern film industry can't see the negative effects of its productions. Living in a small, isolated town, he can. If he tosses out props, Davis said, he sees them every time he drives by the dump. Plus, there's the warming. It breeds an acute consciousness, he said.

The Yukon Film and Sound Commission has used the slogan "Need snow?" to lure filmmakers who want to shoot in frosty weather conditions during months that are not winter elsewhere on the continent. With less and less snowy months, though, Davis said, that competitive edge is being eroded.

Davis isn't the only filmmaker thinking green. The environment is the star of the international film industry in 2007. Reel Green B.C., a set of best practices designed by the British Columbia Film Commission, debuted this year. Hollywood Goes Green, coming up in Los Angeles on December 11 and 12, is the California industry's first major conference on the environment. Greening the Screen was New Zealand's watershed report on the climate impacts of their industry. The films Syriana and The Day After Tomorrow were made "carbon-neutral" through offsets, according to the University of California at Los Angeles's 2006 Southern California Environmental Report Card.

As the same UCLA report points out, however, the film industry depends on travel–both air and ground. And the industry, in California alone, generated 8.4 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions last year.

For Davis's local enterprise, going green is a personal, relatively simple affair. For larger film events, however, the how-to is not so easy, or so obvious.

Yes, the seventh annual Whistler Film Festival attracted more than 7,000 mostly fly-in and drive-in visitors from Burnaby to Beijing from November 29 to December 2. And yes, the festival provided bottled water and handed out promotional delegate bags. But festival director Shauna Hardy Mishaw was earnest in her November 12 news release that "the only [festival] footprint left behind will be the ones in the snow." On the phone from the resort town, Mishaw told the Straight that in every aspect of planning this year's event, green was a priority.

"We tried to find ways to be responsible for our actions," she said, noting that the cornerstone of the greening of the festival was carbon offsets. Offsets are a voluntary donation program to "neutralize" greenhouse-gas emissions, often through tree planting. "It's not a huge cost, and it's a really attainable commitment. We challenge everyone to do it."

Working with EcoNeutral, a program of Ecosystem Restoration Associates that plants trees in B.C. to "balance" the burning of fossil fuels, WFF paid $2,085 to offset emissions. That's based on 139 tonnes of carbon emissions at $15 per tonne, as required by EcoNeutral. Mishaw helped calculate that amount based on transporting the 115 guests and staff of the festival over 500,000 kilometres, and on the festival operations at Whistler.

The 139 tonnes does not, however, account for the travel of the additional estimated 6,885 people who attended the festival, Mishaw said. Nor does it include carbon consumption at the hotels or venues.

The bugaboo of bottled water, which requires trucking and recycling, also flummoxed Mishaw. "It came up and we were like, 'Oh, my God, how are we going to deal with that?'" she recalled.

Working with Whistler Water Inc., organizers decided to provide mostly two-litre bottles and encourage guests to refill them with tap water. Finally, the festival banned paper products from the 750 delegate bags it produced. Although holding destination festivals is inherently emission-producing, Mishaw said the WFF could not reasonably move or go on-line.

"I really don't think the solution is not holding events in destination places," she said. "The event is specifically held in this town for specific reasons. It's a very intimate event. And if it was moved, it would be redundant. Vancouver already has five or six large film festivals."

Indeed, the industry is only beginning its green transformation, but it's a powerful beginning, claimed Gordon Hardwick, the 25-year film location manager at the helm of Reel Green B.C. It's coming from the grassroots. Caterers, truckers, set decorators, makeup artists, and other frontline film workers have all jumped aboard the green train, Hardwick affirmed, each seeking to waste less in their own little corners.

"People are leading me to believe we're a world leader in this," he told the Straight at a West Broadway coffee shop. "Ultimately, we hope to market the fact that B.C.'s industry has such high environmental standards, it will draw business here."

B.C. is inherently more green than California, Hardwick said, because most electricity here is produced by hydropower. In addition, filming on location, as the local industry usually does, has less of an impact than filming in studios, with fewer sets to build and destroy. Even Vancouver's highly skilled work force cuts down on emissions, he said. When Hardwick first started working here, the American studios would fly 20 or more techies to Canada to support a film, and they would stay in hotels for the duration. Now, he said, they might send three. The rest are hired locally.

On October 24, 145 industry insiders turned out to Simon Fraser University's Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue for the first Reel Green B.C. forum. Speakers included Pete Mitchell, the chief operating officer of Vancouver Film Studios, who explained that they're seeking greater energy efficiency through an on-site audit. Shelly Billik, Warner Bros. Entertainment's vice president of environmental initiatives, spoke about her company's solar-energy project, the first in the industry. The studio set up 360 solar modules on the Mill Building, which has been used for prop construction since the 1930s. Warner Bros. claims on its Web site (wbenvironmental.warnerbros.com/) that it saves more than $1 million annually through energy-efficiency programs and nine million kilowatt hours of power.

So green is being talked about here at the forum, and certainly in Los Angeles, where every major studio has a department dedicated to environmental initiatives.

But is it enough?

Of course not, said Whitehorse's Davis. The filmmaker said he "won't throw stones at anyone who is doing something" about the environment. But for the North, where the sea ice is thinning, the winters are warming, and at least one grizzly has mated with a polar bear, talk and haphazard changes are not enough.

As for carbon offsets, he wouldn't slam the WFF for using them. In fact, he bought some when he flew to Toronto to accept his award. However, Davis doesn't think offsets should be used as indulgences, the medieval church's sin "offsets" sold to wealthy Christians that allowed them to avoid modifying their behaviour in exchange for cash.

"At least the festival is thinking of the emissions," he said. "But the industry as a whole needs to change."

Davis may have finished his award-winning film, but he still chooses to ride his bike to work, even in what's left of the bitter winter.

"I do it to show the next generation that there is another future, and it is possible," he said.