Family tensions boil in Recipes For Disaster's environmental experiment

Have you ever tried to get your friends, family, or coworkers to follow environmentally sensitive practices and faced resistance? Or conversely, have you ever felt pressured into saving the environment by someone in an overbearing way?

Both of those experiences are represented by an Anglo-Finnish couple in the documentary Recipes For Disaster, when their family embarks on a year without oil products.

When filmmaker John Webster decides to help save the planet by putting his family on an oil-free "diet", his Finnish wife and two children go along with his plans. But reluctantly, and only for his sake.

Webster documents how challenging it is for the family to avoid anything made from oil. Buying groceries becomes a challenge, as everything is wrapped in plastic. Their car is abandoned in favour of the bus and train. They resort to homemade concoctions for things like toothpaste (which the children say tastes awful) and gel, with mixed results.

For the most part, Webster's wife doesn't see the larger benefit or purpose of their efforts. She's more concerned with her children's health, and worried what people will think of them if they find out what they're doing.

Yet she does discover some unexpected benefits of going green: she finds herself spending much more quality time with her children.

But when Webster ramps up his efforts by trying to purge their home of plastic products, simmering tensions boil over. The family's relationships are put to the test: Webster fails to successfully convey the point of his vision to his wife, and she resents feeling bullied into doing things against her wishes.

Ultimately, the issue becomes one of communication, and the film serves as an interesting case study of the opposing sides of activism and complacency.

In the film, Webster refers to a study in which residents near a dam were questioned about how concerned they were about the dam breaking. Who were the most concerned? Those living furthest away from the dam. The least concerned? Those living closest.

The study revealed that it's impossible for anyone to function if the thought of sudden death and disaster is constantly on their minds. Webster's wife echoes this coping mechanism when she comments that the prospect of environmental disaster is too horrific to think about.

Understanding and overcoming this pyschological barrier, however, may be essential in trying to get populations to take action for the sake of our collective future.

In advance of Earth Day (April 22), the film will be screened on Thursday  (April 16, 7 p.m.) at Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour Street) as the third and final installment of DOXA's Documentary Film Series that will lead up to the DOXA Documentary Film Festival (May 22 to 31). Webster will participate in a Q&A session after the screening via Skype.

Tickets for the screening at $10 available at the DOXA Web site, Videomatica (1855 West 4th Avenue), and the DOXA office (5–1726 Commercial Drive).

For a taste of Recipes for Disaster, here's an excerpt from the film:

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