A person’s calling might come knocking at the most unexpected places. For second-year environmental science student Hayley Moller, it was an accidental encounter with an environmental GE cluster that led her to enroll in the Education for Sustainable Living Program, a one-unit lecture series started by students focusing on sustainability issues.
“I came in as an English major,” Moller said. “I enrolled into ESLP, which I found out about through a class announcement. … I called my mom after I’d been in that class for a couple of weeks to say, “˜This is the kind of class that you go to college for,’ because it was just so inspiring.”
Now, Moller, together with fellow ESLP member Spencer Hill, a second-year mathematics and atmospheric and oceanic sciences student, is programming a film series that will run in conjunction with the lecture. The series, which kicked off Sept. 30 with the documentary “The Future of Food,” will screen free of charge at Sproul Hall every other Tuesday at 7 p.m.
Conceptualized by Eddie Murphy, a UCLA alumnus who graduated in 2008 with a degree in philosophy, the film series initially began last year as a supplement to the ESLP lectures. “We went every week last year,” Hill said. “It was very eye-opening, especially to people who wouldn’t call themselves environmentalists, to watch these movies and get a sense of all the areas that sustainability can encompass.”
Moved by their enthusiasm, Murphy handed over the task of programming this year’s series to Hill and Moller, confident that they would keep its spirit alive. “It’s such a good source of information, and it’s easy too,” Hill said. “You don’t have to go to class and take notes … to find out so much. We wanted to make that available to other people.”
This year, in addition to making the film series more visible, the duo has also decided to run it throughout the year, as compared to a single quarter as when it had first started. “We wanted to have a way for students to connect to the sustainability material throughout the entire school year, even after the lecture series is done,” Hill said. “So that meant that we had to pick more films.”
And more films they did pick.
Hill spent most of the summer scouring the Internet for films regarding environmentalism and sustainability, eventually narrowing the selection down to over 50 films. The larger number of films have also allowed Hill and Moller to compile a program that covers a wider range of topics organized by theme throughout the school year. The program for the fall quarter, for instance, will deal with sustainable food systems, featuring award-winning documentaries such as “We Feed the World.” The winter quarter will feature documentaries related to energy problems such as “Who Killed the Electric Car?” while the films shown in the spring quarter will revolve around sustainable business and equity issues.
Both Hill and Moller hope that the accessibility of these films will attract people who are not specialists in the field. “People usually think documentaries are boring, but that’s not necessarily the case.” Moller said. “Some of the films are really entertaining and they were put together to engage and inform viewers.”
Hoping that the exchange of opinions will continue beyond the films, Hill and Moller have also scheduled discussion sessions that will follow each screening. “It’s really great to hear people’s opinions and be able to answer their questions,” Hill said. “Obviously, all these films have a lot of questions worth answering.”