We are on time. With this roundness Javier Peña puts himself before the camera and, one after another, he offers arguments and examples of real actions to show that it is possible not only to stop climate change, but even reverse it. The documentary series of five chapters produced by the Green Cat Producciones and recently released in RTVE, presents testimonies and examples of 17 countries from four continents of successful and replicable actions. It has the participation of personalities of science, economics, arts and international prestige policy. In short, an ambitious dissemination project with a huge job behind the one Javier Peña puts face and voice and that is already on the public television screens.
What can “Hope, we are on time” see?
Everything we can do to put the weather in place. For this you have to put life in place, first. You have to retire the pieces. And in the series, throughout the six chapters, we take a tour of stories, with its protagonists, which exemplify solutions that, in addition to solving the question of climate change, remedy many environmental, economic, health and social welfare problems, distributed throughout 17 countries on four continents. It is a very human trip, focused on people, both pioneers, as scientists, farmers, etc., people who are pushing a new border in their fields and who have reached a point where the solution they exemplify is perfectly prepared to replace the old practices.
He talks about reversing climate change, perhaps a very optimistic vision?
It is the scientific basis of the drawdown project. A project with a solidity out of all doubt, of the largest solution research center. The inventory they make provides solutions that are already available to stop climate change. Practiced at the required scale, they allow us to dream of cooling the planet.
Don’t you think the general public will see it as too optimistic?
On the contrary. Almost even realistic. Because we present the solutions and then, using Drawdown’s calculations, the most conservative even, we show the results of its massive application in the form of a medium global temperature for the end of the century. All this with models that allow us to live better and that are valid for farmers, for industries, for the energy model, etc.
Audiences apart, what would a good result of the series be for you?
A very good result is that the conviction is extended that the future can be better, that everything is not written and that what we do matters. We have many cases of transformations of people, who change what they do or how they do it. The result is that they are better and, at the same time, they generate a positive environmental impact. Those pieces, added to a puzzle, are the way.
A very motivating approach.
We are in a moment of fertility recession of human imagination. There are many people with a lot of fear or anguish when thinking about the future in climatic and political terms, very reason. It’s true. Therefore, the purpose of the series is to emphasize and record on fire that we have the media and we have them within our reach. Which are the actions of the people who are going to mark that course. The British economist, Kate Raworth, who guides us in one of the chapters, pointed out that the great paradigm change we need is one in which people realize that what we do matters and, in doing so, we give permission to other people to change too. It is an earthquake that moves the pillars of politics, companies and our own acts.
But, we are at a time when there are many forces pushing against green policies, such as the European green pact, and many people protesting basic things such as limits to traffic in cities, for example.
TRUE. But, for example: the European Green Pact, what is most thrown back is that of the farmers. Well, just the farmers we take in the series, in some cases are groups of 500 farmers such as Albelar in the Spanish Southeast in the Almería and Murcia area. People who go beyond what is imagined by the green pact in terms of sustainability, that their fields seem ecosystems and produce more and spend less because all chemicals are saved, and so on. Well, these people tell you “I am not returning or crazy, even if they paid me.”
In the advance of the series, he comments that something that made him see things in another way was to contemplate his daughter when she was a baby.
Now he is seven years old. But, yes, being a father did something chasca in my head. In addition to a responsibility call, being a father or mother gives you as super powers. It also makes you vulnerable, because you have to look for another person who depends on you and, above, you are your reference person. A Kenyan engineer who comes out in episode five and who has done incredible things with solar energy, told us that, when the day ends, she always tries to think if her daughter will be able to be proud of her mother. Somehow that is the engine that also moves me. I try to do my best and, in what is in my hand, leave a planet in better conditions. We have a responsibility and for our children for ourselves. It is a message that I usually say: we don’t have to agree on everything. But we can agree that we want a cleaner air, some living floors, healthy eating, ecosystems full of life, recovering our nature, in having more green and cooler cities. There are many things absolutely transversal that can unite us in a great common mission that ends this polarized era, so divided and with so much hate and getting to work on what we join. Which is also extremely urgent. For me, it is what is called regeneration and it is what we are talking about in the series.