DRYING FOR FREEDOM
Our Future is Hanging on the Line
Thursday April 25, 2013 (7pm)
Guest speaker Gwendal Castellan
Our planet’s economic and environmental future hangs on an unlikely thread: the clothesline. British filmmaker Steven Lake criss-crosses the world to unravel the reasons and consequences for banishing the clothesline in favour of tumble dryers. Corporate America sold the world an electric dream, replacing simple centuries-old outdoors line-drying with the electricity-hungry dryer. As a consequence, the demand for coal, and energy consumption across the globe has rapidly increased. To make matters more complex, the developing nations are also starting a love affair with the electric utopia, exponentially increasing the demands on an already threatened environment. From the laundry-less gardens of sunny California to India’s communal open air Laundromats, DRYING FOR FREEDOM is a voyage into the new environmental battlefield where money, status and class come first and our planet is a poor second. dryingforfreedom.com
Gwendal Castellan is an energy specialist with Tourism Vancouver actively working to achieve targets set in the Greenest City plan by assisting tourism businesses and organizations identify wasted energy and developing strategies to overcome barriers to implementing conservation opportunities. Prior to that Castellan assisted home owners in identifying and prioritizing energy energy retrofits and acted as a residential new construction consultant modelling energy consumption and advising builders of the best strategies for building energy efficient housing. He has also produced a feature length documentary chronicling his journey from Patagonia to the North-West Territories by bicycle.