How many U.S. national parks can you name? Yellowstone? Yosemite? The Grand Canyon? The Rockies? Granted, you probably couldn’t name all 63, but you would have more answers than if I asked you the same question about the country I am studying abroad in.
Do Arevik, Dilijan, Lake Arpi, or Sevan sound familiar? These are all in Armenia. There’s a lot to say about how the soft power of a country shapes the global knowledge about it. There’s more still to say about the power of documentary filmmaking to transmit local knowledge far and wide, which might be otherwise prevented by a host of social and international inequalities. Conscious filmmakers (like ones at https://www.instagram.com/ffwildlife_ffw/) and the 10th UN Sustainable Development Goal both work to dismantle these to include more perspectives.
As I learned from researching, important work is being done by ecological initiatives in Armenia. These focus on taking climate action, protecting life in waters and onland. Improvements in this realm don’t stop there; they ripple and promote progress towards other SDGs. For example, taking care of our environment has a direct impact on our food and our health. Accomplishments in these areas would signify that Armenian bodies are strong enough to hold industries that cause harm accountable – a necessity if Armenia is to stand a chance long-term against mining and agricultural operations that contaminate soils, rivers and cause illnesses. This would be similarly beneficial in other places. Dr. Arsen Gasparyan, conservationist and biodiversity researcher, has outlined efforts taking place, actors, and policy agreements influencing them at https://biodiversity.am/armenian_biodiversity_matters.
It is a shame that these and the unique endemic phenomena of Armenia are not better known, and that I only found out about them because I was looking for people to talk to, places to film, and things to care about on the days that I won’t be studying. It is a shame that my travelling there, so valuable because of the learning and collaboration it encourages, also brings environmental detriments. Flying uses fossil fuels and dedicates land to airports hostile to biodiversity. Tourism industries rely on hotels with unnecessarily large carbon footprints. If more people visited Yerevan to learn (as I am), its environment would suffer. The pollution of the Hradzan river would worsen.
Luckily, there’s a way to make local knowledge accessible worldwide, without anyone going anywhere and inadvertently causing harm. Inspired by https://www.alveussanctuary.org/’s youtube channel, I plan to digitally share my experiences and the sustainable work of Armenian communities, ask people to contemplate what travelling sustainably means to them, discuss my own choices, and post resources that people can use to stay informed about Armenia. While I’m there, I’ll aim to use public transport, eat local and live sustainably. Since I am only a filming crew of 1, my impact will be light.
Ultimately, I’ll channel art as a way to imagine and bring into being a more sustainable world, like https://www.andrewsage.org/solarpunk.
