An audience with Franny Armstrong and Sian Berry

CAMPAIGNING film director Franny Armstrong said people can’t do nothing in the fightback against climate change – but what they do should fit their strengths.

She was talking at a lunchtime conversation event at the NLCop alongside Sian Berry, the former co-leader of the Green Party, as they discussed how people often felt like they did not know where to start.

Ms Armstrong, who made the pioneering Age of Stupid and more recently Rivercide, said: “After one of my films, probably everybody in the audience is thinking: What can I do? And the answer is: everything needs to be done, and there’s something for everybody.”

She added: “There’s people who go on gantries, but there’s filmmakers, there’s people doing their thing in the solar panel community.

“What is not helping is people continuing in their jobs which are destroying everything, and people doing nothing.”

Film-making had been her way to take action, she said, but Ms Armstrong added: “You look at what your personal strengths are, and think what can I do?

“I’m feeling extremely panicky about the whole situation and I find that doing local, proactive stuff really helps.

“So for example, where I live in Devon, we have our community orchard and that’s literally digging holes and watering things but to me it just makes me feel personally so much better.”

Ms Berry said that people did not have to worry that a future “carbon free world” would wreck their lives. “It’s not going to be different to anything you might name for what you want out of life now, unless what you’re going to say is ‘I need to be on top of everyone else and be a billionaire with a yacht and look down on everyone’. Most of us are not like that. It’s just the way that we do things and currently depend on a massive throughput of resources and the extraction of fossil fuels that needs to change.”

Asked about recent headline-grabbing eco protests, she said: “Although there are people who will hate people like Just Stop Oil. They still influence the space within your head for recognising the issue that they’re raising. “

“So even if a Conservative in the London Assembly says ‘I hate Insulate Britain’, the phrase ‘insulate Britain’ is getting out there.”

But she added there also needed to be a “moderate flank” of the movement “that people could talk to”.