Up In Smoke
Sat | 5 Nov | 11.55 | Screen 2 | Book Tickets
Dir. Adam Wakeling | UK 2011 | U | 70min + Q&A
Slash-and-burn farming generates more carbon annually than all air travel put together. It sits at the crossroads of two of the greatest threats to global stability: accelerating climate change and diminishing food security. Up In Smoke follows Lostwithiel scientist Mike Hands, who has laboured for 25 years to find a solution to replacing slash-and-burn agriculture in equatorial rainforests. Slash-and-burn farming is practised by anywhere between 250 and 500 million farmers worldwide. In the tropics, slash-and-burning leaves the soil infertile, leading farmers to cut down ever more trees in order to grow food.
Up In Smoke tells the story of Hands’s struggle to find out why the soil was losing its fertility. He became convinced the problem was a lack of phosphorous, a key nutrient, and discovered that the Inga tree, planted in rows interspersed with food crops, would act as a natural soil fertiliser while providing shade and blocking out weeds. Working with two Honduran farmers, Hands began the slow process of trialling the technique – overcoming a lack of funding, support and the farmer's initial skepticism. Filmed over four years in Honduras and the UK, this fascinating documentary presents a historic opportunity to address one of the most urgent issues of the present day. It parallels the farmers’ struggles with Hands’s attempts to get heavyweight political backing, as he tries to get the Inga tree and alley-cropping technique onto the agenda at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit.
*We warmly welcome Lostwithiel ecological scientist Mike Hands and the Inga Foundation’s Bozena Piniecka, who will offer a Q&A following the screening.
Up In Smoke will also be screened in the Newquay secondary schools 3 and 4 November, followed by Q&As with Mike and Bozena. We are grateful to the Eden Project for sponsoring these screenings.
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