On April 20, about 60 people joined the New Deal Café in celebrating Earth Day during its first ever virtual Reel and Meal.
For several residents, this was their first time attending a Reel and Meal event. For a few, this was the first event via Zoom they’d ever experienced.
As community members, with food delivery courtesy of DC Vegan and joined virtually by relatives and friends from all over the East Coast, cozied up in their living rooms for the start of the event at 7 p.m., many shared waves and smiles from screen to screen. One attendee, whose background showed a lush, green forest, admitted he was just in his living room. “Our son had shown us how to change [the background], but we don’t know how to change it back,” he said. After some instruction from Susan Barnett, who was hosting the event, on how to raise your hand, share reactions and reset your background, the Reel and Meal began. The focus of the series of videos and discussion was on the global climate crisis, as it relates to both the global community and Greenbelt.
The first video featured Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in 2019, where she said, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” The clip was received very well, with participant Beth LeaMond saying, “She was not fooling around. It was great to see that.”
Joseph Jakuta, among others, compared the global response to COVID-19 with the type of drastic change Thunberg called for in her speech. “With COVID, we’re showing that we can make that drastic change,” Jakuta said. “However, with climate change I fear we’re not doing things here, in the U.S., yet.”
The second video showed the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led political movement fighting to stop the climate crisis, during a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018. Along with demonstrating the power of youth-led movements, the clip also led into the introduction of Angel Nwadibia, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School (ERHS) and one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement hub at ERHS.
Before the coronavirus halted their efforts, Nwadibia and the ERHS Sunrise hub had been working with the school board to allow one day of excused absence for civic engagement, to be used for students to participate in events like climate strikes. “In 2020, it’s about time the board allowed students to engage in these historical events,” Nwadibia said.
The third video highlighted the top 10 solutions to climate change, the effects of drawdown and the importance of incorporating not just the biggest solutions to climate change, but finding ways to incorporate all of them.
Lore Rosenthal, program coordinator for Greenbelt Climate Action Network, said, “Personal actions are too small to fit the scale of the problem and legislation is too slow. However, we can work on a community level.”
While participants nodded their heads in agreement with Rosenthal, attendee Walter Teague stressed the importance of defining a climate goal. “At some point, what we’re asking for has to be real clear,” he said. “Demands need to be clear. If there isn’t a clear demand, people won’t get behind it.”
The fourth film featured another youth-led group called Save Tomorrow and the final video was an inspirational song on the importance of caring for the environment organized by communities in Belgium. The evening concluded around 9:30 p.m. with closing discussion around the night’s films and friendly goodbyes as participants signed off of the first – but not the last – Reel and Meal of its kind.