Transition Kamloops is pleased to host the first “Film for Change” in over 2 years on Wed April 20^th at 7 pm at the TRU Alumni Clocktower Theatre. The Magnitude of All Things documents the grief of director Jennifer Abbott, who loses her beloved sister to cancer. This loss opens her to the grief of the losses we are all experiencing with climate change. 

As the summer approaches, how many of us in British Columbia have had at least one anxious thought in this vein: “What this year is going to be like? Will there be another heat dome? Will wildfire smoke obscure the sky and make it hard to breathe? The drought… will it continue, and how is this going to affect my life and that of my family and community? How will the weather be affecting our plans this year? How many people and creatures might be displaced, or die?” I suspect I’m not alone in having had these concerning thoughts.

2021 was the year that many Canadians were personally struck by the reality of climate change for the first time. Many have been semi- or completely oblivious to the fact that people in many regions of the world have been experiencing the impacts of climate change for decades… or perhaps we’ve been lulled into thinking they’d pass over us.

No such luck. It is here. 

As I think of the worsening effects of global heating, the shape of the future has begun to take form, and this is how it appears to me: increasing uncertainty about a host of things from clear vs smoky skies, to food supplies, to how the ecosystems that support us will be altered, to the timing and intensity of coming disasters, to life and death.

I am repeatedly struck with a sense of loss ~ loss of a stable future for myself, children, grandchildren. While I understand that everything always changes, the losses will pile up, unless and until as a species we begin to seriously turn this ship around. As it stands, though, regardless of any action we take now, the facing of losses will be a large part of the fabric of our lives for years to come.

What is the healthy human response to loss? We experience it regularly, from small things, such as when the kind words we needed to hear weren’t uttered, to big ones, like the death of a loved one. The appropriate human response to loss, and one which I think has become terribly eroded in our culture, is grief. 

Healthy grief is a powerful and necessary emotional process that speaks deeply to our connection to that which is being or has been lost, and to our own heart of love for others, including all the beings — the land, the creatures, the waters, the winds — of this world. When we are losing or have lost something, when we love it, we feel grief. 

Photographer Chris Jordan, speaking about his experience of being present with hundreds of dying albatross on Midway Island, watching his tears pour out with each dying bird, said he realized that grief “… is a doorway that takes us right home to the love that we are made of.” 

If we don’t love, we don’t grieve. If we love but avoid grief, we lose connection with ourselves and with the wider beautiful world. 

The film The Magnitude of All Things beautifully reminds us of what is most important as we find our way with humanity, loving the beauty of this world as we navigate the present, and face our new reality of a changing world. 

The Magnitude of All Things is a documentary film exploring grief and climate grief. When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown. Abbott’s documentary draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief—both personal and planetary. Stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood on Ontario’s Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.

For the people featured, climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action.

As always, the film will be followed by a panel discussion. Admission is free; donations are gratefully accepted. Popcorn will be available, but bring your own water bottle. BC government Covid protocols at the time of screening will be followed.