Meaningful Movies: Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line

Please join Meaningful Movies Bellevue on Tuesday, October 25^th, for the 2022 documentary Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line. Necessity is a powerful film following activists who enlist the “necessity” defense in a 2020 jury trial after being arrested for a direct action at Zenith Energy in Portland, Oregon. This story of climate resistance in the Pacific Northwest brings into view a historical landscape of tribal leaders, Indigenous activists, and white allies as they resist oil trains and trucks carrying highly inflammable products through protected waterways and treaty lands. In following the path of oil-by-rail and oil resistance along the Columbia River Gorge, the film revisits lessons of the New Deal era of building massive dams and what climate activists take from that era as they think about a Green New Deal.

Documentary filmmaker Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University and a clinical psychologist. As a psychologist and documentarian, Haaken weaves research and historical analyses into rich and vividly drawn landscapes that represent the perspectives of her subjects.