Environmental Documentary- Choosing a route and forming an idea

For this project I have chosen to do route 1, producing visual communication products to encourage support for the London Wetland Centre.

I was drawn to this community led organisation as I love to produce imagery on nature and when researching found it was particularly interesting how this environment is generally good for you. Studies have shown that being near water helps ill people to recuperate faster, and being around nature reduces stress levels. Wetlands consist of both water and nature meaning that the London Wetland centre provides a form of escapism and emotional release from a fast passed city life.

When researching I also found some interesting facts about Wetlands and their global importance:

• Peat wetlands alone store more carbon in the soil than rainforests do. They store a third of the world’s total despite only taking up 3 per cent of the world’s surface.
• Wetlands have amazing biodiversity. All life needs water and nearly all of it needs land too at some point. More than 100,000 species of animal rely on freshwater ecosystems alone (half of which are insects!).
• Wetlands help to provide most of the world’s drinking water by slowly feeding into our rivers, reservoirs and groundwater. The USA’s Environment Protection Agency says “Wetlands are the foundation of our nation’s water resources”.
• Wetlands help to clean our drinking water. They can remove up to 60 per cent of metals in the water, trap and retain up to 90 per cent of sediment from runoff and eliminate up to 90 per cent of nitrogen.
• Wetlands power industry. It takes 8,000 litres of water to make a pair of leather shoes – including feeding and supporting a cow and processing its hide into leather.
• Wetlands are financially valuable. They provide us with a huge amount of services for free, including cleaning our water and buffering us from floods. If we had to meet these costs ourselves, economists estimate the opportunity cost in the UK would be at least £6.7bn – which we’d have to meet through higher prices and taxes.
• Wetland plants are used extensively in medicine. More than 80 per cent of the world’s population relies on traditional medicines from plants and animals.
• Sadly, England has lost 90 per cent of its wetlands in the last 400 years. Currently 57 per cent of freshwater and wetland species for which we have sufficient data have declined, and 29 per cent have declined strongly.
• The world has lost about half its wetlands in the last 100 years. Most of the losses in the UK and globally are due to wetlands being drained for agriculture or to be built upon.

On the London Wetland Centre website in particular I noticed that there was a lot of written information on Wetlands, why they benefit us and why we should preserve these environments but there wasn't necessarily visual imagery that illustrated these points. For example one of the subheadings on the website reads "WWT in numbers". Although this is valuable, people often won't be bothered to read these so it might be a nice idea to illustrate the words and make them more visually appealing so that people actually take the time to read them instead of just scrolling past. I also noticed that there were lots of images of the environment as a whole/from far away but there wasn't many close ups of specific features e.g. Animals and plants.

I therefore thought it would be a nice idea to produce imagery that illustrated these written factual points, highlighting the benefits of Wetlands. This information might be suitable to present in the form of a small leaflet or zine that could be handed out to the public to audiences that might not know about these areas or who don't already support the preservation of them, for example the younger generations. On the website it also states that to continue the preservation of these environments "local people need to appreciate the value they get from the wetlands so they don't destroy it." Therefore it might be a good idea to hand out leaflets/zines to locals in the street or in letter boxes. The images may even be suitable for billboards, on trains, buses or bus stops as people often through leaflets they get handed or that come through the letter box away.

Another option for a zine could be focusing on just one benefit of Wetlands, for example how some of the fauna can be used to make medicines. I could illustrate some of these plants and accompany each image with a small amount of text informing the reader which medicines they are used to make.