3E Film Festival, Aug. 10, 11, 17 and 18, 7-9:30 p.m. at Kay Meek Centre, 1700 Mathers Ave., West Vancouver. Tickets: adults $20 each or $60 festival pass; students $12 each or $36 festival pass. Admission includes beverage and canapés. 3efestival.org
When Lucinda Jones brushes her teeth in the morning, she looks out a window with a partial view of Howe Sound and Bowen Island.
"There's a little patch of blue that I can see, some little boats sometimes," says the Caulfeild resident.
With the body of water so close to home, Jones is passionate about preserving its long-term environmental health and has major concerns about the proposal from Woodfibre LNG to construct a liquefied natural gas plant and export terminal in Squamish at the head of the fjord.
"It's an important issue for people to just simply make a little bit of time for," she says.
To raise awareness of the proposal, Jones has spent the last year organizing the 3E Film Festival. The four-day affair at Kay Meek Centre encourages dialogue among members of the surrounding communities and explores alternatives to the LNG project.
"There's going to be a lot of exposure of very successful renewable energy systems and utility systems and utilization that is currently well-used around the world," Jones explains.
Each of the four evenings will focus on a theme: Energy (Aug. 10), Environment (Aug. 11), Economics (Aug. 17) and Investing in Our Future (Aug. 18), and will feature a lineup of short films and speakers that address that theme. Rueben George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Jay Ritchlin of the David Suzuki Foundation and SFU professor of public policy Doug McArthur are among the dozen guest speakers.
Raised in Canada and New Zealand, Jones enjoyed a long career in the fashion industry before turning her attention to environmental activism.
"I did fashion design and it was fabulous because I love textiles and I fell in love with silk. That was the fabric that seemed to just so embellish my ideas and patterns," she says.
After graduating from the Wellington Polytechnic School of Fashion in New Zealand, Jones spent three years sailing through Australasia to see the world and source silks for her clothing collections.
In 1978, she settled in Vancouver and started a business importing silk textiles and selling them to designers and fabric stores across Canada.
"Silk was this rare commodity that was kind of a refined thing that you might have a ballroom gown or something made of," Jones explains.
She had the imported silk pre-washed and dyed to her specifications and marketed it as a washable fabric to encourage more retailers to keep it in stock.
"I ended up selling to most fabric stores across the country," she says.
Thanks to her import business, Jones was able to build up enough capital to open a studio on Broadway in Vancouver and created a high-end men's loungewear collection that she sold into the U.S. market.
When she had children, she closed her fashion house and focused her energy on parenting and the environment. Over the last three decades, Jones has been involved in a lengthy list of environmental causes, including co-founding WHEN (the Worldwide Home Environmentalists' Network), which lobbied West Vancouver to introduce the Blue Box program in the 1980s.
Jones says it's important for people to take responsibility for the area of the world in which they live.
"If you've got the capability to also be engaged in other places in the world and have a passion for other situations in the world, that's great, but let's not forget that Canada is just as much at risk as anywhere else in the world," she says.
Jones is hopeful those who attend the film festival will think beyond their own generation and consider long-term, sustainable energy solutions.
"I hope that people get a better sense of the potential of what we can secure for our youth and for future generations," she says.
For a complete schedule of films and speakers, visit 3efestival.org.
