The Save the Waves Film Festival came home to San Francisco just before Thanksgiving, after three months of traveling the globe. The audience poured in swiftly, eager to get out of the rain, wearing salty grins along with almost every shade of flannel. The festival has reached its widest audience yet this year, returning from stops in Portugal, the East Coast of the United States, and Southern California.
Film Festival Director Trey Highton says the annual event is Save the Waves’ biggest avenue of outreach to let people know what the organization does. It also brings together a diverse audience of surfers, environmentalists, filmmakers, and musicians, providing common ground for all of its attendees. The festival, which began in 2008, will soon head south to Mexico, and then Hawaii and Australia, completing its six month run of fifteen events on four continents.
The night started with a screening of short-films, followed by live music from Half Moon Bay’s Bar Fight and then ended with its feature films selection. The audience was buzzing with enthusiasm all night, hooting and hollering at barrels and wipeouts onscreen, grooving to Bar Fight’s surfy tunes. But what really made the event special was a collective passion to protect the ocean and environment. “Being able to sit down with a community that actually cares about these things, and to give them a visceral experience of what’s going on with our oceans, and what’s going on with our environment, is really what makes this event so important to us,” says Highton.
Save the Waves works tirelessly to partner with communities around the world and establish World Surfing Reserves (WSR’s), and then implements policies and actions to protect those sacred places. Today, eight surf spots are protected by WSR’s, and Save the Waves is the leading organization working to preserve them. This year, Australia’s Gold Coast was named the eighth WSR, with a ninth soon to be named.
Save the Waves is currently running a “Nature Trump’s Walls” campaign in response to US President-Elect Donald Trump and his hotel company, Trump International Golf Links. The hotel chain is planning to build a controversial seawall on Doughmore Beach in western Ireland. The proposed seawall would protect Trump’s golf course from possible sea-level rise. Save the Waves’ Executive Director Nik Strong-Cevich fears the wall could block access for beachgoers, ruin the waves for surfers and disrupt the current dune system at that beach, which naturally regulates erosion. The strangest part about the controversy, says Strong-Cevich, is that Trump justifies building the seawall as protection against rising sea levels brought on by climate change– “totally the opposite of what he’s run on or what his policies suggest going forward.” Save the Waves has gathered over 100,000 signatures on their petition to block the seawall so far.
Nich Mucha, Director of Environmental Programs at Save the Waves, says he is excited about what’s happening in his own backyard, Santa Cruz, California, which was named a WSR in 2012. Cowell’s Beach, directly north of the Santa Cruz wharf and boardwalk, is notoriously known to have the dirtiest water in California due to its reported number of high bacteria warning days. Recent discoveries have lead scientists to believe that the dirty water at Cowell’s is due in large part to fecal matter released by birds nesting underneath the Santa Cruz wharf. In response, Save the Waves installed netting along the areas where birds typically nest, and their efforts have resulted in a 50% reduction in high bacteria warning days since 2015, according to Mucha.
Victories like these are what keep Save the Waves afloat, and the film festival is a celebration of all the hard work the organization does as well as the hard work ahead. “It’s about the community coming together to recognize what we have and to recognize that it’s worth protecting,” says Highton. And after watching Chris Malloy drop into a twenty foot barrel on screen, it’s an easy realization that the surf community has something worth fighting for. The Save the Waves Film Festival shows us that there is hope among surfers working as a community for global good, and that coming together in ways that allow us to celebrate our common ground (and a common vision for the future) is how to make that fight a success.
Editor’s Note: Visit savethewaves.org for more info on where to catch the film festival during its tour, and to find out how to get involved with Save the Waves’ current projects in your community. Save The Waves Film Festival will be in Ensenada on 12/9 and on the North Shore of Oahu at Turtle Bay Resort on 12/17.
