With water as its central theme, “Cross Currents” takes its viewers across five Asian ecological sites and shows how local inhabitants, often without scientific help, have developed indigenous ways of taking care of their local environments. Two trends stand out as the region’s most notable responses: spirituality and community action. Across the continent, spirituality often becomes the first line of action towards combating an environmental threat, and finds expression in shamanism to ritual medicine. But while spirituality forms a pervasive practice, local peoples are practical enough to take physical action in order to effect real change in their communities, whether it may be through the observance of merti code (river cleaning) in Indonesia, suan som rom (mixed orchard farming) in the mountain orchards of Thailand, or the seasonal cleaning of irrigation canals in a farming village in Japan. These environmental practices, of ordinary people in disaster-prone communities, provide new perspectives that will give hope for survival in the evolving field of new ecology.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Global Voices Performing Arts Series, The Program on the Global Environment, the Center for International Studies, the South Asia Language Resource Center, and the Chicago Consulate General of the Philippines.