Would the Cumbrian film-makers at the back please stand up

Happy New Year to you. I have a good feeling about 2006, my first venture way from home since festive hibernation having been surprisingly good:

Pulling up at the venue for the Cumbrian Film-maker's Network inaugeral 2006 screening, my heart sank somewhat. The bar, a dim 'aluminium-chairs-blond-wood' type of place, had stopped doing food at 6pm due to lack of customers, and we were forced back into Kendal's hellish one-way system to find fish and chips.
However, on returning later with my DVD of my short film 'Welcome To' there was a pretty good crowd, though I was surprised to see mainly the over-50s, many blokes, and very few of what you might guess were filmmakers wanting to network....Jo Hutton, the organiser, is an enterprising young woman who hosts the event too.
Debate was modest but the atmosphere warm, and I squeezed in the trailer for 'Bata-ville' and plugged its next screening at the local-ish Keswick Film Festival (Feb. 19th FYI).
Along with my film there were a number of others procured on the whole through the local screen agency North West Vision. They were kind of slick but not my thing at all. Most of my attention was spent noting the funders logos at the end for future reference.

The highlight was Edward Acland, a local ex-councilor, 'creative soul' (his words) and eco-zealot who had done an exhibition at the Brewery Arts Centre in 2004. The show ("It was an enormous project, it took over a week!" he said. i didn't want to tell him how long most of my projects take...) included a short autobiographical film which was both elegiac and a call to arms against the impending global envornmental crisis. A guy from the world of corporate video had produced the film, which was technically very competent but formally very pedestrian. What made the film so compelling was the charisma and succinctness of Acland's narration, as he told how he had abandoned his dayjob at the Council and now acknowledged the impossibility of radical green politics ever reaching 'the establishment'. Miraculously un-bitter anyway, he spoke passionately about his concerns for the planet's future, in a seductive language which was tinged with the more predictable hippy-dom but which also was energised with an impatience to find new ways to influence people's behavior and awareness of green issues.

Many of my friends would be surprised to hear that I have been a member of Greenpeace since I was 15. I don't wear that side of myself on my sleeve despite my passion for horticulture and early consumption of organic foods (seeking them out when at art college, you had to buy a bag of what was mostly mud from a dingy shop staffed by some very strange people). Naturally, since moving to the middle of nowhere, the dynamic of nature has gradually taken on more significance for me, as I connect again to my childhood weekends and holidays romping on the Arran hillsides until dusk. In many ways I find the culture of the Lake District largely stagnant / static, and so my theory is that this makes you finely attuned to the very dynamic natural world, and by extension more committed to its sustainance. (Note, I don't say 'protection' a la Lake District National Park Authority).
And so I am always delighted and suprised to find people here like Edward, who manage to actually apply what many would deem hopeless idealism to his life and work - maybe this in turn produces culture?