Virtually attending a film festival on Martha’s Vineyard has become a lot easier over the months since the pandemic first sent movie presenters scrambling for alternatives to in-person screenings.

Using an internet streaming platform called Eventive, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society opened its annual Nature as Inspiration Environmental Film Festival last Thursday with six films, a program of shorts and a series of recorded interviews, all of which remain available through May 27.

It’s a leap forward from the society’s Spectrum LGBTQ+ festival a few weeks ago, for which every film was hosted on a different website and every ticket purchase required an individually-composed email.

“It was a struggle,” said film society director Richard Paradise.

On the new platform, mveff2020.eventive.org, viewers can purchase single tickets for $12, or an all-access pass for $60. There’s also an option to make an additional contribution to the nonprofit film society.

“The person buying the pass has immediate access to the film,” Mr. Paradise said. “They can choose to watch it at the moment, or they can chose to watch any time during the seven-day window of the film festival.”

Once a ticket holder has clicked the “watch” button on a selected film, the clock begins ticking toward a 48-hour deadline. “They can watch multiple times in that 48-hour window,” he said. “It gives the visitor to the festival flexibility.”

That’s a flexibility viewers may wish to exercise, to get a second or even third look at some of the intriguing documentaries in this year’s environmental film festival.

Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective is a Kickstarter-funded film that interviews 20 farmers and authors in various locations, from city-sponsored roof and playground gardens in New York city to a Wisconsin nut orchard, an off-the-grid Kentucky farm and suburban New England lawns transformed into food-producing farmettes.

Inhabit looks intently at both the present and future of the environment. Sustainability is too limited a goal for these activists: they want to change their ecosystems for the better, starting immediately.

“It’s us doing good, not just us doing less bad,” explains Vermont farmer and author Ben Falk. “I want the lives around me to be better as well, because I have lived.”

Sustainability, Mr. Falk says, just tries to lessen ongoing environmental damage, where permaculture seeks to end and heal it.

“Permaculture is not a thing, it’s a way of thinking,” he says. “It’s a process of design... applicable in any landscape, for any set of objectives.”

The upbeat German documentary 2040 also takes an optimistic view of what humanity can do for the Earth, while The Love Bugs is a tenderly funny, 34-minute visit with two elderly, married entomologists as they prepare to transfer their lifetime collection of more than one million weevils and leaf-hoppers to Arizona State University. Animated drawings of insects and old photographs of the couple at their collecting add whimsy to the documentary.

In The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, a pioneering Canadian zoologist returns to South Africa where she was the first to study the towering ruminants in the wild a half-century earlier. Emptying the Skies looks at the black-market trade in migratory songbirds.

The Story of Plastic examines the environmental toll of the ubiquitous material, and National Geographic’s Akashinga: The Brave Ones follows an all-female team of rangers protecting elephants from poachers in Zimbabwe.

The recorded interviews, which Mr. Paradise conducted with directors and documentary subjects via videoconferencing, are included with the related films and also are free for anyone to watch. All of the content will be coming down after Wednesday, the festival’s seventh day.

The Nature as Inspiration Environmental Film Festival website also includes a link to the Vineyard Conservation Society’s annual Art of Conservation exhibition, a juried arts competition for Island high school students. This year’s theme was Solace & Insight, with the 48 winning entries posted in an online slideshow.

“They would normally have been hanging in our lobby,” Mr. Paradise said.

In one of the curiously encouraging adaptations that have been springing up since social distancing atomized the arts audience, this virtual exhibition contains a bonus that likely wouldn’t have been part of the lobby show: a funky guitar instrumental by seventh-grader Elliot Stead, titled Corona Blues.

The film society’s next festival, starting June 28, is the Filmusic Festival. Mr. Paradise hasn’t released the schedule yet, but said he’s looking forward to exploring the programming possibilities offered by Eventive.

“We just put this together in the last three or four days,” he said of the environmental film festival. “I have a month to get ready for Filmusic, and I can get a lot more creative.”

Mr. Paradise added that he expects to continue using Eventive even after movie theatres are permitted to reopen, with reduced capacity, under Gov. Charlie Baker’s phased guidelines this summer.

“That way people who don’t really want to go to the theatre can still watch the movie,” he said.