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By Danielle Nierenberg and Katie Howell
While COVID-19 is exposing fundamental flaws in the global food and agriculture system, it is creating the opportunity to reimagine honoring farmers and food workers and producing healthy, nutritious food. The virus is forcing people to press pause on their daily lives, so Food Tank has compiled a list of 34 movies and series to watch from home that remind us of the power of food.
<p>This list may serve as a guide to help you learn about large- and small-scale agriculture, the relationship between diet and health, and the social and cultural implications of the food system. But these movies and series also offer hope. They show how individual choices can foster connections between people, and they may even inspire you to advocate for a more equitable food system during and after the pandemic.</p>
1. 10 Billion – What’s on Your Plate? (2015)
<p>By 2050, the global population is expected to hit 10 billion. This documentary from German film director Valentin Thurn looks at how we could feed that world. The film explores food production and distribution, analyzing potential solutions to meet the enormous demand on the global agriculture system. The most-viewed film in German cinemas in 2015, "10 Billion — What's on Your Plate?" provides a broad look into the issues in current food production and offers a glimpse of hope through innovation.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube</em></p>2. Always Be My Maybe (2019)
<p>"Always Be My Maybe" is a romantic comedy that follows a successful chef named Sasha as she reunites with her childhood best friend as an adult. During her stay in San Francisco to open a new restaurant, Sasha, played by Ali Wong, and her old friend rediscover their connection though eating, and she remembers the influence her friend's family had on her love of cooking. "Always Be My Maybe" shows Sasha's journey as she falls in love and reconnects to her Asian American culture.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>3. A Tale of Two Kitchens (2019)
<p>"A Tale of Two Kitchens" is about two restaurants — Cala in San Francisco and Contramar in Mexico City — owned and operated by acclaimed Mexican chef Gabriela Cámara. The film tells the stories of the restaurants' staff, alternating between personal accounts and shots of employees interacting with customers and preparing meals. "A Tale of Two Kitchens" offers an inspiring look into how people find personal and professional growth in the restaurant industry and how restaurants can become second homes for those that work in them.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>4. Barbecue (2017)
<p>Embarking on a journey across 12 countries, "Barbecue" tells a story of the culture behind grilling meat and how it brings people together. The film offers a portrait of those who stoke the flames, showing that barbecue is not just about the meat, but about the rituals, stories, and traditions that surround the process. "Barbecue" won the James Beard Award for Best Documentary in 2018.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play</em></p>5. Before the Plate (2018)
<p>Filmmaker Sagi Kahane-Rapport documents John Horne, Canadian chef and owner of the prestigious Toronto restaurant Canoe, as he follows each ingredient from one dish back to the farm they came from. "Before the Plate" offers a look into what it takes to grow and distribute food and the issues farmers face in today's food system. </p><p><em>Where to watch it: YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Video</em></p>6. Caffeinated (2015)
<p>Working with coffee connoisseur Geoff Watts, this film explores the life cycle of a coffee seed, following the process from bean to mug. The film focuses on the social and cultural landscape around coffee and how it shapes the lives of thousands of individuals worldwide. "Caffeinated" filmmakers interview coffee farmers, roasters, and baristas to provide a comprehensive idea of all that goes into a cup of coffee.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Google Play</em></p>7. Cesar Chavez (2014)
<p>"Cesar Chavez" is a biographical film that reconstructs the emergence of the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s. The film focuses on Chavez, co-founder of the UFW, whose commitment to secure a living wage for farm workers ignited social justice movements across America. The film inspired a<a href="http://www.takepart.com/follow-your-food/index.html" target="_blank"> "Follow Your Food"</a> series by Participant Media and the Equitable Food Initiative as well as won an ALMA Award for Special Achievement in Film.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play</em></p>8. Chef Flynn (2018)
<p>"Chef Flynn" tells the story of Flynn McGarry, who became famous after running a fully functional kitchen in his bedroom at age 10. The film chronicles McGarry as he outgrows his bedroom kitchen and sets out to join New York City's innovative culinary scene. With a focus on the relationship McGarry has with his mother, "Chef Flynn" shows how far McGarry was able to go with the support and dedication of his family.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Hulu, Google Play, YouTube</em></p>9. Chef’s Table (2015- )
<p>From David Gelb, the filmmaker that created "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," comes "Chef's Table," a series that profiles professional chefs around the world. Each episode of "Chef's Table" spotlights a different chef as they share the personal stories that have inspired their culinary ventures. The series has won a variety of awards, including a James Beard Foundation Award and an International Documentary Association Award.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>10. Cooked (2016- )
<p>"Cooked" is a series based on Michael Pollan's book by the same name. In each episode, Pollan focuses on a different natural element — fire, water, air, and earth — and its relationship to cooking methods throughout history. "Cooked" brings together different aspects of cooking to show its ability to connect us all as human beings.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>11. Dolores (2017)
<p>"Dolores" documents the life of Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the first farm workers union, United Farm Workers (UFW). Filmmaker Peter Bratt chronicles Huerta's life from her childhood in Stockton, California, to her work with UFW and becoming a leading figure in the feminist movement. Huerta has often not been credited for her equal role in establishing UFW; "Dolores" argues this is because Huerta is a woman, and the film strives to spotlight her heroic efforts in the fight for social justice.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Google Play, YouTube</em></p>12. Eating Animals (2017)
<p>Based on the 2009 book <em>Eating Animals</em> by Jonathan Safran Foer, filmmaker Christopher Quinn examines factory farming and its associated negative environmental and public health effects. "Eating Animals" spotlights farmers, activists, and innovators who are raising awareness about where our meat comes from and standing up to big companies to tell their stories.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play, Hulu</em></p>13. Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table (2017)
<p>In the 1940's, New Orleans' food and drink business generated less than US$1 million a year; today it is a billion-dollar industry that attracts tourists from around the world to the city. Many credit the transformation to the Brennan family, guided by Ella Brennan. "Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table" tells the story of Ella Brennan and how she revolutionized creole cuisine and helped push it into American mainstream dining culture.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Apple TV, Commanderspalace.com</em></p>14. El Susto! (2020)
<p>"El Susto!" tells the story of a sugar tax in Mexico, implemented in an attempt to curb the prevalence of diabetes. The film documents the battle between public health activists and the corporate wealth of the "Big Soda" industry, offering a look into the reality of challenging powerful industries. The film premiers this May as part of the virtual Vermont International Film Festival.</p><p><em>Where to watch it:</em><a href="https://www.filmmovementplus.com/products/vermont-intl-film-festival-presents-el-susto" target="_blank"> <em>VIFF virtual cinema</em></a></p>15. Farmsteaders (2018)
<p>"Farmsteaders" follows Nick Nolan and his family as they try to resurrect his grandfather's dairy farm in Ohio. Once a thriving agriculture economy, Nolan's rural community has given way to the pressures of agribusiness and corporate farming — left with unused fertile farmland, abandoned buildings, and skyrocketing health issues. "Farmsteaders" gives a voice to a new generation of family farmers, showing the hardships those who grow our food are having to endure.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: POV – link through movie website</em></p>16. Fed Up (2014)
<p>Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig and journalist Katie Couric investigate the role of the American food industry in rising obesity rates and diet-related diseases. "Fed Up" uncovers the sugar industry's influence on American dietary guidelines and argues that hidden sugar in processed foods is the root of the problem. With the tagline "Congress says pizza is a vegetable," the film shows how interactions between industry and government can directly affect the health of the nation.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Tubi, Google Play</em></p>17. Food Chains (2014)
<p>Supermarkets' buying power and farm contracts often set the substandard wages and conditions farm workers face. To improve their livelihood, <a href="http://ciw-online.org/" target="_blank">The Coalition of Immokalee Workers</a> demanded a penny more per pound of tomatoes picked. But Publix, Florida's largest grocery chain, refused. "Food Chains" follows farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, as they prepare for and launch the resulting hunger strike at Publix headquarters. The documentary aims to expose the exploitation of farm laborers and the complicity of corporations in the creation of conditions the filmmakers liken to modern-day slavery.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Tubi, YouTube</em></p>18. For Grace (2015)
<p>"For Grace" tells the story of renowned chef Curtis Duffy as he builds his dream restaurant, Grace, at a difficult time in his personal life. Filmmakers Kevin Pang and Mark Helenowski offer a look into each step in opening the luxury dining spot, Duffy's troubled past, and how he came to seek refuge in the kitchen. "For Grace" gives a bittersweet look into the restaurant industry and the sacrifice it requires.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Google Play, YouTube, Apple TV</em></p>19. From Scratch (2020)
<p>"From Scratch" follows chef, actor, and producer David Moscow as he travels worldwide making meals from scratch. Each episode begins with a chef presenting a dish that Moscow then has to hunt, gather, forage, and grow each ingredient to recreate. "From Scratch" reveals the overwhelming amount of work that brings each part of a meal into the kitchen. </p><p><em>Where to watch it: FYI</em></p>20. In Our Hands (2017)
<p>This one-hour documentary takes viewers on a journey across the fields and farms of Britain. "In Our Hands" discusses diversity of the land, the importance of generational knowledge, and the need for innovation to create a more sustainable food system. A project by Black Bark Films and the <a href="https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/" target="_blank">Landworkers Alliance</a>, the film advocates for sustainable methods and the rights of small producers through a feminist lens.</p><p> <em>Where to watch it: Vimeo</em></p>21. Just Eat It (2014)
<p>"Just Eat It" explores the enormous amount of food waste that exists in the supply chain – from farms and retail to an individual's home. The filmmakers pledge to quit grocery shopping and survive only on discarded food for six months. Featuring interviews with food waste experts and food writers, "Just Eat It" exposes the systematic obsession with perfect produce and confusing expiry dates that has ultimately cost billions of dollars in wasted food each year. The film has received multiple awards from film festivals across North America.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Tubi, Google Play</em></p>22. Maacher Jhol (2017)
<p>A Bengali film directed by Pratim D. Gupta, "Maacher Jhol" tells the story of a Paris-based chef returning to his home in Kolkata after 13 years. Challenged to cook a bowl of fish curry, a quintessential Bengali dish, the film shows the master-chef return to his roots and reconnect with his family.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>23. Polyfaces: A World of Many Choices (2015)
<p>"Polyfaces" documents the Salatins, a fourth-generation farming family, who moved from Australia to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the United States to practice regenerative farming. The film follows the family for four years as they operate Polyface Farm without chemicals and provide food to 6,000 families within a three-hour radius. "Polyfaces" shows how working with nature, not against it, is a way to reconnect to the land and to the community.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video</em></p>24. Rotten (2018- )
<p>Zero Point Zero and Netflix combined to produce "Rotten," a series that highlights the problems in the process of supplying food. With a human-centered narrative approach, each episode focuses on one food product, interviewing manufacturers, distributers, and others involved in the process. "Rotten" reveals the corruption, waste, and dangers involved with eating certain foods<em>. </em></p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>25. Salt Fat Acid Heat (2018)
<p>"Salt Fat Acid Heat" follows chef and food writer Samin Nosrat as she travels the world to explore the core principles of cooking. Based on Nosrat's New York Times bestselling book of the same name, Nosrat uses each episode to travel to Italy, Japan, Mexico, and the United States, where she began her culinary career. "Salt Fat Acid Heat" helps the audience learn about each element of cooking and how to incorporate them into their own recipes.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>26. SEED: The Untold Story (2016)
<p>A winner of 18 film festival awards, "SEED: The Unknown Story" follows the story of farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers in their fight to defend seeds from the control of biotech companies. The film highlights the importance of the seed in the future of our food and presents a heartening story about the efforts to reintegrate an appreciation of seeds into our culture. "SEED" features Vandana Shiva, Dr. Jane Goodall, Andrew Kimbrell, Winona Laduke, and Raj Patel.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play</em></p>27. Soul of a Banquet (2014)
<p>"Soul of a Banquet" shows the journey of Cecilia Chiang and how she introduced America to authentic Chinese food. Chiang opened The Mandarin, her internationally renowned restaurant in San Francisco, in 1961 and has since greatly influenced the culinary scene in the United States. Through interviews with Chiang as well as Alice Waters and Ruth Reichl, the film documents Chiang's life in Beijing, her move to the United States, and how she became a restaurateur.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Hulu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Video</em></p>28. Sustainable (2016)
<p>"Sustainable" investigates the economic and environmental instability of the current agriculture system and the actors in the food system who are working to change this. The film presents the leadership and knowledge of some prominent sustainable farmers around the United States, like Bill Niman, Klaas Martens and John Kempf, who are challenging the country to build a more ethical agriculture system. The film offers a story of hope, with a promise that our food system can be transformed into one that is sustainable for future generations.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube</em></p>29. That Sugar Film (2014)
<p>"That Sugar Film" looks at the impact of high-sugar diets on an Aboriginal community in Australia and travels to the United States to interview the world's sugar experts. When director Damon Gameau decides to test the effects of sugar on his own health, he consumes foods commonly perceived as healthy, revealing the prevalence of sugar in each item. The film documents how sugar has become the most dominant food in the world, infiltrating both our diets and culture.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Documentary Mania</em></p>30. The Biggest Little Farm (2018)
<p>"The Biggest Little Farm" follows John and Molly Chester for eight years as they transition from city living to a 200-acre farm. Directed by John Chester, the film shows the couple start Apricot Lane Farms and follows the farm's expansion to include multiple animals and fruit and vegetable varieties. Through their work, the Chesters find that the importance of biodiversity extends far beyond the farm.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: YouTube, Google Play</em></p>31. The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution (2018)
<p>Director Maya Gallus profiles seven female chefs as they face obstacles in a profession dominated by men. "The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution" shows how the culture of restaurant kitchens has bred toxic working conditions and how women are working to change it. Through the women's stories, the film documents the greater challenges female chefs face as they attempt to rise to the top of the restaurant industry.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Tubi, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Video</em></p>32. The Lunchbox (2013)
<p>"The Lunchbox" tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a lonely housewife and a widower. The housewife, played by Nimrat Kaur, decides to prepare her husband creative, elaborate lunches, sending them along with a note through the famously complicated Mumbai lunch delivery system. The lunchbox ends up with the wrong man, played by the late Irrfan Khan. The housewife recognizes her mistake and sends Khan another note to apologize, starting a conversation between the two and sparking a relationship as they discuss life's joys and sorrows over the exchange of delicious meals<em>.</em></p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play</em></p>33. Ugly Delicious (2018- )
<p>"Ugly Delicious" combines travel, history, and cooking as award-winning chef David Chang takes the audience on a journal to culinary hot spots around the world. Each episode explores one dish or concept and tells the story of how it is made in different regions and how it has evolved over time. Chang brings guests, such as Jimmy Kimmel, Nick Kroll, and Peter Meehan, to join him as he celebrates different cultures through food.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Netflix</em></p>34. Wasted! The Story of Food Waste (2017)
<p>Executive-produced by the late Anthony Bourdain, filmmakers Anna Chai and Nari Kye aim to change the way people buy, cook, recycle, and eat food. "Wasted!" not only explores the effects of systematic food waste on the environment, but also offers potential solutions. The film follows some of the world's most influential chefs who create dishes from typically discarded items and features success stories from around the world. These efforts try to show the audience that any action, no matter how small, can contribute to the fight against food waste.</p><p><em>Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play, Vimeo</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Juvenile hatchery salmon flushed from a tanker truck in San Francisco Bay, California. Ben Moon
That salmon sitting in your neighborhood grocery store's fish counter won't look the same to you after watching Artifishal, a new film from Patagonia.
<p>The project, which got its start when Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard wanted to make a film about the arrogance of humankind, turned out to be a film about <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/salmon">salmon</a> … and what we're doing to them.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://therevelator.org/author/taralohan/" target="_blank">Tara Lohan</a> is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist,Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis.</em></p><p> <em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://therevelator.org/artifishal-patagonia/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/core/dashboard/editor/2638804754?#/" target="_self"></a></em><em></em></p><p class=""><a href="https://therevelator.org/author/taralohan/" target="_blank"></a></p>
<p>The film uses salmon as a lens to tell a larger story about wilderness.</p><p>"It's about how we keep trying to control nature rather than allowing it to do what it does," said the film's director, <a href="https://www.liarsandthieves.tv/josh-murphy" target="_blank">Josh Murphy</a>.</p><p><em>Artifishal </em>looks specifically at how fish hatcheries and fish farms threaten wild salmon populations, which in turn has ecosystem-wide effects — all because of our desire to eat these culturally significant species.</p><p>"We fell in love with this wild thing and then we took too many of them and we degraded the environments that produce them," explained Murphy of the genesis of the film.</p><p>But instead of helping wild salmon recover, we've created hatcheries and farms to make more of them — at great cost, both economically and ecologically. The film explores the process, the tradeoffs and what's at stake if we continue down this path.</p><p>As <em>Artifishal</em> and its filmmakers travel around the country conducting screenings with community organizations, we spoke with Murphy about what he learned making the film and why wild salmon are so important.</p>
It seems like the heart of this film is fish hatcheries, which don’t get a lot of attention. What did you learn about them?
<p>There's this narrative that hatcheries are a good thing. But I wanted to know where that came from because there's no other animal that I can find that's mass produced, much less by a state or a federal government, and then released into the wild. It doesn't happen.</p><p><span></span>I found the story of George Perkins Marsh, who wrote a book in 1864 called <em>Man and Nature</em> about the irreparable harm humans were having on the environment. And that was a big thing. Creeks and rivers had been so degraded by industry, dams, mills and forest practices [that] he proposed that we should restore fish. He had just heard about this technique brought over by some French guys about how to take the fish eggs and milt and combine them. And he thought that this is how we'll solve the problem — we're just going to make more fish. Within five years of the Civil War ending there were fish hatcheries all over New England.</p><p>It played on our agricultural norms — we do this for chickens, sheep, cows — of course we're going to do this for fish. But we didn't realize that fish are going into an uncontrolled environment.</p>What are some of the risks to wild salmon from this?
<p>Fast forward to today and now you have certain people who wanted to further degrade rivers, for example, people that want to develop the rivers for hydropower, and they're allowed to do that — they can dam the whole river and just put a hatchery at the bottom of it.</p><p>Hatcheries have enabled people to believe that you could control the river and still have fish.</p><p>And what we're realizing now is the science over the last 25 years says that's a completely false narrative. It's actually degrading the biological diversity.</p><p>By bringing fish into a hatchery, you're decreasing all of the natural selection that would have happened and so you're taking the fitness out. And then we started selecting certain breeds within a river, like fall-run Chinook, because it was easier and cheaper for us to produce those. But we only do that with economically viable species, not the biologically viable species. So we don't have, for example, hatcheries for lampreys, which are an important part of the ecosystem. And we don't have hatcheries for spring-run in many places or winter-run, which some rivers have. It's only fall-run.</p><p>I think the scariest thing is that in choosing as we are, we are actually degrading the fishes' ability to adapt in the future to things like climate change. They're becoming more like a monocrop.</p>The first part of the film is about hatcheries and then it jumps to fish farms. You show the risks of Atlantic salmon being raised in open pens in Pacific waters. Was this a commentary on that practice specifically or fish farms in general?
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTU5NzEwMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MjIyOTQ0Mn0.oSyGlzWEpbRAPmS2Wdphaso9r96i5Is6EPDVsn0UlWc/img.jpg?width=980" id="db819" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d0e3d36540482e8510ffb688f771f501" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Net-pen salmon farms concentrate fish at unnaturally high levels, creating ideal conditions for disease, parasites and other health issues. Alta, Norway.
Ben Moon
<p>In open net-pen aquaculture, when you have opportunities for the farmed fish to escape and interbreed with wild fish — when you have Atlantic salmon in the Pacific — one has to wonder, what are we doing? What's driving this? And it's just money.</p><p>There are other ways. There're opportunities for fish to be raised on land with either freshwater or saltwater with less harm to the wild environment. But we don't do it because we want more money. Floating a net in the ocean costs nothing. You don't even pay property taxes. You may have a license fee to the state, but that's it. And you get to dump everything into the water.</p><p>We may need to have aquaculture in the future and I think that it's a promising sector. But if we need more fish, if there's a demand for that, we need to do it in a way that does not harm wild fish.</p>What do we lose if we don’t have wild salmon?
<p>There're the obvious benefits that salmon give to ecosystems.</p><p>So for example, right now in rivers that have hatcheries, there's often a fish weir on the river and the fish will swim up to it until they can go no further. So they've taken all of the nutrients that they have acquired in the ocean, and they swim up to that weir, turn the corner and they swim themselves into the hatchery. The hatchery kills the fish, takes the gametes, makes the new generation and throws the fish into a landfill. All of those nutrients that used to funnel from the ocean to the headwaters of these rivers are gone. That means all of the animals that relied on those nutrients no longer have that.</p><p>But we don't care because we just want to make more fish and release them. For who? Commercial and sport fishers. That's it. That means there's no other value that salmon have to anything else in the ecosystem. If fish are not seen as wildlife and they're only seen as food and fun, then we will just try to churn them out and manufacture them as quickly as we can because of the economic benefits.</p><p>But we don't do that for grizzly bears. We don't have hatcheries for deer, for elk, for waterfowl. When you hear the word "hatchery," it sounds quaint, but if we call these "fish factories," which is what they really are, people might consider the whole thing differently.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTU5NzA5NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MzgwNDYwNH0.gZElp3Wa284S07u--v96C6HhZ4Ft1uvckbIxJl7Bk1g/img.jpg?width=980" id="db27c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ba2eec70243d1c3d2b3b4f36859c6d05" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Raceways for raising juvenile spring Chinook salmon at the Sawtooth Hatchery, in Stanley, Idaho which is managed by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, and funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Ben Moon
What do you hope people take away from this film?
<p>If we don't respect wild and we just try to replicate them in farms and replicate them in hatcheries, then we could lose wild altogether. What I hope the movie leaves people with is this kind of disquieting question, which is, are we at the end of wild?</p><p>If we are then that's a really frustrating reality. If, in fact, that's what we've decided, what then for birds? What then for bears? For elephants?</p><p>Some people just don't want to hear that because they're so focused on themselves — their livelihood or their recreation. But what about the rest of the entire ecosystem that relies on wild fish? It's not just about us. That is the arrogance of man — this whole story is just about us. And I think that's what we have to reconsider.</p><p>Fish are really indicators of water quality. I think about that in terms of the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine. If a miner was descending into a mine and the canary dies, it says to the miner, "don't go any farther." Right?</p><p>With fish it's like we're descending into that mine, the fish dies, and we just make more of them to put in the cage. It's telling us something. It's saying the environment can't support them. Fix that problem. Don't make more of them. We have to fix the disease, not just manage the symptom, which is a lack of fish. And until we do that, our future for wild fish, and our future for other wild things is in question.</p>
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The animals are the real stars of The Biggest Little Farm. Neon
By Andrew Amelinckx
Take a broken-down 200-acre property that has been transformed into an incredibly lush and diverse biodynamic farm over eight years and capture it all on film and you get The Biggest Little Farm. This documentary tells the story of two newbie farmers and their rescue dog as they leave Los Angeles behind to build a farm that will work in harmony with nature in Moorpark, California. John Chester, the Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who directed the film, and Molly Chester, a private chef and blogger, discovered that nature isn't easily harnessed when there are coyotes, gophers, snails, windstorms and wildfires to contend with. Here are some of the biggest reasons to go and see this film, which is at times heartbreaking, funny, achingly beautiful, charming and full of surprises.
Todd
<p>Both the farm and the film owe their existence to a dog named Todd. The Chesters rescued him from an animal hoarder and promised him that their home would be his last. But Todd was a prodigious barker when left alone, so when the inevitable notice to vacate arrived due to noise complaints, the Chesters decided to take a chance on their dream. "It changed the course of our future because we had blindly committed to an animal and weren't willing to break that promise," said Chester. "Our love for that dog gave us this incredibly epic and magical existence."</p>“We Went Crazy”
<p>In less than a decade, <a href="https://www.apricotlanefarms.com/" target="_blank">Apricot Lane Farms</a> went from a dilapidated monocrop operation to a thriving farm with 10,000 orchard trees encompassing 75 different kinds of stone fruit, lemons, and avocados; a cornucopia of vegetables; and a boatload of animals, from pigs and sheep to horses and highland cattle. "We piled too much on from the beginning and were growing way too many things," said Chester. "We wanted a biologically diverse ecosystem, but we went crazy."</p>An Untimely Parting
<p>The reason for such diversity rests with the agricultural ethos of Alan York, a pioneer in biodynamic growing, an integrated system that builds soil fertility through composting, animals, cover crops and crop rotation. Chester enlisted the help of York early on, and he convinced the couple to bring in an incredibly diverse mix of crops and animals to help rebuild the soil. But an untimely parting with York, just when the system he had set up needed the most attention, left the Chesters feeling angry and frustrated. In the end, it forced them to become more creative and self-reliant to overcome their challenges. "I had to respect that there was something special about this farm, and I needed to look at in a different way," said Chester. "The problems were just things to be solved — they weren't going to kill us or our dream."</p>Working in Harmony
<p>By year five, the system created by York had begun to show results. Nature and agriculture were working hand in hand, with a balance between predators and pests that kept both in check. Yet, even with this dynamic ecosystem chugging along, every season would see a new pest or problem crop up, said Chester. The only difference now is that the system responds faster, preventing infestations and epidemics. Beyond this, their farm remains resilient in the face of climate change, with less soil erosion, an ability to store more groundwater and higher levels of carbon in the soil than a typical farm. "I didn't want to make a film about climate change," said Chester. "I wanted to make a film about its consequences and living through them. It's about the potential to unlock these ways to integrate ourselves within a system that regenerates it rather than depletes it."</p>From Your Site Articles
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Healthy Soil, Coming to a Theater Near You: 5 Lessons From 'The Biggest Little Farm'
09 May 2019
Popular
The Biggest Little Farm [Official Trailer]
By Karen Perry Stillerman
An email in my inbox last month caught my attention. It was from author, environmental advocate, and Academy Award-winning film producer Laurie David (An Inconvenient Truth), and it offered a preview of The Biggest Little Farm, a new documentary film David had coming out soon. "I promise you that any person that goes to see this film will leave inspired and caring a whole lot more for the planet," her note said. "I promise you it will help your organization achieve your goals!"
<p>I clicked on the link, watched <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfDTM4JxHl8" target="_blank">the trailer</a>, was intrigued. The movie looked gorgeous. But would it hold up to scrutiny from skeptical agricultural scientists?</p><p>A few days later, in a conference room with several members of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/about/staff/staff/food-agriculture" target="_blank">food and agriculture team</a>, I dimmed the lights and let the film roll. <em><a href="https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/" target="_blank">The Biggest Little Farm</a> </em>(in theaters this month) chronicles the adventures of filmmaker <a href="https://www.johnchester.com/" target="_blank">John Chester</a> and his wife Molly as they leave their lives in Los Angeles behind to start a diversified farm on an exhausted piece of land north of the city, where they intend to live and grow food "in perfect harmony with nature."</p><p>At first, the storytelling seems to veer toward the precious. John documents the promise they made to their rescue pup Todd about how much he'd love being a farm dog. The narration, over cute animation, extols the idyllic life John and Molly imagine for themselves. But I soon realized he was setting up viewers for the same jolt he and Molly would soon get — repeatedly — about the harsh realities of farming, especially when you're trying something new and complex.</p><p>Because it turns out this kind of farming isn't all rainbows and puppies and adorable baby goats. It's also exhausting and sometimes heartbreaking. Before long, the story got real — very real — and I was hooked. After the credits rolled, my colleagues' reviews came in:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><em>A really beautiful, honest, and engaging film. It shows the many tough challenges of farming with nature rather than against it, but leads with the opportunities and a hopeful optimism.</em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><em>I don't think I've ever seen such a stunning illustration of the ecology of diversified farming – the challenges, the potential, and all the interconnectedness of a complex farm ecosystem. </em></p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><em>More dead chickens! Why did you make me watch this??</em></p><p>Indeed, midway through the film, the casualties start to pile up. John, Molly and their team face a seemingly never-ending string of predator attacks, pest and disease outbreaks, and other deadly natural phenomena as they struggle to make <a href="https://www.apricotlanefarms.com/" target="_blank">Apricot Lane Farms</a> a sustainable enterprise. Although the relentless mishaps challenge their core belief in working with nature rather than against it, they persist, learning something from each experience and finding creative ways to adapt.</p><p>Their story, while unique in many ways, contains some key lessons for U.S. agriculture:</p>
<p><em>The Biggest Little Farm</em> opens this Friday, May 10, in Los Angeles and New York, and nationwide May 17.</p>
Soil is paramount.
<p>When the Chesters first arrived at Apricot Lane Farms, their newly acquired soil was so compacted and devoid of organic matter, they could hardly break it with a shovel. "The soil is dead," John says flatly. "And we have no idea how to bring it back to life." But with the help of consultant and soil guru Alan York, they set about enriching it. "Plants build soil," Alan said as they seeded cover crops. They also installed a <a href="https://growingsolutions.com/using-compost-tea/" target="_blank">state-of-the-art compost tea system</a> and added animals (so many animals!) for their manure. And indeed, by the end of the film—which spans a seven-year period of <a href="https://www.drought.gov/drought/california-no-stranger-dry-conditions-drought-2011-2017-was-exceptional" target="_blank">historic California drought</a> followed by an <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/very-wet-2017-water-year-ends-california" target="_blank">unusually wet year</a>—the Chesters' <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/food-agriculture/advance-sustainable-agriculture/turning-soils-sponges" target="_blank">spongier soil</a> seemed to have paid off, as it held water better during dry periods and soaked up more of it when the rains fell. At a time when climate change is driving more weather extremes in every part of the country, building healthy soil will be critical to ensuring that farmers can be successful.</p>2. Increasing a farm’s biodiversity is critical (and hard).
<p>Someone recently said to me that farmers are the only manufacturers who work outside, completely exposed to the elements. There's truth in that, for sure, but the choice of the word "manufacturers" is revealing. Factories typically make one thing, over and over, day in and day out. And farming in the United States has become a lot like that—an overwhelmingly industrial process, divorced from nature and, in fact, often fighting it tooth and nail. In the film, we see Alan explaining how the Chesters must emulate how natural ecosystems work (we call this <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/marcia-delonge/the-abcds-of-agroecology-what-is-it-all-about-926" target="_blank">agroecology</a>). His mantra: "Diversify, diversify, diversify." John and Molly take this to the extreme, eventually farming 200+ crops and animals across pastures, orchards, and a large vegetable garden. A plethora of wildlife also returns, including new pests that require more creativity and further diversification to combat. Alan promises all this diversity will become simplicity, but as John notes, "a simple way of farming is just not easy."</p>3. Few farmers can go to the lengths the Chesters have. But most don’t need to.
<p>The 76 varieties of stone fruit trees John and Molly now tend is…probably a bit much for most farmers. And without access to investors like they recruited, few farm startups can afford fancy composting systems, miles of new irrigation line, and the costs associated with repeated trial and error. It is never clear, in the film, how much up-front and continued investment was necessary to do what they did at Apricot Lane Farms (though we can assume it was a lot). Nor do we know at what point in the saga that investment was fully recouped, if it has been. But recent research has shown that even more limited and lower-cost efforts at diversification on farms—for example, expanding <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/food-agriculture/advance-sustainable-agriculture/rotating-crops-turning-profits" target="_blank">from two crops to three or four</a>, or planting <a href="https://www.nrem.iastate.edu/research/STRIPS/content/what-are-prairie-strips" target="_blank">prairie strips</a> around the edges of crop fields—can have substantial benefits. And <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/marcia-delonge/the-bipartisan-2018-farm-bill-brings-some-consequences-cautious-optimism-for-conservation" target="_blank">federal farm programs provide help</a> (though not nearly enough) for farmers to do such things.</p>4. One way or another, the ecological debts of our industrial farming system must be paid.
<p>Apricot Lane Farms required substantial upfront investment not only because the Chesters had ambitious plans, but also because they needed to pay down an enormous ecological debt racked up on that piece of land over the years. Industrial agriculture has been <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25012019/climate-change-agriculture-farming-consolidation-corn-soybeans-meat-crop-subsidies" target="_blank">called an "extraction industry"</a> because it takes nutrients from the land without replacing them, allows precious soil to wash or blow away, and sends rainwater running off the surface rather than percolating down to refill underground aquifers for later use. Due to decades of short-sighted management, this is the situation on farmland all across this country. And while John, Molly, and their investors had the means to take on Apricot Lane's ecological debt, it's not fair or realistic to expect farmers to make up for the damage caused by industrial practices and the public policies that have incentivized them. Rather, "The Biggest Little Farm" shows once again why shifting agricultural policies to help farmers diversify the landscape and rebuild their soil and is a smart investment in the future.</p>5. Nature is breathtakingly beautiful.
<p>The film's message is in line with what the science tells us about farmland diversification and healthy soil, and it comes at a time when legislators in <a href="https://soilhealthinstitute.org/resources/catalog/" target="_blank">many states</a> and <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/karen-perry-stillerman/farmers-are-excited-about-soil-health-thats-good-news-for-all-of-us" target="_blank">in Congress</a> are looking to expand policy supports and public investments to help more farmers advance soil health. Even though Apricot Lane is just one farm, and a unique one at that, my hope is that this film adds to the conversation. But you don't have to be an advocate for healthy soil policy to appreciate the movie, which above all is visually stunning and brimming with optimism. You'll marvel at the ways John Chester's cinematography captures the beauty and devastation of nature and life on a diversified, ecologically-based farm—from aerial footage of painstakingly designed orchards to images of playful lambs and terrifying wildfires, infrared footage of nocturnal predators, and superslomo shots of the hummingbirds and beneficial insects who return as part of the farm's renewal. If you like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmhdx_kRd-w&cid=wwa-us-kwgo-iphone-slid---+iphone++commercial-b&mtid=20925d2q39172&aosid=p238&mnid=sONjxlDdV-dc_mtid_20925d2q39172_pcrid_343878260391&anonymizeip=set" target="_blank">that iPhone commercial</a>, you'll find this film equally appealing.</p>Related Articles Around the Web
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IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde (L) and broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough take part in a discussion on nature and the economy in Washington, DC, April 11. MANDEL NGAN / AFP / Getty Images
Beloved nature broadcaster Sir David Attenborough narrated a BBC documentary on climate change Thursday that Guardian reviewer Rebecca Nicholson said aimed to encourage action around climate the way that Attenborough's Blue Planet II galvanized the world against single-use plastic.
<p>The hour-long program, called <em>Climate Change—The Facts</em>, marked Attenborough's strongest warning to date on the dangers posed by global warming, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47976184" target="_blank">BBC News reported</a>.</p><p>"In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined," Attenborough said in the film. "It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies."</p>
<div id="b5832" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="UNCQ6C1576663582"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1118884506927345665" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">There is still time to hit the emergency brakes on the damage we are doing to our planet. There is still hope. 💚
C… https://t.co/Ori051VOSv</div> — BBC One (@BBC One)<a href="https://twitter.com/BBCOne/statuses/1118884506927345665">1555597828.0</a></blockquote></div><p><br>The program looked at the impacts of climate change, showing footage of people fleeing <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/wildfires" target="_self">wildfires</a> in the U.S. and highlighting how <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/sea-level-rise" target="_self">sea level rise</a> is forcing the residents of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana to leave their homes. It also spoke to scientists studying ice melt in <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/greenland" target="_self">Greenland</a> and <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/antarctica" target="_self">Antarctica</a>.<br></p><p>"In the last year we've had a global assessment of ice losses from Antarctica and Greenland and they tell us that things are worse than we'd expected," University of Leeds Prof. Andrew Shepherd said.</p><p>The documentary was also upfront about the role of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/fossil-fuels" target="_self">fossil fuel</a> industry, Nicholson wrote, explaining that it was the most profitable business in human history and that its companies consulted with the same people who advised the tobacco industry in order to develop PR campaigns that spread doubt and slow down action.</p><p>The program also proposed solutions, such as <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy/" target="_self">renewable energy</a>, carbon capture technologies and political action.</p><p>The documentary featured 16-year-old Swedish activist <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/greta-thunberg" target="_self">Greta Thunberg</a>, whose one-person school strikes for climate action sparked a global youth movement, <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/david-attenborough-climate-change-society-collapse-1399984" target="_blank">Newsweek reported</a>.</p><p>"My future and everyone else's future is at risk and nothing is being done, no one is doing anything, so then I have to do something," Thunberg said.</p><p>The program aired in the UK as the fourth day of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/extinction-rebellion" target="_self">Extinction Rebellion</a> protests <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/extinction-rebellion-arrests-2634767072.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1" target="_self">blocked busy streets</a> in central London. The combination of the headlines generated by the protesters, who want the UK government to reach net-zero emissions by 2025, and the Attenborough program, worked to increase media coverage of climate change in the UK, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/19/extinction-rebellion-and-attenborough-put-climate-in-spotlight" target="_blank">The Guardian reported</a>.</p>
<div id="ce474" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="O6VRDW1576663582"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1118781914544996353" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Tonight at 9pm on @BBCOne Sir David presents the stark reality of the #ClimateCatastrophe . It’s good timing as hop… https://t.co/gGssBlQmRZ</div> — Chris Packham (@Chris Packham)<a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisGPackham/statuses/1118781914544996353">1555573369.0</a></blockquote></div><p>BBC Presenter and environmentalist Chris Packham said the BBC was giving more attention to the environmental crisis.<br></p><p>"They [the BBC] are certainly making sure they are moving away from criticism levelled at them in the last few years of only showing a rose-tinted view of the natural world," Packham said.</p><p>In recent years, two complaints against the network's Radio 4 Today program have been upheld due to interviews with <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-denier" target="_self">climate denier</a> Nigel Lawson that did not adequately challenge him on the facts.</p>
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SimonSkafar / E+ / Getty Images
A powerful documentary can help inform viewers and spark a more conscious lifestyle. Maybe you've thrown out rotting greens one too many times, or waste from online shopping has you feeling guilty. The following list of documentaries may inspire you to "green" your life a bit more just in time for spring.
<p>From a Sir David Attenborough Netflix series to a food waste documentary produced by the late Anthony Bourdain, these five environmental documentaries are an absolute must-watch.</p>
<p class=""><em><em>Irma is the associate editor <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/about-ecowatch-1886104674.html" target="_self">at EcoWatch</a>. She graduated from Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in Athens, Ohio.</em></em></p>
1. Our Planet (2019)
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="69e129efc63a37ca6258d5ce32b4650d"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aETNYyrqNYE?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p><em>Our Planet </em>is a new Netflix original nature docuseries premiering April 5. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, this is the first of his series to appear exclusively online.</p><p><strong>How to watch:<br></strong></p><p>Stream all<em> </em>episodes on <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80049832" target="_blank">Netflix</a>.</p><p><strong><span></span>Want to know more?</strong></p><p>You might like this article from The Atlantic: <em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/wildlife-series-finally-addresses-elephant-room/586066/" target="_blank">Netflix's Our Planet Says What Other Nature Series Have Omitted</a></em><em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/wildlife-series-finally-addresses-elephant-room/586066/"> Says What Other Nature Series Have Omitted</a></em>.</p>2. The End of Meat (2017)
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="0cbc0adcd62d6660a505fcbeb13c0035"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N71QxvZxfGk?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>After sold-out premieres worldwide, German Filmmaker Marc Pierschel's <em>The End of Meat</em> launched worldwide on March 12. The documentary exposes the brutal impact of meat consumption, while also exploring what a shift to a more compassionate diet can look like. </p><p><strong>How to watch: </strong><br></p><p><em>The</em> <em>End of Meat</em> is available to stream on <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-end-of-meat/id1423170756?mt=6&ign-mpt=uo%3D4" target="_blank">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/End-Meat-Steve-Jenkins/dp/B07G5F1GR2" target="_blank">Amazon Prime</a> and <a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theendofmeatfilm" target="_blank">Vimeo</a>. You can also purchase a DVD or Blu-ray. If you live outside the U.S. here's how <a href="http://www.theendofmeat.com/en/watch.html" target="_blank">you can watch</a> in your country.</p>3. Hostile Planet (2019)
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c4d4cfc80860c77d243b1f9feb1a1b22"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QkUmyFripgQ?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>From Director Guillermo Navarro (<em>Pan's Labyrinth), </em><em>Hostile Planet</em> is a six-part nature series that premiered April 1 on National Geographic. The series is narrated by <a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/2290586/bear-grylls-will-never-give" target="_blank">Bear Grylls</a> (<em>Running Wild with Bear Grylls).</em><br></p><p><strong><em></em>How to watch:</strong></p><p><strong><span></span></strong>New episodes premiere Monday nights at 9 p.m. EST on the National Geographic channel. If cable TV isn't your thing, catch up on <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/hostile-planet/" target="_blank">episodes online</a>.</p><p><strong style="">Want to know more?</strong></p><p>Check out Outside Magazine's <em><a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/2393053/hostile-planet-series" target="_blank">'Hostile Planet' Takes a Candid Look at Climate Change</a>.</em></p>4. Rotten (2018)
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c59e3cd4f4f9979b330fb9f46856daee"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_ot6W_7hvrM?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p><em>Rotten</em> is a six-part documentary series featured on Netflix. The series shines a light on the corruption, waste and danger behind the food we eat. The series was produced by the team behind Anthony Bourdain's <em>Parts Unknown</em> and <em>The Mind of a Chef.</em></p><p><strong>How to watch:</strong></p><p>Stream the documentary series on <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80146284" target="_blank">Netflix</a>.</p><p><strong>Want to know more?</strong></p><p>Here's a 2018 article from SIERRA Magazine that breaks down <em>Rotten</em> by episode: <em><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/netflix-rotten-2549886352.html" target="_self">Netflix's 'Rotten' Reveals the Perils of Global Food Production</a>.</em></p>5. Wasted! The Story of Food Waste (2017)
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1c20ce055dfa29dafe008475ee97872b"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KUQGVSyXDWA?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p><em> <em>WASTED! </em>produced by Anthony Bourdain explores both a broken food system and possible solutions to our <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/food-waste" target="_self">21st century issue</a> of food waste.</em></p><p><strong>How to watch:</strong></p><p>Check out<em> WASTED!</em> on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wasted-Story-Waste-Anthony-Bourdain/dp/B075RNMZ1Y" target="_blank">Amazon Prime</a>, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/wasted-the-story-of-food-waste/id1273278809" target="_blank">iTunes</a> or through a <a href="https://www.starz.com/play/38378" target="_blank">Starz</a> subscription. </p>From Your Site Articles
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Sir David Attenborough opens Woodberry Wetlands on April 30, 2016 in London, United Kingdom. Danny Martindale / WireImage
Beloved nature broadcaster Sir David Attenborough will produce a new documentary for BBC One focused entirely on climate change, the network announced Friday.
<p>The show, to be titled <em>Climate Change—The Facts</em>, will be a 60 minute documentary that will air in the spring, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/22/attenborough-to-front-climate-change-film-as-bbc-moves-from-teach-to-preach" target="_blank">The Guardian reported</a>. The news comes little more than a year after Attenborough helped raise the alarm about <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/plastics" target="_self">plastic</a> pollution as part of his <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/david-attenborough-plastics-2514828090.html">Blue Planet II BBC series</a>.</p>
<div id="97c7b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="NTXIYV1576663649"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1109213160278351872" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">"We're running out of time but there's still hope."
Sir David Attenborough will present a landmark climate change… https://t.co/GQjN6U4QgY</div> — BBC One (@BBC One)<a href="https://twitter.com/BBCOne/statuses/1109213160278351872">1553292000.0</a></blockquote></div><p>"There is a real hunger from audiences to find out more about climate change and understand the facts," BBC's Director of Content Charlotte Moore told <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47666007" target="_blank">BBC News</a>. "We have a trusted guide in Sir David Attenborough, who will be speaking to the challenging issues that it raises, and present an engaging and informative look at one of the biggest issues of our time."</p><p>The documentary will show footage of the impacts of climate change and include interviews with climate scientists and meteorologists, who will explain how global warming has already influenced <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/extreme-weather" target="_self">extreme weather</a> events like the California <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/wildfires" target="_self">wildfires</a> of November 2018.</p><p>The 92-year-old Attenborough, who made his first nature documentary series for TV 50 years ago, has increasingly spoken out on climate issues. He delivered the "<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/cop24-climate-2621562738.html" target="_self">People's Address</a>" at the UN climate talks in December of last year and spoke with Britain's Prince William about the issue in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/david-attenborough-and-prince-william-2626738435.html" target="_self">this January</a>.</p><p>In that interview, Prince William asked Attenborough why he had held back from speaking out on environmental issues for much of his public career.</p><p>Attenborough responded that when he started his career, he didn't think there was anyone "who thought that there was a danger that we might annihilate part of the natural world."</p><p>"Now, of course, we are only to well aware that the whole of the natural world is at our disposal, as it were," he said in the interview. "We can do things accidentally that exterminate a whole area of the natural world and the species that live within it."</p>
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c40f4c7f0efd200912201dae0ebcbe47"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EBbQ79uA9FY?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>The climate change documentary is part of a BBC series called Our Planet Matters that kicked off with Blue Planet Live Sunday night.<br></p><p>Julian Hector, the head of BBC's Natural History Unit, which has been the force behind most of Attenborough's shows, said that climate change had changed both the tone of the unit's documentaries and the practicalities of filming.</p><p>"Not a single development goes on in the Natural History Unit where we're not talking about a conservation element or the difficulty of filming because of climate change," Hector said. "This nervousness about the state of the natural world is omnipresent."</p><p>In one example, Hector talked about filming in Kenya for the program Dynasties. Hector said in the past it was easier to predict what would happen on location, but parts of Kenya has been impacted by <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/drought" target="_self">drought</a> for many years, which makes it harder for <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/wildlife" target="_self">wildlife</a> to find food.</p><p>"Climate change is increasingly the backdrop to our films, and so the causes of it are worth exploring," Hector said.</p><p>Hector said a shift in tone from wonder at the natural world to concern about its survival started with Blue Planet II. That program featured a heartbreaking segment on the fate of albatross chicks who ingest plastic.</p>
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It started with a call from actress and animal rights activist Natalie Portman to author Jonathan Safran Foer. The latter had recently taken a break from novel-writing to publish 2009's New York Times best-selling treatise Eating Animals—an in-depth discussion of what it means to eat animals in an industrialized world, with all attendant environmental and ethical concerns. The two planned a meeting in Foer's Brooklyn backyard, and also invited documentary director Christopher Dillon Quinn (God Grew Tired of Us) over. The idea was to figure out how to turn Foer's sprawling, memoiristic book into a documentary that would ignite mainstream conversations around our food systems.
<p>The fruit of that discussion is now open in select theaters. Narrated by Portman, <em>Eating Animals </em>begins with the simple question about how much we really know about the food on our plates. The film succinctly traces the history of farming from its small-scale, agrarian roots to the rise of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/factory-farming">large-scale industrialized farming</a>—which incidentally started in 1923, when Delaware housewife Celia Steele accidentally ordered 500 rather than 50 chicks and experimented with keeping them inside and maximizing their productivity, thus creating the first "broiler house." This planted the seed that resulted in today's proliferation of industrial livestock operations, through which huge agribusinesses pit contracted farmers against one another to produce ever more Chicken McNuggets, KFC and cheap grocery meat. The film follows several farmers—including a factory farmer running one such operation (which he describes as a "treadmill of debt"), a rancher who raises heritage turkeys, an Iowan raising the healthy hogs that end up on conscientious foodies' plates and others. All sources are united in their desire to bring farming back to its roots in the American heritage, and away from its polluting, health-endangering and increasingly inhumane state. Early on in the film, Portman, quoting Foer's writing, states that whereas farmers used to profit by working in concert with nature, <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/big-ag">Big Ag's</a> goal is to calculate "how close to destruction we can keep the environment without losing it altogether."</p><p><em>Eating Animals</em> isn't necessarily out to expose the cruelty that feeds so much of American life; in fact, much of its content is devoted to pastoral footage of happy animals that are beloved by their farmers and granted great pre-slaughter lives. Yes, other footage does reveal massive stacks of chickens in battery cages, the Pepto-Bismol pink fecal hog lagoons of North Carolina, and the many antibiotic-doused animals that have been bioengineered to grow obese and lame during their few weeks of existence. "They've calculated how close to death we can keep an animal without killing it," Portman intones. However, <em>Eating Animals</em> doesn't offer what so many activists and whistleblowers already have: a blow-by-blow account of the horrors of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or what happens inside slaughterhouses.</p><p><span></span>That's because this film isn't presenting the horrors of industrialized farming as news, <em>per se</em>, but rather urging audiences to consider what they already know to be true. <em>Eating Animals</em> conveys a great deal of compassion for the farmers themselves, many of whom would not be able to survive today's economy if not for being the pawns of mega corporations like Tyson and Smithfield. It also reveals the ways in which lawmakers funded by Big Ag have passed statutes that institutionalize the cycle of producing and consuming cheap, factory-farmed meat. </p><p><span></span>That said, pro-vegetarian propaganda this film is not. While Portman is a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/vegan">vegan</a> and Foer, a credited producer, is vegetarian, Quinn is a omnivore, which the others saw as an asset. After all, <em>Eating Animals</em> doesn't posit that consuming meat is intrinsically bad, but rather that the circumstances surrounding it—environmental degradation, increased use of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/antibiotics">antibiotics</a>, "ag gag" laws, and animal-tending practices developed to be as cost-efficient as possible—are becoming overwhelmingly urgent. Americans are consuming more meat than we were when Foer published the book; what's more, our animal product-intensive eating habits are proliferating throughout the world. As the global population is expected to balloon to nine billion in the next 50 years, industrial farming—which already accounts for 50 billion animals raised for food—is only poised to further explode. </p><p><span></span>This film offers an objective look not only at the debate over eating animals, but also discusses ways in which we can sustainably raise animals and avoid the inherent problems of factory farming. It also brings in Temple Grandin to discuss some positive changes the industry has made. To learn more about the years-long process of creating this complex, unsettling, and absorbing film, Sierra called up director Christopher Dillon Quinn.</p><p><strong><em>Sierra</em>: The film seems to be only loosely based on Foer's 2009 book. Can you talk about that adaptation process?</strong></p><p><strong></strong><strong>Quinn</strong>: During that first meeting with Jonathan and Natalie, I made it clear that I wanted to, as Jonathan did in the book, create a personal case for why food matters from a family standpoint. We decided not to go down the same road Jonathan had in the book, which started with family stories about his grandmother, but I still wanted to follow subjects very closely, so that through their eyes, you start to see the bigger picture. The part of the book that probably captivated me most were the many open letters from farmers themselves, where Foer just let them say what they wanted. I sought to expand those narratives. So we followed subjects like one such farmer from the book, Frank Reese, the Kansas rancher raising heritage turkey breeds that have been around for centuries. It was fascinating to follow these farmers and see the contrast, because by and large, the chicken we eat today has been hybridized by genetic companies to become broad-breasted birds designed that can create as much white meat as possible, and whose bodies are compromised in such a way that they start to break down in just a couple of weeks.</p><p><strong>Who was your intended audience?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>We wanted to cast a wide net, but it's hard because a lot of people don't want to look under the hood and really think about where their meat, dairy, and eggs come from. We didn't want to wag the finger and tell people not to eat meat, but rather to portray the food industry from as many angles as possible so that anyone could watch it and find value in it. It's why audiences see how the contract farmers are under the thumb of a very large, vertically integrated system that holds many in debt their whole lives—it's not just the animals suffering. And of course, there's nothing else on the planet that causes more environmental degradation than raising animals for our food, so that's pertinent to absolutely everyone. Everybody knows something's wrong with our food system and that compromises are made, so hopefully this film offers a way to ultimately make some choices. </p><p><strong>What was the most difficult part of making this film?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>It forces you to adapt and change, and nobody likes that—I certainly didn't! I've opted out of commodity meat altogether, but I was at an event recently honoring Frank Reese and I was happy to eat his bird when it was put on my plate. The other was the visceral reaction I had to really seeing where my milk, my butter, my cheese come from. But the film is really meant to help facilitate those difficult conversations around whether you want to support a system that takes so much from our environment and society, and gives so little back. With the world's population set to explode, this is kind of the most pressing thing we have to address—we don't have enough water or resources to keep feeding people like this—and I so I like to think this film could be a starting point for a conversation that could result in real change.</p><p> <em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/eating-animals-drives-home-where-our-food-really-comes-natalie-portman-jonathan-safran-foer-chistopher-dillon-quinn" target="_blank">SIERRA Magazine</a>.</em><em></em></p>
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Truly great films about the climate crisis are tough to come by. Allusions to environmental destruction are very familiar in the futuristic dystopias Hollywood churns out like clockwork, but they rarely get the science right—or they abandon it entirely in favor of skipping straight to some post-apocalyptic CGI extravaganza.
<p>Those of us with a little knowledge of the climate crisis bristle at this kind of doom-and-gloom bombast—<a href="https://www.climaterealityproject.org/choosehope" target="_blank">because we know better</a>. But that doesn't mean a few thoughtful films haven't been able to cut through the noise.</p><p>Below are six of our favorites. We decided to spice it up by mixing narrative films with documentaries—and while our changing climate understandably casts a long, dark shadow over any future that wrestles with its impacts, we did our best to stay on the right side of the fine line between raucous, factually dubious calamity and thought-provoking "what if" explorations or science-centered spectacle. </p><h3>1. <em>Interstellar</em></h3><p>Director Christopher Nolan's <em>Interstellar</em> is that rarest of Hollywood anomalies—a wildly complicated, lavishly expensive, wholly original mainstream blockbuster. It doesn't exist in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes; instead, it occupies a not-so-distant-future version of our very own—and things aren't exactly going great. </p><p>While the words "climate change" are never explicitly said in the film, the impacts of the crisis are writ large, driving a plot about an attempt to flee a near-future Earth reeling from drastically changing weather patterns and global food shortages for the safety of a new habitable planet.</p><p>Featuring one of the most stacked casts in recent memory, including Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine and Ellen Burstyn and nominees Jessica Chastain, Timothée Chalamet and John Lithgow, <em>Interstellar</em> takes on <a href="https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/food-and-water-security-and-climate-crisis-what-you-need-know" target="_blank">a very real consequence of climate inaction</a>, though it offers up an untenable solution.</p><p>After all, there's still no Planet B.</p><h3>2. <em>Beasts of the Southern Wild</em></h3><p>Living in a Louisiana bayou community called "the Bathtub," six-year-old Hush Puppy (youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis) can't get the prehistoric aurochs her teacher tells her will be released from melting ice caps off her mind—even as the world in front of her crumbles and cowers, the victim of powerful storms, failing levees and familial health problems.</p><p>While the film's setting is technically fictional, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/movies/the-making-of-beasts-of-the-southern-wild.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">it was inspired by</a> several very real fishing villages in Southern Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish. These small, isolated wetland communities are threatened by climate-driven erosion, extreme weather and rising sea levels. Most notable among them is the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles, former home of "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/resettling-the-first-american-climate-refugees.html" target="_blank">the first American climate refugees</a>."</p><h3>3. <em>Chasing Coral</em></h3><p>The 2017 documentary <em>Chasing Coral</em> <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chasing_coral/" target="_blank">enjoys a rare accolade</a>: It is one of a pretty short list of films to hold a 100 percent "fresh" rating on popular review aggregator <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/" target="_blank">Rotten Tomatoes</a>.</p><p>That coral reefs are existentially threatened by the climate crisis is a truth near-universally acknowledged. But filmmaker Jeff Orlowski doesn't simply telegraph a report on this impending ecological catastrophe.</p><p>Instead, Orlowski infuses his film with such empathy and ardor for our world's oceans and their vibrant ecosystems—as well as those working hard to save what's left—that it's impossible to not walk away pumped up and ready to join the fight.</p>
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<p><br></p><h3>4. <em>Snowpiercer</em></h3><p>Like we already mentioned, we try to avoid cynical, despondent hot takes on the climate crisis. But we're fans of director Bong Joon Ho's <em>Snowpiercer</em> for two big reasons: First, it's a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/snowpiercer/" target="_blank">very, very good</a>, <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=snowpiercer.htm" target="_blank">wildly underseen</a> film, and second, because it confronts head-on the dangers of a "we'll deal with this later" approach to climate action.</p><p>The film is set in a future where a failed geoengineering experiment to counteract climate change plunges the planet into a new ice age, killing all life except for those lucky enough (a phrase we're using loosely here) to have boarded the titular train. This train now circles the globe on a constant loop and a tyrannical class system has taken hold onboard.</p><p>It's an important cautionary tale: While we should investigate any and all scientific developments to stop the climate crisis, dangerous gambles like geoengineering—or for that matter, fleeing our planet for an imagined oasis somewhere deep in the universe—could come with unintended consequences. So, why risk it when we know for sure that quickly transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables <em>can</em> and will<em> </em>work?</p><p>There's even an important philosophical principle – one at work in another great, underappreciated sci-fi film, 1997's <em>Contact—</em>to back this one up. Attributed to fourteenth century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Occams-razor" target="_blank">Ockham's Razor states</a> … well, Jodie Foster's Dr. Ellie Arroway put it best: "All things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one."</p><p>(<a href="https://www.climaterealityproject.org/climate-101" target="_blank">We agree, Dr. Arroway</a>.)</p><p><em>Note: For all its incredible imagination, Snowpiercer definitely has some moments of real violence and isn't one for younger audiences.</em></p><h3><em>5. An Inconvenient Truth / An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power</em></h3><p>Now, of course, the film that started a movement—and the follow-up that propelled it to new heights.</p><p>After seeing former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em>, people worldwide finally understood the reality of the climate crisis devastating our planet. For many, it was the moment they knew they personally had to do something about it. The film's impact continues to be felt more than a decade after it won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and took its place among the highest-grossing documentaries ever.</p><p>Last year's follow-up, <em>An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power</em>, took that story further, showcasing both the amazing progress that's been made as well as how much further we still have to go to solve the climate crisis.</p><p>Both documentaries present the science and stakes of the crisis and ask viewers if they're ready to fight like our world depends on it (because it does).</p><h3>Are You Ready to Fight?</h3><p>Just like you saw others do in <em>An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power</em>, you too can work with Vice President Gore himself along with a host of field-leading experts and activists to learn the facts of the climate crisis and how we can solve it together. <a href="https://www.climaterealityproject.org/training" target="_blank">Apply today to attend our Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Los Angeles, California</a>, from August 28-30, and join an incredible network of dedicated activists devoted to solving the greatest challenge of our time. </p><p>You know our climate is changing. You know renewable energy is the answer. And you want to make a difference. <a href="https://www.climaterealityproject.org/training" target="_blank">We'll show you how</a>.</p>
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Nicky Milne / Thomson Reuters Foundation
By Lucy Guanuna
The devastating storms of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 submerged more than 80 percent of New Orleans and left more than 1,800 fatalities in its wake. Meanwhile, rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets have caused sea levels to rise by 3.2 millimeters a year since 1995, which some predict could leave New Orleans submerged by the end of the century. In both scenarios—the levee failures in the Lower 9th Ward and the flooding caused by sea level rise—the low-income communities of color along the water's edge are the first to go.
<p style="">
A new season of
<a href="https://www.kcet.org/" target="_blank">KCET</a> and <a href="https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=ecowatch" target="_blank">Link TV's</a> news-magazine series <a href="https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus" target="_blank"><em>Earth Focus</em></a>, in partnership with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, explores how environmental change is forcing all living creatures to adapt in order to survive.
</p><p>
The first episode,
<a href="https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus/episodes/sea-level-rising-living-with-water" target="_blank"><em>Sea Level Rising</em></a>, is an in-depth look at the movement brewing in Louisiana to help communities adapt to a changing environment. Community organizations are educating the people of New Orleans on <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-change">climate change</a> while residents are taking matters into their own hands by building homes elevated off the ground and planting rain gardens that hold rainwater and prevent stormwater runoff. Cameras follow New Orleans Councilman at Large Jason Williams, as he and architect David Waggonner walk through an industrial area of New Orleans that is dotted with green infrastructure and criss-crossed with canals designed to catch stormwater runoff and circulate it around the city as part of the state-funded Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan.
</p><p>
The episode then shifts its focus to the
<a href="http://www.cantstopthewater.com/the-island/" target="_blank">Native American Cajun community of the Isle de Jean Charles</a>, which is being displaced as coastal erosion and rising sea levels submerge the island, making them the first climate refugees in the U.S. The world watches as they partner with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop and implement a <a href="http://isledejeancharles.la.gov" target="_blank">pilot program</a> for the relocation of an entire community.
</p><p>
The six episodes in the upcoming season of
<em>Earth Focus</em> feature stories of both humans and animals surviving and sometimes even thriving in their rapidly changing environments as close as Los Angeles and as far as Madagascar.
</p><p>
As
<a href="https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/explaining-extreme-events-from-a-climate-perspective/" target="_blank">global warming continues to drive extreme weather events</a> around the world, people are fleeing areas hit with unprecedented droughts and rain. <a href="https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus/episodes/climate-migration" target="_blank"><em>Climate Migration</em></a>, episode two of the season, shines a light on how drought and extreme winters are eliminating a traditional, nomadic farming lifestyle in Mongolia. Farming communities are moving to the city, where the air quality is so bad that many children are too ill to attend school on peak pollution days.
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<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Shanshan Chen / Thomson Reuters Foundation</small>
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The episode also examines the way a chain of text messages on Whatsapp and Facebook lead to the migration of thousands seeking asylum from earthquake and hurricane-ravaged Haiti to the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. The episode explores how a system of migrant shelters struggles to provide aid to the large influx of Haitian refugees and how thousands refugees have resettled in Tijuana after President Trump ended a temporary residency permit program for Haitian refugees.
<br>
</p><p>
Adaptation is a recurring theme this season with episode three,
<a href="https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus/episodes/city-planning" target="_blank"><em>Urban Planning</em></a>, exploring the ways in which San Francisco and Freetown, Sierra Leone adapt to changing weather patterns that threaten communities built in areas susceptible to mudslides and flooding.
</p><p>
Developers in San Francisco are pouring billions of dollars into developments to keep up with the city's growing tech industry, but with nowhere left to build, they're looking to waterfront real estate that sits on San Francisco's floodplains, while city officials look for ways to fund repairs for a century-old cracking seawall. The episode then looks at how years of civil war in Sierra Leone caused migration from rural areas to hillside slums in urban Freetown. Rocks to build homes were pulled from hillsides and slums expanded without infrastructure, contributing to massive floods and mudslides as unprecedented rainfall hit Freetown in 2017.
</p><p>
While some parts of the world are facing torrential downpours, areas like Western Morocco and Fresno have faced unprecedented drought. Episode four,
<a href="https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus/episodes/adaptation-to-global-water-shortages" target="_blank"><em>Adaptation to Global Water Shortages</em></a>, shows how 13 villages in Morocco are being taught to use the ancient method of gathering moisture from fog, giving villagers a level of local control over their own water sources.
</p><p>
The episode also looks at how small unincorporated farmworker communities of Fresno struggle with water contamination while they work in agricultural fields that use up 80 percent of California's water supply. The viewer will learn how researchers are working to develop innovative affordable water treatment plants for the area.
</p><p>
Episode five,
<em>Future of Food</em>, looks at how fishing villages in Madagascar dealt with overfished and underprotected oceans by developing sustainable fishing practices, particularly for sea cucumber, that are resilient to climate change and growing populations.
</p><p>
Shifting to San Diego, California, the episode explores how aquaculturists are exploring open ocean farming as a more sustainable model for the fishing industry and the implications of this model for the local fishing industry.
</p><p>
The season ends in Los Angeles with episode six,
<em>Urban Habitat</em>, which explores how the county's wildlife has been adapting and thriving in spite of urban sprawl and how people are learning to embrace wildlife by implementing city and county projects that expand and connect green spaces for Angeleno wildlife like bobcats, coyotes and mountain lions.
</p><p>
"This is not a hoax, this is real. Climate change is real, so how do we live with it?" asks William P. Walters, a resident of New Orleans' 9th Ward. "[In] this section of town, we started to understand that water and climate change goes hand in hand."
<br>
<em></em>
</p><p>
The Earth's changing environment is forcing living creatures to adapt in order to survive, but their experiences can provide blueprints for survival for others around the world. Tune in to the upcoming 2018 season of
<em>Earth Focus</em> to see just how resilient communities around the world can be.
</p><p>
<span></span>The new season of <em>Earth Focus</em> premieres April 25 at 8:30 p.m. on KCET in Los Angeles, April 26 at 9 p.m. on Link TV on Dish and DirecTV in the United States, with FREE streaming worldwide on <a href="http://link.org/earthfocus" target="_blank">link.org/earthfocus</a>.
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Watch the new season of
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Wendell Berry writes at his 40-paned window in the 1970s. James Baker Hall
By Katie O'Reilly
Wendell Berry hates screens. The 83-year-old novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic and Kentucky-based farmer is of the mind that TV and technological devices serve to degrade the imagination and threaten literature. His distaste for idolatry is part of why he's turned down several requests to be featured in documentary projects. On April 23, however, a cinematic portrait of America's foremost "prophet of rural America" hits the PBS airwaves. Look & See: Wendell Berry's Kentucky portrays the changing landscapes and shifting values of rural America in an era dominated by industrial agriculture, through the eyes of Wendell Berry.
<p>This is a film that subverts biopic conventions. Berry doesn't frequently appear on screen, but audiences are immersed into his world. The film makes liberal use of his prescient, poetic words and features illuminating testimonies from his family members and neighbors, and from fellow farmers in his native Henry County, Kentucky. <em>Look & See</em> counts Robert Redford and Terrence Malick as executive producers and Laura Dunn as director.</p><p>Dunn has known Berry since 2004, when she released <a href="https://vimeo.com/13687513" target="_blank"><em>The Unforeseen</em></a>, a film about water and development issues in her hometown of Austin, Texas. The critically acclaimed film (also executive produced by Robert Redford) included an audio recording of a poem of Berry's—the acquisition of which involved Dunn traveling to the poet-farmer's home in Kentucky. <br><br>"The film ended up playing at a lot of festivals, and I was just so surprised about how few people knew of Wendell Berry," said Dunn, who continued to visit the author and his wife, Tanya, with some regularity after <em>The Unforeseen</em>'s release. "I just couldn't get Wendell out of my head."<br><br>It was in 2008, when Dunn was rereading <em>The Unsettling of America</em>, Berry's 1977 argument that agribusiness was threatening the culture of family farms and further estranging <em>all</em> humans from the land, that she finally wrote Berry with an important request: She wanted him to star in her next film project.<br><br>"It started a lot of letter writing back and forth—he'd kind of say yes, and then say no," Dunn said with a laugh. "He'd reason, 'Our culture idolizes people. I'm nothing but the place I'm in, the people who made me.'"</p><p>Ultimately, and with help from Tanya (pictured, right, courtesy of Lee Daniel), Dunn convinced Wendell that <em>Look & See</em> would not be "a literal rendition of a face," as she puts it, but rather a portrait through Berry's eyes, intended to capture the essence of him and the places he loves. Shooting began in the the summer of 2012, and Dunn and her film crew returned to Kentucky to capture five subsequent growing seasons. "We didn't have full funding out of the gate, so we'd go and shoot a season, and come home, edit, raise money, and go back," she said. "Seeing the same place across the seasons creates a more intimate sense of that place—the seasons are an integral part of the farming community."</p><p><span></span><em>Sierra</em> spoke by phone with Dunn, who revealed more about what it was like to work with such a reluctant idol and why this conversation is particularly urgent now—when more Americans than ever before are disconnected from the farmers who feed them. </p><p><span></span><strong><em>Sierra</em>: What was your relationship with Berry's work like before you met him?</strong></p><p><strong></strong><strong>Dunn</strong>: I grew up with a single mother who was a maize geneticist, so I was raised with a strong sense of environmental stewardship, and spent time in a lot of experimental cornfields and university greenhouses. My mom had me reading Rachel Carson by sixth grade, and I got into Berry's poetry and nonfiction in high school. For the first six months of this project, I just read and read and read—I was new to Berry's fiction—and pondered ideas.</p><p><span></span><strong>This film premiered at South By Southwest in 2016, but afterward, it was retitled and updated to reflect some conversations that have emerged since the 2016 presidential election. Can you talk about what was changed and why?</strong></p><p>The original title was "The Seer," because it had this prophetic quality, and if you look at what Wendell was writing in the '70s and what's happening today, he really could kind of see the future. But Wendell did not like that title! He didn't tell us directly, but after we went to Kentucky to screen it, his wife pulled us aside and said, "You know, Wendell <em>hates</em> the title." It was the so-called elevation of himself that bothered him. So, I wrote to him and we changed it and he wrote back saying he was grateful; he said that "The Seer" gave him more credit than he deserved or knew how to deal with. We made it <em>Look & See</em> to highlight what his daughter Mary notes early on in the film, about how her father encouraged his children to look around, to notice what's around you. <br><br>And after Trump got elected, I thought, "How do we make people in liberal progressive environmental circles care about white male tobacco farmers from the rural South?" And at the same time, it had become clear that there was a very third-world view of rural America, that no one really understood it. So we tried to highlight some questions around the urban/rural divide via some small but significant changes. And we further opened up our examination of today's farmers, and how and why they're struggling.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xNzU4NjIyNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NzYxNDg5M30.yVckPu1S5REiL37pemPb3-360JyY0wQqqNcdfoJqPJU/img.jpg?width=980" id="7054c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7f5d848b78e59981cd15a6d9d58ba55f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Berry with son Den Berry, 1970s.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">James Baker Hall</small></p><p><strong>The film closely follows the lives and struggles of a few such farmers. How did you find these sources?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>Wendell and Tanya led us to them. She'd give me lists of people, and then they'd give me more people, and it would expand from there. I'm kind of an ethnographer; my style is to go and talk to a lot of people, and spend a lot of time in a community I'm covering. From there I decide what interviews will work well together—there isn't a road map right from the beginning. I'd read all that Wendell had written and wanted to find people that reflected the world in his writing—characters who could speak to some of the issues he wrote about. But it's hard to get a group of farmers together; they're not at all impressed by the movie camera. Plus, it's a tight local community. They don't appreciate outsiders, and you've got to appreciate that.</p><p><span></span><strong>Who's this film's intended audience?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>Food is really trending right now—there are so many books and movies and shows about how it's grown and produced, and yet so few people know of Wendell. So our original intention was to get it before people who already care about some of these issues, but who have never heard of Wendell Berry. His daughter Mary said it well—there's this rise in the demand for organic produce, but as it goes up, the number of farms that are actually able to produce that food is going down. And there's a big disconnect there. As Wendell himself has pointed out, people in these urban centers really are totally disconnected from rural culture, and don't have that much regard for it, quite frankly. We wanted to try and bridge that with the film.</p><p>What's neat, though, is that a lot of people have responded who know and love Wendell Berry—many of whom are trying to live a life inspired by his writings. So, we've been able to do a lot of community screenings in rural places—people are screening the film on their small farms, and in churches and high schools. So in retrospect, I think we made this film for rural places, and for rural people. Because as a culture, we rarely show portraits of rural American in a way that's positive, that shows a different kind of complexity.</p><p><strong>What are you hoping viewers will take away from this experience? Are concerned audiences in any position to do anything about the capital-intensive model of industrial agriculture that's increasingly characterized by machine labor, chemical fertilizers, and degradation of the soil?</strong></p><p>There are so many different ways someone could engage these questions and issues that I don't want to reduce or oversimplify the solution. Wendell always said, "You're accountable in your own community." Ask him how to maintain hope, and he'll tell you, "Find a solution by putting <em>two</em> things together; not all things. That's the way to go through life." But specifically talking about agriculture, you can grow your own garden. You can find local farmers and support them by buying their foods. You can pay a dollar more for tomatoes with the knowledge that you're supporting a local economy that's healthier for the land, and for the people. You can become a CSA member and directly support farmers. Teach your kids about it. Work on sustainable agriculture policy. And then there's the question of how you can resist an industrial economy that takes away people's local ownership and people's personal liberties. Right now my husband and I are homeschooling out kids, so we can teach them the values we really care about. It's hard, but it's fulfilling. <br><br>I take a lot of inspiration from [Berry's daughter] Mary, who started an organization in Newcastle, Kentucky, called <a href="http://berrycenter.org/" target="_blank">The Berry Center</a>. It's a neat organization, and it's totally focused on local farmers and land-conservation issues. They've started an agrarian literacy league in Henry County. They've helped some farmers start a local meat-processing plant. They're launching an educational program with undergrad courses, as well as extension courses through which local farmers can learn about sustainable agriculture. They're doing the real work of renewing rural communities, and that's really what Wendell wants to see. When you see people working at a small, more local, regional scale, it gives you real models for what you can achieve in your own community.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xNzU4NjIxOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNTk4NTYzNH0.3csMZ524zEQZGQShM5OaimqjaF1Eks3VIgREN6kPzqk/img.jpg?width=980" id="ce2e8" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="69bf5e28f732d25ab819bafb4e52c92b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="add caption...">Mary Berry of The Berry Center.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Lee Daniel</small></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from our media associate <a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/new-documentary-unveils-world-according-wendell-berry" target="_blank">SIERRA Magazine</a>.</em><br></p>
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