Until recently, the Arctic was thought to be a pristine place, but this is no longer true. Even before polar bear cubs “leave the safety of their dens” in some parts of the high Arctic, the environmental journalist Marla Cone writes, “they harbor more industrial pollutants in their bodies than most other creatures on Earth.” Cone calls this tragic transformation “the Arctic Paradox” in her award-winning 2005 book Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic. Through ocean and air currents, industrial pollutants, including persistent organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyl and DDT, from all over the world travel to the Arctic and enter the food web, and then move up the food chain through bioaccumulation, eventually concentrating in the fat tissues of the top predators—polar bears and humans. Arctic warming is speeding the transfer of toxins from ice to water and from there into the food web. The intertwined, tragic fates of the bears and the Inuit underscore the differential nature of accountability and vulnerability in cases of environmental violence and challenge the universalizing tendency of the Anthropocene narrative.
The Iñupiat interdisciplinary artist and activist Allison Akootchook Warden, who hails from Kaktovik, brings us back to the dancing and drowning of polar bears in her solo performance Calling All Polar Bears (2011). Its story goes beyond the plight of polar bears, connecting Arctic warming with the relentless push to drill for oil and gas in Arctic land and seas. In this piece, Warden impersonates human and nonhuman, mixes modern and Iñupiat clothing, and sings pop and hip-hop, blending humor with sadness. Her performance is both an elegy and an act of resistance. The Anthropocene, if we begin it at the Industrial Revolution, is largely a product of affluence and power, in which the poor and the marginalized, including indigenous peoples, have contributed little to climate change so far but will continue to be disproportionately affected by its devastating consequences. Indigenous peoples all over the world are fighting back, however, using their art, creation myths, literature, and other stories to resist the destruction of their homelands, food, and culture. Calling All Polar Bears belongs to this cosmopolitics of indigenous resistance.
In the climate change documentary This Changes Everything (2015), the author and activist Naomi Klein says that images of “desperate polar bears” make her “want to click away” from the films that include them, fueling her search for a new way to tell the story of climate change. Such a reductive assessment fails to capture the complexity in images of polar bears—achieved through visual depiction, literary allusion, memory, and performance—which collectively stand as an emblem of political ecology, connecting the bear and its home, the Arctic, with its people, the Inuit, and the rest of the planet in many unexpected ways, encouraging us all to see the Arctic anew.
THE RETURN OF THE BOOMERANG
LUC JACQUET
My interest in environmental filmmaking began when I was twenty-four. I left France and spent more than a year in Antarctica, where I thought I could get away from every trace of civilization, live at last where all was virgin, unknown, unexplored, intact. This was not to be. Even down there, at the end of Earth, my scientific colleagues were measuring radioactive fallout in freshly fallen snow; we were being irradiated through an ozone hole that gaped over our heads and had been caused by our shaving cream spray cans; traces of pesticides and heavy metals were turning up in the fat of penguins; and glaciologists were drilling into glaciers and telling us about the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) with ever increasing confidence from evidence in air bubbles imprisoned in the ice.
So I couldn’t escape. I was born too late to live on a generous and resilient Earth that permitted our species all excesses, defilements, and predations. I discovered the concept of the raft floating in space, bearing a human race suddenly obliged to be responsible for its acts. I found myself a child of the Anthropocene, an era whose hero is humankind, wretched and miserable. I would have to live with, and probably in opposition to, a society that, to judge by my expertise as a scientist and traveler, was headed for disaster. The system into which I was born and the values that had been handed down to me were, from all evidence, lethal. An uncomfortable finding, to say the least.
And yet how successful humanity has been: after fifty thousand years, this fragile and widely scattered primate has succeeded in a practically complete conquest of the entire planet. All environments, however hostile—hot, cold, dry, on steep slopes—have been colonized or otherwise exploited. Only Antarctica, protected by its belt of unconstrained oceans, has escaped human colonization, but even then, it still has not escaped human influence. So, a complete success. Why give up the conqueror’s drunken spree after the battle?
In nature, the outcome of this type of success is well known: when a pioneer invasive species, capable of adapting to all situations and driven by a formidable instinct for conquest and a high birthrate, becomes too numerous, it may disappear brutally, starved out or choked by its own waste—the return of the boomerang.
How long before our own boomerang comes back? For us it’s more complicated, because we are aware of the phenomenon and have the technical means and the energy to salvage the situation. Still, nothing is being done, except maybe at the margins. One idea obsesses me. We have in our genetic heritage, and thus deep within ourselves, the undoubted qualities of conquerors, discoverers, domesticators. We are also motivated by permanent fear of the future, panics from the abyss of time: Will I eat tomorrow? Will I be able to shelter and feed my family? Survive the calamities and chances of existence? Everything that we have done for millennia tends to make the world more predictable, less dangerous. We love to foresee.
So, will we be able to change this colonizing attitude into an attitude of stewardship? This question is the colossal challenge that faces our species; furthermore, we are not in the habit of making decisions in the name of everyone collectively but rather do so in a fragmented fashion, according to the interests and beliefs of the group, the family, the clan, the nation. A dizzying catalog. How, then, can I situate myself as an individual within this superhuman program?
First, with emotion. In the forty-eight years of my life as a filmmaker, I have seen the world degrading around me, landscapes disappearing. I have seen nature just trickle away. I know that the food I eat is unwholesome; my lungs let me know every day that the air I breathe is polluted; the water I drink resembles a chlorine tea; a blue sky is an indication of a high-pressure area and so of pollution, which the pollution warning signs on the highway are there to remind me of. It’s all noxious, even if not immediately visible, and depressing. When I pick up my camera, I often have trouble framing a shot to avoid traces of civilization or scars on the landscape, and I take it hard—because, like everybody else, I need nature to regenerate myself, to dream, to tell stories. I need to feel at peace with the world in which I live without bearing the collective curse of the destroyer. Of course, in saying this I acknowledge that we must first ensure that our more basic biological needs such as nourishment and breathing are safeguarded.
Next, I do my share by fulfilling my responsibility to others. I have three children; I owe it to them to hand over a viable and intact world. I want to share with them places that are dear to me. Besides, I feel that I have had a lot of good luck in my life, and consequently that I have a responsibility to share this luck. I don’t like politics; my friends often call me a bear that prefers the retreats of its mountains to showing itself, and they are right. Yet I feel that I don’t have a choice, as my grandparents did not when the Nazis invaded their country. Submit or resist?
It’s almost like fighting myself. I come from a peasant tradition where nothing is more satisfying than land subjected through full struggle to the will of the one who cultivates it. I learned to be proud of our victories against “weeds,” against “harmful” species, against wasteland and sloppiness, proud of a land that was “productive,” of a forest finally “clear-cut,” of a swamp “reclaimed,” and so on. We also learned that technological progress was king and science
sovereign, that these two divinities conferred on us colossal—maybe divine?—powers. And here we are, betrayed by these same gods, which are turning against us.
Who today wants to renounce these powers, this comfort, even though they threaten us? Nobody. Here is the immense paradox of ecological discourse, which no one wants to hear but which nevertheless speaks in the name of the well-being of the human race. One would have liked to profit from the victory, enjoy the fruits of the planetary conquest, before going further.
I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the effort needed to tip society toward an awareness of a sustainable world. I sometimes think that I am given enough means to wear myself out but not enough to be effective. The inescapable lesson of history is that this is a long-haul effort. It was not those who first took to heart the iniquity of slavery or the injustices done to women and men who had the joy of seeing laws passed that remedied those evils.
We have started a marathon, but we are falling behind. If we slacken our pace, we will lose altogether. Yet I believe in the power of the positive force. We must make people want to help rather than judge them. We must explain, make them understand. Art in general, and film in particular, is a formidable tool for this battle: it speaks the language of empathy and emotion, which is what we need to give ourselves the energy to invent a new form of existence on this planet.
Translated by Roger Sherman.
FILMMAKING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
JOHN GRABOWSKA
My home in North America’s Eastern Woodlands rests about ten miles (sixteen kilometers) upriver from where the Potomac joins the Shenandoah and bursts through a gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains to continue down to Great Falls, the Chesapeake Bay, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. One of my favorite pastimes in late summer is to walk through the woods and climb down the limestone cliffs to fly-fish in the big river for feisty smallmouth bass. Ospreys and eagles soar overhead pursuing the same prey. Bank beavers make an occasional appearance, surfacing, eyeing me, and submerging. Crafty little green herons slink along the rocky bank, where tracks of raccoons, opossums, and (sometimes) black bear are imprinted in the mud.
Hiking through mature woodlands and fishing in the Potomac allow me to indulge in a primordial fantasy. As I stand waist deep in water, casting for smallmouth, seeing not another soul, I can imagine that this stretch of the river is a two-tone wilderness much as it was five hundred years ago, with heavily forested riverbanks, the green river gliding by, the blue sky above.
The fantasy, of course, is just that. The mature trees make up a secondary forest and are known as dog hair woods, growing up crowded and branchless, desperately competing for sunlight after the cattle were removed from what was once pasture. The diversity of plants is diminished because of the absence of fire, the eradication of apex predators, and the resulting proliferation of white-tailed deer, plus the introduction of invasive plants; multiflora rose, barberry, and wineberry catch on my waders as I walk through the woods on the way to the cliffs. The smallmouth I catch and release are nonnative and now intersex, with most of the males growing ovaries because of endocrine disruptors in the water. The sound of jets on the glide path to Dulles Airport is omnipresent: the Lower 48 is a noisy environment, particularly to a filmmaker attuned to such things.
Such contrasts between idyllic visions and the reality of human impacts on the environment have been reflected in the evolution of natural history filmmaking over the past century.
Often considered the first documentary film, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) embraces the romanticism of humankind living in harmony with nature. Like many natural history films to follow, it was shot in a remote location, features exotic cultures and charismatic wildlife, and encourages audiences to engage in armchair adventuring. In one of the next major milestones in documentary film, attention to the environment took the opposite approach. Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), a jeremiad against abuse of the land, introduced many techniques that make nature documentaries so popular: liberal use of music to guide emotions; spare, poetic narration; striking cinematography; and deft editing. Some seventy years before the term was popularized, The Plow That Broke the Plains was unmistakably about the Anthropocene, profiling the ecological crisis caused by unsustainable agricultural practices paired with Dust Bowl drought.
After World War II, Walt Disney’s wildly popular True-Life Adventures series, shown in theaters from 1948 through 1960, offered nature as pure entertainment. That tradition of producing armchair nature adventures continued into the television era with the work of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Natural History Unit, the productions of the National Geographic Society, and the Public Broadcasting Service’s award-winning Nature series. In the United States, the proliferation of cable channels dedicated to wildlife and nature combined with the tyranny of television ratings and the splintered media landscape to increase the emphasis on flash and shock (e.g., the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week). Before the plethora of cable programs appeared, the prevailing aesthetic in most nature documentaries in the previous hundred years had been a fascination with charismatic wildlife and seemingly pristine landscapes and an appreciation of the wonders and complexity of science and the natural world. That emphasis on beauty and wonder was and is legitimate and valuable, a method of inspiring a love and regard for the natural world. People tend to protect and preserve that which they love, but most of these films avoided showing human intrusion upon the landscape: the telephone wires just outside the frame, the highway in the distance, or the degraded farm field just off camera.
With the advent of the modern environmental movement and civic engagement in the 1960s, protest films revealing environmental crises began to appear, highlighting the disasters of pollution and oil spills, though less frequently pointing out the devastating habitat loss caused by rampant development. Again, before the term came into being, filmmakers were producing documentaries about the Anthropocene without even knowing it.
Crises are a heady brew, however. If audiences are fed a relentless diet of environmental calamity and catastrophe, they shuffle out of the theater dispirited rather than engaged, hopeless and fatalistic in the face of problems too big to solve or even comprehend, or they simply ignore yet another outrage du jour. I have cofounded two environmental film festivals; if their slates are one helping of despair after another, the theaters are empty. The audience votes with their feet, and heads to a pub.
Conversely, whistling past the graveyard is an exercise in irresponsibility. Even the venerated BBC and its partner Discovery Communications were rightly criticized for avoiding any mention of the causes of climate change in their 2012 series Frozen Planet. Eliding the issues that threaten the natural world in the Anthropocene is unacceptable.
What is called for is a delicate balance between hope and despair. In my own natural history films, I do not ignore the threats, particularly the single issue of greatest import in the history of humankind, anthropogenic climate change, but I try to balance the grim acknowledgment of current and future realities with an inspirational reminder of what it is we so love about the natural world. In that spirit, I have made films that examine the mid-Atlantic’s Outer Banks barrier islands, collapsing because of rampant development and rapid sea-level rise; about a mountain range in the desert Southwest where entire forests of piñon pine have expired because of heat and drought; and about the remote Alaska Peninsula, where bears digging for razor clams on mud flats still unearth lingering oil from the Exxon Valdez, twenty-five years after and 450 miles away from the 1989 spill.
Audiences must not be shielded from the realities of the Anthropocene, but they need hope and desperately want to be reminded of what it is about the natural world that they loved as children and want to love today. And there is reason for hope. Al Gore is now making the case for optimism on climate change because of rapid improvements in renewable-energy use and technology. In 2016, Jane Lubchenco gave an address titled “Enough wi
th the Doom and Gloom!” to the National Academy of Sciences. E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth Project is the very definition of audacity of hope. Natural history films must illumine the realities of living in the Anthropocene while reminding audiences that the natural world is precious and valuable, both for how it provides for the very existence of human society and for its own wondrous complexity and capacity for inspiration.
• • •
In early spring, the water of the Potomac is too cold and turbid for fly-fishing, but I walk in the gray and brown woods to see the annual phenomenon of spring ephemerals. Up through the leaf duff, spring beauties come peeping, awakening from the ever shorter winter, followed by delicate cutleaf toothwort and silly Dutchman’s breeches. Twinleaf and bloodroot appear and disappear, sometimes in the same day, petals detached by a mere breath of wind.
Despite the encroachment of Japanese stiltgrass and garlic mustard, these native wildflowers return to provide delight. Pileated woodpeckers make their looping, parabolic flights to dead trees; tropical migrants bring their song back to the still-temperate forest; blue jays mock other avifauna with false red-tailed hawk screams. Under a log, a little red-backed salamander hides—delicate, resilient, beautiful. Even in my sad, sorry, lovely woods, the natural world has the capacity to thrill, inspire, and enlighten, and that is what filmmaking in the Anthropocene must do.
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