Why I Make Environmentally-Centered Films but Am Not Interested in Saving the Earth

When I was four, my family moved from Portugal to live with my grandparents in a mid-century house across the street from one of the small lakes that pock mark central Florida. If you’ve ever spent time near the coast of the southeastern United States, you’ll notice that the native vegetation functions at a primal level where plants, trees, vines, and mosses seem to devour one another in this either brutal or orgiastic (depending on your mood) dance of life and death. I feel charged in these environments.

Among the gnarly trees that flanked the lake, I remember one tree in particular, what we called an ear tree because of its dark grey ear-shaped seed pods. I collected these seed pods in a small orange bucket. I even remember what they smelled like; a cross between eucalyptus, the inside of an old leather suitcase, and dirt. What I loved most about the ear tree was that its trunk grew almost horizontally making it an easy tree to climb. We only spent a year living with my grandparents near the lake, but I still consider that tree as an early childhood pet and family member. This tree was probably the catalyst that prompted me to form a particular kinship with what we might call “the natural world.”

After my family moved to Texas and I spent a fair chunk of my childhood and adolescence cycling though the undeveloped Texas hill country near Austin, my appreciation of the trees and the natural landscape grew. If the plant life of the southeast was thick with devouring, the central Texas trees, shrubs, and cacti felt like grizzled, stone-like old men who crouched under an expansive sky.

Now, many years later, I live 20-minutes from the beach in southeast North Carolina and feel like I’ve come full circle in a way. Some of my first memories were of being in Portugal on the beach. Now, I’m on the opposite side of the same ocean. I’m half-American and half-Portuguese so I suppose my native country is the Atlantic Ocean - the place in between these two countries.

My appreciation for the natural environment continues to evolve. Trees are no longer just trees but also diffusers of hyper-vivid sky and sunlight. The ocean is not just the ocean but a liminal realm where the noise of industrialization ceases.

I have tried to come to terms with industrialization as well as the urban and suburban sprawl it produces. I do this by thinking of the ever encroaching human development as nature in a different form. And it really is, I suppose. In a sense, everything our species creates is a garden of sorts. But instead of growing tomatoes and lettuce, some gardens produce chemical plants, skyscrapers, and Starbucks. Arteries are both biological tunnels that carry blood from the heart to the body and also highways carrying cell-like cars to and from the heart of an urban area. Even the unseeable products of our technological developments are nature in a different form. The map of the internet, for example, has an uncanny resemblance to mushroom mycelial growth. Our creations remind us that we are not separate from the nature we keep “out there.”

Map of the Internet (left) and mushroom mycelium (right)

The idea that we seem to consciously or unconsciously be tapping into eons-old natural patterns to write a new chapter of a continuing story brings me comfort in the sense that, though we may feel alienated from nature, we are still immersed in it. At the same time, I recognize that this particular chapter, which is focused on modern human technological development, is highly problematic for a number of reasons - not the least of which is a that our modern industry and technology is arguably behind a great mass extinction event.

It’s daunting and a bit depressing to walk along the beach of an uninhabited barrier island encountering scuffed up plastic soda bottle fragments, weathered mylar balloons, and forgotten goggles (all of which probably travelled several miles before washing up on shore) and then contemplate the overwhelming amount of micro-plastics in the ocean that I can’t see. Where this is heading, I can’t help but wonder.

Though I recognize that my personal beach experience is just the tip of the melting iceberg of an impending ecological collapse, I pick up what trash I can that will fit in my small kayak for a trip back to the mainland. I also understand, from a material perspective, how futile this may be. Hell, for all I know, the trash I pick up and throw in recycling bins and trash cans could end up on giant barge in the Pacific, only to be dumped back into the ocean.

But my primary reason for picking up the trash is somewhat immaterial. With each piece of trash I pick up, I feel that I am nodding/waving to the Earth system and the Earth system is waving back. And that acknowledgement forges a connection - a continuing conversation. I don’t claim to have an answer for what we, as a species living in this time, should do to create a more sustainable environment, but I have an increasing sense of what I should do, which is to continue picking up trash on the beach.

I am also drawn toward creating a new breed of environmental film. I believe our culture relies too heavily on a dominant scientific model to solve our ecological issues and not enough on the arts - particularly not enough on the arts free of science. Don’t misunderstand; an arts/science collaboration can have a huge impact but just as science has managed to sometimes function without art, I feel that it is sometimes necessary for art to go out on a limb beyond the realm of hard science where it can enter a purely intuitive and for lack of a better term, “magical” dimension.

In this realm, art can tap into and then communicate whatever experience four-year olds have with gnarly trees. I want to clarify that I am not anti-science. Rather, I believe that science, as we understand it today, is one way of knowing among many. Science has brought us a lot of fantastic stuff but it can’t (so far as I am aware) offer us a vision, a narrative, or a myth that helps us use that stuff responsibly. Art can do that. Art is a mode of understanding the universe that can uncover those truths that science can’t measure, quantify or prove. At the same time I respect that without science, we wouldn’t have as many tools available to express those truths. Ultimately, I’m an advocate for a symbiotic relationship between art and science and whatever other ways of knowing we may not have tapped into.

Back to how to engender an appreciation of what ecologist and philosopher David Abram has termed “the more-than-human world” through film and video. This is no small task. The light coming from a video (or even film) projector is a weak substitute for the nutrient rich light bouncing off sand, trees, rocks, and water. The sense of stillness, cut by the squawk of a coastal bird and mixed with the charged salt air of an early morning on the water is compressed and neutered when captured by a camera and sound recorder. Even the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of freezing by waning winter moonlight on 4 hours sleep is missing - though it too is part of the experience. My first instinct is to discourage the creation of environmentally-themed films altogether, for the same reason that one might discourage van Gogh paintings on beach towels - because both are a poor substitute for the real thing. From this perspective, it makes more sense for me to stand up in front of a film audience advising, “just get out there and see for yourself!”

Unless . . .

. . . there is a way to feed some of those nutrients, lost to projection, back into the content of the film.

My son’s elementary school had this tradition when guests came to visit. Rather than simply thank the guests for their visit, the young students were encouraged to gift a “Thank You + 1.” In other words, they not only thanked the guest, but mentioned one thing that they really enjoyed about the guest’s presentation.

I’ve borrowed from this concept to create an “environmentally-themed film + 1.” For example, in my short film, “Tides” (full film, below), I set out to not just show the salt marsh landscape, but inject something of my own experience being out on the salt marsh. I don’t tell the viewer why protecting the salt marsh is important in any concrete sense but rather, I do my best to communicate a personal dimension that comes as close as I am able to transfer my experience to the viewer.

“Tides” 8 minutes (2020)

Before “Tides,” I created a short film “Black River,” which I also consider an environmentally-themed film + 1. “Black River” is an observational documentary, shot on high-contrast black and white 16mm film, about a largely undeveloped river in southeastern North Carolina that is home to the oldest Bald Cypress trees on the planet. The text at the end of the film reveals that the oldest trees in the Three Sisters swamp region of the Black River are 1600 years old. Since the the time the film was completed in 2016, that age has been revised to 2600 years old. In yet another twist, I recently learned that the several trees that have been hollowed out by natural process of aging can not be cored and thus can not be dated. These undatable trees may be even older (3000+ years?).

“Black River” 4 minutes (2016)

I documented the river during the late winter and early spring, when it felt gritty, crusty, and especially ancient without any leaves yet on the trees. The audience engages with the +1 (or enhanced) experience, not through the images recorded by the camera, but through what happens to the film emulsion via the dark-room processing. This process involved squeezing 100 feet of film at a time into cake tubs filled with chemicals. For a few minutes, I massaged the film stock with thick industrial gloves as tiny negative images faded into view under a dim red safe light. This type of hand-processing is, needless to say, a very primitive approach that produces its own document on the film emulsion - in a language of nicks, scratches, and inconstancies in development. But rather than see these “imperfections” as casualties of the process I consider them a way to communicate the course, primal feeling of being immersed in the Black River environment.

This finally brings me to the incendiary title of this post. Why, if I have such an appreciation for the more-than-human world, would I not be interested in saving it? I think the problem of “saving the Earth,” lies in the phrase itself. First, our Earth has been through far worse cataclysms, between meteor impacts and mega volcanic eruptions, than we humans could even imagine much less cause. And the Earth will continue to go through far worse - especially whenever the day comes, long into the future, when our sun will expand and swallow the Earth along with our neighbor planets. This may sound like I’m saying “why bother,” but stick around.

The other issue that I have with “saving the Earth” is that this implies that there is me, and there is the Earth, and I should save it. But if I project my consciousness out into near Earth orbit, there’s just Earth, and I am just one of its unseen cells. If this sounds a little to new-agey-far-out to you, then I suggest you liberate all the cells and gut bacteria that occupy what you think of as your body, because, if we are separate from our planet, then all the microscopic life that occupies our bodies is separate from us and we don’t exist (insert your own philosophical rabbit hole, here).

So again, what’s the point of it all? I don’t know. And by “I don’t know,” it doesn’t mean that I doubt that there is a point but rather that there is a point and I can’t fully grasp the significance of it with my higher primate brain. But occasionally, seemingly, out of the corner of my conceptual eye, I get a dim glimpse of what that point is - which is that it is all in flux and impermanent and that if feels yummy to be in the soup. And even when the sun swallows the Earth billions of years from now, I will have (or the molecules that currently assemble as this performance called André will have) taken on many strange forms and will continue to take on strange forms long after the solar system has exited the stage.

I get that this may still seem a bit nihilistic but I don’t mean it as such. As I claimed before, art can explore realms beyond our current understanding of material science. Art allows for both/and paradoxes. I suppose quantum physics does, too, to be fair to science. In a both/and frame of mind, I can simultaneously acknowledge that no matter what I do to “save the Earth,” it will ultimately end (as all things do), while at the same time feeling a purpose in picking up trash on the beach.

When I was four, the ear tree didn’t tell me why it was important to save it. Instead, it gave me the experience of climbing on its knees and back and collecting seed pods, and as I have mentioned, this has planted in me (no pun intended) an appreciation for, and connection to, the more-than-human world.

My goal with crafting environmentally-themed films, likewise, is to come as close as I can to creating metaphorical ear trees for viewers to climb. There is, of course, a purpose to environmental films that sound a warning bell to “wake people up” to the impending ecological collapse.

But for me, I will continue to plant ear trees through my filmmaking just as I will continue to pick up trash on the beach.