👀What I'm watching

Gavin Lamb
Jun 17, 2023
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“Filmmaker Ciara Lacy documents Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, a Kanaka Maoli wahine poet, activist and academic, and her continued work towards justice for Hawaii’s native population.”

  • The Dark Divide, a film featuring David Cross and Debra Messing. The film is based on the new book by Robert Michael Pyle, a lepidopterist and nature writer. A portion of the film's profits will be donated to the National Wildlife Federation’s mission to protect wildlife and wild places. Here’s the trailer.

“While IPCC risk assessments and emission projections can help us understand climate change, they don’t exactly inspire the imagination or provoke a personal response to the crisis. The solution? A growing league of storytellers who use photographs, films and the human experience to breathe life into the cerebral science of climate change and conservation. Images can tap into our senses and break down barriers that statistics cannot — how far can they go to inspire a global climate response? Join us for a conversation on the art of visualizing climate change with filmmaker CĂ©line Cousteau, producer and director Davis Guggenheim, and photographer Cristina Mittermeier.”

  • A new interview with ecolinguist Arran Stibbe: “Arran Stibbe, author of "Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By", explores how the language we use can impact the ecological crises impacting the world today.”:

  • An interview with Barry Lopez on storytelling. I saw Lopez speak in 2017 when he came to the University of Hawai‘i where I was a grad student. He spoke about his most well-known book Arctic Dreams, and its connections to a documentary film that was being screened at the university at the time called Standing on Sacred Ground, a four-part documentary series about Indigenous activism around the world, including Hawai‘i.

  • Bear 71 by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes, a documentary made in 2012. This is an interactive documentary about Bear 71, the “story of a female grizzly bear monitored by wildlife conservation officers from 2001–2009” in Banff National Park.

  • Water Flows Together by Taylor Graham, Palmer Morse, and Matt Mikkelsen. “Colleen Cooley is one of the few female DinĂ© river guides on the San Juan River. This short documentary follows her down the river as she reflects on the profound responsibility we have to treat water with reverence and care.”

  • “A Message From the Future II: The Years of Repair” is an animated short film that dares to dream of a future in which 2020 is a historic turning point, where the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic and global uprisings against racism drive us to build back a better society in which no one is sacrificed and everyone is essential.

  • “Do Whales Judge Us? Interspecies History and Ethics: Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University, and author of the recent book Floating Coast mentioned above gave one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever heard in December, 2019 on whale-human relationships.

  • The nature writer Robert Macfarlane, in an interview during the first British Council Nature Writing Seminar held in Munich, Germany in 2018, suggests some ways ‘new nature writers’ might counteract eco-culturally destructive stories about places and landscapes.

  • Geo Takach on the role of art and humor in environmental communication: “Rational appeals to science are failing us when it comes to environmental protection. So how can we motivate people to act? Laughter, arts-based methods and appeals to emotion are more effective at getting to the heart of the matter, says School of Communication and Culture Associate Professor Geo Takach.”

  • If you enjoyed watching Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read her inspiring poem “The Hill We Climb” at the January 20th presidential inauguration, you should definitely check out her 2018 poem about climate change, ‘Earthrise’. Here are a brief excerpt and full video of the poem below:

Where despite disparities
We all care to protect this world,
This riddled blue marble, this little true marvel
To muster the verve and the nerve
To see how we can serve
Our planet. You don’t need to be a politician
To make it your mission to conserve, to protect,
To preserve that one and only home
That is ours,
To use your unique power
To give next generations the planet they deserve.”

“Starting a nature journaling practice can be hard. Let’s walk through it together. In this workshop, we will explore ways to scale down the anxiety or barriers that might form between you and your journal. Learn how to get started and how to create the habit of nature journaling that can last a lifetime.”