Fixing a broken world

Mountainfilm focuses on themes of peaceful mending

by Allen Best

Like the prayer flags that flutter at various venues, this year’s at Mountainfilm in Telluride had many colorful themes; some bold, others subtle. No one person can absorb it all. Breaking and mending were the strongest themes I detected.

A crowd favorite was “DamNation.” Produced by Yvon Chouinard, of Patagonia fame, the film about the damming of rivers was shown four times with strong attendance. The central premise of the film is that dams inflict great physical and ecological damage. That’s hard to dispute. The treasured Glen Canyon was lost to Lake Powell, and the great dams on the Columbia have blocked the epic spawning of salmon. Targeted in particular were four dams on the Snake River, which originates in Jackson Hole and has carved our wonderful but now plugged canyons in Idaho.

Those dams need to be broken, the filmmakers say, and some have been. One, in Olympic National Park west of Seattle, was breached several years ago, salmon returning and the ecosystem mending quickly.

In “Emptying the Skies,” songbirds of the Mediterranean are threatened by poachers. In one passage, a woman rationalizes killing birds for profits saying she kills just five. Seeking to mend this situation are bird-lovers. The moral is that efforts of a few committed people can make a difference.

A more global problem is explored in “The Seeds of Time,” about Cary Fowler, a scientist from Memphis, whose mission is to protect genetic plant diversity of the last 12,000 mostly ice-free years. Fowler, who was in Telluride, explained that there are, for example, 200,000 varieties of rice.

In this time of big agriculture, our system of food is broken. We have discarded much of the genetic diversity of potatoes, rice and many other foods. Having just a few varieties of wheat, for example, leaves us vulnerable to pathogens.

Fowler, working with other scientists, has established a “repository of options for the future.” Seeds from around the world are stockpiled and archived inside a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle, safeguarded for a time of future need.

“Without crop diversity, agriculture will not be able to adapt to climate change, and neither will we,” said Fowler. It’s not just a matter of planting the same crops farther north, he said. He looks to a time beyond his own, a time when our agriculture system must absolutely be mended. GMO food is not at the top of his list of concerns.

Jackson Hole was the setting for at least two films. One, “The Grand Rescue,” recounts the tense and daring rescue of an injured climber on the north face of the Grand Teton in 1967. Short and sweet is the story of a current ranger in Grand Teton and his new love, an immigrant from Mexico, their paths united in marriage in a meadow below the spires of the Tetons.

My interests in energy led me to films about the drilling fields of North America. One set of films, called “Dear Governor Hickenlooper,” explored the explosive drilling in Colorado. The central contention is that laws give neighbors of such drilling so few rights. In one scene, a young family in their dream home in the country is confronted with a drilling operation across the gravel road that drives them to their basement and fills them with dread about the long-term impact of exposure to chemicals.

“Some things are knowable, and some things are exquisitely unknowable,” says a scientist in one sequence. That is a pivotal statement for Colorado as it girds for a nasty election this fall about a sane way forward amidst this new, furious pace of drilling.

More moving yet, but for different reasons, was a story from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields where Williston is the largest boom city. Job-seekers from across the country are drawn to the prospect of big-money in a story has been well told.

“The Overnighters” tells the story of some people, mostly men, many older or from more desperate situations, who can find no place to stay once they arrive.

In response, Jay Reinke, the pastor of a local Lutheran church, persuades his congregation to allow the homeless men, 1,000 of them over the course of two years, quarters in the church.

If that is, on the face of it, an act of Christian charity, some church members confide to the filmmaker that they have trouble with the imposition. “This is not my home anymore, and it’s very difficult for me,” says one, speaking of Williston altogether but, it seems, the church, too. City officials also have problems.

“I don’t see how a community can simply turn its back on people who have no place to sleep,” says Reinke.

But also this: “It’s a very broken world. Everyone is broken.”

Among those broken people is the pastor himself, a revelation that adds further drama to an already rich movie.

Premiered at Sundance in January, “The Overnighters” is a superb piece of documentary filmmaking. It was also extremely low budget. Jesse Mosse, the filmmaker, explained that once a month he traveled from San Francisco to North Dakota and, in Williston, slept on a cot in a hallway along with the other desperate men. His film got my vote for best film of Mountainfilm. There was not one mountain in it.

Wilderness was an overt theme of this year’s festival, as this is the 40th anniversary of the 1964 law passed by the Congress. But at a breakfast, several of those involved in the trenches of preserving wild land and the ecosystem warned against issuing visions from the mountain top. Instead, when working in places like Africa and Latin America, they said, the concept of human rights must be integrated into wilderness.

“Don’t be a savior, be a partner,” said Vance Martin, president of the WILD Foundation.

At another breakfast, Peter Yarrow, one of the principles in the folk-singing group Peter, Paul and Mary, lead attendees in renditions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” as fog shrouded the streets of Telluride. “Don’t try to compete with your neighbor,” he advised. “Try to sing softly enough to hear them, too.”

The result was harmony, and a metaphor for mending those things that are broken, whether it’s ecosystems or human beings.