In a yearlong series of short films for Undark (undark.org), the Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Ian Cheney, whose works include documentaries like “King Corn,” “The Search for General Tso,” and “The City Dark,” turned his lens on climate change and the scale of the challenge facing humanity — from the scientific and technical to the emotional, psychological, and political. Cheney doesn’t pretend to offer answers or specific solutions; he only seeks to shine a light into the fog, to look for shapes and patterns, and ultimately to explore the many reasons why the problem of climate change is so difficult for humanity to even fathom, much less come together to solve.
Above is a 12-minute compilation of Cheney’s six short films in his series for Undark, “Measure of a Fog.” We also encourage visitors to explore each of the six installments, which are individually titled “Distance,” “Carbon,” “Energy,” “Geoengineering,” “Politics,” and “Ethics.”
“The very concept of ‘climate’ challenges the human mind,” Cheney noted at the outset of the series. “Its epochal timescales are difficult to fathom, its inner mechanics, rhythms and contours — they’re sometimes hard to discern, and even scientists are still trying to understand it all.
“Meanwhile,” he continued, “the changes we’re making to this immense, complex machinery — changes arising from a colorless, odorless gas tied to positive-sounding things like progress and growth and prosperity — it can all seem placeless and everywhere at the same time, both invisible and plain as day.”
Exploring and admitting to those tensions and ambiguities, Cheney suggests, is an important part of any conversation on where we go from here — perhaps the most important part. We hope you will find them useful as you continue your own discussions on this most crucial topic.
Every year, sea ice fluctuates through the seasons, growing in the winter and shrinking in the summer. This year, Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum March 13, 2019. It wasn’t a record low, but it continued a trend of declining sea ice maximums and minimums. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Katy Mersmann
The philosopher Immanuel Kant introduced the concept of “enlarged thought” — the idea that we can only truly comprehend the world if we are able to step outside of our own subjective framing of it and consider the experiences of others. It’s a notion that has great currency in the debate over climate change.
