A surf photographer, business owner and father of two is seeing more and more plastic wash ashore his beloved home beach. In a bid to discover the route of this problem he embarks on a journey of discovery to educate himself and understand more about the problem. Along the way, he discovers some alarming issues.
Plastic Pollution is a very real threat to the future of our planet, the animals that inhabit our oceans and ultimately the human race. The problem is far worse than it seems on the surface and we need to act now to ensure we protect the future for ourselves and our planet.
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.
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.
