Thursday, June 24, 2010

Documentary: Deep Green


A film by Matthew Briggs


Deep Green” is an upbeat documentary about how to de-carbonize energy and restore the natural world in order to stop man-made global warming. It is all about solutions.

Filmmaker Matthew Briggs’ intense interest in man-made global warming began long before “Deep Green” was conceived. Since 1981, when he helped pioneer the wild mushroom industry in the U.S., Briggs has spent much of his time roaming the national forests between the Rockies and Pacific Ocean in search of elusive fresh fungi. By the 1990s, he says, the encroachment effects of climate change was undeniable.

As Briggs relates in “Deep Green”: “Warmer winters allowed bark beetles to survive, explode in numbers, and overwhelm the trees. Early snow-melt has left mountain forests drier. All over the West you see dead trees and explosive forest fires. What was a natural cycle of destruction and then renewal has been short-circuited by man-made global warming, and is now mostly destruction. Climate change stepped into my life.” Determined to do something about it, Briggs attended a Bioneers conference in 1999. “When I went to that first one, I thought I knew a bunch, and I didn’t know much at all. There were so many great speakers. The demonstrations of how everything and everyone was connected. That we’re all downwind and downstream. The full truth of how the natural biological world balanced itself, and how the size of the human footprint was throwing it out of balance in so many places, in so many ways. And that this was all fixable.”


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“Other films have done a great job of showing us the problem. We wanted ‘Deep Green to be about solutions. The best way to stop man-made global warming, at every level, is to find out who and what is the best at fixing it all over the world, and then share it. And that’s what we did for two and a half years in nine countries.”
– Matthew Briggs, “Deep Green” director


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