Fall and Winter

Fall and Winter had its world premiere at Austin's SXSW film festival. The film is a very well-intentioned and beautiful photographed and edited film about the impending environmental disaster that is predicted by a small cliché of environmentalists. They seem to believe that only are we going to experience severe repercussions of global climate change, but that we are going to run out water and soil leading to massive environmental dislocations and ecological collapse within a few years. This puts them into the category of environmentalists who seem to be predicting that the end of the world is near. They seem to believe that we are doomed by our own technological advancement and that the problem started somewhere around the beginning of mechanized agriculture. The film seems to be overly alarmist even by the standards of the most of the environmental movement.

In response to this massive environmental crisis they seem to only be able to offer very small scale solutions in local sustainable development projects that seem nowhere close to addressing the scale of the problem that they lay out. The solutions seem to be impractical and anarchistic efforts to rely on the wisdom of Hopi Indians and environmental gurus to get our civilization back in tune with the natural biorhythms of Mother Earth. If the problem is as dire as they say than the solutions cannot be as naive as they suggest. They need to instead begin to organize and challenge the existing political institutions instead of dismissing them as hopeless corrupted as they seem to be inclined to do. Fall and Winter is beautiful filmed, frustrating depressing, deeply idealistic and well-intentioned, but also unfortunately hopeless naive.