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Courtesy of A Fierce Green Fire
A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet
San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker Mark Kitchell begins A Fierce Green Fire with this introduction:
“The environmental movement is about nature versus humanity. It arose at a time when our industrial civilization has grown so powerful, it threatens the natural world on which we depend for survival. It has become the battle for a living planet.”
A nearly two-hour history of this battle, the film derives its title from the story of Aldo Leopold, a young forest ranger who shot a wolf—for no particular reason. As she lay dying, Leopold saw what he called ‘a fierce green fire’ in her eyes.
“He had a personal realization,” Paul Hawken states on camera, “of what it means to chew away at the web of life. And so if you look at the manifestation of environmentalism in the world, it’s because people—one by one by one—have had that experience.”
Although some of the film’s information and stories can be found in previous documentary films, Kitchell has woven them into a compelling matrix that deserves to be seen and understood by those familiar with those stories and, especially, those not. Much of the footage, however, was new to me—especially the militant American housewives of the 1960s and 70s fighting passionately for their lives and the lives of their families.
I was sadly delighted to see and hear Kitchell’s coverage of ‘Climate Change’ in Act 5. He covers four decades of still-born political efforts to acknowledge global warming and do something to mitigate it—something that can only be done by global human cooperation.
How solutions will be developed and implemented is, of course, a mystery of the seas.
A Fierce Green Fire is organized in five ‘acts’ which are narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende, and Meryl Streep.
To purchase the film’s DVD or to stream it, simply go to the home page. The links are at the top.
The film’s comprehensive website includes a link, Recommended, to books and films about our environment. This is a great list! I will be using it.
Don Schwartz