Short Summary
Climate scientists have warned us that insect infestations would be greater on a warmer planet. A few degrees of warming in the Rocky Mountains, about double the global average, has allowed a native pine beetle to go beserk. Over a billion trees are dead across 61 million acres and the attack is out of control. Only cold can kill the pine beetle, cold that disappeared with the warming at the end of the 20th century. The outbreak is 10 to 20 times larger than anything ever recorded and forest professionals and climate scientists see no reason why it will not progress across the entire continent. This film is the story of abrupt climate change happening now . . . Across the Rocky Mountains of North America I furiously sped for 7,500 miles, on an odyssey to witness the death of the forests across the backbone of a continent, crossing the Continental Divide 14 times in 23 days. Driven as I was, to share the story of the great changes happening on our planet, generations ahead of expectations, all happening because of just a few degrees of warming. I made 19 camps and inspected 17 national and provincial forests and 6 national parks. Everywhere I went there were dead trees and sick forests, unhealthy because of continued stress from a changing climate, inflicted with dozens of different diseases and infestations. The trail continues with the miseries of the forced march averaging 325 miles a day, through campgrounds that have been clearcut because of falling tree hazards, getting searched at the Canadian border because being a solo filmmaker is suspicious, and being the first white person in decades to go deep in the Tsilhqot'in Nation in British Columbia. The score for What Have We Done was first inspired by my visit to the melting Greenland Ice Sheet and is performed by my band in Austin, Texas.
Trailer - What Have We Done: North America's Mountain Pine Beetle Pandemic
Scientific Basis: 20,000 words, 58 images, The scientific basis for the film and the book -
Road Trip to Climate Change: Ecosystems Collapse Noiselessly
Long Summary
The forests across entire mountain ranges in the Rockies are dead, or nearly so... The high altitude of the Rockies is warming, like the Arctic, at greater than twice the rate of average global warming. Extreme cold that can kill the beetles disappeared at the end of the 20th century. This 61 million acre attack is out of control. It is nearly as large as New England and Pennsylvania combined. Trillions of native bark beetles have killed billions of trees in a little more than a decade.
Two years ago the forest professionals started saying that they see no reason the beetle will not circumnavigate the entire continent. This year, climate scientists started saying that this is the beginning of what is called ecoregime change. An ecoregime change is where continental scale regions of forest die-off, and are replaced by some other ecosystem such as grass or scrublands. Vast changes to major global ecosystems like this have been common on Earth in prehistory, but only during abrupt climate changes.
In August and September (2010) I finished filming for my third documentary on the beetle. This new film will be a 100-minute HD effort. The filming expedition was a 7,500 mile, 23 day road odyssey from New Mexico to Prince George, British Columbia. I made 19 different camps, crossed the Continental Divide 14 times and inspected and filmed 17 national and provincial forests and 6 national parks.
A new book will compliment the film; Road Trip to Climate Change – Ecosystems Collapse Noiselessly. The book will be an extensive reporting on the pine beetle and the current state of major climate changes impacting global scaled ecosystems now.
The ”take-home message”; even with aggressive emissions mitigation, our planet will warm three to five times as much as it has warmed already (under business as usual the warming will be ten times or more greater than what we have already seen.) Warming is impacting forests across the world and the impacts are not isolated to the mountain pine beetle pandemic in the Rockies.
The boreal forest in Alaska, has changed from a carbon sink to a carbon source because of increased forests fires. Fire numbers have doubled and extreme fires quadrupled, but it is not just the forests that are burning. The extreme conditions caused by warming are causing forest soils to burn.
Soils in the north have a huge carbon content because of slow decomposition during eight months of the year under frozen conditions. This partially decomposed organic material burns when it dries out under these "new" warmed conditions. But the boreal is not the most astonishing forest news. The Amazon has seen billions of trees die in two, 100-year droughts in the last five years. This single, globally important carbon sink has also changed to a carbon source with emissions greater than all emissions in the United States.
I work directly from the discoveries in the academic journals copiously referencing my words. This project however, is about more than climate changes today happening faster and with greater impacts than the public and our leaders anticipated. It is about more than the emerging consensus among scientists that this is the beginning of a dangerous abrupt climate change. It is about my solo journey averaging 325 miles per day, filming and camping my way through the dyeing forest of the high Rockies. It is about the people I met along the way, some who did not realize that the red trees were dead trees. It is about clearcut campgrounds, potted meat products, a brake job in Denver, new tires in Jackson and getting searched at the Canadian border because being a solo filmmaker is suspicious. It is about finding out my wife had a breast tumor the day I made my furthest north of the trip, over 3,000 miles from home.
The film is a new type of climate change documentary. It is a reality adventure where I explore a new planet, changed by warming beyond the bounds of our current evolution. I am a 21st century climate explorer, trained in Earth sciences and engineering (one of the definitions for engineering is the real world application of science.) I am also a trained science outreach specialist, or one who interprets the discoveries authored in the scholarly journals – into English – so you don't have to.
This is not a normal documentary: the topic nor the treatment (treatment is what filmmakers say when they mean the way they made the film.) Music, from the live music capital of the world - Austin, Texas - is at the soul of the film. I learned that I was a singer songwriter when I went to Greenland in 2007 (yes, an engineer singer songwriter.) I was chasing the warming at the time, the news out of academia was just too fantastic too believe. When I arrived, I found that the discoveries in the journals were conservative. “The Big Melt”, as the scientist I met there called it, was far worse than the peer review literature stated, or at least this is what the scientists I met there told me, and seeing it first hand made it pretty obvious as well. You see, science, at least the publication of scientific findings, is almost always, across all science disciplines, conservative. Scientists have to be conservative. If they are wrong, they cannot get their findings published. If they cannot publish, they perish.
It was on the melting ice sheet itself, shooting for my film The Ice and the Sea, that I was inspired. The ice sheet was covered with dirt. Dirt from dust accumulated over millennia. Dirt left behind by melting and evaporation on a warming planet. I was inspired not only to write songs and sing, but to focus on documenting these changes that were already happening and to effectively communicate them to the public using the techniques I have learned as an outreach specialist.
So instead of talking heads spewing incomprehensible eco jargon in this climate change film you get music and visual spectacles to enhance the delivery of the complicated and frightening things happening to our Earth that the evening news does not contemplate, that other climate documentaries only briefly mention. Yet the evidence is all there in the halls of academia, and in the real world. These astounding things that are already happening are mostly hidden from everyday life. and yet are so, so important to you and me.
My Previous Film about the Pine Beetle: This is the second film I have made about the mountain pine beetle. The first is on my Casa Grande Films page, and it is called What Have We Done? The title of my previous film (45 minutes) is a question. The new film's title is not a question. In 2008/9 when I made this first film it was not clear "what we had done." It was clear that the pine beetle infestation was beyond anything seen on this planet since mankind has evolved complicated society, but the science was not clear. The science is crystal clear now.
