Wild & Scenic Film Festival

The Wild & Scenic Film Festival got its start in 2003 by the South Yuba River Citizens League in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Their goal: to put a human face on the environmental movement. After the films premiere annually in Nevada City, California, the festival—with the help of sponsors and individual organizations—goes on tour to communities across the globe. This is the 7th Annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival Utah has seen and, while typically held in Park City alone, it has since leaked into the Salt Lake Valley with a partnership between the Park City and Salt Lake Film Societies. Organized as a benefit for the Summit Land Conservancy, a non-profit based in Summit County dedicated to saving local lands, these films are curated with the hope of inspiring wonder at our natural resources, as well as action to help protect the planet we live on.

The second day of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival started out with a short film entitled Earthbook—a desktop point of view of Earth using social media to document the history of the planet we inhabit. After the dinosaurs pass and humans begin to over-populate, Earth “chats” with Mars, gets “poked” by meteorites and adds animals to “Endangered Species” groups. Pending catastrophe raises Earth’s stress level (and temperature), but there’s a change in human attitude that eventually mends the course. While the ideas in this film were clever, the film might have been better received in an elementary school classroom, and came across like a commercial with cheesy jingles for the soundtrack, making it feel pretty old school despite it being a fairly up-to-date Facebook interface.

Adventures With a Purpose: A Higher Calling, put together by Teton Gravity Research, took a unique idea to inspire easy action. Once we are introduced to the main characters of this story—Jeremy Jones, snowboarder and creator of the “Protect Our Winters” campaign; Ryan Mayo, Clif Bar rep and outdoor enthusiast and Gregg Treinish, National Geographic’s 2008 Adventurer of the Year—we begin to learn their philosophies and thoughts on what the outdoors means to them, and what to do with that meaning. Recognizing that it’s usually a selfish pursuit that takes you outside, Treinish decided to come up with a way that people can give back to the places they play in an attempt to keep protecting those areas. By training outdoor enthusiasts to gather scientific data, explorers can be in the field doing much-needed footwork for the scientific community in their studies of the effects of climate change. To propel this idea into motion, Jones decided to participate by gathering samples of glaciers from the Himalayas to assist Natalie Kerhwald, a scientist at the University of Venice, who needed the data to explore the impacts of human nature on glacier growth and replenishment.

In many ways, Montana is America’s final frontier, holding vast expanses of wilderness unmatched in any other state. With over 400,000 acres of public land that spans across the Rocky Mountain front, along with pristine rivers and forests through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, locals struggle with how best to maintain that space, from development to conservation. Common Ground takes a look into the lives of the ranchers that have inhabited the area for generations, and asks what the land means to them. While most ranchers are fairly straightforward with their philosophy of conserving the land they’ve worked on their entire lives, they offer valuable perspective in the fight over the Heritage Act. Landscape painter Stoney Burk offers the most emotion when he changes from talking about his thoughts to ask the audience who speaks for the rivers, the cliffs and the baby fawn, reminding us that we are the ones that can speak for the wilderness, and therefore have the power to protect it.

Taking a break to partake in a visual feast, The Ridge with Danny MacAskill takes us to the Black Cuillin Ridge in the Cuillin Mountain range in Scotland. We follow him on bike as he traverses through some seriously gnarly terrain. MacAskill’s name implies his biking talent, made evident as he hops through cliffs and jumps over rivers, all on wheels, making it seem like it would have been just as easy for him to walk through the Isle. The combination of the filmmaking with the challenging traverse and the magnificence of the Isle of Skye left me with a sense of awe and vertigo, making this some of the best action filming I’ve seen in a while.

Being at an environmental event in Utah, I usually expect Utah author and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams to come up in some way, shape or form. The Wilderness Act: 50th Anniversary, put together by the Sierra Club, gave her a cameo alongside Tom Udall (New Mexico senator and son of Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior and champion for conservation legislation), Daniel Wildcat from the Haskell Indian Nations University and Michael Brune, president of the Sierra Club. The Wilderness Act was signed into legislation 50 years ago, and the interviewees take a look at the idea of wilderness, conservation and the way we use our resources to create an environment that reflects the freedom we are so adamant about protecting in America. While inspiring one-liners were spat and the idea of wilderness being honored in the government is presented, the film felt like Sierra Club propaganda, and could have used a more interesting narrative than personal anecdotes.

The longest film of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival (at a whole 36 minutes), and one of the most impactful for me personally, School’s Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten still populates my thoughts and has me scheming of ways for myself to enroll (I know I’m not a toddler anymore, but a girl can dream, right?). Outside of Zürich, Switzerland, kids ages 4–7 are given the option to spend two years in an outdoor classroom in the nearby forest, where they spend every day in their outdoor playground, no matter the weather. The curriculum stays pretty loose: when they arrive at their destination the class typically sing a song, and then they are given the rest of the day to play and explore. Unlike American public schools, with strict schedules and a school day spent almost entirely indoors, there is no reading, no math and no tests. (FYI: Children don’t start reading and writing until age 7, and they catch up to Americans by age 10). This way, the kids have a chance to develop social and motor skills in ways that indoor schools lack—students learn by making their own mistakes, by climbing and crawling through their environment, and lack the fear of retribution if they misbehave or don’t study. Not only are kids taught useful outdoor skills, like how to use knives and start fires, but despite the brutal winters in Switzerland, none of the parents reported an ill child. I want everyone to watch this film, and I really hope that this idea spreads across the Atlantic to our country; but what I really want is to go to my own outdoor school for two years. Can we make this happen, America? You deprived me in my youth, but it’s not too late to make amends.

The Wild & Scenic Film Festival concluded with the film I Heard, another visual treat narrated with a poem recited by two kids, Finela Guy and Oliver Lamond Ramsey. Filmmaker Michael Ramsey guides us through the variety of lands we celebrate in America, inspiring amazement at all we have to offer in the US.

Find out more information, and stay tuned for next year’s event by keeping up to speed at wildandscenicfilmfestival.org. For more information about the Summit Land Conservancy, visit wesaveland.org.