Episode 72: Every climate apocalypse is local
The complete transcript for episode 72.
Molly Wood Voice-Over PRE-ROLL:
Hey, happy holidays, Everybody in the Pool listeners! I wanted to let you know that this will be our last show for 2024 we are on hiatus until January 15th when I am back from CES. I will be launching the new year with a multi-part series on everybody’s favorite topic AI and climate tackling data center energy use and more so please keep an eye out and in the meantime get caught up on any episodes you might have missed and hey take a little break, why don’t you. You’ve earned it. See you next year.
Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.
This week one of the things that led me to do this work as a reporter and also start this podcast and my little climate solutions media company
is recognizing the importance of STORYTELLING when it comes to talking about the climate crisis potential solutions and the impact of climate change on the economy and the world and the people in it.
It can be a tricky story to tell for lots of reasons and one of them is that climate change is hard to SEE on a planetary scale and its impacts are very LOCAL so it’s hard to imagine it as a planetary PROBLEM as opposed to isolated incidents of weird weather or bugs or strange ocean behavior.
So this week a little something different I’m talking with one of the directors of a documentary about climate change comprised entirely of first-person accounts of climate shocks that were posted on social media over the course of a year
no narration no big lesson or lecture just the real raw unfiltered reality of the world we now live in.
Greg Jacobs
My name is Greg Jacobs and I'm the co-director with John Siskel of the documentary film, The Here Now Project.
Molly Wood
So tell me about this. This is a very ambitious and unique storytelling device applied to what seems like just sort of a killer of a subject, right? A climate change documentary.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, so the Here Now Project is definitely a documentary unlike any other climate change documentary. It's basically a year in the life of climate change, that year being 2021, told entirely through the eyes and cameras of ordinary people all over the globe. So no narration, no talking heads, just the sort of visceral and oddly intimate experience of watching people go through extreme weather events that are unlike anything that they've ever experienced before.
Molly Wood
What, give me the backstory, what got you interested in wanting to make a documentary about climate change and then what led you to this storytelling device?
Greg Jacobs
Well, so we'd always, I think, mean, we're always interested in climate change, but we just couldn't figure out our way in. You know, like what can we bring to the table that would be unique or interesting or different? And so my co-director John was talking with a woman named Wendy Abrams who would go on to become our executive producer. And Wendy has been doing climate work at a high level as an advocate for decades now. And she's always said to John,
You know, you guys should do a climate film. You guys should do a climate film. And, you know, we're like, we don't know what to do. So so they were talking and John mentioned a documentary we had done for the History Channel about 15 years ago on 9-11 called 102 Minutes that Changed America. And that was a real time reconstruction of the morning of 9-11 using all found footage and sound. And it really struck a chord. It has won a bunch of Emmys and it has become kind of the thing they air every year.
you know, as a way that people used to commemorate the day. And the impetus for that was at the time around 2008 or so that there were all these sort of almost obligatory documentaries to mark the anniversary. And you got the sense that people were like, we know we have to do this, but we don't know how to tell the story anymore. And the idea of stripping away the narration and just letting people sort of experience it almost as a primary source documentary was
the way to kind of crack through that crust. And so we were, John, I think realized and Wendy realized, my God, that's the structure you have to use to tell the climate story. Because in a sense, the climate narrative, particularly in the documentary world, has also become something that almost feels obligatory. You know what's coming, half the audience is gonna drop out the moment they hear what it's about. And so maybe this can be used in the climate space.
with the same intent and with the same effect to just crack through that sense that I know what's coming.
Molly Wood
Right. Well, and I feel like a thing you've talked about in the past, and I think the thing that is particularly powerful here is that climate change, unlike a lot of other disasters, right? Climate shocks are local. And so it's sort of easy to think like, well, yeah, we had a bad weather year in Nebraska, but it is the power of seeing them all globally, one after the other, that makes this device like especially powerful, it seems like.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, it's so funny you mentioned that because just today somebody said to us, you basically put the backyard in the climate documentary. And that's like metaphorically and literally the case. I mean, there's a bunch of backyards in the documentary. And I think one of the things we realized as we were doing it was when you string together all these events, the film is chronologically, you know, it starts in January and ends in December, takes you through the year essentially.
But when you string them together as beginnings and events but not ends, beginnings and middles and but not ends, you end up sort of, you don't give the audience the break of making it think of this event as a discrete event. Because I think we tend to think of climate shocks as that was an event, it's over, and now the further we get from it, the more we forget about it and we lose the tether to the other events. And I think the goal of this film is to present them in a way where you don't get an ending.
You just get it as one global phenomenon. this isn't, climate is not about the event, it's about the pattern of events. And this was a way to show that.
Molly Wood
and the kind of unrelenting nature of it. It feels like the ending part that you're saying is especially important because there will be, you know, somewhere in the world, one of these is happening now, no matter what.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, no, we thought this would. mean, one of the concerns was, it's 2021. It'll feel dated by that time. And I think what we're finding is instead it actually makes people go, my God, this was happening all the way back in 2021. And, you know, there's that sense that the unrelenting this of it then is just, you know, this is just this is this is the movie of the rest of our lives. This is going to keep happening. And so it doesn't matter when you start the film and end the film.
It's just, this is life now.
Molly Wood
Right. There's an interesting element in there too about attribution. Like for example, there were certain types of storms you left out because you don't feel like the attribution science is there. These are things that are made worse by climate change. Talk about that kind of the science and choosing what to include.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, so we went through 2021 and we kind of went through all the weather, the extreme weather events and we, know, there's a sort of matrix of reasons why, you know, narrative reasons why we chose what we did. And some of it was geographic diversity and some of it was event diversity and the time of the year and all of that. It has to work as a film. But, but in doing so, we sort of realized there were certain events that happened that were, you know, awful events, but
Maybe we didn't want anybody to say to get to the end and go, aha, that tornado outbreak, that's not really climate change. You don't know that. And then sort of that kind of to be able to undermine the whole effort. So that was in 2021, there was the massive tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and Tennessee and Kentucky and all throughout the Midwest in December. And we had there's unbelievably powerful footage of that.
But we just decided, you know, tornadoes, the data's not quite there. We know they may be moving where they occur. We know they're maybe moving when they occur. But, you know, the data from the 50s is like, you know, Dorothy saying there's a tornado. So we just don't know. We can't trace it back the way you can trace all these other events. And so we left some of those things out. And there are other events, are sort of longitudinal events that don't necessarily work in this format either. Drought is really hard.
to capture as an active visual event. And then things like, you know, I was fascinated by, it was the earliest cherry blossom bloom in Japan in something like 1200 years. And we just like, that's just, that can't be right. That can't be good. But we couldn't figure out a way to make that work or, you know, the bark beetles, it turns out don't have cameras. So we couldn't make the bark beetle infestation work. So a lot of stuff is sort of outside the purview of
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
you know this approach but I think there's more than enough to make a movie out of the awful stuff that happened.
Molly Wood
Yeah. What are some of the things, everyone please watch it, but what are some of the things that are included for folks who haven't seen it?
Greg Jacobs
So we have sort of starting it in January. It starts with the Texas deep freeze from that year and which, you know, it turns out to be the most, costliest winter disaster in American history. And then from there, you know, it goes through the locust outbreak in Kenya and the cyclone Seroja in Indonesia and the strangest one of all, the sea snot infestation in the Sea of Marmara in Turkey.
And the Pacific Northwest heat wave fires everywhere, especially Siberia, floods the same week in Germany and China. And then a whole sequence at the end that just is a way of signalling, these things kept going, but we gotta wrap up here.
Molly Wood
Let's talk more about the filmmaking process. as you said, there's not narration. There's not a big Richard Attenborough moment at the end that's like, here's how we have to save the oceans. But there is this of graphical opening sequence that does do this attribution, that does say, what we are about to show you is climate change.
Greg Jacobs
Right. Yeah. And I think we wanted to really minimize the sort of the announcing of climate change in a way, because, you know, I think another problem a lot of times the documentaries about climate change have is in this media environment, it's hard enough to get them distributed. But then it's not necessarily how people, you know, consume media. So one of the interesting things about what we're hoping with this film is that this is a film you can watch in its entirety or you can sort of dip in and out.
and experience it the same way. So we wanted to just let people know right at the beginning, here's what this is. And now we're taking our thumb off the scale and we're just going to let it unfold, you know, as it goes. And, you know, one of the balances was how much context do you slide in there to remind people the reason this sequence is here, the reason we're talking about locusts is because they are, these infestations are made more frequent by, you know,
things that are happening elsewhere that shouldn't be happening. So you have to sort of drop in, you have to seed in little bits of context from some experts, you know, over the, you know, just news media or whatever that kind of help just tether people to the issue.
Molly Wood
And then the end credit then is real people.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, and then the Ed credit is real people. And that's what we, you we were hearing from people like the climate folks, the climate communications people in particular, they just are like, my God, this is amazing. We love this because it does something different. does, it does crack through in that way. But a lot of them were like, but you have to give people something to grab onto at the end. have to give them, if not hope, we sort of landed on courage.
as a way to frame what needs to happen and the emotion we want to leave people with. And in doing so, what we ended up doing was going back to some of the footage sources who were memorable throughout the film and asking them to film themselves again to give their message to the world. So you just went out and shot this thing just because you were driven to do it. But by...
recontextualizing it in this movie about climate change, we've made that random act something different. We've made that bearing witness. Now you are bearing witness. Now tell us what you want the world to know. every time I get choked up when I see it, because especially the very last one is saying, like, I don't know what I would tell people. Just take it seriously. And that's sort of like, that's kind of it. Just take it seriously.
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Yeah. What is the, before I talk more about the nuts and bolts of the, of making this, because my God, what an undertaking. what can you point to, you know, we're usually on this show, we're talking about solutions, like let's make fusion, right? What, what is the impact that you hope to have and, and how are you, you know, seeding the ground for that impact?
Greg Jacobs
So we've always seen this as something that is really about kind of raising the floor for people's urgency. it feels like there's an urgency gap now. There's a lot of people, and the people that you usually have on the show are people who know this stuff inside and out and understand the urgency of it. But I think there's kind of a more general population level lack of urgency, even for people who care.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Greg Jacobs
You know, it's, I care about climate change, but it's number 20 on my list of voting priorities, whatever. And so our hope is that this becomes a filter that people then see the world through, that it, it, it closes that gap between sort of general awareness and the necessary urgency. And in doing so, it seems like if the more we can do that on a population level, the more it also then softens the ground for all the people who are doing the real work.
So, you know, it's easier to get elected. It's easier to get money for your start-up. It's easier, you know, in every other kind of way. But we just feel like there's, you know, this is unusual, I know, for the show because it's not a solutions oriented thing, but it is in a sense a solution. It is a narrative solution to try to reach people who have otherwise tuned out.
Molly Wood
absolutely. And I feel like there's so much power. I mean, I am so drawn to the ability to create this bright circle, right? To say this is a shared experience that is apolitical, it is geographically agnostic. Like, I am fond of saying climate change doesn't care if you believe in climate change. And I kind of feel like that's what this does in a way. Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's one of the things that we feel very strongly that, you know, growing up in the 70s, I remember the poster that said save the planet. And I sort of feel like we've always had that scrim that we're saving the planet. We're doing something nice for the planet and the planet doesn't care. so it's really it is sort of reframing it in a way it's intimate and deeply human, but it's also selfish. It's save ourselves.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Greg Jacobs
So we were very cognizant of, know, this is not, we're not showing ecosystems, we're not showing icebergs, we're showing always people.
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, more on how to tell the story of a year in the life of a changed climate.
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Greg Jacobs co-director of the Here Now Project. I asked him about making an entire film out of found footage he said it’s very different from how he’s done documentaries in the past where Greg Jacobs. There's a lot of legwork, a lot of sort of journalism. You know, you're making call after call after call and tracking down sources. Now it's all up there.
It's all online. People just post this. So it really was the kind of thing where 99 % of the material was already out there in the world. And we just had to find it either ourselves or we kind of pulled together a global team of footage producers who could navigate the social video landscape of their particular place. So China or Brazil or Kenya, whatever, where we couldn't.
Molly Wood Right?
Greg Jacobs
And then we would pull videos from out there in the world and then start to narrow them down.
Molly Wood
Right.
Molly Wood
Got it. So 99 % is found footage and it's the process of compiling and putting it in. And then why the chronological order?
Greg Jacobs
think we wanted to not make people feel like we were cherry picking. Because you can very easily make this case by just showing the worst of the worst over and over again. But I think by kind of keeping it in chronological order, wanted people to be, we wanted to say, no, this is just happening. This is just unfolding. We could pick other things, but regular old year, just, know. And it also,
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Molly Wood
Right.
Molly Wood
This is a regular old year, folks. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
then gives you the opportunity to kind of do the deep cuts as well. You know, they're the greatest hits, everybody knows, fires, floods, et cetera. But something like Cease Not is one that people just didn't know about.
Molly Wood
describe the, describe the cease nought for people who were not familiar with this particularly delightful infestation.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
I didn't expect people to be as grossed out by it as they are, but it is mucilage, which is sort of like the recipe you get in water when you combine raw sewage with water that is hotter than it should be. And this, sort of, it had been happening for years in the Sea of Marmara and Turkey, but this particular year the water was so hot and there was so much created that it started to float to the surface and just covered the surface of.
Molly Wood
It's pretty gross. Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
the body of water and it is really disgusting. It's not, there was one phenomenon that we didn't include because it was for me even more disgusting. But the mouse infestation in Australia that spring, that footage is horrifying. So, my God, you see like farmers throwing tarps up and thousands of mice.
Molly Wood
Really?
Greg Jacobs
screwing around underneath them. just was like, we can't put the audience through that. They just watched locusts. We're not going to give them these horrific, you know, hoards of mice as well. But the sea's nothing. I mean, it's really and it is the kind of thing where it sort of stands in for algae blooms and other crises that are happening in, you know, bodies of water all over the world.
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Molly Wood
I mean, I want to stay on your point about the greatest hits things, right? Like the fires and the floods and even heat waves, which is hard to show, but obviously very powerful and deadly. I do think that there's so much in there that people don't understand that there are going to be a lot more bugs and a lot more mice and a lot more cherry blossoms at the wrong time. Were there things that, it sounds like the mice thing.
was a surprise. But were there things in there that you just were shocked to discover were happening and could be attributed to a changing climate?
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, the Locus is one of them we didn't include there was also there were floods, I think maybe in Egypt that year.
Molly Wood
Tell us about the locusts. assume no one's seen this yet and tell us what was in there with the locusts and then.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah. So there it was the third year of the worst locust outbreak in Kenya in 70 some years. And, you know, it's easy for people to say, but that's biblical. You know, that's Passover. Like whatever that, you know, we can we've had we've always had locusts. But the fact that I think cyclones are occurring in different places and at different times and are then sort of like.
creating water in the places where the locusts breed, which then makes it easier for them to breed and then suddenly you have locust infestations everywhere. So I was not expecting that and I am not a fan of bugs. So this is like, this is really a scary thing for me. There were scorpions in Egypt.
Molly Wood
Yeah, I lived in North Dakota for eight years and I'm pretty familiar with the like occasional cloud of locusts, like enough that it's happened to me once so badly that I had to pull over on the highway, right? And it's just, and they're kind of trying to get through the vents. Like you can't, you cannot imagine how awful it is. then to see it at that scale and be like, this is from, you know, like you said, storms leading to water, leading to breathing.
It's kinda, I mean, there's just, it's very powerful to be like, guys, you have, you don't even know the levels of horror.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, there was a headline in the Atlantic about CSNOT, an article about CSNOT that said, I've seen the future of climate change and it's really gross. And I think that is a good way to put it. And I think it just emphasizes that the borderlessness of it all, that we can think that we are immune, but it's when, I think for people last year when the fires in Alberta, Canada cancelled the White Sox game.
if you're from New York, the Yankees game, then I think that's when people, that was a moment where people were kind of like, it doesn't matter, there's no passport for climate change.
Molly Wood
Hahaha.
Molly Wood
All right, totally. OK, so talk briefly then about the kind of editing and distribution process. That was like a whole lot in one question. Let's go back to the editing process and the picking and choosing. And please feel free. These examples of things you left out are also amazing.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, so the editing, we have amazing editors, John Farbrother and Katarina Simic, and they, you what we would do is we would go through and we would kind of narrow down the events and then we would all kind of look at the footage and start to create, you know, they would start to create sequences that took you from, you know, the beginning through the middle and then near the end of the event. And one of the things that really became apparent that was totally fascinating and I think is
true about climate change is that there's a kind of trajectory, narrative trajectory that happens in these events where it starts off as nobody's anticipating it. And so people aren't prepared. often at the beginning, they're like, this is kind of fun. I've never experienced rain this hard. The kids are running around in it. It's really cute. And then it very quickly becomes, this is not fun anymore. And then it goes from there to this is the worst thing I've ever experienced. And I think so. And you hear it over and over in the film, people saying,
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
I've never seen anything like this. Or my parents, my grandparents have never seen anything like this. And I think that is kind of part of the emotion of it. is awe-inspiring and fascinating, and it leaves us with this sort of sense that we are infrastructurally, psychologically, socially, totally unprepared, not even for what's happening, what's to come, but what's already happening.
Molly Wood
And that was a pretty consistent through line. I mean, I suppose people are not posting footage online of like when they endure a storm and it works out fine. Maybe there's some selection bias there, I want to believe, but also, yeah.
Greg Jacobs
No, they are. mean, you know, in all of these people, it's one of the things also is I sort of describe it sometimes as the climate middle class, because it's like, it's people who did survive. It's people who did make it through and had the wherewithal to post what they shot. But in the meantime, it is just, you know, it's like this emotional trajectory and
One of the things that I think is important about it, like when Helene happened, what, two months, a month ago, before we are taping this, I think it was that trajectory again, like it was predicted, but the severity of it could not be anticipated, or could be anticipated, but nobody would believe it. And I think that's where we are now. It's like you have water that's unbelievably warm.
this is going to wreak havoc. But you know, you just you can't say that as the weather person right then.
Molly Wood
So, okay, so then talk about distribution. So you have this like massive editing challenge. You're making all these choices. You're kind of consulting with a lot of, it sounds like climate experts and communications experts to choose the right things. And then you have a film and where does it go? I know some other filmmakers. I know that's like the question.
Greg Jacobs
Well, that's the... This conversation is over. No, that's the... Always the big mystery because, you know, it is, as you, I'm sure, know and can explain the economic reasons for this much better than I can, it is the worst of times for documentary distribution or at least social issue documentaries.
So the valve for distribution of this kind of documentary is very, narrow. And for climate documentaries in particular, for all the reasons that we know these are, know, are people going to want to watch them? Does the algorithm allow them to happen? Do these giant conglomerates want them to be shown? You know, all of these questions. So right now we are, you know, sort of following the traditional path of festivals to hopefully finding distribution in various.
broadcast or streaming ways around the world. But it's entirely possible that this film may not find that kind of distribution, in which case it's a sort of brave new world of figuring out all these creative ways to get it out there. So is this something where ultimately it's distribution by influencer? You know, something like that. So we just, really don't know, if we will happily take the audience's suggestion, so if anyone has any ideas, or owns a ginormous streaming service.
Molly Wood
Right?
Greg Jacobs
Please get in touch.
Molly Wood
Exactly, I certainly hope that one of you do. Somebody out here listening, what has been the response so far?
Greg Jacobs
What's that roll?
Greg Jacobs
It's been amazing. think people are somebody described it as the weirdest combination of horrifying and inspiring they had seen that there's something, you know, on paper, it sounds like a horror movie, but in practice, because of the weirdness of social video and the intimacy of it, I think of it as like one of those old school war movies where, know, you've got the
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Greg Jacobs
Italian kid and the Jewish kid and the black kid and the the farm kid and they don't want to be together But they are and they have to fight the enemy or fight the monster or whatever and that's sort of what Comes out of it is that like we may not want to be with all these people But we have so much in common with them and we're fighting a beast that we created But it's still the only way we're gonna fight it is is we realize that we are in this together And I think people get that which is great and I think the other thing that we worried about was that
Molly Wood
Right.
Greg Jacobs
it would be an anxiety exacerbator because climate, especially for young people. But I think what we've sort of learned is that for young people in particular, first of all, it's speaking their language, kind of a visual language that they're so familiar with in terms of using social video. But it also, it's like the anxiety doesn't come from the fact that the world is getting worse. The anxiety comes from the fact that the adults in their lives aren't listening when they say the world is getting worse.
So this is sort of like something that is almost like a proof of what we've been trying to tell you. And so it is weirdly not anxiety, it's confirming rather than anxiety provoking. And that's really great. And that's sort of, think, one of the things that we were hoping that young people in particular would really connect with it.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Molly Wood
Right, it's validating. And then what has it meant to you? Like certainly it sounds like your team, you got a movie out of it and could have gotten many more just from the sheer amount of footage. Like I wonder what it's like for you psychologically, especially as the US as we're taping this is on the precipice of just rolling back a bunch of climate action, you know?
Greg Jacobs
Yeah. Well, it's funny you mentioned that doing it every year, because that is one of our goals. The ultimate goal is to get the resources to be able to do like the Michael Apted 7 Up series with this, where if you do this every two years, in 20 years, you have a sort of a visual record of how climate change itself is changing, which I think would be totally fascinating and valuable. But I think for us, like people are like, well, you watched, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of disasters.
Molly Wood
Right? Amazing.
Greg Jacobs
climate disasters happening. Isn't that depressing? And actually it sort of the more you dive into it, the more inspiring in a weird way and hopeful it becomes partly because you see all these people around the world who are being forced to think about it and forced to confront it. And so there's a sense of community that comes out of that. And then, you know, as you dive into the research and the understanding, you know, you sort of get to the people that you're talking to.
And you realize there are so many smart people doing so many interesting and exciting things to deal with this that you're just like, my God, bring it on. so it's really, it becomes much more oddly, you know, we talk about the courage piece of it and it's sort of part of that on the continuum from doom and gloom to toxic positivity. There's like a, you know, you go through courage, which gets you to hope. and I sort of feel like we are now on the.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Greg Jacobs
you know, on the hopeful side of the spectrum because we have come to understand how much people are doing and are caring about this.
Molly Wood
Yeah, I mean, what I hear you saying is you have to push through the acceptance layer. Like what this movie does is give you a big boost up the acceptance ladder and that's what gets you to action.
Greg Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, and we hope the urgency of it makes people say, I take this more seriously. I get this a little bit better. Maybe I will step out in my community and do something or even just learn about it more or vote or, you know, all the climate communications people say the most important thing you can do is just talk about it. And that may be enough. So that's what we are hoping happens.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Molly Wood
Greg Jacobs is one of the directors of the Here Now Project. Tell us where people can find out more.
Greg Jacobs
HereNowProject.com is probably your best bet. So go there and we love to hear from people and hopefully very soon you will be able to see it everywhere.
Molly Wood Those of you with the ginormous film studios, drop me a line. Great, thanks so much for the time.
Molly Wood Voice-Over:
That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. I’m thinking of trying to put together a screening of this film maybe for San Francisco climate week in April. What do we think? Anyone who might want to sponsor such an effort drop me a line!Email me at in at everybody in the pool dot com and just keep sending your feedback and your suggestions for the show. Remember together we will ALL experience a changing climate but together we can get this done. See you next week.