From mountain gorillas on the border of Rwanda, via late cocaine baron Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippos in Colombia, to island reserves where endangered Australian bandicoots can flourish away from predators introduced by misguided humans, a new documentary brings visually stunning views of successful wildlife restoration projects to the big screen – but skirts some weighty political questions.
“What is the cost of indifference, when is the point of no return,” begins the emotive narration by three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep. A whistle-stop tour of global environmental destruction, from cleared rainforest to bleached coral reefs answers the first question. The second is left hanging.
But that is not the point of the film, producer and director Matthew Brady said after a European premier in the European Parliament. “I think the message of hope was really important to me in this film because we watched so many movies that are doom and gloom,” Brady said. “This was a film where there's actually positive things happening in the world.”
There’s a substantial section about the efforts to restore gorilla populations in Rwanda, from a perilously low 200 in the 1980s to over 1,000 at the last count. The film presents the argument that tourism can be a force for good – with rich visitors paying substantial sums to get close to their distant cousins, some of which can be ploughed back into local communities.
A central theme is connectedness. Take sea otters on the Pacific coast of America, hunted to near extinction for their fur. The removal of this apex predator meant sea urchins ran riot, virtually eliminating the giant kelp from the coast of California. Now populations are growing, the otters are acting as unwitting custodians of growing patches of biodiverse kelp forest.
Didactic by turns, the film gives a useful primer on invasive alien species, using as a cautionary tale Australia, where rabbits and foxes ran amok after being introduced by European settlers. Feral camels (ditto, via the Canary Islands, of all places) are now routinely culled from helicopters. Incidentally, the film also explores the morality of such culls.
It culminates in a plea for recognition of the valuable role indigenous populations – who, surprisingly, retain strong links to a quarter of the world’s land surface – can play in nature restoration and stewardship. More broadly, it makes the case – as in gorilla tourism – for demonstrating to local communities, whether indigenous or not, that they can make a better living through protecting and restoring nature than by treating it as a resource to be exploited.
Meryl Streep driven to drink
The narrator isn’t new to environmental and social activism. Streep had recently co-founded ‘Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet’ – a campaign sparked by a pesticide scandal – when she played a disillusioned activist pouring her heart out to barman Kevin Costner in a 1990 Earth Day special.
In 2015 the actress became the figurehead of a campaign for the release of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who had been sentenced to 20 years in a Russian penal colony following the annexation of Crimea (he was released in a prisoner swap in 2019, and went on to make a documentary showing the reality of life on the new front line). Last year Streep gave an impassioned plea for women’s rights in Afghanistan – “a bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not” – during the UN general assembly.
“I know her agent and I approached him and I just said I have this film,” Brady recalled. “The SAG [Screen Actors’ Guild] strike was almost ending and it was one of those miracle stories…And she agreed to do the film and she's passionate about animals and the environment as well and wanted to help and lend her voice to help the cause.”
The message of Brady’s film – a sequel to an earlier production also made for the American Humane Society and narrated by Helen Mirren – is the same as that in Streep’s two-hander with Costner 35 years ago: you can’t fix it all, but do something.
Viewers are advised to choose one species and do what they can for it – whether through activism or supporting green groups. Don’t be overwhelmed by the scale of the destruction: start small, let a patch of your garden grow wild.
“I literally do nothing, I just let it grow and leave it alone,” Brady said of his garden back home in California. “And that can be very empowering to know that you can help in such a small way.”
The political dimension
To be fair to the filmmakers, Escape from Extinction – Rewilding was in the can before the Trump II administration began to reveal the full extent of its hostility towards environmental protection – though, having already pulled out of the global climate effort once and promising to “drill, baby, drill” while on the campaign trail, the signs were there for all to see.
But the absence of a political context in the documentary is somewhat jarring, even if there is a dig at alt-right news outlet Breitbart in a fleeting reference to disinformation. Especially when the European premier was hosted in the shadow of the EU Council building in the heart of the Brussels policy making bubble.
On this side of the Atlantic, a rightwing pushback against the European Green Deal is gathering momentum even before the ink is dry on a slew of environmental legislation – including the Nature Restoration Law that sets legally binding targets for precisely the kind of ecosystem restoration advocated in the film.
The film praises the 2018 treaty between Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda to cooperate on conservation, but doesn’t mention the threat to wildlife from fighting between M23 insurgents backed by Rwanda and the Congolese armed forces – not to mention the scramble for raw materials behind the conflagration.
Perhaps that is asking too much of a single documentary – but with the sixth mass extinction already well underway, no alarm bell is one too many, and any call to action must be welcomed.
