News | Benjamin Drummond + Sara Joy Steele

This is UW Environment

December 5, 2019

At the UW College of the Environment, undergraduate students work to solve urgent sustainability and global change issues from the Earth’s core to the cosmos. The College’s academic affairs team needed a new recruitment tool that would push the boundaries of what this work looks like and leave prospective students feeling, “I want to do that!”

We sat down with a group of college administrators and student ambassadors to brainstorm various approaches and strategies and settled on a short film that would tell five tiny science stories in under 20 seconds each, without any interviews or narration. The film would follow students from five common interest areas: engineering, environmental studies, marine science, earth science and conservation. Each of these scenes would also highlight a different theme such as technology, working outdoors or saving-the-world and show students learning alongside faculty and other mentors.

Blue Carbon wins award at CERF

November 7, 2019

We’re honored to share that Blue Carbon won the Sonde Award for Vital Information at the 2019 CERF Film Festival. The festival was part of the 25th biennial conference of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation held in Mobile, Alabama. More information on the conference, festival and other winning films can be found here.

Blue Carbon at Fresh Coast

October 14, 2019

Our film on mud and climate mitigation is making one last festival appearance this year, this time in Marquette, Michigan. The Fresh Coast Film Festival features more than 140 films focused on the waters and outdoor spirit of the Upper Midwest. Blue Carbon will screen on October 18 and 19 in the Masonic Building.

Blue Carbon and the Climate Stewardship Act

August 8, 2019

A while back EarthCorps teamed up with Restore America’s Estuaries to study the rate at which coastal wetlands, estuaries and tidal marshes sequester carbon. The idea was to use research and restoration work from the Snohomish Estuary as a case study to influence the conversation at a national level. Our Blue Carbon film was designed to be a catalyst in this effort.

This week the team learned that it worked! Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey just proposed the Climate Stewardship Act, which would create a grant program to provide funding to states, tribes, local governments and nonprofits in order to restore 1.5 million acres of wetlands over ten years. In supporting background information, the act cites EarthCorps and RAE’s efforts, that the staff learned about from our film. It’s not often that we can trace back how a film leads to change and we are honored to have contributed to this process.

Blue Carbon continues to tour festivals nationwide, including more than 35 tour stops with the Wild and Scenic Film Festival.

Global Sustainability Scholars

July 15, 2019

The Global Sustainability Scholars program aims to build a new generation of innovators in the sustainability sciences. It’s a paid, three-summer, immersive experience that takes undergraduates abroad to conduct research on real-world issues and build their professional network. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation and Future Earth and grew out of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program we documented a few years ago.

This summer’s cohort is focused on the food-water-energy nexus and will be working in Seattle, the U.K. and Germany. We joined the scholars during the first few days of the program to make portraits and follow them as they toured various components of Seattle’s food system, including a massive grocery distribution center. In 2020, we plan to reconnect with the scholars in Australia for a film project.

Permanently Protected

May 29, 2019

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In 2014, a Canadian mining company proposed to drill for copper at the headwaters of the Methow River. Five years later, on March 12, 2019, The Methow Headwaters Protection Act was signed into law, permanently protecting 340,079 acres from mineral exploration and development. It’s a remarkable achievement by a formidable coalition of community members, advocacy organizations and elected representatives.

A success of this magnitude is extraordinarily rare. So, just after the bill was signed, we sat down with six people involved in the campaign to discuss this accomplishment and what it means for the future of the valley. Our new film examines how this diverse community came together to stand up for a common vision and why, in regions across the West, the economy depends on access to public lands. Maggie Coon summarized it well: “The Methow isn’t this way by accident. It has required a whole community for decades and decades, caring and acting on behalf of this incredible place.”

Climate Visuals

May 14, 2019

How can we motivate people to take action on climate change with photography and video? It’s a question that Resource Media and Climate Visuals have been working to answer and they’ve summarized their research in a new film, Climate Visuals: From Photos to Video. We’ve collaborated with Liz Banse at Resource Media on a number of our recent films, such as Blue Carbon and our Oceans Are Our Business series, and this report uses these projects as case studies. It’s a great guide for any content creator or organization working in this space.

A new website for Little Star

April 10, 2019

We just launched a new website for Finn’s preschool here in the Methow Valley. Over the last two years Little Star School has doubled their program capacity, opened a second campus in Twisp and expanded their campus in Winthrop. It’s grown from a small school to a community-wide cause, and with all this change, it was time to refresh their visual brand and how they tell their story. This winter we overhauled the school’s identity and launched a modern website featuring many of our photographs. Find it at littlestarschool.org.