The “Chasing Ice” director turns his lens on global warming’s human casualties
Trailer for The Human Element. Available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, and local screenings.
Photographer and mountaineer James Balog was once a climate change skeptic. He changed his mind in 2005, after an assignment for National Geographic brought him to the Arctic. That first taste of ice inspired Balog to found the Extreme Ice Survey, leading a team on a mission around the northern part of the globe (from Nepal to Montana) to capture multi-year time-lapse footage of Earth’s shrinking glaciers. The resulting documentary, Chasing Ice, released in November 2012, received critical acclaim.
In his latest project, available now on DVD and major VOD platforms, Balog demonstrates even broader ambitions: he sets out to tell the story of climate change through the lens of not just ice, but all four of the classical elements. And so the film is split into four sections: the first retreads melting ice caps and discusses their consequences on the Southeastern United States, the second shows the effects of air pollution on a community in Denver, the third focuses on the forest blazes of the West, and the fourth introduces viewers to Balog’s home town, a coal community in Kentucky. What ties all these stories together, Balog states on screen, is the film’s fifth, titular element—The Human Element.
