Nature Documentary Quotes

So you're Zach." Townsend didn't even try to hide the judgement in his voice as he looked Zach up and down in some sort of silent but dangerous examination. Zach huffed but smiled. "so you're Townsend." The two of them stared for a long time, wordless. It felt like I was watching a documentary on the Nature Channel, something about alpha males in the wild.

Okay, 'Best Party Ever' -- to me, that's like saying 'Best Gym Ever' or 'Best Nature Documentary Ever,' like how good can it really be?

I could sit and watch nature documentaries with Jenks and the kids the rest of the night if I wanted. And trust me, watching a dozen pixies scream as a crocodile chomped on a zebra was something not to be missed. They invariably cheered for the crocodile, not the zebra.

I’ll check on you when I get home. I love you, baby. (Kiefer) I love you too, Daddy. (Kiara) What the hell was that action? (Syn) I think it’s something called ‘paternal concern.’ (Nykyrian) What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth. (Syn) No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny. (Nykyrian) Get the fuck out. No way. You’re screwing with my head again, aren’t you? (Syn) No, I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up. (Nykyrian) Yeah but it’s really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What’s next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals? (Syn)

Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life—it’s like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh?

In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.

The image of evolution as a process that reliably produces benign effects is difficult to reconcile with the enormous suffering that we see in both the human and the natural world. Those who cherish evolution’s achievements may do so more from an aesthetic than an ethical perspective. Yet the pertinent question is not what kind of future it would be fascinating to read about in a science fiction novel or to see depicted in a nature documentary, but what kind of future it would be good to live in: two very different matters.

The one I love the most is about two mayflies on a date; they watch a nature documentary about themselves and discover their life span is only one day long ― after mating, they'll die.

All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.

I wrinkled my nose at her. “You really need to stop watching those nature documentaries with Layne.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I know, but the footage is so amazing.

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.

What the hell was that action?"Syn asked him. "I think it´s something called ´paternal concern.´" Syn scowled at his bland explanation. "What...? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth." Nykyrian shrugged. "No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Belive it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny." "Get the f*ck out. No way. You´re screwing with my head again, aren´t you?" "No, I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make this shit up." Syn shivered. "Yeah but it´s really messing with my concept of natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What´s next? Limp regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals?

I fill up by reading poetry that excites me, reading poetry I don’t always get, watching nature documentaries, writing notes over a period of days, researching the etymology of words,”-Benjamin Garcia @bengarciapoet

One day, back when I working at a video store, a woman accompanied by her two small sons walked up the counter with a tape box displaying a man slicing off someone’s head with a chainsaw. “Does this have any sex in it?” she asked. In my mind, it was like I was narrating a nature documentary on humans. “Watch as the American mother protects her young ones from dangerous influences.

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me … I see pictures merging before my mind’s eye—paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home…

In a 1981 interview with Gregg Rickman, Dick describes a nature documentary he viewed in the 1960s in which a female Galápagos turtle crawled the wrong direction after laying her eggs in the sand and began to die from exposure while still moving her limbs. That night Dick heard a voice tell him that the turtle believed that she had made it back to the ocean, adding, “And she shall see the sea.

The sense of modernism is often seen in the determination of each of the arts to come as close as possible to its own particular nature, its essence. For instance, lyric poetry rejected anything rhetorical, didactic, embellishing, so as to set flowing the pure fount of poetic fantasy. Painting renounced its documentary, mimetic function, whatever might be expressed by some other medium (for instance, photography). And the novel? It too refuses to exist as illustration of a historical era, as description of society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of “what only the novel can say.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

I thought you weren't supposed to force action." He laughed. "You know, my wife was filming a nature documentary a couple of years ago, and a flock of penguins got stuck in a ravine. The crew had to watch, completely helpless, as dozens of birds tried and tried and tried to get out to no avail. And if they did nothing, that entire flock would've died. So they broke their rule about intervening and carved stairs in the ice and snow, and the penguins marched right out of that ravine as soon as they had the chance." I shook my head. "Not sure that's a flattering comparison if you're me." He slapped me on the back. "They were smart enough to climb those stairs, Griffin. All I'm asking you to do is open your eyes. Once you do, your life will never be the same.

I know some of you must be thinking, This is a preposterous and thinly veiled attempt to obscure the use of relaxers, weaves, and lace fronts. Trust me on this one: Unless she tells you otherwise herself, every black woman’s hair, though it may change dramatically from day to day in ways that defy nature, is absolutely her God-given, though possibly magically altered, hair. White people: Do not broach this topic. It doesn’t matter that you’ve seen the Chris Rock documentary Good Hair. Like your favorite movie Frozen suggests, “Let It Go.

There were inquiries, Congressional hearings, books, exposés and documentaries. However, despite all this attention, it was still only a few short months before interest in these children dropped away. There were criminal trials, civil trials, lots of sound and fury. All of the systems—CPS, the FBI, the Rangers, our group in Houston—returned, in most ways, to our old models and our ways of doing things. But while little changed in our practice, a lot had changed in our thinking. We learned that some of the most therapeutic experiences do not take place in “therapy,” but in naturally occurring healthy relationships, whether between a professional like myself and a child, between an aunt and a scared little girl, or between a calm Texas Ranger and an excitable boy. The children who did best after the Davidian apocalypse were not those who experienced the least stress or those who participated most enthusiastically in talking with us at the cottage. They were the ones who were released afterwards into the healthiest and most loving worlds, whether it was with family who still believed in the Davidian ways or with loved ones who rejected Koresh entirely. In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.

One night I happened to come upon a documentary called Facing the Storm, about the buffalos in Montana. Robert Thomson of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks discussed how buffalo run into the storm, thus minimizing how long they will be in it. They don’t ignore it, run from it, or just hope it will go away, which is what we often do when we want to avoid our storms of emotion. We don’t realize that by doing this we’re maximizing our time in the pain. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course, knowing that the pain will eventually pass, that one of these days we will find the love on the other side of pain.

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

Our experience of nature is becoming more and more about what we see on our screens, and less about actually being outside and experiencing it for ourselves. Crouched on the fellside, nose to flower with Purple Saxifrage, I had felt such wonder at just being present with another organism, the kind you can only experience when you’re there, on the mountainside, or in the meadow, or under the trees. It’s impossible to get that same, raw feeling from a television documentary, from our social media feeds or even from a book like this one. True appreciation of nature requires us to form real life bonds with it. [...] I think plants can offer us a lot in this regard, and the fact they can’t move actually allows us to spend time with them in a way that you just can’t with many animals.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Kiara ached as her father left her alone with the two men she wasn’t so sure about. Her heart heavy, she locked the door, then frowned at the mocking expression on Syn’s face as he walked over to Nykyrian. “What the hell was that action?” Syn asked him. “I think it’s something called ‘paternal concern.’” Syn scowled at his bland explanation. “What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth.” Nykyrian shrugged. “No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny.” “Get the fuck out. No way. You’re screwing with my head again, aren’t you?” “No. I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up.” Syn shivered. “Yeah but it’s really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What’s next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals?” Kiara gave Syn an irritated grimace. “Don’t your parents ever worry about either of you?” Syn arched a brow. “What parents?” A ripple of apprehension went through Kiara that she might have been insensitive to them. “Are they dead?” “Careful,” Nykyrian said, returning to the kitchen. “You might not want an answer to that question.” She tried to understand his cryptic response. “What do you mean?” Syn laughed evilly. “Kip wasn’t born, he was spawned.” Now she was completely confused. “Who’s Kip?” Syn indicated Nykyrian with his thumb. “You were a tubie?” Nykyrian glanced up from his dinner preparations. “Syn has a brain disorder that causes him to lie most of the time. Ignore him.” Syn snorted. “I don’t lie. I merely tell the truth creatively.

This is a way of thinking about the past in which space and time echo each other, and it is by no means particular to the Bandanese. Indeed, this form of thought may well have found its fullest elaboration on the other side of the planet, among the Indigenous peoples of North America, whose spiritual lives and understanding of history were always tied to specific landscapes. In the words of the great Native American thinker Vine Deloria Jr., a shared feature of Indigenous North American spiritual traditions is that they all “have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature. . . . Regardless of what subsequently happens to the people, the sacred lands remain as permanent fixtures in their cultural or religious understanding.”12 Developing this argument, Deloria contrasts modes of thought that take their orientation from terrestrial spaces with those that privilege time. For the latter, the crucial question in relation to any event is “when did it happen?” For the former, it is “where did it happen?” The first question shapes the possible answers in a determinate way, locating the event within a particular historical period. The second question shapes the possible answers in a completely different way, because it accords a degree of agency to the landscape itself, and all that lies within it, including the entire range of nonhuman beings. The result, in Deloria’s words, is that “the [Indian] tribes confront and interact with a particular land along with its life forms. The task or role of the tribal religions is to relate the community of people to each and every facet of creation as they have experienced it.” For many Indigenous groups, landscapes remain as vividly alive today as they ever were. “For Indian men and women,” writes the anthropologist Peter Basso, of the Western Apache of Arizona, “the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.”13 Stories about the past, built around familiar landmarks, inform every aspect of Apache life. Through these stories features of the landscape speak to people just as loudly as the human voices that historians bring to life from documentary sources.

(Notably, temporary loss of blood or oxygen or excess carbon dioxide in the blood can also cause a disruption in the temporoparietal region and induce out-of-body experiences, which may explain the prevalence of these sensations during accidents, emergencies, heart attacks, etc.) NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES But perhaps the most dramatic category of out-of-body experiences are the near-death stories of individuals who have been declared dead but then mysteriously regained consciousness. In fact, 6 to 12 percent of survivors of cardiac arrest report having near-death experiences. It’s as though they have cheated death itself. When interviewed, they have dramatic tales of the same experience: they left their body and drifted toward a bright light at the end of a long tunnel. The media have seized upon this, with numerous best sellers and TV documentaries devoted to these theatrical stories. Many bizarre theories have been proposed to explain near-death experiences. In a poll of two thousand people, fully 42 percent believed that near-death experiences were proof of contact with the spiritual world that lies beyond death. (Some believe that the body releases endorphins—natural narcotics—before death. This may explain the euphoria that people feel, but not the tunnel and the bright lights.) Carl Sagan even speculated that near-death experiences were a reliving of the trauma of birth. The fact that these individuals recount very similar experiences doesn’t necessarily corroborate their glimpses into the afterlife; in fact, it seems to indicate that there is some deep neurological event happening. Neurologists have looked into this phenomenon seriously and suspect that the key may be the decrease of blood flow to the brain that often accompanies near-death cases, and which also occurs in fainting. Dr. Thomas Lempert, a neurologist at the Castle Park Clinic in Berlin, conducted a series of experiments on forty-two healthy individuals, causing them to faint under controlled laboratory conditions. Sixty percent of them had visual hallucinations (e.g., bright lights and colored patches). Forty-seven percent of them felt that they were entering another world. Twenty percent claimed to have encountered a supernatural being. Seventeen percent saw a bright light. Eight percent saw a tunnel. So fainting can mimic all the sensations people have in near-death experiences

A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard. The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bear as a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists will have no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made at once specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquant spectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol. ...If we are concerned with fisherman, it is not the type of fishing which is whown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essense of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.

write animal stories. This one was called Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly; a meditation on ethics, you might say; it had been inspired by a short business trip to Brittany. Here’s a key passage from it: ‘Let us first consider the Breton cow: all year round she thinks of nothing but grazing, her glossy muzzle ascends and descends with impressive regularity, and no shudder of anguish comes to trouble the wistful gaze of her light-brown eyes. All that is as it ought to be, and even appears to indicate a profound existential oneness, a decidedly enviable identity between her being-in-the-world and her being-in-itself. Alas, in this instance the philosopher is found wanting, and his conclusions, while based on a correct and profound intuition, will be rendered invalid if he has not previously taken the trouble of gathering documentary evidence from the naturalist. In fact the Breton cow’s nature is duplicitous. At certain times of the year (precisely determined by the inexorable functioning of genetic programming) an astonishing revolution takes place in her being. Her mooing becomes more strident, prolonged, its very harmonic texture modified to the point of recalling at times, and astonishingly so, certain groans which escape the sons of men. Her movements become more rapid, more nervous, from time to time she breaks into a trot. It is not simply her muzzle, though it seems, in its glossy regularity, conceived for reflecting the abiding presence of a mineral passivity, which contracts and twitches under the painful effect of an assuredly powerful desire. ‘The key to the riddle is extremely simple, and it is that what the Breton cow desires (thus demonstrating, and she must be given credit here, her life’s one desire) is, as the breeders say in their cynical parlance, “to get stuffed”. And stuff her they do, more or less directly; the artificial insemination syringe can in effect, whatever the cost in certain emotional complications, take the place of the bull’s penis in performing this function. In both cases the cow calms down and returns to her original state of earnest meditation, except that a few months later she will give birth to an adorable little calf. Which, let it be said in passing, means profit for the breeder.’ * The breeder, of course, symbolized God. Moved by an irrational sympathy for the filly, he promised her, starting from the next chapter, the everlasting delight of numerous stallions, while the cow, guilty of the sin of pride, was to be gradually condemned to the dismal pleasures of artificial fertilization. The pathetic mooing of the ruminant would prove incapable of swaying the judgment of the Great Architect. A delegation of sheep, formed in solidarity, had no better luck. The God presented in this short story was not, one observes, a merciful God.

Steve was a warrior in every sense of the word, but battling wildlife perpetrators just wasn’t the same as old-fashioned combat. Because Steve’s knees continued to deteriorate, his surfing ability was severely compromised. Instead of giving up in despair, Steve sought another outlet for all his pent-up energy. Through our head of security, Dan Higgins, Steve discovered mixed martial arts (or MMA) fighting. Steve was a natural at sparring. His build was unbelievable, like a gorilla’s, with his thick chest, long arms, and outrageous strength for hugging things (like crocs). Once he grabbed hold of something, there was no getting away. He had a punch equivalent to the kick of a Clydesdale, he could just about lift somebody off the ground with an uppercut, and he took to grappling as a wonderful release. Steve never did anything by halves. I remember one time the guys were telling him that a good body shot could really wind someone. Steve suddenly said, “No one’s given me a good body shot. Try to drop me with a good one so I know what it feels like.” Steve opened up his arms and Dan just pile drove him. Steve said, in between gasps, “Thanks, mate. That was great, I get your point.” I would join in and spar or work the pads, or roll around until I was absolutely exhausted. Steve would go until he threw up. I’ve never seen anything like it. Some MMA athletes are able to seek that dark place, that point of total exhaustion--they can see it, stare at it, and sometimes get past it. Steve ran to it every day. He wasn’t afraid of it. He tried to get himself to that point of exhaustion so that maybe the next day he could get a little bit further. Soon we were recruiting the crew, anyone who had any experience grappling. Guys from the tiger department or construction were lining up to have a go, and Steve would go through the blokes one after another, grappling away. And all the while I loved it too. Here was something else that Steve and I could do together, and he was hilarious. Sometimes he would be cooking dinner, and I’d come into the kitchen and pat him on the bum with a flirtatious look. The next thing I knew he had me in underhooks and I was on the floor. We’d be rolling around, laughing, trying to grapple each other. It’s like the old adage when you’re watching a wildlife documentary: Are they fighting or mating? It seems odd that this no-holds-barred fighting really brought us closer, but we had so much fun with it. Steve finally built his own dojo on a raised concrete pad with a cage, shade cloth, fans, mats, bags, and all that great gear. Six days a week, he would start grappling at daylight, as soon as the guys would get into work. He had his own set of techniques and was a great brawler in his own right, having stood up for himself in some of the roughest, toughest, most remote outback areas. Steve wasn’t intimidated by anyone. Dan Higgins brought a bunch of guys over from the States, including Keith Jardine and other pros, and Steve couldn’t wait to tear into them. He held his own against some of the best MMA fighters in the world. I always thought that if he’d wanted to be a fighter as a profession, he would have been dangerous. All the guys heartily agreed.

Discourse is engaged with Being. Idle talk (colloquially known as ‘bullshit’) is idle by being disengaged; it has a life of its own that, in effect, floats on top of the world. Although popular nature or history documentaries are more insidious modes of idle talk, the kind of celebrity gossip found in certain magazines and newspapers is probably the most obvious mode. In idle talk you receive, discuss and pass on, what is said without checking the veracity of the claims. Idle talk takes on a life of its own which becomes increasingly detached from what it is supposed to be about.

Filming wildlife documentaries couldn’t have happened without John Stainton, our producer. Steve always referred to John as the genius behind the camera, and that was true. The music orchestration, the editing, the knowledge of what would make good television and what wouldn’t--these were all areas of John’s clear expertise. But on the ground, under the water, or in the bush, while we were actually filming, it was 100 percent Steve. He took care of the crew and eventually his family as well, while filming in some of the most remote, inaccessible, and dangerous areas on earth. Steve kept the cameraman alive by telling him exactly when to shoot and when to run. He orchestrated what to film and where to film, and then located the wildlife. Steve’s first rule, which he repeated to the crew over and over, was a simple one: Film everything, no matter what happens. “If something goes wrong,” he told the crew, “you are not going to be of any use to me lugging a camera and waving your other arm around trying to help. Just keep rolling. Whatever the sticky situation is, I will get out of it.” Just keep rolling. Steve’s mantra. On all of our documentary trips, Steve packed the food, set up camp, fed the crew. He knew to take the extra tires, the extra fuel, the water, the gear. He anticipated the needs of six adults and two kids on every film shoot we ever went on. As I watched him at Lakefield, the situation was no different. Our croc crew came and went, and the park rangers came and went, and Steve wound up organizing anywhere from twenty to thirty people. Everyone did their part to help. But the first night, I watched while one of the crew put up tarps to cover the kitchen area. After a day or two, the tarps slipped, the ropes came undone, and water poured off into our camp kitchen. After a full day of croc capture, Steve came back into camp that evening. He made no big deal about it. He saw what was going on. I watched him wordlessly shimmy up a tree, retie the knots, and resecure the tarps. What was once a collection of saggy, baggy tarps had been transformed into a well-secured roof. Steve had the smooth and steady movements of someone who was self-assured after years of practice. He’d get into the boat, fire up the engine, and start immediately. There was never any hesitation. His physical strength was unsurpassed. He could chop wood, gather water, and build many things with an ease that was awkwardly obvious when anybody else (myself, for example) tried to struggle with the same task. But when I think of all his bush skills, I treasured most his way of delivering up the natural world. On that croc research trip in the winter of 2006, Steve presented me with a series of memories more valuable than any piece of jewelry.

It was a brave new world that I found myself in. At night I would hear the sounds of the fruit bats as they came into the trees. Also in the mix were the strange, far-off grunts of the koalas as they sang out their mating calls. Herds of wild pigs passed right behind the tent. Venturing outside in the middle of the night with my dunny roll to go use a bush was a daunting experience. Steve was a natural in front of the camera. John had to give him only one important piece of advice. “Stevo,” John instructed, “there are three people in this documentary. There’s you, Terri, and the camera. Treat the camera just like another person.” Steve’s energy and enthusiasm took over. He completely relaxed, and he managed to just be himself--which was true of his entire career. This wasn’t just a film trip, it was also our honeymoon. Steve would sometimes escape the camera crew and take us up a tributary to be alone. We watched the fireflies come out. I’d never seen fireflies in Oregon. The magical little insects glowed everywhere, in the bushes and in the air. The darker it got, the brighter their blue lights burned on and off. I had arrived in a fairyland.

Instead, the weeds are being read as a parable, a lesson that a monolithic, oil-based urban culture is unsustainable in the twenty-first century, and that there might be other, more ecologically gentle ways of living in cities. Families too poor to buy fresh food are starting neighbourhood organic farms on the sites of demolished local blocks. Young people from all over America – musicians, Green activists, social pioneers – are flooding into the abandoned areas, keen to experiment with new patterns of urban living which accept nature – including its weedy frontiersmen – rather than attempting to drive it out. As Julien Temple, director of the remarkable TV documentary Requiem for Detroit, has written: ‘amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all’.

I was watching a documentary that described a night at Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello. After the meal each night the family, with their guests, would retire into the parlor to drink tea and spend 3-4 hours discussing things they learned or were pondering lately. Without the television or other individualistic electronic means of entertainment I think we’d still do this to avoid boredom. When I first heard about this practice my first thought was, “Oh, that’s what a family does.” I grew up in an age where it was natural to entertain myself or go off with friends but it makes sense that, in the absence of these things, a family would need to learn to interact and really enjoy each other’s company. So 3-4 times per week we have an informal meal followed by what we simply call “family time.” This can be done around the dining room table or the coffee table but it’s been an amazing experience. I begin by asking if anyone learned or had any ideas or questions they’ve been pondering about God. We move from that topic into a more general question like, “Did anyone learn anything today or have something they want to discuss?” We share stories from the day, passages of things we’ve read, watch funny videos or play a family game. At the end we often talk about what’s in store for tomorrow and pray together.

To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today? The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

read that summer as if searching for the right recipe—how to do it. In Bob’s book I found familiar prescriptions: travel, reading, nature, friendship, journal-keeping, letter-writing. Yet all of this was delivered with heightened impact through a method Bob calls “documentary biography,” in words and scenes lifted straight from the past, as if the book were a documentary film.

Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our nature?

Documentary photography is one of the prominent and influential branches in the art of photography that records social, cultural, and even historical realities. This type of photography allows the photographer to depict real and sometimes untold stories of everyday life and people. In this type of photography, the main goal is to convey the sense of realness and authenticity of the scenes. In this article, we will review important tips and principles for documentary photography with a camera and explain how to record facts in an attractive and effective way. Choosing the right equipment Choosing the right equipment Choosing the right equipment for documentary photography is very important, because you often need to act quickly and accurately. Using DSLR cameras and mirrorless cameras are the best options for this type of photography. Camera feature advantages High flexibility DSLR, excellent image quality, various lenses Mirrorless light and compact, more speed, silence Recommended lenses: 50mm prime lens: for portraits and close-ups. 24mm wide lens: for shooting wide landscapes and scenes. The importance of light in documentary photography Natural light is one of the main factors in documentary photography. You can't always control the lighting conditions, but learning to use ambient light, especially in public or outdoor settings, can help you create better images. Important points in using light: Natural light: during the golden hours (early morning and evening) is the best time to take documentary photos. This light is soft and pleasant. Shadow Light: If the direct sunlight is strong, try shooting in the shadows to avoid harsh shadows on your subjects. Composition techniques in documentary photography Composition is one of the key principles in documentary photography, with the help of which you can tell a telling and interesting story. The rule of thirds is one of the best and most common compositional rules used by documentary photographers. Rule of thirds: Divide the image frame into three horizontal parts and three vertical parts. Place the important subjects of the photo at the intersection points of these lines. Also, pay attention to the depth of the scene and try to use the foreground and background properly to make your image more dynamic. Taking meaningful photos One of the important principles in documentary photography is the meaningfulness of the images. Each photo should tell a story or capture a special moment. In order for your images to be real and emotional, it is better to interact with your subjects and capture them in their natural state. Don't be afraid to record unexpected and normal moments; Because these moments can better reflect the reality of everyday life. Recording feelings and emotions: Documentary photography should be able to show feelings and emotions well. Pay attention to small details in faces, gestures and looks. These details can add depth to your images. Choose the right angle The right angle of view can make a big difference in the impact of your documentary photo. Try different angles to find the best way to tell your story. Low Angle: To show the power or glory of a subject. High Angle: To show the smallness or loneliness of the subject. Normal angle (Eye Level): to create a closer and more realistic connection with the viewer. Camera settings for documentary photography Camera settings for documentary photography Camera settings are very important for documentary photography, as you may be shooting in different light conditions and at high speed. In the following, we mention some key camera settings for documentary photography. shutter speed For documentary photography, where there is a lot of movement in the scene, the shutter speed is very important. If you are shooting moving scenes, the shutter speed should be faster than 1/250 second to avoid blurring. resource : nivamag.ir

It’s the visuals, and that’s the engine inside the methodology. Then you have the natural sound on camera. It’s what your subjects tell you, the cars passing by in the street; in the case of Afghanistan, it’s the helicopters flying over and the guys firing machine guns. And then you’ve got your own narration, which connects the dots and tells you what all of this means.

even a documentary film, Transcendent Man (2009), and a science fiction film, Transcendence, in which a brain implant allows you to control a computer network.

The British public first fell in love with Jamie Oliver’s authentic, down-to-earth personality in the late ‘90s when he was featured in a documentary on the River Café. Jamie became a household name because of his energetic and infectious way of inspiring people to believe that anyone can cook and eat well. In his TV shows and cookery books and on his website, he made the concept of cooking good food practical and accessible to anyone. When Jamie Oliver opened a new restaurant in Perth, it naturally caused a bit of a buzz. High-profile personalities and big brands create an air of expectation. Brands like Jamie Oliver are talked about not just because of their fame and instant recognition, but because they have meaning attached to them. And people associate Jamie with simplicity, inclusiveness, energy, and creativity. If you’re one of the first people to have the experience of eating at the new Jamie’s Italian, then you’ve instantly got a story that you can share with your friends. The stories we tell to others (and to ourselves) are the reason that people were prepared to queue halfway down the street when Jamie’s Italian opened the doors to its Perth restaurant in March of 2013. As with pre-iPhone launch lines at the Apple store, the reaction of customers frames the scarcity of the experience. When you know there’s a three-month wait for a dinner booking (there is, although 50% of the restaurant is reserved for walk-ins), it feels like a win to be one of the few to have a booking. The reaction of other people makes the story better in the eyes of prospective diners. The hype and the scarcity just heighten the anticipation of the experience. People don’t go just for the food; they go for the story they can tell. Jamie told the UK press that 30,000 napkins are stolen from branches of his restaurant every month. Customers were also stealing expensive toilet flush handles until Jamie had them welded on. The loss of the linen and toilet fittings might impact Jamie’s profits, but it also helps to create the myth of the brand. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How would you like customers to react to your brand?

I was fully intending to cook you something complicated and delicious,” Meg said. “But then I started to watch this nature documentary, and a fluffy baby seal was being chased by a polar bear, so I muted it and shut my eyes, and when I woke up it was two hours later. How does soup and toasties grab you?

Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life.

Although there is general agreement that the 'Goldstein' book and the Appendix both stem from the same satiric impulse, the degree of Orwell's success in combining satire and naturalism remains a subject of debate. Crick may be right to leave the matter open: 'Perhaps [Orwell] had not solved the structural problem of integrating these two things into the narrative, or perhaps their unintegrated documentary appearance was fully deliberate.' But, if the 'documentary appearance' was deliberate, what did Orwell hope to achieve? Although Samuel Hynes, among others, has rightly noted the dependence of Orwell's imagination on 'the sense of recorded fact,' I cannot agree with him that the 'Goldstein' book and the Appendix serve 'as a kind of make-believe documentation' intended to 'make the world more horrible by verifying it.' On the contrary, I would suggest that the real horror of the 'Goldstein' book is not that it verifies the world of the novel but that it fails to verify any world. Does Big Brother exist? Does Goldstein exist? Does the Brotherhood exist? Did the Party write the 'Goldstein' book? Winston cannot get straight answers to his questions, and neither can the reader.

I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up. The café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that's too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air; documentaries about tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis have a soothing effect. Of course, it's terrible — we've all been taught to say that we think it's terrible. But a world without disasters and violence — be it the violence of nature of that of muscle and blood — would be a truly unbearable thing.

Console Wars is a narrative account based on information obtained from hundreds of interviews. Re-creating a story of this nature, which draws from the recollections of a multitude of sources, can often lead to inconsistencies; particularly when dealing with industry competitors and especially when dealing with events that took place more than two decades ago. As such, I have re-created the scenes in this book using the information uncovered from my interviews, facts gathered from supporting documents, and my best judgment as to what version most closely fits the documentary record. In certain situations, details of settings and description have been altered, reconstructed, or imagined. Additionally, most of the dialogue in this book has been re-created based on source recollections of content, premise, and tone. Some of the conversations recounted in this book took place over extended periods of time or in multiple locations, but have been condensed, or reorganized in a slightly different manner, while remaining true to the integrity and spirit of all original discussions.

The purpose of art is not to create a literal, documentary-style reproduction of a scene from real life. “The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see, and in order to do so he often needs to modify the familiar appearance of things and so make something which is, in the photographic sense, a bad likeness.” The greatest artists teach us how to perceive through the use of expression and decoration. They are scientists, manipulating color, line, light, space, and mass in ways that reveal human nature. “The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing far more clearly than we could see for ourselves.” A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye.

I desire to write, be wildly in love, support my son to be who he is, keep my hair thick and shiny, get more tattoos, recite mantras, speak onstage, sleep in linen sheets, drive alone in the wide open spaces of New Mexico for hours, be flexible and productive, be alone at parties, be alone at home, be alone, be liked-loved-respected, keep a temple-tidy house, drive a reliable car, make millions of dollars and give lots away, meditate, get caught in thunderstorms, dance long and hard, wear cashmere, make things that make people want to make things of their own, sleep in, recycle, be One, seek approval, go to weddings (and funerals), order in, worship Rothko paintings, call my grandmother, free spiders, go back to India, stay up too late, get just the right font spacing, listen to Tibetan singing bowls on repeat for hours, watch three documentaries in a row, give all I have to give at any given moment to pretty much anybody, wear perfume every day of the week, shave my head, burn everything I’ve ever written, give insight, give money, give time, find my True Nature, and touch the face of God … Why do I desire what I desire? The answer is fast, clear, and simple: to feel good, of course.

All the while, an intensely personal real-time documentary was being shot, with the help of seventy-five CBS cameras, about a man, private by nature but famous by deed, trying to reclaim a lost life while starting a new one, and doing so with millions of people watching.

But do not call me a psychopath. And I request this for two reasons. One, it shows you know little of what a true psychopath is. You would most likely go along with the Hollywood stereotype or the image created by true crime documentaries you binge watch on Netflix for 8.99 a month. Two, it demeans what I do and makes it seem alien. It removes the human nature from human nature. It makes it seem as if what I do is unusual or not of the norm or is done because something is wrong with me. As I said, gladiators killed and died for entertainment. People were hung for stealing in the 1800s and families would go watch it like the picnic in the park.

Brunetti, no fan of television, did occasionally watch nature documentaries, and so he was familiar with the pose cobras took when they were preparing to attack. They somehow managed to raise their heads about thirty centimetres into the air and begin a graceful side-to-side motion that Brunetti always found quite hypnotizing, They flicked their tongues in an out, in and out, preparing to strike, while their intended prey froze and tried to figure out what to do. Long familiarity with his wife's tactics had somehow transferred portions of the genetic code of the mongoose into Brunetti, suggesting to him the correct motions that would remove him safely from the target area. "For one thing, it makes us sensitive to the fact that they might be at risk of blackmail." "I see," she said. "Anything else?" "Well, since most people have a bad opinion of the police, I'd like to tell you that many of us feel a certain sympathy for them." "I see," Paola said. As he watched, her tongue ceased to flicker and disappeared into her mouth, and she ceased her restless side-to-side motion, turning again into his wife, the treasure and joy of his life.

Predators, in her view, may not always be the supreme hunters nature documentaries suggest they are. A significant portion of their catch of the day may be low-hanging fruit brought within their reach courtesy of parasites.

In another test of the wills of young female dieters, each one was tempted by a bowl brimming with M&M’s that was placed in the screening room with her as she watched a nature documentary (a nontearjerker about bighorn sheep). For some of the women, the bowl was placed nearby, within easy reach, so they had to continually resist the temptation. For other women, the candy bowl was placed on the other side of the room and hence was easier to resist. Later, in a separate room with no food in sight, the women were given impossible puzzles to solve, that standard lab test of self-control. The dieters who had sat within arm’s reach of the M&M’s gave up sooner on the puzzles, demonstrating that their willpower had been depleted by the effort of resisting temptation. Clearly, if you’re a dieter who doesn’t want to lose self-control, you shouldn’t spend a lot of time sitting right next to a bowl of M&M’s. Even if you resist those obvious temptations, you’ll deplete your willpower and be prone to overeating other foods later.

Watch nearly any documentary film that uses CGI to recreate dinosaurs in their natural Mesozoic habitats and you will never see a dinosaur sitting, lying down, sleeping, or otherwise taking it easy. That is understandable on the part of the director and animators, because the attention span of viewers would decrease in inverse proportion to the lenght of such segment and they would quickly switch to the channel to watch they favorite reality-TV stars. (Coincidentally, these "stars" will be mostly sitting, lying down, sleeping, or otherwise taking it easy.)

It’s true that an atheist can look at a complete natural explanation and conclude that there is no need for God. Yet many scientists, even atheist scientists, do not see a scientific explanation as ruling out spirituality. And for many laypeople, greater scientific understanding leads to a greater appreciation of design and the Designer; recent studies of people watching nature documentaries (with sweeping scenery and beautiful animals) found that the viewers were more likely to perceive something beyond a materialist explanation.3 From a Christian perspective, scientific explanations elicit even deeper praise, as they reveal new examples of God’s beauty, power, intricacy, and craftsmanship.

I had learned about tigers from a National Geographic documentary that had triggered this whole bait idea, from a channel dedicated to MoFos’ reverence of the natural world.

To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal ‘the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that he will not be able to tell himself.’ The interviewee, for example, avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves drinking at the office. A friend sitting across from you at dinner, called to play therapist for your trivial romantic hang-ups, has to pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and get in bed to read Barbara Pym. No audience has to be physically present for a performer to engage in this sort of selective concealment: a woman, home along fro the weekend, might scrub the baseboards and watch nature documentaries even though she’d rather trash the place, buy an eight ball, and have a Craigslist orgy. People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The ‘lively belief that an unseen audience is present’, Goffman writes, can have a significant effect.

We are seeing the potentiality when it comes to technological optimism; the internet used in the correct way is an educational fountain of knowledge. Our social networking platforms can be turned into insightful articles about scientific marvels, medical breakthroughs, engineering tutorials, philosophical discussions and debates, nature documentaries, religious questions, news relating to politics or current activism going on around the world… The list goes on and on yet the access (depending on where you live) is unprecedented and vast.

Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments hat turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature...

Some tribes maintain blood quantum, such as once-quarter proven blood degree from their tribe. Even so-called purely ‘descendancy’ tribes such as the Five Tribes with no blood quantum requirement jealously guard some proven, documentary link by blood to distant ancestors. More than any single BIA requirement, however, this criterion has proven troublesome for southeastern groups because of its reliance on on-Indian records and the confused (and confusing) nature of surviving documents.

Though the nature of this missing mass was completely unknown, Zwicky gave the German name "dunkle materie" to the material, which translates to "dark matter". It is now believed that 90% of the mass of the Coma Cluster is in the form of dark matter. Unfortunately, Zwicky was a difficult man to get along with (he was dubbed "borderline psychopathic" in a BBC documentary Most Of Our Universe Is Missing, available on YouTube). Zwicky referred to his colleagues as "spherical bastards" — because they were bastards no matter which way you looked at them. As a result, Zwicky's work was ignored for many decades.

We can learn lessons from the antiplastics movement. It started with nonprofits complaining but having no real impact. Business and government were content to make superficial responses (such as litter-education campaigns). Meanwhile, the science was building. But it took entrepreneurship (notably Boyan Slat with Ocean Cleanup) and media (numerous documentaries, including Drowning in Plastic, A Plastic Ocean, and Plastic Is Forever) to trigger consumer and public pressure. Legislation followed (plastic-bag bans, the EU plastics strategy, and the Basel Convention changes). Now we get serious innovation, investment, and change.

I think about how the majority of her films feature women of a certain age, women who are often addressed as halmoni. I always assumed Inseon’s outgoing nature would have played a large part in generating the extraordinary intimacy of her interviews. That as the women paused in their remarks or trailed off into silence when their eyes fell on the camera, Inseon would have sat across from them, her face open and sincere, and tried her best to meet their gaze. It was this off-screen face of hers I pictured while watching her documentary on Việt Nam, specifically the scene where the local guide is translating Inseon’s questions to the woman who lives alone in a remote jungle village. She is asking if you have a story you want to tell her about that night. Above the somewhat stiffly translated subtitles, the woman looks past the camera. Her short white hair is tucked behind her ears, her face small and gaunt, and her eyes are unusually sharp. This person came here from Korea to ask you this. Finally, the woman speaks. All right. I’ll tell you. She stares steadily at the camera with remarkable focus, not once glancing at the interpreter. The gleam in her eyes pierced the lens and—I imagined—Inseon’s eyes, lancing directly into my own. This was the reply of someone who had waited a very long time for this moment. This brief consent, I realized, held the entire weight of her life.

[Of the documentary film My Octopus Teacher, made by Craig Foster:] Gentleness is the most important thing that hours and hours in nature can teach, Foster says. She made me feel just how precious wild places are, he says. You start to care about all the animals, even the tiniest ones, you understand how highly vulnerable these animals' lives are, how vulnerable all lives are. You start to think about your own vulnerability and about death, your own death. And in the hours and hours he spent exploring the kelp forest, he was stunned repeatedly by the intelligence--the genius--of what he calls the forest mind, a great underwater brain developed over eons, and the intricate work it does to keep everything balanced.

It’s like a pair of rams from a nature documentary. They smack into each other with another loud crash, retreat, and then do so again. This is…a game?