An Ecological Discourse – 3 Short Films on Seasons

How do you tell the story of the climate crisis? We’ve all seen pictures of floods and Mars-like orange skies. Some of us don’t need photos—we’ve lived it. But if we are to understand how the world is changing, we need more than snapshots and fragments of experience. We need a narrative. 

The anthropologist (and artist and seasonal shepherd) Namrata Neog is hoping to give us one. Namrata lives in a small village in Kerala, India, where she’s devoted her work and research to exploring the relationship between humans, animals, and landscape and the impact of those “entanglements” on the climate. 

She’s producing a three-part series of short films entitled “An Ecological Discourse” based on three annual seasons—grazing, non-grazing, and monsoon. Each chapter will show a changing landscape and allow viewers to watch as a grazing commons transforms into rice farmland and then is submerged under monsoon floods. 

Once the films are complete, Namrata will show them at local schools and colleges to kickstart a discussion on how to rethink the human relationship to animals and landscape. She also hopes that the collaborative nature of the project will open up conversation about caste, class, and gender in the village. She’ll use our grant to purchase equipment, including a sound recorder, tripod, lapel mic, and hard drive. Climate change is here. Understanding it—knowing how to talk about it and then knowing how to act on it—will be key to surviving it.