The Human Element
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The film follows the photographer James Balog, one of the leading voices in world environmentalism, as he documents the growth of climate change.
To achieve his goal, Balog considers the four elements–earth, water, air, fire–and observes how they are being altered by human activities. In a journey across the United States, he sees: the transit of devastating hurricanes, a fishing village threatened by an increase in the sea level, the depletion of the air supply, ruinous fires in California and a community of unemployed minors looking for new hopes. In spite of everything, Balog confidently uses his art to recover the vital relationship between nature and the fifth fundamental element: humanity.
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About the Movie The Human Element
“When I was a photographer, I wanted to celebrate elegance and the beauty of nature. But I soon understood that there was something more complex in the world–and that something was the clash between human beings and nature. I felt a very strong need to record it because these events are part of the fabric and history of our time.”
A passionate mountaineer with a degree in Geography and Geomorphology, Balog has always felt equally at home on Himalayan peaks as on rivers rapids, on the African savannah as on the polar icecaps. As a press photographer for Mariah Smithsonian and National Geographic, in the 1980s he moved spontaneously from scientific photo-journalism to nature photo-journalism. Driven by the need to investigate the complexity of a changing world, Balog used his lens to explore the relationship between human beings and nature, capturing flashpoints and documenting effectively and evocatively the progressive modification of the environment as a result of human activities. In 2007 he founded Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), an innovative long-term photography program integrating art and science to give a “visual voice” to the planet’s changing ecosystems. Thanks to EIS, in the late 1990s Balog completed one of the most exhaustive surveys ever carried out. It lasted eight years and involved positioning dozens of cameras on the glaciers of Greenland and Alaska. Seen in time-lapse, the footage filmed shows how they are melting. These images of alarming and dramatic change are edited into Jeff Orlowski’s documentary Chasing Ice (2012), which won an Emmy Award in 2014 and received a special mention at the 15th edition of CinemAmbiente. The film is an example of the perseverance of the human spirit and courage in facing physical risks and financial challenges, the leitmotifs that inspired Matthew Testa’s The Human Element. James Balog, a world spokesperson on climate change, spoke at the UNO conferences in Copenhagen (COP 15) in 2009 and in Paris (COP 21) in 2015. In 2019 he received the Movies Save The Planet special award at the CinemAmbiente Festival.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.