Racing Extinction (2015)

Director: Louie Psihoyos                                   Writer: Mark Monroe
Music Score: J. Ralph                                       Cinematography: John Behrens
Starring: Louie Psihoyos, Shawn Heinrichs, Paul Hilton and Ady Gil

Racing Extinction is a remarkable piece of work, not only for its ability to convey the immanent destruction of our planet in an objective, non-sensationalized way, but in the way that it calls upon humanity to do something about it before it’s too late while still being able to celebrate what remains. Director Louie Psihoyos is an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society. He won his Academy Award six years ago for his film, The Cove, which documented the abuse and slaughter of dolphins in one particular Japanese cove. His new film brings together a host of important scientists and researchers, including Jane Goodall, and edits their contributions together in a way that shows a common thread running through all of them: that human life on Earth is actually dependent upon the rest of life on the planet. The main stories in the film are also woven together in a way that moves each of them forward chronologically but uses the ideas in each to reinforce each other as well. The photography is brilliant, especially the underwater sequences, and there are some cutting edge graphics that illuminate the statistics without dominating the narrative. Psihoyos should earn another Oscar nomination, and hopefully a victory, for his dire warning of the consequences of our poor stewardship of the Earth.

The film opens with a photographer taking shots of a bird, an orange Dusky Sparrow, dead in a jar, the last of its kind, extinct as a species from the planet in the summer of 1987. Director Louie Psihoyos then relates the story of reading in the newspaper and seeing in a small article somewhere in the middle, that mankind may be causing a new mass extinction event. That’s the way humans are dealing with their own culpability in destroying other species, he says, by burying the information so that they don’t have to think about it. The beginning of the story starts with Psihoyos and his colleagues doing undercover work to expose the sale of endangered whale meat at a sushi restaurant. Ultimately it was activist Ady Gil, who camped out in front of the restaurant showing images of whales and telling customers that they were contributing to their deaths that finally closed the place down. From there Psihoyos moves backward to his work as a photojournalist for National Geographic, having done a total of four stories on extinction, primarily dinosaurs. Natural extinction occurs at the rate of about one in a million species ever year, but predictions for the next hundred years are as high as fifty percent of all species on earth lost by the next century. Then Psihoyos presents the thesis of his film, that we are living in a new age of extinction and yet we have the power to do something about it.

In discussing the precarious state of the blue whale, the director visits with Chris Clark, head of the bio-acoustic lab at Cornell University. Clark’s lab is the largest repository of animal sounds in the world, and in addition to listening to whale sounds he plays a tape of an extinct bird, the Hawaiian Oʻo. The lab contains many such examples of the only living sounds of such species. From there, Dr. Kirk Johnson calls this new age the Anthropocene, an epoch in which the human imprint upon the planet is so large that is able to actually alter the planet itself. The participation of Ady Gil to shut down the restaurant serving whale meat leads to a discussion of the dedication of thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to saving species--and some who have lost their lives doing this work. Shawn Heinrichs, of Boulder, Colorado, is one of those. Heinrichs helped turn a Mexican island that had hunted whale sharks to elimination in the area into a tourist destination, making the people there far more money than they were making fishing, and saving the sharks. Photojournalist Paul Hilton, from Australia, assists Heinrichs on his mission, and helps him get into black market wholesalers--primarily located in Asia--who are illegally selling endangered creatures in an attempt to shut them down. Sharks, for example, have been fished down to ten percent of their original numbers primarily to satisfy the Chinese desire for shark fin soup.

Dr. Charlie Vernon explains that all of the extinction events on Earth prior to this one, have involved an increase in carbon dioxide but none of them as extreme as what is going on today. Another gas that doesn’t get as much attention is methane, a major waste product of livestock used for food production, as well as its release from melting polar ice, and yet it is twenty-two times more harmful than CO2. The emphasis on the destruction of sea life is actually part of a larger issue of the destruction of the ocean in general, not only in terms of species extinction but the heat of the water due to climate change, and the raising of acidity in the water that is wiping out shellfish and coral reefs. But the most damaging effect of ocean destruction is the way in which it is killing plankton. Dr. Boris Worm has done extensive studies on the effects of absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans. Plankton account for half of all the oxygen produced on the planet, and yet plankton numbers have been reduced by forty percent in just the last fifty years. The end of oxygen production on Earth would certainly wipe out a majority of land-dwelling species, including most human life. Racing Extinction is a brilliant film. It is not just well filmed, but the message that it sends to us is that life matters, all life, not just human life. And without those other lives on Earth, it may just mean the end of our own.