A couple of principles guide our approach to A Fierce Green Fire. First of all is a focus on environmentalism as a movement, looking at it in terms of people fighting for change, using stories of activism to get at issues and ideas. Second is going for the big picture, bringing together all the parts of environmentalism and understanding it as a whole – from the conservation era to climate change, from pollution to resource issues, from saving the biosphere to reinventing industrial civilization. It needs synthesizing.

Nothing quite like A Fierce Green Fire has ever been made. We think it’s a more engaging approach than the cant and rant of too many environmental documentaries.

It’s more open-ended too; instead of explicating issues we present stories and let the audience decide what they mean. Most of all we’re trying to make connections. You can’t isolate climate change from cutting down forests and the lives of people in the forest. Throughout the film there are resonances, convergences, pieces of a larger vision. “Everything is hitched,” as John Muir observed. Integrating all the elements of environmentalism, capturing the larger arc of the movement and shaping it into a coherent narrative may be the enduring value of this film.