Film producer, biologist and wildlife photographer David Moskowitz was shocked to find that old-growth logging is continuing in B.C.’s interior temperate rainforest, despite clear evidence that it threatens fragile herds of endangered mountain caribou and, as he worked on his latest film, he tried to figure out how caribou and ancient trees could be saved, while protecting the local economy.

There is no simple solution, said Moskowitz, but he is hoping his film, “Last Stand: The Vanishing Caribou Rainforest,” which will be playing at the ELEMENTS film festival at Science World in Vancouver this weekend, will make people aware of what is at stake.

Last Stand will play Sunday afternoon as a part of the film festival’s Beautiful B.C. segment, that features short films A Northern Path: Exploring the Nisga’a and Stewart-Cassiar Highways and I Am Salmon as well as Creekwalker, a feature-length film that traces the creeks of the Great Bear Rainforest.

“[Last Stand] is about the last and largest remaining inland temperate rainforest on Planet Earth and these amazing creatures, the mountain caribou, that are tied to this ecosystem and how we are continuing to destroy it through logging and resource extraction,” he told DeSmog Canada.

The population of mountain caribou now stands at about 1,500 animals in a dozen herds that roam between the Kootenays and U.S. Pacific Northwest and they are struggling to survive, said Moskowitz, who worked on the film for about two-and-a-half years with director Colin Arisman.

“The whole population is at risk of extinction right now and the key part of this story is that B.C. and Canada have refused to take any substantive action to stop destroying the habitat for these animals,” he said.

“The reason these animals are disappearing is that humans have destroyed their refuge habitat, which is old-growth forest…They are turning old-growth trees into toilet paper.”

As forests are destroyed other species such as deer move in, followed by more predators and produces the conundrum of how to keep the mountain caribou alive while protecting First Nations culture and a forest economy, Moskowitz said.

In addition to the shock of finding B.C. is continuing to harvest timber in unique old-growth ecosystems, Moskowitz was stunned to discover that logging is subsidized by government because it costs companies more to get the trees to market than they get from selling them.

The province also mandates how much companies must cut, stipulating they will lose their licence if they do not harvest enough, he said.

“There is an imperative for them to keep cutting, regardless of the economics,” he said.

Marcus Reynerson inspects the mountain caribou tracks along the banks of a lake in the Canadian Rockies. Photo: David Moskowitz

There is little old-growth logging on the U.S. side of the border, but that does not necessarily mean the U.S. has done a better job, Moskowitz said.

“We had a few decades head-start, so there’s a lot less to cut. The opportunities to salvage this ecosystem is north of the border, but it is slated to be logged over the next four decades…Where the rubber meets the road is Canada and B.C.,” he said.

Moskowitz does not pretend he has solutions, but the film looks at topics such as community forestry and value-added forestry, where, rather than exporting pulp, jobs are created in local paper mills.

“Conservation initiatives that don’t work for local people just don’t work. Period. Some of the changes that need to take place in forestry would have a huge impact on the local economy,” he said.

“But we could cut a whole lot less trees and employ just as many people, if not more, if we looked at a value-added economy.”

Moskowitz hopes that one message that will resonate with audiences is that human beings cannot not turn away from the mess they have created.

“Climate change is going to change this ecosystem which is going to set in motion cascading ecological issues where we have increased some species numbers, which affects predators, which affects endangered species. We can’t take our fingers out of this pie,” he said.

“We have made a mess of things and we can’t just stay out of it. We must stay engaged and make really difficult choices.”

Last Stand (Trailer) – The Vanishing Caribou Rainforest from Wild Confluence on Vimeo.

The ELEMENTS film festival will feature nature, wildlife and conservation films from 11 countries April 14-15 at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver.

See more of Moskowitz’s photography on Instagram: @moskowitz_david

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In the Q&A following the screening of her debut feature documentary A River Changes Course (2013) at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), director Kalyanee Mam told her audience: "We are disconnected from nature – each other – because of the global system we live in."

Heard or read in isolation, it's a sentiment that's familiar, didactic, even trite. But the film personalizes the adverse effects of that "global system" so elegantly, and with such a lack of editorializing or preaching, that the phrase makes a powerful impact.

The "system" Mam is speaking of is, of course, our current iteration of global capitalism, which tends to favour the financial well-being of multinational corporations over that of the environment, the health of economies of scale over that of local economies.

Following three families of indigenous Cambodians living off land and rivers increasingly encroached on and ecologically transformed by globalization and climate change, Mam's film eschews commentary and interviews for a moving personal narrative that tells a story we all know already, but from a point of view most will not have experienced.

Mam is wise to leave the words to the film's subjects, who say more with their resigned recognition of their fading way of life than any number of experts on the subject might have. Their isolation (most have never seen a city in their lives) leads to their perspective being limited, but it's striking nonetheless – such as when mother and farmer Sav Samourn talks about how she's always sick ever since fish and wildlife started dwindling in the forests her family stays in.

Image: Sav Samourn, a mother and farmer who fears corporate encroachment of her family's land, as she watches the forests of her home in Northeast Cambodia disappear.

It's up to the viewer to figure out that Sav Samourn and her family are getting sick more often because of increasing contamination of the water in the fragile ecosystem of their home, as well as an increased dependence on food from external sources rather than that grown or caught by the families in the forest (because of dwindling wildlife and changes in soil fertility, and farming being taken over by corporations).

It's not a difficult conclusion to reach. But it makes far more of an impact when seen first-hand as a simple, devastating fact of life for people who depend on a wilderness raided down to its weakening bones. The irony is that it's all to sustain the engine of globalized economies that primarily benefit the privileged and financially mobile, not these families who are losing their livelihoods.

Sari Math, a boy from a family that lives on the water, is forced at 15 to give up school and his dreams of an education and a life outside of fishing. To alleviate increasing financial hardship caused by dwindling numbers of fish that his family sells, he goes to work on a cassava plantation run by a Chinese corporation.

Khieu Mok, a young woman from another farming family, has to go to the capital city of Phnomh Penh to work all day for very little income in a garment factory because of her mother's debts. Neither Sari nor Khieu find enough money in their new jobs to really make a difference to their families' financial security.

Image: Sari Math, a 15-year-old boy forced to work at a cassava plantation because of the dwindling numbers of fish being caught by his family.

Both Sari Math and Khieu Mok end up working for the very system that's affecting their families' livelihoods. Both find that this system has no interest in adequately compensating those that form its foundation of cheap international labour – labour driven to such work because their land is being taken away and permanently altered in the name of 'progress.'

Their stories are moving and captivating even without any political baggage attached, but the ramifications of their struggles makes their problems even more touching, and disturbing.

"We've worked so hard on this land, and now they've come to destroy it all. Sooner or later it will all be gone," says Sav Samourn in one scene, after explaining how loggers and corporations simply deforest wide swathes of land, and plant industrial crops that cannot sustain the life of the ecosystems they're taking over (the huge Chinese cassava plantation that Sari Math works in being just one example). In contrast, farmers burn parts of the forest so the soil is fertile enough to re-grow crops the next year.

Sav Samourn mentions that they were once afraid of ghosts and bears in the forest, but are now only afraid of "people," the people who are deforesting their home, the people their neighbours are selling their land to. Wildlife and ghosts are long gone in the cleared acres of land now surrounding their home, and soon, the local communities will be gone too. As she says, hauntingly: "We can't win."

There's a telling moment when Kieu, despite her unforgiving, spare life working in the bleak garment factory and living in overcrowded dormitories with other rural refugees in Phnomh Penh, says that she hopes urbanization eventually transforms the farmland that is her home, so that she can see city lights shining everywhere, and have roads and shops instead of the constant, backbreaking labour of farm work that is, year by year, yielding less money and less food.

Image: Khieu Mok, who tries to alleviate her mother's debt from poor crops by working for low wages in a garment factory in Phnomh Penh.

It's a surprising moment, since the more privileged audiences of A River Changes Course will want her to stay true to her and her family's vanishing way of life, to perhaps assuage their own guilt. But she's only just seeing the allure of globalized living, the convenience and ease that those on the other side of the financial and class divide have long settled into. In an interview for NPR, Mam said that she thinks Kieu "represents all of us."

"I think all of us are living in a deep well, where we don't really understand the consequences of our actions. We may understand what would happen if a factory came to her village, but we may not fully comprehend what could happen if we continue to drive every day – you know, if the whole planet is covered with cars and we continue to be dependent on fuel and oil and so forth," said Mam.

Mam isn't blaming Kieu or the audience, just recognizing that we're too deeply dependent on the system to upend it. "My stories – your stories – are embedded in their stories," as Mam told her audience after the VIFF screening.

It's Mam's intention to drive home the fact that the plight of the Cambodians in the film is a universal one, because, for better and worse, globalized capitalism and its accompanying wave of modernization is all-encompassing and inescapable. Indeed, the ongoing conflict between indigenous First Nations and the Canadian oil industry (and government) over the exploitation of their lands for natural resources has many parallels to the Cambodian situation Mam is illuminating.

Image: Kalyanee Mam, director of A River Changes Course.

We can't get rid of the system. Which makes it all the more necessary to alter, to make it sustainable, to find compromise. Mam calls the mistreatment of those shoved under the march of progress in Cambodia an "atrocity" that "very few people comprehend," even comparing it to the devastation of the Khmer Rouge regime. Coming from Mam, who personally remembers escaping the Khmer Rouge as a child, with her father walking ahead into minefields to create a path for his family, these are strong words indeed.

But Mam wants her beautiful, moving portrayal of these families and their plight to act as "a vehicle of change," inspiring advocacy. The filmmakers are currently raising funds with the goal of screening A River Changes Course at "60 universities and villages across Cambodia in the next 12 months, and facilitate substantive dialogue in the most remote corners of the country. Through these screenings, Cambodians will be encouraged to analyze their current situation, and within their respective communities, determine how to respond to this rapid change."

Those interested in helping reach this goal can contribute here. For a more detailed explanation of Mam's reasons for making the film, and what she hopes it will achieve, read her director's statement.

"This is a decisive moment for Cambodia. And so it is also a decisive moment for the world. How do we find balance? How do we advance and develop without destroying ourselves in the process? By delving deeply into the lives of families directly affected by development and globalization, I hope this film, A River Changes Course, will invite viewers not to draw simple conclusions, but to ask questions that demand thoughtful answers and action."

– Kalyanee Mam

Images courtesy of A River Changes Course official website.  

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.