Erin Espelie - "Silent Springs"

What have we learned in the last 60 years about fragile ecosystems and chemical body burdens? Silent Springs swivels our focus from the birds and insects highlighted in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, which warns of the perils of pollutants, to currently endangered amphibians. This film combines archival sound, Super8 and 16mm footage, along with the artist's documentation of the biologist Valerie McKenzie and the poet Dan Beachy-Quick, to highlight our environmental paralysis and perennial backslide in wildlife ecology. Putting disparate entities in conversation, without explanation of time separation, epitomizes the slippages of chronology and the pitfalls inherent in a rational dissection of the natural world.

Ultimately cinema—with its scientific roots in the rigor of chemical, kinetic, and optical experimentation—offers the ideal medium for uniting the largest and smallest earthly phenomena while kindling the imagination toward more expansive, interdisciplinary inquiries. Balancing the macroscopic and the microscopic, the society and the individual, is a challenge for both artists and scientists, utterly necessary for understanding the tenets of our existence.