I was working as a hiking guide in the Canadian Rockies
and sort of, you know,
watching climate change in action kind of thing.
When you're living in the mountains,
you're sort of on the front lines of climate change--
you see the glaciers melting,
you see droughts happening, things like that.
So that sort of gave me the impetus to make my first film.
And from that, it--
the part of the process when you're editing a film,
there's a lot of stuff that has to end up
on the cutting-room floor.
And so I realized that there was a whole part
of the story that wasn't being told
and that this dichotomy that we have in our society of,
"Well, you know, it's the economy or the environment
"and you got to choose one or the other."
And I thought to myself, "Well, what if these projects
"that are damaging our environment
"are also not economically sustainable?
"Is that possible?"
And that was essentially what drove me.
So 'To the Ends of the Earth'
is about the rise of extreme energy,
sometimes called "unconventional energy,"
"unconventional oil and gas."
And the economic ramifications of that
and how we adapt as a society to this new reality going forward.
Unconventional oil and gas is fracking,
it's tar sands bitumen.
It's, you know, different kind-- Arctic oil, things like that.
And so the more I looked at these things,
yes there's a huge amount of resources out there
and oftentimes large oil companies
or what have you, governments as well,
are always talking about the size of the resource out there,
but they're not talking about the quantity of that resource
that you can get out of the ground,
in an economically sustainable way.
Essentially these companies, what they'll do
is they'll come into a community and they'll talk about,
you know, how they're gonna build a recreation center,
how it's gonna be wonderful,
there is gonna be all kinds of jobs and things like that.
And there is for a short period of time--
there are economic benefits that flow into communities.
However, these benefits don't last long.
This isn't conventional natural gas.
Conventional natural gas,
you'll have a field produce for 20 or 30 years,
but here it's a year or two years and it's done.
So it's certainly not the gas of yesteryear
and the resources of yesteryear.
Essentially we're at a civilizational crossroads.
So we can either choose renewable energy,
we can reduce our consumption,
we can aggressively pursue that kind of a path,
or we can do more of the same, except with diminishing quality.
What I'm hoping to do with this film is to shift
the conversation around energy.
And shift it away from your sort of hackneyed, clichéd,
"economy versus environment"
that, "Well, you know, we really like the environment."
Everybody likes the environment, nobody--
you know, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who says,
"Oh, you know, the environment is not important.
"But we can't harm the economy."
So the intended audience for this film is essentially,
I'd like to think, it's anyone who uses energy.
So, well that's basically all of us.
Energy touches our lives in so many ways.
And there-‑ you can't get through life
without using extraordinary amounts of energy.
In the landscape of mainstream media,
there's not a lot of content
that sort of challenges the status quo.
And so that can be challenging as a filmmaker
to reach the audience that you want to reach.
So something like 'Documentary Showcase'
is a critical platform
to be able to get that out to the world.
So if my film can help kick-start a conversation
about this new reality that we're facing, the new reality,
and focus on positive ways that we can shift our society,
then it's mission accomplished for my film.