movie review: "kiss the ground"
All image rights belong to Kiss the Ground Movie, 2020.
“Kiss the Ground” offers up a hopeful solution to stemming climate change and is a thankful respite in the midst of the piles of climate change news we’re inundated with on a nearly daily basis.
Much ado has been made of methane, CO2, and the host of other greenhouse gases (GHG) building up in our atmosphere and heating our planet at alarming rates. We’ve been told to reduce our meat consumption, travel by train over a plane, recycle, and buy hybrid vehicles. However, there are just 100 companies that are responsible for 71% of the planet’s GHG emissions, so why are we as consumers always being chastised? “Kiss the Ground” offers up a solution that focuses less on the individual, but does share ways we can possibly begin to shunt CO2 out of the atmosphere and into…the soil.
In the last week at work the terms “carbon sinks” and “bio sequestration” have popped up and I have done the beginnings of some research. Turns out, within the environmental field it’s a controversial topic (but the documentary doesn’t dive into that controversy). Personally, I find it to be an intriguing approach to how we can rapidly reconcile our carbon emissions, which has led to stronger hurricanes, compromised marine life, and desertification.
“Kiss the Ground” does a good job of explaining the concept and illustrating how it is already beginning to work in various areas around the planet, but it’s missing a key voice and lacks a diverse perspective. There is a mention of the Indigenous peoples of what we currently call America, but it’s brief. The documentary glosses over the detrimental impacts of colonization that have led America down a path of soil lacking in the microorganisms and deep roots that help balance CO2 emissions and makes no mention of how the concept could greatly benefit by listening to the people who stewarded this land for centuries before the first settler landed on the coast. We see few people of color speak, but several scenes of ‘white saviorism’ as the documentary wraps and examples of how this concept is working well across the planet. At one point about halfway through, a rancher asks the question, “how did Thomas Jefferson do it?” when he experienced several seasons in a row of bad crops due to soil erosion. My immediate response as I watched from my living room was, “uh...slavery.”
With just over an hour, you’d be hard-pressed to find a docu that satisfies all of the requirements of nuanced perspective, diversity of voices (not just ethnically, but also geographically, of age, and ability), and can strike the perfect tone between hopeful and realistic. I understand that the purpose of “Kiss the Ground” is to offer up a hopeful solution which is, once again, a much-needed interlude in between the barrage of dire climate news. It will, maybe only momentarily, quell your climate anxiety and give you something positive to dig into and research more on your own. Overall, I look forward to seeing more documentaries like this one - non consumer-based band-aid solutions to climate change - and I look forward to climate and environmental justice taking more of a center stage.
Bottom line: 100% worth a (discerning) watch.
in hope,
