Investigative Environmental Documentaries: Films That Changed the Conversation

What is an investigative environmental documentary? For me, it is a documentary that seeks to uncover the truth. What is really going on underneath the news headlines? What is being overlooked? What conclusions or assumptions are wrong? Are there silos of information that need to be brought together? Is someone or something being unfairly treated or framed? A documentary is investigative if it uncovers something new, something corrupt, something unfair, something that is destroying an ecosystem, or something that is putting a species in jeopardy.

The world as it exists today revolves around money. Money is needed for rent, meeting payroll, government services, food. The short term demands of meeting payroll or expenses require short term cash flow responses. A long term view is a luxury most organizations cannot afford, especially now with a rocky world economy. 

This means that with climate change now running in overdrive, the decisions being made are not always in our collective best long-term interests. As a species we are now vulnerable to the short-term view. In the past, governments were able to maintain a long-term view and left the short-term view to the private sector. But government debt has made it hard for many countries to prioritize environmental concerns. Instead, development of any kind is the new focus. With the cross pollination between industry and government, where hiring from each other has blurred the lines between the regulator and the regulated, the system now carries a bias toward development and offers more lip service on environmental impacts.

The Green Channel is home to independent filmmakers who risk their careers, and sometimes their lives, to bring stories of truth. The irony is that even though their findings can be disruptive, they often stimulate the economy as it moves in a new direction, creating new opportunities and spending that can benefit both the economy and the environment. Even though speaking truth to power can face a lot of resistance, it can bring people together once they know what the problem is. The first step in solving a problem is knowing about it. The second step is knowing enough about the problem so that the path to a fix is clear.

What follows is a walk through the investigative environmental documentaries in our catalogue. Some of these environmental exposé films were made by me. Most were not. All of them went looking for something. You can browse the whole collection on our investigative documentaries hub.

The whistleblowers: Science on trial

The Green Channel is home to a growing library of science and whistleblower documentaries. At the heart of this collection is 395 episodes of the Cohen Inquiry hearings. This federal inquiry was struck in 2009 and lasted until the final report was published in 2012. Its formal name was the Commission of Inquiry into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River, and Justice Bruce Cohen called his report The Uncertain Future of Fraser River Sockeye.

The Fraser River sockeye began a precipitous decline in 1992. By 2009, only 1.4 million fish returned when roughly 10 million were expected. That was the collapse that forced the Prime Minister to call the inquiry. I was granted permission to film the hearings when I discovered there was an open camera spot. This collection is streaming on The Green Channel and on The Green Channel’s YouTube channel, sorted by topic.

It is a fascinating journey through a wide range of topics. Many were only of interest to the scientists and bureaucrats conducting the studies. Others filled the room. The days featuring whistleblower Dr. Alexandra Morton and muzzled scientist Dr. Kristi Miller were packed. Through all of it I remained the fly on the wall, because I felt my recordings might, in a small way, give the stakeholders a way to stop the in-fighting and find a way to save the iconic sockeye.

Dr. Miller’s story is the one that still bothers me. Her research was published in the journal Science in January 2011, and the journal thought it important enough to alert more than 7,400 journalists worldwide. She was not permitted to talk about it. She told the inquiry she learned only through the process itself that the decision had come from the Privy Council Office rather than her own department. She left the hearing room with two security guards. That is what it looks like when the science is inconvenient.

Dr. Morton got the other treatment. When she took the stand in September 2011, she was not asked mainly about her data. She was accused of ethical breaches and pressed on her motives. Her answer was short: she is completely independent, and works for no university, government, or industry. Put the scientist on trial and you never have to argue with the science. That is the whole tactic, and once you have watched it happen you see it everywhere.

Two films came out of that footage. The Unofficial Trial of Alexandra Morton follows what happened to her in that room. Trial of an Iconic Species gathers the testimony from the scientists on what was happening to the fish. If you watch true crime nature documentaries for the courtroom, this is that, except the witnesses are biologists and the victim is a salmon run.

Watch the courtroom drama unfold. Stream Trial of an Iconic Species to hear the testimony the public was never meant to sit through.

Following the money: the energy sector

If money is what usually wins, then following the money is usually the story. The best investigative filmmakers in the energy sector do not start with an argument. They start with a river, or a road, or a town, and they keep asking who pays.

David Lavallee did it the hard way. In White Water Black Gold he travels down the Athabasca River to see for himself what the search for oil is doing to the water, and to the third largest watershed in the world. It is a simple structure and it works, because the further downstream he goes the harder the answers get.

His follow-up, To the Ends of the Earth, is broader and colder. Narrated by Emma Thompson, it looks at the rise of extreme energy, the end of easy economic growth, and the people caught in the middle of both. Extreme energy is what you turn to when the cheap oil is gone: the tar sands, the fracked wells, the deepwater rigs. Every one of them costs more, in money and in damage, than what came before. That is the part the quarterly report never shows you.

Neither film tells you what to think about oil. They just show you the bill.

The illusion of green: uncovering false solutions

Greenwashing is when an industry spends more on looking sustainable than on being sustainable. The marketing is the product. Corporate greenwashing documentaries exist because the gap between the brochure and the operation is usually only visible from up close, and usually only to someone who went and looked.

Salmon Secrets went and looked. The film follows an undercover investigation into an “experimental” fish farm near Tofino and the industry’s response when regulators start asking questions. The word experimental is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the film is about who decided it should.

The Pristine Coast is mine, and I will declare that plainly. It premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2014 and it examines the relationship between open-net pen fish farms and the collapse of wild fish populations in the North Pacific and the Atlantic. I started out looking at what the farms were doing to salmon. Then Alexandra Morton showed me a photograph of a bleeding herring, and my two science degrees kicked in, and the question got much bigger. The film raises the possibility that disease spread from open-net pens is a driver of wild fish decline on a scale nobody has properly costed.

I want to be careful here, because this is contested ground. Justice Cohen did not find a single cause for the sockeye decline, and he said so. What he did find was a regulator with a conflict written into its job description, and he recommended doing something about it. That is not a climate change cover up in the conspiracy sense. It is duller and more durable than that: a system where the agency promoting an industry is the same agency policing it.

The aftermath: when investigations spark action

People ask whether any of this changes anything. Sometimes it does, and rarely in the way you expect.

The Cohen Inquiry heard 179 witnesses over 138 days and produced 75 recommendations. Those recommendations have been argued over ever since, and that argument is itself the result. Documentaries that changed laws are rarer than the phrase suggests. Documentaries that changed what a community was willing to accept are much more common, and they matter more than they get credit for.

Peace Out is the clearest example I know. Charles Wilkinson went into the Peace River region and found a dam, a nuclear proposal, tens of thousands of fracked gas wells and the tar sands all going in at once, mostly out of sight of the rest of the country. What makes the film work is that he refuses to pick the easy villain. He talks to the energy executives and the activists and the scientists, and he lets the contradictions sit there. People in that valley organised for years afterward. The film did not make them do it. It made the rest of us aware they were doing it, which is the part that had been missing.

Why independent film still matters

None of these stories arrived on their own. Somebody had to sit in a hearing room for months, or paddle down a river, or take a camera somewhere they were not welcome. Without independent filmmakers, most of what you have just read stays in a filing cabinet, and the environmental exposé films that eventually shift public opinion never get made at all.

That is the whole reason The Green Channel exists. Not to tell you what to conclude, but to make sure the evidence gets out of the room.

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