What Is The Green Channel? Canada’s Home for Environmental Film

A wildfire season arrives as a hectare count. A watershed shows up as a line in a policy fight. A salmon run becomes a stock assessment. All of that is accurate, and none of it tells you what the place feels like, or who is standing in it when the decision comes down.

The Green Channel is a Canadian streaming service for independent environmental films and documentaries, built around stories from Canada and the Pacific Northwest. The films are made by people who stayed in one inlet, forest, or community long enough to notice something a news segment has no room for.

We wanted to gather the type of  stories you can find on The Green Channel. If you would rather skip ahead and look around yourself, you can explore the full environmental film catalogue here.

Environmental stories are never only about nature

A film about a river is also a film about the people who fish it and anything that is affected by it. Some environmental documentaries have room for all of that at once. That is the main thing separating them from wildlife programming, which is often beautiful and usually stops at the animal.

For example, The Salish Sea – A Single Body of Life takes the connected view as its starting point. It asks you to hold the coast, the water, and the animals living in it as one system rather than a set of separate subjects. That is a way of seeing rather than a scientific finding, and it changes what you notice on your next walk along the shore.

Another film on The Green Channel, Living River works closer to the ground. As one of the first attempts to make an environmental film in British Columbia, it follows the plants, birds, fish, and animals that depend on a single wild BC river. When you watch it, you will see that the word ecosystem stops being an abstraction. This film has historical significance and was digitally remastered by Juggernaut Pictures in 2014.

Not every film here is built on that idea, though. Some are portraits and some are investigations. 

Films that begin close to home

The fastest way to care about a large problem is to meet a small piece of it.

The Hundred-Year-Old Whale is a portrait of Granny, the orca matriarch known to researchers as J2. The film sets one whale’s life inside the changing history of the West Coast, which is a different experience from reading about orcas in a headline. You come away knowing a specific animal rather than a category.

Herring Spawn is shorter and stranger. Bob Turner floats in his kayak and captures the intensity of the annual spring spawn and the animals that gather to feed on it. 

Birth of a Salmon, which was filmmaker Robin Morton’s first film, takes the salmon life cycle as its subject, and it is worth watching before or after either of the other two. That film was originally released in 1979 and was remastered in 2019 for re-release on The Green Channel. 

When you watch the three together, then something clicks. The whales are eating the salmon. The salmon, the seabirds, and the sea lions are all working the same herring. You can see that these are not three separate animal films. They are depicting one coastal system, filmed from three angles.

Start with BC’s coast: Explore films about ocean and marine ecosystems, including whales, salmon, herring, and the Salish Sea.

Films that ask difficult questions

Some of the catalogue on The Green Channel is harder going, and they do that on purpose.

White Water Black Gold follows a filmmaker across Western Canada to examine the relationship between water and the oil industry. It is a point-of-view investigation, which means it builds an argument and shows you the evidence it gathered. It is more useful as a set of questions than as a verdict.

Trial of an Iconic Species documents parts of the public inquiry into the rapid decline of Fraser River sockeye. The value is in watching an inquiry do its work, and in seeing how difficult it is to pin a single cause on a decline with many candidates. One could just read the transcripts from the Inquiry. But you will miss a critical part of the story. The sub-text is palpable in the body language of the panelists. Who is aligned with whom?  And you will find yourself asking, why is everyone walking on eggs while on the stand? Are they hiding something or just afraid to tell what they know? If you want to dig deeper, you can watch the raw footage of the Cohen inquiry streaming under the title  Exhibit 2148. There are 423 episodes altogether, watch for them on TGC or on TGC’s youtube channel. 

The Unofficial Trial of Alexandra Morton looks at the unexpected pressure put on a whistleblower and independent biologist. Morton was a thorn in the side of governments for decades about the impacts of open net pen fish farms on British Columbia’s coast. She took governments to court and won, she challenged multinational corporations and now they had a chance to put her on the hot seat. And they did.

None of these films end with a clean resolution , because the situations they cover do not have one yet. That is a reasonable thing to want from a documentary and a rare thing to get. But often films like these bring attention to issues that need resolution and these stories can make resolutions possible. 

If you want films that follow the evidence, our investigations into climate and energy are the place to go next.

Films that make space for community and stewardship

Noticing a problem and doing something about it result in very different films.

The Streamkeepers’ Way follows volunteers in and around Howe Sound and Burrard Inlet who investigate and act to protect herring eggs. It is close, patient and local work. It does not fix the herring decline on its own and the film is not selling it that way. What it records is the unglamorous part of environmental work: the same people, the same shoreline, on repeat. But perhaps the biggest gain was that persistence pays handsomely with public awareness. 

Wildfire Warriors was filmed during BC’s 2017 wildfire season and follows Tsilhqot’in communities protecting their homes and territory. It is specific to the Tsilhqot’in Nation and to that season. Watch it as their story rather than as a general lesson about Indigenous knowledge, because it was never offered as one.

If you are interested in our films about land, stewardship, and community, we have a dedicated page for that. 

Films that help us imagine the future differently

Some streaming websites treat harm and hope as separate genres. But we prefer to put them next to each other.

Director Brett Mazurek’s film, The Future of Energy is one of the most optimistic films on The Green Channel. It looks at the renewable-energy transition through the people and communities taking part in it from a positive angle.

Food and Fuel: A Story of Resilience is stranger and more personal. It sets Cuba’s “special period” alongside one person’s attempt to live with less fossil fuel on BC’s Sunshine Coast. What it does well is make the question concrete. What actually changes when the fuel gets scarce?

If you are more interested in films like this, we have a page that showcases Investigative films on The Green Channel. 

How to choose your first Green Channel film

It depends on what brought you here.

• For wildlife and wonder, start with The Hundred-Year-Old Whale or Herring Spawn.
• For an investigation, start with White Water Black Gold or Trial of an Iconic Species.
• For community-led action, start with The Streamkeepers’ Way or Wildfire Warriors.
• For a look at how things could change, start with The Future of Energy.

There is no correct order. Most people find their way in through a place they already know or a species they already like, and follow the connections from there. You can also see all our environmental films here.

Watch closely. Stay connected.

So what is The Green Channel? It is a place to watch environmental films online for people who want more than a three-minute explainer or a slow-motion shot of something pretty. Independent film has the time to show how a place, a species, a decision, and a community are attached to one another, and that is not easy to find anywhere else.

You do not need a list of films to watch or an IMDB list. Pick one issue you already care about, whether that is the salmon, the coast, the fires, or the energy question, and watch one film about it today. The next one tends to suggest itself naturally. 

Find the environmental story that matters to you. Explore The Green Channel.