Green Fire Sneak Preview
The 2012 Wild & Scenic Film Festival is just around the corner, and for those of you who just can’t wait, we are excited to announce a special sneak preview opportunity. Watch Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic of our Time, a pre-screening of one of our 2012 Wild & Scenic Film Festival Official Selections!
Join us at the historic Nevada Theatre in Nevada City on December 4 at 7 pm. This is more than just a film experience; accompanying the screening is a panel discussion lead by Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and Louis Warren, UC Davis Professor of History and editor of Boom: A Journal of California.
Tickets are $15 in advance and $18 at the door. Tickets may be purchased at the Briar Patch or at SYRCL’s office (216 Main Street in Nevada City).
Green Fire depicts Aldo Leopold’s legacy as one of America’s most influential conservationists through conversation with scientists, ranchers, scholars and Leopold’s children. The film includes portraits of land shaped by his land ethic – from the Gila Wilderness, America’s first wilderness area, to green space in Chicago. A consistent theme of the film is Leopold’s epiphany when watching the “fierce green fire” fade in the eyes of dying wolf. This image is an integral aspect of his landmark essay “Thinking like a Mountain.” Through his work, Leopold urges us to no longer think of land as a commodity, but rather as a community.
Gary Snyder, Nevada City local poet and naturalist, has been at the center of cultural changes that transformed the modern world. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he was a founding author of the Beat Generation. He has been the voice of a new environmental awareness, which never loses sight of direct wild experience – local people, animals, plants, watersheds and food sources. He has been called the poet laureate of deep ecology. After living in Japan and traveling abroad as a young man, Gary returned to the United States and built his own house – along the Yuba River near Nevada City – where he has lived since. He co-founded the Yuba Watershed Institute, which is celebrating its 20th year with the book, The Nature of Place. His writings include, A Place in Space, the Practice of the Wild, and Turtle Island, which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize.
Louis S. Warren is the W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches California history, environmental history, the history of the American West, and U.S. history. He is author of The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (Yale University Press, 1997) and Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). In addition, he is the co-editor of Boom: A Journal of California, covering social, cultural, and political issues in California and beyond. He is currently at work on an environmental and social history of the Ghost Dance of 1890, which explores how this millennial, pan-Indian movement originated in the California-Nevada borderlands and how it gave birth to modern anthropology and ideas of religious tolerance.
