A RACE AGAINST TIME IN ‘EXTINCTION’
Discovery’s ambitious documentary is a global call to action
After the Academy Award-winning success of his 2009 documentary The Cove, which helped expose the hunting and slaughter of dolphins in Japan, filmmaker Louie Psihoyos wanted to paint a picture of extinction in broader strokes.
The result is Discovery’s Racing Extinction, premiering Wednesday and airing in 220 countries and territories after a Sundance screening and limited theatrical run. Shot over six years and culled from more than 2,000 hours of footage, the documentary follows Psihoyos and his team as they travel to dozens of countries, charting the global effects of climate change.
“We wanted the audience to get a sense that there are several drivers of extinction; there’s not just one thing causing it,” Psihoyos says. As thousands of land mammals and sea creatures die out, smaller species such as plankton and bees are endangered. “Humankind is part of a web of life, not a pyramid with man on top. When you start losing the small things, breaking apart this web that took 4.6 billion years to evolve, everything else begins to fail.”
Actor/producer Fisher Stevens, who teamed with Psihoyos on both projects, says: “The Cove was a microcosm. This takes it to a much bigger level in terms of how many species of animals. Then we cover something much bigger, which is ourselves. If we continue polluting, and putting as much carbon and methane in the air, we’re the ones that are going to be extinct. Or certainly, we won’t be able to lead these big, beautiful lives.”
Cameras uncover often disturbing scenes: a Hong Kong factory where hacked-off shark fins are traded; an Indonesian village where manta rays’ gills are torn out and sold; and a restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. (since shut down), after an undercover sting operation revealed it was illegally serving endangered whale.
But for those still reeling from Cove’s haunting images of butchered dolphins and blood-filled waters, Extinction offers a less graphic look at illegal poaching.
“The Cove got the reputation of being a horror film, and a lot of people didn’t end up seeing it that we thought should have,” Psihoyos says. “Racing Extinction is also a thriller, but we kept a lot of the violence out of this one. We wanted to create a film that could incite change at all ages, bringing families together to watch and make an impact.”
Extinction also looks at how meat consumption is a driver of climate change. “The amount of land we use to grow cow, chicken, and pig food, and the amount of carbon and methane emitted because of cows — that scared the hell out of me,” Stevens says. Such gases warm the environment and acidify the oceans, speeding up the process of global warming and leading us closer to what the film refers to as a “sixth mass extinction.”
Extinction isn’t all bad news. The film shows the efforts of activists to save endangered wildlife and pioneering efforts in green technology such as electric cars.
“Many more people are understanding, and it’s interesting that the documentaries are really the drivers of the movement,” Stevens says. “The idea behind showing this film on Discovery is that we want eyes. We want the world to see this movie, and there’s no better network or audience for it. Hopefully, this movie will be seen more than any of these others.”