Breached by Storms

Set to Inharmonic Fantasy No. 17 by Hubert Howe, Breached by Storms is a short film inspired by the fragile ecology of coastal salt marsh areas, also known as salt ponds, which are important natural features of the coastal ecosystem. Each salt pond has a unique identity, supporting a range of wildlife and coastal habitats as well as many important commercial and recreational activities. They typically are protected by barrier beaches that can be breached by storm surges, causing seawater incursions and threatening stable ecosystems that can take years to develop. While anthropogenic climate change is increasing the severity of these events, other other detrimental human impacts pose even greater dangers, exascerbated by the societal inaction and ethical failures that philosopher Stephen Gardiner calls a “Perfect Moral Storm.” In a visual style that takes inspiration from Hokusai’s famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, this film juxtaposes fragmentary representations of humans in motion with imagery of the Trustom Pond Wildlife Refuge on Rhode Island’s south coast, which protects the state’s only undeveloped salt pond, providing habitat for over 360 species, including many migratory and local birds.

This film is part of Your Ocean, My Ocean (YOMO), a series of intermedia works concerned with the natural history and impacts of human interventions in coastal environments. Inspired by earth’s natural beauty, including aesthetics of human involvement, this project is a response to the escalating crisis driven by the rapidly evolving human capacity to alter planetary ecosystems, embracing multi-dimensional approaches to a systems view of life in which humans are part of a larger, living whole, and acknowledging how lack of attention to crucial values combined with unquestioning acceptance of rational thought can create unhealthy dependence on ill-considered technological “solutions.”