film
Death in The Garden began as an exploration into dietary alternatives to veganism —
a search for a food system that fulfilled the promises of human health, planetary health, and animal welfare after realizing that veganism wasn’t necessarily a solution to the problems of the global food system.
While countless films & books described the harm of industrial animal agriculture…
iT SEEMED LIKE VERY FEW WERE CRITIQUING THE INDUSTRIAL FOOD SYSTEM AS A WHOLE, WITH THE INDUSTRIAL PLANT-FOOD SYSTEM REINFORCING THE INDUSTRIAL cafo SYSTEM.
WHY “DEATH”?
Noticing the societal resistance to things like livestock-integrated agroecology and regenerative agriculture, we realized that there was a deep discomfort with death, and therefore, with the cycles of life itself.
We knew that if we wanted to be part of a truly sustainable food system, we had to connect to the fact that in order for us to live, something else has to die. This was a law of ecology that we can’t escape, in spite of our society’s attempt to escape this reality at all costs.
Delving into history, it became clear to us that this desire to avoid death through subduing and controlling nature lay at the heart of industrial civilization.
What began as an exploration into the food system quickly expanded to all realms of society as we realized industrialization, mechanization, standardization and commodification have extended into all areas of the global system. Without looking at the system from a holistic perspective, we recognized that the trajectory of “sustainability” as we know it is to continue on the same path of managing symptoms while never addressing the root of the issue. We noticed that many so-called “solutions” to climate change & ecological crisis perpetuated the same mode of thinking that got us into the problem in the first place.
we discovered that colonialism & ENCLOSURE is playing a role in “GREEN” MOVEMENTS GLOBALLY…
All under the guise of saving the world.
So we decided to expand the film’s trajectory from an analysis of how the food system is harming ourselves and the planet to attempting to break down the entire industrial apparatus of our globalized civilization. This film series will explore global agriculture, renewable energy, conservation, protected areas, and so much more— exposing the same ideologies of perpetual material progress, accumulation, and limitless growth lie at the center of these movements, not because people are bad but because we are still telling the same exact story as before. We explore the costs of sedentarization, enclosure of the commons, colonialism, and the financialization of nature.
Fundamentally we aim to show: Where did we come from? What is the direction of our current solutioneering? But most importantly, why did we go down this path, and do we still have time to course-correct?