ABSTRACT

Biologist and lmmaker Joel Heath spent seven winters lming the ecodocumentary, People of a Feather (2011), which focuses on how the eider duck, a species now facing extinction, and the Inuit living on the Belcher Islands in Canada’s Hudson Bay have suffered from climate change due to hydroelectric energy development. By using underwater cameras, time-lapse photography, and satellite imagery, People of a Feather reveals how massive dams that power New York City and other eastern North American cities affect marine environments and wildlife. What the lm shows is how hydroelectric dams are changing ocean currents and having an adverse effect on sea ice ecosystems in Hudson bay. This devastatingly informative lm, when used to contextualize Linda Hogan’s novel, Solar Storms (1995), shows that today, twenty years after publication of the novel, ction and lm can work together to alert the public to risks in accessible ways not necessarily common to scientic articles and technical reports.