For the month of December, we decided to watch Chasing Ice, a 2012 award-winning documentary about the effects of climate change. The film made its first TV debut on National Geographic and since then have been screened in over 172 countries.

The film documents James Balog, an environmental American photographer, on a quest to photograph the most powerful issue of our time: the interaction of humans and nature. Balog chose to tell the story of climate change and to “photograph climate change in a way that would make interesting photographs, and the only thing that made sense, and sounded right, was ice.” With his project, Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), Balog and his team set up a total of 25 cameras in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and Montana, to capture a photo of active glaciers every hour, for 3 years.

Beautifully made, Chasing Ice took us on a journey of emotions with its moving storytelling and cinematography. The images and videos Balog and his team captured were so powerful, we could never forget them. The film left us moved, mesmerized, and shocked by the evidence shown. Before he embarked on the project, Balog claimed he was skeptical about climate change –– “I didn’t think that humans were capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of this entire huge planet. It didn’t seem probable, it didn’t seem possible.” But Chasing Ice provides real visual evidence of climate change in a way that has never been documented before. For believers and (perhaps, previous) non-believers, it’s clear that the evidence is real –– you’ll believe it and understand it.

We hope this film inspires those who watch it to take action against climate change. In Balog’s words, “We as a culture…we’re forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection and contact with nature. You can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.”

You can watch Chasing Ice on Netflix now while it’s still “free”! Those that have seen it: were you as moved as we were? What are your thoughts?

Cheers,
Jennifer and Vivian