“The Anthropologist” Isn’t Another Climate Change Horror Flick
Sapiens
An evocative new film brings the realities of climate change out of Hollywood and into the intimacy of our everyday lives.
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SAPIENS
In its much more quiet way, The Anthropologist does not take on all of climate change or terrify its viewers with footage of glaciers falling into the sea. Instead, it makes climate change feel very personal.

It introduces us to a farmer who can no longer grow the potato known as puma’s claw because of environmental changes. We meet a woman who is trying to teach the people of Kiribati, the I-Kiribati, about climate change and their options as the sea rises.

But these people are not shown only as victims, screaming with terror or clinging to trees as the water rises around them. They are depicted as everyday people. The I-Kiribati climate activist in the film braids Yegorov-Crate’s hair and teaches her some local tunes. The Andean farmers celebrate a local holiday with glacier-ice snow cones. The Siberian farmers take Yegorov-Crate on rides in the sidecars of their motorcycles.

In essence, the film does what the cultural anthropology of climate change also seeks to do: It humanizes those affected, telling their stories in detail and with compassion. You can tell people that by 2030 climate change and the use of fossil fuels will cause 6 million deaths annually, or you can argue that 760 million people might be displaced by rising seas, as recent news stories have done. Readers and viewers will say, “That’s horrible,” and find themselves feeling paralyzed and numb. Or you can, as The Anthropologist does, spend a few moments with a single affected person and invite viewers to look into his eyes and listen as he says, “When the land is broken, there is a shaking in the heart.” The latter invokes empathy, not horror.

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Near the end of the 78-minute film, Crate talks about the “cultural transformations” she is documenting as societies around the world adapt to the changing climate. We see that the Peruvian farmers are diversifying into aquaculture to compensate for their lost crops. In Kiribati, there is talk that the transformation may require physical relocation, even though that puts their local culture at risk.

The people Crate studies probably don’t need saving; they are already saving themselves. With a few scenes from a protest at the White House against the construction of an oil pipeline, the film hints that perhaps, slowly, one Prius and demonstration and fuel-efficiency standard at a time, our Western industrialized culture is going through its own cultural transformation. “I don’t really think we can change the world,” Crate says. “I think we change, and that changes the world.”

Ultimately, The Anthropologist isn’t a film about how to solve climate change. Nor is it designed to convince us climate change is real or to beat its urgency into our heads. It is a film with a few memorable stories about how the shifting climate is affecting humans on Earth. And it is about the value of those stories. By the end, we are not terribly surprised when the daughter goes off to college to pursue a path similar to her mother’s. Like her, we’ve become convinced of the importance of collecting and telling the stories of people whose lives and cultures are being reshaped by climate change.