Questions for a Dinosaur (Video)

I struggled for many years to have productive conversations about the climate crisis; conversations that went beyond politics and nihilism, where me and my conversant could articulate for each other what exactly it feels like to live during this time of transition. What does it feel like, this slow loss of familiarity, this existential uncertainty on a global scale? I couldn’t have this conversation because I didn’t have the language for it. Didn’t have the language to describe this new experience of being a body on a warming planet. To build a framework for what language might look like, I began researching Earth’s history of past mass extinctions, including the extinction of the Dinosaurs.

While making Questions For a Dinosaur (9 min, 2017), I had hoped to gain wisdom from one who had already experienced a changing climate. But dinosaurs are extinct, and instead of talking to a Triceratops, I soon realized I was having a conversation with myself. The kind of conversation I was struggling to have with others. Through an evolving series of questions, I asked and tried to answer, when I am fearful about the climate crisis, what do I feel fearful for exactly? This film is an articulation of the ambient eco-anxieties that are often left unsaid. And in saying, maybe we can learn to be less afraid, and more prepared to face the present for what it is, and the future for what it might become.

Talking to myself helped me better talk to others, and these questions have given birth to more questions, and more questions, and hopefully even more questions beyond those.