Green Fire Cinema Documentary

Green Fire, a film about Aldo Leopold, at BCAC Saturday, March 24 7 p.m.

Green Fire, the first full-length, high-definition documentary film ever made about legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold, tells about highlights from his extraordinary career, explaining how he shaped conservation and the modern environmental movement. The film also illustrates how Leopold’s vision of a community that cares about both people and land continues to inform and inspire current projects across the country and around the world.

Leopold’s ideas about a “land ethic” and human’s relationship to nature is key to much modern conservation work. Leopold saw that our communities include not just people but all elements of the natural world, such as soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land. Leopold lived and worked at a period in history when people were leaving farms, forests, and small rural towns and losing their direct connections to the land. He saw that treating the natural world with respect would be difficult unless people found ways to stay connected to the natural world. The land ethic evolves as individuals make decisions that affect the community playing a part when deciding how to act as neighbors, voters, consumers, and in many other roles as everyday citizens. Leopold asks each person to see that they must play a part in protecting and preserving a healthy, productive, and beautiful planet. He calls on us to help create an “ecological conscience” - a common sense of what is right and wrong when it comes to how we treat the land. Aldo Leopold wrote “A Sand County Almanac” to encourage better understanding of the many connections between human communities and the natural world and to inspire a sense of personal responsibility to use the land with respect.

Green Fire will be shown at the Basin City Arts Center on Saturday, March 24 at 7 p.m. The film is free and open to the public. Donations are always welcome. The BCAC is a nonprofit organization developing and supporting the arts in the Big Horn Basin. For more information call 568-9346.