TERMINUS (Directed and Edited by Jeremy Hunter Rubingh) is a short project made in collaboration with Olympic National Park. An expanded version is currently in the works. This creative film shines through the perspective of a pair of toddlers and their journey learning about a specific glacier in Olympic National Park that is quickly receding. The storytellers of this piece are two brothers who are also my neighbors. Emerson, age 5, and his little brother Cedar, age 3. I live across the water from these little sailors on my own respective sailboat in Seattle. From our dock, the Olympic Mountains constantly keep us company to the west. They are our lives’ backdrops, as constant as the tides. Sometimes hiding in the fog, sometimes ablaze in neon sunsets, sometimes obscured by smoke. Always an elusive range that feels close but holds such imagination and mystery beyond their isolated summits.
As part of this volunteer project, I adopted a glacier to memorialize through art, in this case a very short film. The Hubert Glacier is on the south side of Mount Olympus and sits at the top of the watershed of the South fork of the Hoh River. The vast biodiversity of this temperate rainforest is dependent on the cold, glacial waters flowing down to the Pacific Ocean from these alpine glaciers. Some of the largest and oldest trees in the world dwell in these ancient forests, their canopies full of life, their understories thick with the resplendent botany of thousands of years of pristine ecology. This is where Cedar and Emerson play in Hubert’s aqua runoff, dumping their little rubber boots out, running through sword fern and hiding in giant red cedar roots, telling us about a glacier’s “toe.”
Produced by Jeremy Hunter Rubingh
PUBLIC TRUST (producer Jeremy Hunter Rubingh) is a feature-length documentary about America’s system of public lands and the fight to protect them. Despite support from voters across the political spectrum, our public lands face unprecedented threats from extractive industries and the politicians in their pockets. Part love letter, part political exposé, Public Trust investigates how we arrived at this precarious moment through three heated conflicts—a national monument in the Utah desert, a mine in the Boundary Waters and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—and makes a case for their continued protection. Watch the full film now: PUBLIC TRUST
Audience Award, MountainFilm; Audience Award, Woods Hole Film Festival; Audience Award, Ashland Independent Film Festival; Big Sky Award, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival; Special Jury Prize Port Townsend Film Festival; Jury Award, Wild and Scenic Film Festival; Green Fire Award, American Conservation Film Festival
Appeared in the “Cleanest Line” and in print in the Fall 2020 Patagonia Journal
WHERE THE WORK GETS DONE by Jeremy H. Rubingh
Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line
“On social media, public lands defense looks like fun—like frolicking on mountain trails and through desert canyons or sipping hot tea before sunrise from the open door of a van. Carefree and cozy in a sleeping bag in a preposterously beautiful campsite—don’t forget to bump the saturation filter.It turns out a lot of the real conservation work is long meetings in fluorescent-lit conference rooms with bad coffee. Impossible agendas wrapped up in emotions, livelihoods and complicated histories. People hammering out differences and finding ways to move forward to protect something we all love, the actual country beneath our feet, the soil, geology, forests, sagebrush, waters and wildlife—in most cases all of this entangled in Indigenous heritage and painful pasts…” Full article here
SUNCOR SUNDOWN
Jeremy Rubingh, of Coast Mountain Creative, was proud to executive produce this project connecting local filmmakers with this campaign throughout 2021 and 2022. Suncor Sundown is focused on community storytelling to help share the story of the most polluted zip code in America, according to the EPA.
Suncor Energy, a Canadian company, runs an oil refinery north of Denver Colorado. Suncor is one of Colorado’s largest emitters of greenhouse gasses, as well as one of the largest emitters of toxic air pollutants, and has been operating without any changes to its operations or pollution controls for years.
In spite of numerous enforcement actions and settlements, Suncor continues to flout air quality laws, putting neighboring communities – who are primarily Latino and low income – at extreme risk. This is their story.
UNACCEPTABLE RISK: Firefighters on the Front Lines of Climate Change
A project in association with The Story Group.
No one knows the changing fire landscape of Colorado better than the men and women on the front lines, our wild land firefighters. The overwhelming consensus is that climate change is quickly creating a dire situation and efforts need to be made to address the issue at its roots immediately. “On a day to day basis, we’re being surprised. And in this business, surprise is what kills people.” So says Don Whittemore, a career firefighter who has battled many of Colorado’s epic fires over the past two decades.
Human-caused climate changes are transforming Colorado’s fire environment, bringing higher temperatures, drier fuels, and diseases to forests. These climate impacts mix with other human pressures to create a volatile situation for firefighters and communities. If current trends continue, we can expect more frequent, larger and more devastating wild fires in Colorado and across the country.