Southampton Arts Center To Screen 'Racing Extinction'

Citizens of Southampton will have the chance to learn about the need to save the planet.

The Southampton Arts Center will host an outdoor screening of the documentary, “Racing Extinction” on Thursday, July 7, at 8:30 p.m. The screening is a partnership between the Arts Center, the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, and React to Film. The screening is free to the public and will feature a musical performance by Kevin Russell Kaye.

“Racing Extinction” comes from Academy Award-winning director Louie Psihoyos (“The Cove”), who assembled a team of activists and artists to search the globe and help protect the world’s endangered species. The documentary also discovers the world’s most dangerous black markets and the link between carbon emissions and species extinction.

Speaking about the process of putting the film together, Mr. Psihoyos said the project took years to make and was not without struggle.

“They say docs are never really finished, they are abandoned. Filmmakers run out of time and money,” Mr. Psihoyos said. “I was tinkering with the film just last week, after the film was ‘finished’ we lit up the Vatican with endangered species for Pope Frances, a very historical event so we tried adding that in to the end for a screening we did for Italian Parliament last week. I’ve got to sit with this new version a few weeks and see how it feels. I’m not ready to abandon it just yet.”

Mr. Psihoyos said he was motivated to make “Racing Extinction” after reading two books, the first being “Terra” by Michael Novacek, a paleontologist for the American Museum of Natural History. “Terra” discussed how humanity is killing off thousands of species before there is even a chance to record their existence.

“He wrote that we are at the beginning of a dangerous new chapter in Earth’s history,” Mr. Psihoyos said. “An epoch paleontologists began calling the Anthropocene, which means ‘The Age of Man,’ where mankind’s actions are causing the 6th Great Extinction in the planet’s history.”

When comparing this to Earth’s last great extinction—the dinosaurs 65 million years ago—Mr. Psihoyos said Mr. Novacek claimed “this new epoch could be just as devastating to life on the planet. But this time around, Novacek said, humanity had become the asteroid.”

The second book was “A Reef in Time” by John Veron. That book talked about the history of the Great Barrier Reef and a shocking fact about the reef.

“He talks about how the planet always loses the reefs right before a mass extinction event; reefs are very sensitive to CO2 and temperature change,” Mr. Psihoyos said. “Veron wrote that we’re losing all the reefs now because CO2 causes acidification and that we are in fact, like Michael’s book argued, at the dawn of the Earth’s 6th Great Extinction. A chill went through me. I run a nonprofit organization called the Oceanic Preservation Society. We had been looking for another big film project, and I realized I had just found it.”

Mr. Psihoyos says that all hope is not lost and that all that’s needed from a mere 10 percent of the world’s population is one action.

“By far and away the largest factor in this mass extinction is the habitat destruction caused by the raising of animals for human consumption. If you want to save the planet, modify your diet. All protein comes from plants anyway, and eating a plant-based diet is better for your own health, better for the environment and obviously better for animals.”

Mr. Psihoyos believes that a plant-based diet has grown in popularity. His next project, executive produced by Academy Award-winning director James Cameron, will be about athletes that follow the vegan diet. Such sports stars include tennis’s Venus and Serena Williams, nine-time Olympic gold medal-winner Carl Lewis, and UFC fighter Nate Diaz.

The work of Mr. Psihoyos has made a huge impact on environmental awareness before, as “The Cove” has made some events shift into motion.

“The impact of ‘The Cove,’ was like weaponized art,” he said. “Audiences were laughing, crying, cheering and then asking what they could do to help. We now have over a million followers on social media and six years later, it’s still growing.”

A similar feeling is with Mr. Psihoyos in regards to “Racing Extinction.”

“It feels like a dream to have our messages be seen and effect people all around the world. Thirty-six million people around the world in 220 countries and territories saw the film on the first weekend launch. People all around the world write and tell us the movie has changed their lives. But we’re seeing the most change now on the policy side. We’ve partnered with Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions for the impact campaign. Working with other groups, we’ve closed down loopholes that allowed for the import of endangered species into the U.S., which, unbelievably, is the world’s second largest market. But we need to reach a lot more people to get to the tipping point, that magic 10 percent number. We were invited to over 200 film festivals but unfortunately we can’t attend them all. My organization only has just five employees. We’re still working on campaign issues as well as the next film and much of my time is spent fundraising. Changing the world is costly, but worth every penny.”

“Racing Extinction” will be screened outdoors at the Southampton Arts Center, 26 Jobs Lane, Southampton, on Thursday, July 7, at 8:30 p.m. Admission to the event is free. Go to southamptonartscenter.org for more information.