Observer

5/29/25 - A reminder to look closely at the world

Observer square, Greenland / credit: Wicked Delicate Films

Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

There is a reason we hold in high regard a person’s “powers” of observation. Observation is neither passive nor casual. It is the active function of awareness, one of the most vital human traits. To be fully aware is to be fully present and attentive, self-reflective and clear-minded, biased toward nothing and conscious of everything.

That kind of enlightened awareness is both spiritual and cognitive, and thus it’s celebrated and sought by all of us in one way or another. We muddle along - “You see, but you do not observe,” as Sherlock says - wishing we had the power to articulate our lives in their true color and full complexity. I think part of the reason we spend so much of our lives being entertained by movies, TV, books, etc., is because the creators of those narratives explain the world to us with observations we need to hear, or need to hear repeated. The best observational comedians make a career out of compressing wit and wisdom into a few insightful punchlines.

An observer is a window onto the world, and their observations are invitations to see the world as they see it.

I tell you all this because I received an invitation a couple months ago to join a gathering that Maine-based documentary filmmaker Ian Cheney and his team at Wicked Delicate Films had assembled to watch his new feature-length film, Observer, and to spend the day together exploring the question of what it means to observe. Cheney is a brilliant guy (Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning) but very modest, and he’s an introvert who knows how to throw an interesting party. I arrived to find a wonderful group of 25 artists, writers, scientists, educators, craftspeople, and more, all with interesting things to say. The day together was fun and fascinating, and the film is extraordinary.

Here’s the trailer:

And here is a summary:

In OBSERVER, filmmaker Ian Cheney embarks on an experiment in which he brings a series of keen-eyed observers - scientists, artists, a hunter - to locations around the world, often without telling them where they are going, and asks them simply to describe what they see. What unfolds is a deep exploration and celebration of the power of observation: what happens when you find new ways to sense and perceive the world around you? With customary whimsy and a small painted red square that Cheney brings on every journey, the film is an invitation to viewers to find beauty and meaning in even the most quotidian of locales.

Observer runs deeper than this cheerful summary would suggest, in large part because its eclectic band of observers are so articulate and interesting. The film is in eight parts, each part following a different observer or pair of observers as they explore a place that’s (in most cases) new to them:

• A writer/biologist and geologist hike through an ancient necropolis in Sicily and trade notes on Earth history;

• A bioengineer wanders the back alleys of Seoul finding hidden worlds of microbes to examine with his folding microscope;

• A husband and wife, both biologists, tour the Atacama Desert and discuss the miracle of life on Earth;

• A quantum physicist strolls along a small Maine stream and explains the entanglement of everything;

• An artist and herpetologist drive the U.S. southwest and find the small things that bring them joy;

• A poet from Mississippi throws a dart and ends up in Greenland, experiencing a very different vision of summer;

• A naturalist takes us on the path he’s walked every day for 28 years to document hundreds of seasonal changes;

• A blind birder/sound recordist listens to a landscape he’s never heard and finds music that thrills him;

• And, in a brief epilogue, a hunter and childhood friend of the director sits by that small Maine stream in the falling snow and helps us connect to the quiet transformation all around us.

Observer squares, Maine / credit: Wicked Delicate Films

After each section, the film revisits the stream - in the forest where Cheney played as a child - as a palate cleanser. It’s an opportunity for the camera to trace the stream through all four season, and to play with the bright red frames that Observer uses to spark conversations about what it means to observe. Cheney offers, in quiet voice-over, wise notes on what it means to observe.

The film has a simple, clear, deliberate structure, much like the bright red frames it highlights. The magic of the film, we’re meant to see, is what’s inside the frame. The stream flows, and each frame captures - if only for a moment - a glimpse of the astonishing world.

Observer asks us to reconnect with nature but is not precious about it. We’re asked to see the world as it is, whether universes of microbes in Seoul’s puddles, a hellish open pit mine in Chile, or the way we tend to imagine the wilds of Greenland without its people. There’s joy and lightheartedness because our observers experience wonder and awe, and there’s grief because our observers are honest.

sound recordist Juan Pablo Culasso, Senegal / credit: Wicked Delicate Films

This is not a film about science, but science is often at its heart. Modern scientific inquiry is the most refined observational process our species has conjured up. Awareness and curiosity are converted into hypotheses, theories, facts, tools, products, and cultural shifts, all of which in turn generate more scientific inquiry.

I don’t necessarily intend “most refined” as a compliment. After all, if the glories of pure science continue to lead inexorably to the dark arts of applied science that decimate the living world in the Anthropocene, then it will have been a mistake. Science is servant and tool of this culture, not its muse. Which means that the innumerable cultures in human history, past and present, which have observed in intimate detail the nature of nature, and did so without burning the world down, have more rational powers of observation.

Yet the scientists in this film offer us the twin gifts of expertise and childlike wonder. The awareness that underpins good observational skills is fed by deep knowledge. A career in geology allows an geologist to stroll into a strange Sicilian valley and tell its story, but only if she’s open-minded enough to puzzle it out. When they do, as Cheney said in an interview with Science, we can see ourselves in them:

To see scientists in the midst of the process of discovering a place—the joy, confusion, disorientation of that—helps us understand that science is a deeply human endeavor, and that there’s no hard line between us and [researchers]. Just as scientists are humans, so, too, can every human be a little bit a scientist. Observation, for me, is the most fundamental way of of exploring that.

geologist Marcia Bjornerud, Sicily / credit: Wicked Delicate Films

There’s a question that quietly underpins the film: Can we observe the world without affecting it? Thanks to a delightful conversation with physicist Jacques Pienaar in Part 4, there’s a quantum answer for that: No. Everything is entangled. The stream seen through the red frame is not the same as the unframed or unseen stream. I don’t claim to understand quantum reality, but observation, as I noted, is not passive, and we cannot separate ourselves from what we observe.

And I’ll suggest an ecological answer to the question: That ship has sailed. There is no longer a future in which acts of human awareness do not impact the Earth. Thanks in large part to the impacts of applied science - advances in medicine, agriculture, energy, chemistry - we live now in a 1:1 relationship between human behavior and the health of the planet. We can stay on our current path and build a (temporary) abstract world atop the ruins of the living one, or we can listen to the observations of our better angels and work to save all we can and heal what remains. Either way, our observations and the actions they inspire will tilt the planet.

The red squares shining strangely in the green Maine forest, a brown Senegalese coast, or on a frozen white Minnesota lake, are a pretty good metaphor for the best we might manage in our modern relationship with nature. They’re brilliant, attentive, intriguing, reflective, and insightful, if somewhat artificial, mildly toxic, and intensely self-referential. The multitude of red squares are like successive frames in the film and like the deepening layers of human meaning it evokes: the artist’s eye (or ear), the camera’s lens, our digital screens, our own eyes, and the thousand ideas (cultural and personal) which which we frame what we experience.

In looking, I find myself leaning toward and then away from the red frames. They’re an invitation to both the macro and the micro, as we step back and see them as small curiosities in the larger landscape we’re suddenly more aware of, or as we step forward to focus on the small corners of life we might have otherwise missed.

The frames are like the glass windows which encase our boxed-in lives - home, transport, work, digital - and which we use to frame the world. Each one is a paradox of freedom and limitations. We can only see what we allow ourselves to see. Reality is defined far too often by which way we’re looking - outward or inward - but we forget that it is entirely strange in human history to be looking at the world rather than living in it. And when the world we’re looking at is increasingly human, we forget what living in the full world means. Still, though, every glance outward is an invitation to shift back into awareness, to step through and rejoin what is real.

And that’s the greatest gift of Observer. I’m grateful for Ian Cheney’s extraordinary powers of observation, for the invitation to join the gathering, and for the ensemble cast of observers who make the film so wonderful, but as Cheney noted in a recent post on his Substack,

Wicked Delicate

, what is so vital about the film is its reminder that we are all observers living in relation to - within, really - the astonishing world:

Let Observer be a chance to admire some great observers, sure, but even more so let it be an invitation for you to go observe: only you sense what you sense.

Observer is still being screened around the country. Check the schedule here or, better yet, host a screening wherever you live. This film deserves the broadest possible audience.

hunter Chad Benner, Maine / credit: Wicked Delicate Films

(p.s. I’m reminded of another documentary film I discussed here, the miraculous All That Breathes, in which two brothers in Delhi care for birds falling from terrible skies, fighting a too-large tide of death while also inspiring a love of life.)

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From

Bryan Pfeiffer

at Chasing Nature, “The Extinction of Virtue,” a good hard look at the fate of the Poweshiek Skipperling, a small critically endangered butterfly, and an even harder look at why we don’t care enough. Bryan writes powerfully and from an incredible depth of knowledge and understanding. His photography is amazing. He is, to stay on this week’s theme, one of our finest observers.

From

Michelle Nijhuis

and Conservation Works, “Block, Bridge, Build,” a mostly uplifting short post on a strategy for conservation-minded folks in this new era of outright hostility from the federal government toward all that is good and Earthly.

From NestWatch, some advice on what kinds of nesting materials to leave out for birds, and what materials are actually dangerous. I mention this because a recent study found that nearly all pet fur left out for nesting birds contained flea-and-tick insecticides.

From Yale e360, among all the poison pills in the giant budget bill awaiting a Senate vote here in the U.S. is a provision that could massively increase one of our worst civilizational habits: growing food for fuel. As I’ve written, corn ethanol is a grotesque product that increases emissions, destroys habitat, poisons waterways, and more. Now, in the new budget bill, there is an industry-supported incentive to produce biofuels for aviation fuel, even though it will make both the climate and biodiversity crises worse.

From

Alexander C. Kaufman

and Field Notes, the prospect of biomining minerals (using microbes to extract metals from waste ore) has taken a moderate step forward.

From Biographic, a video story about a project in the Great Plains to observe with dozens of solar-powered cameras over many years how the Platte River watershed is changing under human influence. “As scientists, we can’t be everywhere. We can’t go back in time. We can’t stand at a creek for days on end and watch it,” one expert says. “We miss so much. Imagery is a way to observe a place in time scales that is just not possible in other ways.”

Thanks to

Amanda Royal

and Earth Hope, here’s a lovely short video about a man in Boston who has been rescuing/relocating snowy owls from Logan Airport for the last 43 years.