Event
Old Growth Forest: Nature's Biotic Water Pump
A New England Forests film, directed by naturalist, local nature documentary filmmaker, and friend of Real Art Ways, Ray Asselin. Old Growth Forest: Nature’s Biotic Water Pump is the next film in Asselin’s New England Forests series for America 250.
The free screening will take place on Monday, February 23, at Simsbury Public Library and is co-sponsored by the Simsbury Grange and Simsbury Land Trust.
The film will be followed by a Q&A with Ray Asselin and Trinity College Professor and Hartford County’s Old Growth Forest Network Coordinator, Susan A. Masino.
Register here to attend.
Ray has screened various projects at RAW over the years, including MARVEL OF SEEDS, THE LOST FORESTS OF NEW ENGLAND, and the BEAVER POND WILDLIFE series.
Have you ever thought about where fresh water comes from? How it gets here? Yes, rainfall brings it, but do you know how and why rain falls across the breadth of the land? Or possibly, why it doesn’t?
For decades now, we’ve been hearing considerable discussion of how greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, cause climate change. What has been almost totally ignored is the effect that alteration of land cover has on our climate. It’s not just about carbon, and never was. The greenhouse gas effect is just one half of the climate change story. Land cover change is the other half, and just as important.
Keeping the land hydrated is crucial to terrestrial life, but that lesson has been learned the hard way. Many cultures have destroyed the very thing that makes the land habitable… forests. Places such as Egypt, Africa, Australia, and others have become deserts because their forests were cut to the point where the hydrological cycle was disrupted; the soil dried out and could not recover on its own (ie, it became a “landscape trap”).
That destructive behavior is still happening today in places like Canada, America, Chile, and the Amazon, putting those places also on the trajectory to desertification.
This film, together with “The Return of Old Growth Forests,” explains the role that forests play in making Earth a place where life thrives.
