I'm almost overwhelmed sometime by the beauty of the world when I have a camera in my hands, because I have the ability to like, journal some of this extreme beauty. My name is Nick Tucker, I work for the Center for Environmental filmmaking at American University. And I'm passionate about documentary filmmaking, especially documentaries that focus on environmentalism and conservation.
For most of history, for most of human history, humans had to adapt to our natural ecosystem to the wild world around us. But now, for the first time in human history, we're having to figure out how to treat nature to deal with us humans. I think it's an important concept to embrace that everywhere is the environment, and that everywhere is an ecosystem. Like human communities, even the densest urban area is its own ecosystem. And it has its own needs, whether that be diversity of organisms, or people or nutrients, in a similar fashion to a wild ecosystem. Science is so technical, and people often get bogged down in jargon, and formulas and these tough things. And I studied science as an undergraduate, and I was really passionate about what I was studying, Natural Conservation, specifically Conservation Biology. But there's a lot of concepts that are super difficult to convey just through speaking. So I think film is the most powerful medium to express environmental values and conservation ethic-- is because it's the most engaging artistic medium, and it works a lot like our memory does with images in combination with sound and we process watching films almost like looking back at that memory. So it can really help. It's always helped me and gotten me psyched about animals in particular, because you can see how animals live their lives in a very unique perspective. Like in a photo, you can only see this snapshot of an animal your imagination has to do a lot of the work about how the animal lives, moves, and functions. But if you get enough footage of an animal, you can actually create a pretty cool picture of animals life history. The goal of my work, and what I want people to take away from my work, and the work of other environmental filmmakers, is that nature's worth saving.
