The face of the environment: environmental human rights on screen

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines eco-documentaries that employ the ethics of the face to engage with the notion of a universal human right to a healthy environment. Climate Refugees (Nash, dir 2010) and I Bought a Rainforest (Searle and Woodward, dir 2014) use close-ups of the human face to bear witness to environmental damage. They each emphasise a shared human right to resources and a safe environment, but in the process often enact colonial discourses that I Bought a Rainforest begins to critique. Terra (Arthus-Bertrand and Pitiot, dir 2015) uses the nonhuman animal face to emphasise an equivalency between human and nonhuman animals in their shared environmental vulnerabilities. Hija de la Laguna (Daughter of the Lake, Cabellos, dir 2015) initially withholds the face to depict the personhood of the environment itself from an Indigenous perspective. These different approaches to the face highlight anthropocentric tensions in the environmental human rights approach to ecological ethics.