In a recent interview on The Ezra Klein Show, in an episode titled “The Art of Noticing — And Appreciating— Our Dizzying World,” the American poet Jane Hirshfield discussed her pronounced shift toward environmental issues and what we might call an overt eco-poetic sensibility. This development was prompted by the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis, of course, but it was also tied to a growing awareness on her part of the staggering inter-connectedness of life on earth. Hirshfield noted that none of this was entirely new — she’d been an active part of the very first Earth Day proceedings back in 1970 and had long had an attraction to nature, in spite of her New York upbringing — but it had become more prominent in her work in recent years as climate change had become a clear and present danger.

Zoe Lucas is a Canadian naturalist who experienced an epiphany in 1971 when she first visited Sable Island, Nova Scotia, a rather large, but extremely narrow spit of land — 40 kilometres long and 2 kilometres across at its widest point — that sits 100 kilometres off the mainland. Lucas had gone to the island to see its famous wild horses, but the experience turned out to be life-changing. She visited the island repeatedly over the next several years, and in the early 1980s she relocated to Sable permanently. Lucas arrived as an art student from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but within a few years she’d become an amateur naturalist —a particularly passionate and committed one. As she’s noted, the thrill of learning things directly, instead of reading about them in books was something she found unbelievably compelling. Lucas has been the island’s sole year-round human inhabitant for over 40 years. Over time, as oil, debris, and especially plastics have washed ashore in greater and greater quantities, wreaking havoc on Sable, its ecosystem, and the waters that surround it, she’s become the island’s steward, as well as a highly respected environmental researcher and sentinel.

Jacquelyn Mills is a talented Canadian filmmaker with a poetic sensibility. Her film Geographies of Solitude is a remarkable account of Zoe Lucas and her profound relationship with Sable Island — an experimental documentary that is “part nature film, part biographical portrait,” as the critic Ben Kenigsberg has noted. At one point in the film we hear audio of Lucas addressing an audience in 2015. “So, I’m not going to give you a straightforward talk about the natural history of Sable Island. This is more about experiencing Sable.” The same could be said of Geographies of Solitude. This is not a conventional film about the natural history of Sable Island. This is a film about experiencing Sable, about experiencing the richness, diversity, and complexity of its ecosystem, about submitting to its majesty, its subtleties, its cruelty, and its peculiar genius, and about the art and science of noticing — and appreciating — its dizzying and awe-inspiring world.

Bon cinéma!

Anthony Kinik
Associate Professor