Momentos Naturales: 'Nature Moments' Goes to Colombia
By Rebecca Goldfine
After spending a year producing videos about nature in New Englanders' backyards, Bowdoin's Nat and Genie Wheelwright took their project of reconnecting people with nature—via digital media—on the road, to Colombia.
With funding from a Fulbright fellowship, the Wheelwrights were invited last fall to teach a course on how to make nature videos at the Universidad del Valle, in the city of Cali. (They both recently retired from teaching positions at Bowdoin—Nat in biology and Genie in Hispanic studies.)
By the end of eight weeks, their twenty-four students had each completed a short video on some aspect of local natural history. Few of their students had ever made a video before, and only a third had a background in ecology.
"We emphasized to them to choose a topic that was not going to be exotic," Genie said. "We said, 'Truly, just choose something common in your yard.'"
That emphasis on appreciating and illuminating what is nearby, even in a Latin American city of two million people, is central to the project. Both the Maine series, and now Momentos Naturales Colombia, sprang from the Wheelwrights' desire to renew people's awareness of nature, particularly at this moment when so much of it is imperiled. "I feel a sense of urgency about connecting people to nature again," Nat said. "And what we stand to lose in the tropics is ten times the diversity we are going to lose in our country."
But whereas the Nature Moments segments were all written and directed by Nat, and filmed by Nat and cinematographer Wilder Nicholson ’16, Momentos Naturales Colombia were all student-made and in Spanish. None of the students used fancy cameras. Many shot footage with their phones.
The short films focus on a variety of life-forms, from geckos in apartments to birds in urban backyards. Like Nature Moments, they begin and end with common sounds people might not be able to identify. (Nature Moments uses a chickadee whistle; Momentos Naturales starts with a great kiskadee call and ends with a common potoo and coquí frog.)
A distinction between the two series is that the Momentos videos tend to feature more people. "One thing we quickly discovered was that people in Colombia enjoy nature differently. It's much more of a family activity," Nat said. "It's much more likely to involve spreading a blanket in a park and having a communal dinner rather than going on a solitary bird walk."
So the Colombian videos in a sense demonstrate how people might interact with and enjoy nature. Virtually all the student videos show nature through the eyes or explorations of older people, children, couples, or community members.
After the course wrapped up, eight of the student videos were selected to premiere at an international environmental film festival in Cali. Two videos from the Nature Moments series were shown as well.
Lina Marcela Isaza Lopez, a student in the class, said the class helped her as a biologist think about how to best share nature stories with people not familiar with the environment around them.
"Here, in Colombia, we have an exuberant natural wealth," she said, so commonplace, actually, that it becomes easy to tune out. "We have a lot of birds—when you look through the window you can find a couple of beautiful parrots. But the people don’t realize it, and we just pass over them like they don’t exist."
She worked on a video about early-morning bird songs in The Dawn Chorus. "The class made me think about those things that I want to be evident to people," she said. "And to let them know that they are there, that they share a space with us—and above all, that we must learn to live in harmony with the environment."
