This January, I visited the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, with the Ohio State Film and Video Society. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend six days at the festival, and in that time, I watched numerous films and documentaries that both caught my attention and sparked my imagination.

On my first night in Park City, I watched Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. This documentary, released in 2018, was directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky. The film is the third in a trio by the directors – the first two films being Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), respectively. All three films explore environmental consequences that result from human influence on and interaction with the Earth. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch explores the concept that the Earth has left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene, an epoch based entirely on human interactions with the Earth, both negative and positive. Narrated by Alicia Vikander and compiling footage from a variety of locations across the world, Anthropocene poses the question: millions of years from now, when future geologists peel back the rock layers of our planet, what histories of mankind will they find?

Suffice it to say, the current additions to the Anthropocene epoch are far from positive. The film is broken into several categories, covering topics that include but are not limited to terraforming, mining, deforestation, and pollution. In each category, several locations are highlighted, with each location somehow contributing to detrimental impact on the environment. Just a small portion of the areas showcased include lithium evaporation ponds in the Atacama Desert, bleached portions of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains, and terrestrial mining machines eroding towns in Germany. From the warmest places on Earth to the coldest, humanity has left its indelible mark, the documentary reveals to us.

This documentary is heavily involved with international affairs. Not only does the film spread across the globe, but it also invites its audience to understand that climate change is a global issue: a human issue. The effects of climate change will ripple across the international community. No country – no matter how developed, wealthy, or internationally connected – will be spared from rising sea levels, erratic fluctuations in weather patterns, or mass extinction of flora and fauna unable to adapt. The content of the documentary urges the audience to take responsibility for mankind’s actions against the Earth, and to make a change before it could be too late.

One of the most powerful scenes in the documentary is the mass burning of ivory that had been taken from poached elephants. Watching the tusks burn, I realized: this was not an effect of global warming. Climate change does not kill elephants and sell their tusks on the black market. Only people are capable of that kind of cruelty. As stewards of our planet, we must work not only to reverse the effects of climate change, but to reverse that mindset of cruelty and superiority. We are all on this planet together, after all – and it’s the only one we’ve got.