Butler's Cinema Scene

 “COMMON GROUND” My rating: B(At the Glenwood Arts)

195 minutes | No MPAA rating:

Exhaustive and a bit exhausting, the doc “Common Ground” makes an encyclopedic case for regenerative agriculture.

If that sounds like an earnest science lecture…well, it is, sort of.  But the filmmakers (Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell) knock themselves out working to keep our attention over nearly two hours, filling the screen with arthouse cinematography and a small army of familiar Hollywood faces (Laura Dean, Rosario Dawson, Donald Glover, Jason Mom, Ian Somerhalder).

Mostly, though, there’s an avalanche of information that will convince most of us that modern agricultural methods are taking us down the highway to hell.  It’s time to change our ways.

The plot, if you will, consists of an opening section about the dangers of climate change that will leave most quaking in their boots, followed by examples of how we can turn the problem around and save ourselves and our planet.

We’re told early on that this is a movie about dirt. Well, soil to be more precise. “if the soil dies, we die.”

We meet Gabe Brown, a North Dakota farmer who is a  champion of the new agriculture. A big beefy guy in coveralls, Brown is also an erudite spokesman, pointing out how his land — farmed to minimize the loss of topsoil to wind and water — looks like an oasis compared two that of his neighbor who uses conventional methods and ends up with huge patches of unproductive dirt.

The neighbor’s system, we’re told, is working to kill things, while Brown’s is working in harmony and synchrony with nature, creating profit while enhancing the ecosystem for future generations.

Over the course of the film the same theme is hammered home: no tilling , use cover crops that return nurtrients to the soil, eliminate or reduce chemical use, integrate animals into cropland (the animals eat weeds and fertilize with droppings — you don’t have to eat them but you need them to be grazing).

“Common Ground” reaches far and wide.  There’s a section on Native American farming practices, on the contributions of black scientist George Washington Carver (who advocated the use of nitrogen-fixing cover crops to replenish soil) and of African women who, coming to his country as slaves, introduced crop seeds they had intentionally braided into their hair before the horrible sea voyage. That last one is a revelation.

A big chunk of the film is devoted to roasting Monsanto for promoting the cancer-causing herbicide glyphosate (sold commercially as Roundup). Particular attention is paid to the unfortunate fates of whistleblowers and investigative scientists and journalists who have dared challenge the chemical giant.

The bee die-offs? Yeah, that’s in here, too.  Pesticides are the culprit.

We even get into the mechanics of the annual Farm Bill, which to date has barely acknowledged the existence of restorative farming techniques, 

Factory farming of food animals is addressed. It’s an ugly business (don’t worry…no gross-out visuals here), but the film also points out that most of the new meat substitutes are crammed with plants grown with chemicals with names you can’t pronounce.

Woody Harrellson narrates a segment about hemp.  No comment necessary.

if there are moments when the viewer feels manhandled by the unyielding crush of information, “Common Ground” does assert there’s hope. 

We just have to change our ways.

| Robert W. Butler