The new documentary “America’s Amazon” — a 51-minute portrait of the 300-square-mile Mobile-Tensaw Delta written and co-produced by veteran environmental journalist Ben Raines — screens at Mobile’s Saenger Theatre on Dec. 3, before airing four times on Alabama Public Television in January.
The film drew positive notices at its public premiere at the Fairhope Film Festival on Nov. 8, and its subject is vast: a quarter-million acres of rivers, swamps and bayous stretching from the Causeway north past Grove Hill, covering some of the most biodiverse terrain in North America.
Breathtaking footage, hard questions
Raines spent 13 years covering the environment for the Mobile Press-Register before becoming executive director of the Weeks Bay Foundation, and the film draws heavily on stories from that decade-plus of reporting. The imagery ranges from overhead shots of meandering creeks to fog-banked stream banks, alligators, manatees on their seasonal journeys from Florida, and recently hatched pelicans.
There are rarities as well: an endangered Red Hills Salamander coaxed from its burrow by a biologist, and the Rusty Gravedigger, a crawfish species presumed extinct until Raines himself dug one from a bayou near a Daphne sewage treatment plant. The film also revisits his discovery of a 15,000-year-old underwater forest miles offshore in the Gulf, and a hollow cypress more than 27 feet in diameter spared by loggers only because it was worthless as timber. Baldwin County developer Pat Ogburn even guides a boat through the trees to a secluded “hidden lake.”
A delta under strain
At its midpoint, the documentary turns serious: more than a century of logging runoff, encircling development, upstream mercury and arsenic discharges, and dams that have severed migratory fish from historic spawning grounds. Native mussel species and much of the lower delta’s seagrass have been lost in our lifetime, and local ospreys appear two to three times less productive than their Florida Panhandle counterparts.
“We have laws on the books that address these issues but they aren’t enforced in any meaningful way,” Raines said after a recent screening, noting that ADEM is underfunded by the state. He sees hope in the hundreds of millions of dollars that could flow to the coast from BP oil spill criminal fines.
After the Mobile premiere, Raines hopes legislators will watch — and that the film becomes part of the state’s grade-school curriculum. “The delta is an incredible resource and the time is ripe to make some changes,” he said. “I think we have a world class piece of nature here and we need to do what’s required to protect and conserve it.”