Each summer for more than half a century, the US ecologist and biologist David Inouye has returned to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. Working out of a small cabin, he examines how life is persisting and changing in the high-altitude mountain meadow, focusing on the relationship between wildflowers and hummingbirds. As To Know a Place details, this pilgrimage has become a family affair, with his son Brian and granddaughter Miyoko joining the annual excursion to help measure, count, observe and share how time and climate are shaping life in the meadow. The Colorado-based director Brendan Young’s documentary is a stirring portrait of both place and family. Capturing the sweeping beauty of the region, the film explores why the often-exciting, ever-evolving and always-humbling business of understanding how life works on even a small slice of Earth is a ceaseless pursuit.
Director: Brendan Young
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Ecology and environmental sciences
Join endangered whooping cranes on their perilous migratory path over North America
6 minutes
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Knowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes
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Architecture
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
14 minutes
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Home
Life moves slowly in a Romanian mountain village, shaped by care and the seasons
13 minutes
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Environmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
‘Do worms cry?’ – and other questions collected from the mind of a curious child
4 minutes
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Nature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
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Earth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes