NEH to fund UB faculty member’s environmental film project

UB faculty member John Fiege has received a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support “The Valley of Ashes,” a new feature documentary project in development that focuses on the disposal of solid waste in New York City and aligns with Fiege’s established portfolio of films about environmental justice and sustainability.

“I am ecstatic that the National Endowment for the Humanities believes in my film and is supporting it,” says Fiege, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study. “NEH is one of the few granting organizations in this country that provides enough resources to make films at a high production level.”

The grant will support a yearlong development process during which Fiege will continue researching, filming, editing and experimenting with various approaches to the story. By the end of the process, he hopes to have a strong work sample to apply for an NEH production grant, which awards up to $700,000. “That’s enough money to make a film the way I’ve always wanted — without most of the usual financial limitations,” Fiege says.

“The Valley of Ashes” evolved from a conversation Fiege had in 2021 with Martin Melosi, an environmental historian at the University of Houston, about the possibility of making a film adaptation of Melosi’s recently published book, “Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City.” Fiege’s current project combines the historical perspective from Melosi’s research with a portrait of efforts already underway in New York City to create a circular economy from a linear economy and a zero-waste society from a throwaway society.

“In New York City, across America and around the world, we humans are literally throwing away Earth’s resources,” Fiege says. “And that system of extraction, consumption and waste is fueling climate change, species extinctions, deforestation, environmental injustice and a whole host of other problems.

“New York City is both a microcosm of America and its own unique laboratory where we can look closely at the particularities of its history and the experiments with alternative ways of thinking about waste in the city.”

Fiege has brought together his background in environmental history and filmmaking for “The Valley of Ashes,” which will focus on the history of waste in New York City and beyond. The story is a history, Fiege says, of asking the wrong question.

“We’ve been asking where to put all the waste we’ve been generating in dramatically increasing quantities,” he says. “Instead, we should be asking how we can redesign our economic systems and ways of living to eliminate waste or transform it into something we need, like soil.”

In the natural world, waste is converted into soil, food and energy that sustains and regenerates life. In human communities, waste merely accumulates, often with toxic effects on human health and climate stability.

“This has to change if we have any hope of dealing with the cascading global environmental crises we face,” Fiege says.

How we tell stories and create media about environmental issues is a focus of Fiege’s creative work and teaching — he is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Environment and Sustainability, and teaches several environmental media courses. He also hosts Chrysalis, an environmental podcast in which he has featured environmental writers and activists, among them Lois Gibbs and Jim Morris, who he interviewed Sept. 26 live on stage at UB.

All of Fiege’s films focus on ecological concerns or environmental justice, including “Slow Season,” which highlights the hardship of crab fishermen in Louisiana following the 2010 BP oil spill, and “Above All Else,” about the resistance in East Texas to the Keystone XL pipeline. The “Valley of the Ashes” continues this work, with the NEH funding allowing him to work at a larger scale than his previous films.

“All of my work asks similar questions about how to transform humanity into a more ecologically balanced presence on this planet, and I’m always looking for new ways to tell that story and inspire others to join in,” Fiege says. “I couldn’t be more excited to now have NEH on this path with me.”

But the NEH was not the only important supporter of the project — Fiege also credits support from UB with helping to get “the project off the ground.” He received a small grant from the Humanities Institute and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, as well as continuing support from the Department of Media Study and the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The support from UB has given me the confidence to pursue major funding for this project — and it paid off. I would not attempt a film at this scale without this kind of support,” Fiege notes.

Fiege’s work has also benefited from his collaboration with Kacey Stewart, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Environment and Sustainability (EVS). Fiege and Stewart have collaborated for the past couple of years on a film focused on ecological restoration and regeneration in Buffalo, which is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and is nearing the end of production. For this project, Fiege and Stewart are collaborating with Melissa White, a two-time Grammy-winning violinist and professor in the Department of Music.

Stylistically, the Buffalo film is much different than “The Valley of the Ashes,” but both films focus on the question of how to transform destructive industrial systems and practices from our past and present into regenerative and ecologically bountiful ways for humans to live on this Earth into the future.

With the success of the Buffalo project collaboration, Fiege brought Stewart onto “The Valley of Ashes,” where Stewart has been contributing to the project with grant-writing support.

“I love movies and I approach the revision process as a viewer,” Stewart says. “I ask how our audience might view this scene or understand this story.”

For Stewart, being able to work closely with an affiliate faculty filmmaker is “just part of what makes the work of EVS so exciting. Scholars are often sequestered in their own discipline, writing for a highly specialized audience, but I see the work I do with John as a bridge between the amazing work scientists and activists are doing, and the broader public,” Stewart says.

“Film can serve as a perfect vehicle to communicate the solutions scientists are coming up with. The medium allows for really broad impacts, which in my eyes can be a catalyst for change,” he continues. “The urgency of our current environmental crisis requires collaboration to generate lasting and meaningful solutions.”

Stewart explains that while science is crucial to understand climate change, thinking of it as a purely scientific issue may be a reason that we have yet to act in accordance with the science.

The environmental humanities help to complete the puzzle by focusing on questions without easy answers — questions of meaning and value. “It's my hope that the study of these less tangible perennial questions can help close the gap and lead to action,” Stewart says. He hopes his collaboration with Fiege will bring these questions to a broader audience to encourage widespread change.

With the support of NEH and UB, Fiege is enthusiastic about what he can accomplish with “The Valley of the Ashes.”

“My hope in making this film,” he says, “is to tell a compelling and powerful story about where our massive waste problem comes from and what a path to a zero-waste world could look like.”