What is humankind's role in nature? Is there such a thing as Nature? What does the word mean? Are human beings simply destroyers of biodiversity and balance or do we have another purpose? In The Edge of Nature, Oscar-Nominated, Emmy-Winning director Josh Fox (Gasland, Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock) isolates himself in the woods amidst a dreamscape of rising worldwide crises.

After a harrowing bout with COVID, Josh isolates himself in a one room cabin in the forest for four seasons. Everything in the film is done in isolation: from the building of the structures to the harvesting of foraged plants to discovering the principles of the forest. The pandemic calls into question everything that our civilization has done to dominate the natural world. The plants tell the history of the land—colonialism is literally rooted into the ground. 

Surrounded by the descendants of the Native American genocide, Josh investigates his own history as son and grandson of Jewish holocaust survivors who created a safe haven among the trees. Like a Coronavirus cocoon, the woods become protection and imagination. Nature itself is a call to action, a value system and a mystery that we must protect.

Watch the trailer on Vimeo.

108 minutes

Part Basho, part Thoreau, part Rachel Carson, Josh Fox finds healing and meaning in the woodlands of Pennsylvania, and masterfully blurs the boundary between humans and nature during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. As Pete Seeger and his banjo ring like a familiar heartbeat through the film, Fox denounces the mass killing in the colonial and modern United States of native beavers, elk, black bears, passenger pigeons, and Indigenous peoples, and how the technocratic plutocrats of today have continued this social and ecological pillaging, even as humanity had a brief but meaningful respite during the pandemic.

—Alberto Arenas, Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Education, University of Arizona, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Environmental Education