TRUE FALSE HOT COLD

A Documentary Series About Climate, Beliefs and Better Conversations.

CHAPTER 1: YODELING / WHO WE ARE

  • First, a citation: the opinion poll we mention is Yale University’s annual “Climate Opinion Map”

    Then, a disclaimer: We're not data analysts, and we did not dive into the methodology of this survey or take a position on its validity. We simply took it as a given that something was making this county look like an outlier in its beliefs, and then imagined that behind the data was a more nuanced, human story about how beliefs are formed. This idea forms the engine for the entire series

CHAPTER 2: CLIMATE OPINIONS / DESERT CATTLE

  • The communities here live sandwiched between forested mountains which (usually) receive a lot of winter snow, and a flat, dry desert. In summer, the ranchers are granted rights to graze cattle on the fertile mountain meadows managed by the government. During other months, they must make do on their own land and the sparse public grazing land in the deserts. This means a lot of effort is spent moving cattle from one feeding range to another.

CHAPTER 3: YOUR CONNECTION WITH NATURE / FARMING

  • Many of the subjects we interviewed have hunting trophies prominently visible in their homes. For a first look at how different beliefs form in different contexts, you could ask yourself why these trophies might seem ironic and incongruous during a conversation about the sanctity of nature to a person who has no experience with hunting, but would seem the opposite in a community where this is a common marker of loving the outdoors.

CHAPTER 4: THE DROUGHT / SENIOR CITIZEN DANCE

  • Route 10 in Emery County passes through several small towns of 100-1000 people (Moving north, they are Emery, Moore, Ferron, Clawson, Castle Dale, Orangeville, Lawrence, Huntington, Cleveland and Elmo). Our story mostly takes place in these towns, and the farms, deserts, and forests which surround them. Most towns have their own mayor, library, and churches, but they also share traditions, family names and ideals, as well as some bigger community features, like a high school, courthouse, and public pool.

CHAPTER 5: HIDDEN MOTIVES / LASSO TRAINING

  • Whether you agree with it or not, here is a pretty clearly articulated explanation for why some are dubious of climate change panic, from Reddit:

    “The climate always changes and always will. That’s how dynamic systems work. What we have now is communists latching on to the fact of constant climate change and using it as a cudgel to further their goals of the destruction of all that is good in life and the subjugation of the human race. The planet will be fine. Communists are the real threat.” - u/Dalovindj - r/conservative

CHAPTER 6: MISS EMERY COUNTY / TRUST

  • We tried to gather a diversity of ages for our interviews; youth were especially hard to find, often being busy with farm work, summer jobs, church events, or travel. They also were less interested in taking a strong position on the climate debate. Whether that reveals a more moderate attitude to climate from younger people, or their just being more wary about talking to strangers on camera about controversial topics, we're not sure.

    For what it’s worth, we also looked for a diversity of ethnicities, but apart from Mr Joe Begay who literally everyone told us to speak to and we did, Emery County is a mostly white area.

CHAPTER 7: WOODSHOP / IS IT HUMAN CAUSED?

  • Some early viewers asked about the ethics of putting information on screen that I might believe to be false or misleading, without pushing back on it during the conversation. It's a good question. I guess my instinct though is that ultimately, when interviewing a person who is not in a position of power - just a regular citizen, as opposed to a powerful politician, business figure or political leader - there's more long-term relational value in respectfully listening, than there is in interjecting with a fact-check.

CHAPTER 8: WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN? / JUNIOR LIVESTOCK COMPETITION

  • My question about defining climate change wasn’t meant as a gotcha, it was a genuine realization a good way into filming, that although we all have strong opinions about issues, our opinions are often formed without, or prior to, much technical knowledge. This is true regardless of your ideologies. There are some fun experiments about how revealing people's lack of detailed knowledge of a topic might make them more open to learning about it, but is also evidence for a deep cognitive inaccuracy about the basis of our knowledge.

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

CHAPTER 9: THE COAL QUESTION / RODEO

  • While interviewing, we noticed how certain phrases were regularly repeated. And I don't just mean the sentiment... I mean almost the same exact words were said by many different people many times over. One of the most common was a version of "We should shut down the coal power plants" to teach people the value of coal. Who creates these phrases, and how do they spread? Shared language is like an ID for membership in a group, whether it's geographic or ideological. They're present in all communities, whatever their beliefs.

CHAPTER 10: SIGN POSTING / OPINIONS ON ENVIRONMENTALISTS

  • Environmental groups seem to be an almost universally disliked entity in Emery County, and this is regardless of people's opinions about climate change. Even some of the strongest believers in environmental causes feel that green groups are doing a bad job connecting with locals. They suggested that policies being pushed by these organizations have been developed without buy-in from the groups who actually live and work in the area, leading to impractical proposals and self-interested motivations.

CHAPTER 11: FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN / ECONOMIC REALITIES

  • A little context to this scene: There are monthly “Public Land Council” meetings with representatives from farming, power generation, the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, county leaders, and more. From their website: “The Public Lands Council will be a forum for open and positive discussion of natural resource/public land issues.” Topics might be everything from water usage during a drought to people illicitly using drugs in the national forest. When we were filming, a large fire was burning in the nearby mountains.

CHAPTER 12: KIDS GOING SHOPPING / RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE

  • There is a well-documented perception gap between how extreme an opposing groups views are, and how extreme we THINK their views are; we tend to greatly overestimate how widely we actually differ. That leads to a gap about how our different neighbors feel about us. One of the most poignant moments of the shoot was realizing that although some rural locals might not have particularly negative views of city dwellers, they were likely to think that city dwellers had extremely negative views of them.

CHAPTER 13: UNGERMANNS / ARE YOU POLITICAL?

  • I just know that when conservatives talk about having more common sense, liberals freak out about how the opposite seems so obviously true to them… this is a good reminder that all people hold their beliefs with as much strength as the next person, and the beliefs feel as logically coherent to them. But ask yourself, of all the thousands of beliefs you hold, what are the chances you are right about every opinion you have… And yet, how often do you change your mind?

Intermission - A Conversation Between the Filmmakers

When screening the project, we usually also participate in Q&A sessions or moderated conversations with a host. Often in these sessions, we are able to offer audiences a lot more context and personal clarity about how we made this project and why we made it in the way we did. In order to replicate this, Ben and Colby (the director and producer) recorded a chat that covers a lot of the same ground as our live events do. Totally optional.

CHAPTER 14: KARL’S HYDROGEN LAB / SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE?

  • For someone who relies on a weather app to tell them if it’s going to rain, science is the only useful system to assess changing weather patterns. But some of the families in Emery County have been living on the land here for more than a hundred years, so they have a longer term lived experience of the local climate. This affects the kinds of evidence that is compelling - if you have a memory of your grandfather telling you about an extreme drought followed by a very wet winter, you might be justifiably dubious of a scientist saying that the current weather is unprecedented.

CHAPTER 15: THE TRUE STATE OF THE WORLD / GONE FISHING

  • Only 34% of Americans have confidence in the news media. But this doesn’t stop it convincing people that the world is getting worse. The reality is more complicated: Deaths of despair are rising in the USA, and poverty and hunger are rising after massive historic declines. Humans also live 4 decades longer than we did 100 years ago, although average life expectancy has declined in the USA recently, more than other developed countries. So is the world getting worse? Depends. Could be fake news.

CHAPTER 16: CHURCH SERVICE / RELIGION AND CLIMATE

  • Religion in Utah is such an intimate, complicated, rich part of life here that we really can’t explore it except in the most glancing way. But one really interesting thing is the unlikely overlap between climate pessimists and Biblical literalists: Both believe that the world is ending, and to some extent that we might even now be in the end times. It could be a pretty potent coalition of belief, if not for the different ideas about the causes and solutions to the impending apocalypse.

CHAPTER 17: BELIEF FORMATIONS / SEARCH AND RESCUE TRAINING

  • Many of the key social services in Emery County are staffed by volunteers, including the search and rescue crew, the fire department, and emergency medical emergency workers, as well as almost all political, civic, and religious leadership roles. It creates a much more cohesive community than places where many institutional interactions are often anonymized and commoditized.

CHAPTER 18: COAL MINERS / CRANDALL CANYON DISASTER

  • Journalist Hugo Dixon wrote: “There is a crisis of liberalism because we have not found a way to connect to the lives of people in the small towns of the postindustrial wasteland whose traditional culture has been torn away.” A few generations ago, there were more than a dozen coal mines in Emery County, and many more in neighboring counties… all of them unionized. Now there are none in Emery, and the county’s purse and pride has been severely wounded. This wasn’t necessarily the fault of environmentalists or even liberals generally, but it certainly won’t endear them to these coal communities.

CHAPTER 19: MOUNTED THUNDER / SHIFTING COUNTY IDENTITY

  • Background: Some of the farmers in this area have huge tracts of land which are not very good for agriculture, but very good for solar, and so they have embraced development, sometimes in spite of their own beliefs about the nature of human caused climate change. But solar farms will not solve every problem, as the taxes paid and jobs generated are likely to be substantially lower than the coal power plants’, not to mention requiring a much larger, arguably uglier footprint.

CHAPTER 20: FEAR / MAIN STREET MARKET

  • People with different influences see the same events and perceive them entirely differently. That has probably always been the case, only now we have so many different intersecting influences, and reality feels like it might be so fragmented, that there’s a risk we won’t EVER be able to experience an event objectively. We might need to lean a little more heavily on the few remaining elements which everyone shares - things like food, family and friendship?

CHAPTER 21: HERITAGE DAY / COMMUNITY DIVISION

  • Holding a belief or idea different to your community can lead to isolation. And no one wants to have their social life derailed for an abstract idea, no matter how important it might seem. So if you want to bring someone around to your ideology, then you have to do it in a way that protects their place in their community. James Clear said “You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.”

CHAPTER 22: PENS / HOW DO MINDS CHANGE?

  • If you come away with one thing from watching this series, it’s that the relationship between a fact and a belief is not a simple cause and effect. We imagine that a person learns a fact and then forms a belief based on that, but the reality is often the opposite: That people form a belief based on things like their upbringing, community, gut instincts, and even genetics, and then use facts as a justification for why they believe a certain way. This is why if you present someone with your fact that runs counter to their deeply held belief, it is less likely to change this person’s mind, and more likely to simply be rebutted with a different “fact” of their own. So how DO you change a belief? My best guess is that you’d have to change the environment in which the belief was formed, perhaps by changing the makeup of a community, or creating personal experiences that suggest problems with an established belief. It’s a slow, opaque process.

    For a really detailed investigation into this, and other connected ideas, a great read is Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”.

CHAPTER 23: MOVING CATTLE / FLASH FLOOD

  • Land use is a particularly thorny topic in this part of the world. Huge swaths of Emery County are managed by federal and state agencies, but also host private recreation, commercial resource extraction, and leased agriculture. It’s also extremely pretty to look at, but historically was not formally protected. So the land is a nexus between many intersecting actors, and thus a site of tension.

    After decades of work, frustration, and compromise, the Emery County Public Land Management Act was signed in 2019, which designated large areas as protected wilderness, while also allowing some use for recreation, mining, power and farming. One of our interview subjects spent a huge chunk of his career bringing about this impressive achievement.

CHAPTER 24: PUSHING BELIEF / EATING FROM THE GARDEN

  • There are an incredible number of dinosaur bones in the area. A rebuttal to the risks of climate change I heard a few times was that the desert of Emery County was once a swamp, teeming with dinosaurs. You could respond that climate scientists are worried about changes over the last 100 years, not the climate from 100 million years ago. But that misses the point a little - desert where a swamp once was is a solid fact that can justify a belief that the climate is always changing.

CHAPTER 25: COMMUNITY THEATER REHEARSAL / THE COUNTY’S FUTURE

  • Asking someone to change their beliefs is like asking someone to move out of their home, or change their profession, or stop talking to a family member… it is a rupture, and will cause damage. It will hurt a person, and risks embarrassing them, so it has to be approached with care.

    “…you say a person’s beliefs ain’t true, they think you’re saying their lifes ain’t true an’ their truth ain’t true.” David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 26: CLIMATE OPINIONS / DESERT CATTLE

  • “If you’re on the right and don’t have a friend from the left, go make one. And if you’re on the left and don’t have a friend from the right, go make one. Talk about your fears. Everybody’s fear is the same: There will be no place for me in this country. If a liberal hears a conservative say, “No, we do want you here,” and a conservative hears a liberal say, “You may be a crazy conservative, but I still want you here” — that’s how you start to build trust” - Former Representative Adam Kinzinger.

  • Cinematography - Brennan Full, Nina Ham, Ben Stillerman

    Post Production - Ben Stillerman

    Production Support - Lucas Pruitt, Jenna Woolley, Jesse Ryan, Katherine Rose

    Associate Producer - Colby Leopard

    Director - Ben Stillerman

    This project was made possible by the generous time, insight and energy of Emery County:

    Wade Allinson, Derek Anderson, Kelly Austin, Tiffani Baker, Joe Begay, Kadrianne Bird, Tiffany Christensen, Darline Debry, Katherine Debry, Casey Dooms, Andrew Fry, Edward Geary, Hilary Gordon, Jace Guymon, Brittney Hansen, Tom Hansen, Joel Hatch-Jensen, David Hinkins, Dayne Howell, Shala Hunsaker, Craig Johansen, Nancy Lee Johnson, Jon Richard Judd, Tom Kay, Tory Killian, Roger Killpck, John Lemon, Sheila Lemon, Leon Mcelprang, Quinn Montgomery, Lee Moss, Nathanael Musser, Ray Petersen, Hauvala Pitchforth, Kim Player, Vaughn And Ellie Reid, Karl Rudisill, Barbara Sehestedt, Brayci Sitterud, Zac Tuttle, Gordon Ungerman, Coco Van Den Bergh, Carson Vanderherp, Ross Willberg, Kent Wilson, Kash Winn, Kaelynn Winn, Gareldine Wright

    Development Support from the Rogovy Foundation

  • If you want to support the work we’re doing here, you can make a tax deductible donation through this link. Whether you make a one-time donation as a thank you for this specific project, or a recurring donation as a means of supporting Social Cohesion Lab longer term, all the proceeds will go toward getting this project in front of more audiences who will learn to flex the muscle of creative and intellectual curiosity. It will be extremely appreciated!

  • Please get in touch directly at info@socialcohesionlab.org if you would like to use this project as part of a class, academic event or conference. We have lots of resources we’d be happy to provide.

  • View the Trailer Here

    View the combined single screener Here