Another "Pistachio Wars" update
We're getting closer and closer.
So we’ve been getting closer and closer to finishing Pistachio Wars, the documentary that Rowan Wernham and I have been working on. Our small team is inching forward every day — now working on the final music score and polishing up our graphics and animated sequences.
Rowan just sent out an update to our Kickstarter backers and I’m reposting it below in case you’re interested.
One thing we’re gonna do in the next month or so is take another trip to the Central Valley. We want to get a glimpse at the historic lake that’s been reasserting itself. A lake that had been drained for almost a century by California’s oligarch farmers, first to grow cotton and now pistachios and almonds, is back on the scene. After going through one of the longest droughts in history, there has been a biblical deluge here on the west coast of America: historic amounts of rain; historic levels of snowpack. So the lake is coming back, despite the best efforts of our industrial civilization.
Nature is healing, as the kids would say — and that healing involves the flooding of toxic sludge dumps used by Los Angeles and tractors and farm equipment and energy infrastructure filled with fuel and chemicals. This is not water you’d want to swim in or land that you’d want to farm when the oligarch farmers finally drain the
—Yasha Levine
Hi Folks!
We're closer than ever to having this film done... Currently wrapping up our second pass through the graphics (Thanks Ben for your help!), things are looking great and some of those last 'difficult sequences' are finally falling into place.
Our composer, Max Scott has worked his way through a mix of the entire film, and we are about a third of the way through the score.
Max's score continues the work done for the Kickstarter trailer, featuring sounds sampled from guitar & other instruments, mixed with ambient sound from the film's locations.
It fits the stark, industrialized spaces of the central valley, and pulses along with the thrilling momentum of a road trip. It's gonna be awesome!
If you have been following the news from Central California, you will know that the state has gone from record drought, to record rain and snow pack. Tulare lake, drained over a century ago, is filling again.
Parts of the state threaten to (at least temporarily...) return to their natural state of floodplain, but now with a swirling mess of human waste — literally, including the giant fields where LA dumps its raw sewage.
Tom Frantz, one of the many people we met and interviewed for the film, has been posting some great updates on the developing situation on Twitter.
We're planning to do another short road trip to capture more footage, either to add as a postscript to the film, or to release separately as a follow up.
The chaos caused by this abundance of water only serves to reinforce one of the main points of Pistachio Wars - California's problem is over development, not just the drought.
And finally, another person we feature in Pistachio Wars, Rosanna Esparza, an incredibly hard working environmentalist and community organizer, ran into trouble with her business importing fire suppression equipment during covid.
She's doing a Gofundme to raise money needed to get her equipment — which was abandoned mid journey by a shipping company — delivered to California.
Please help her out if you can!
—Rowan Wernham
Get specific and provide detailed maps, otherwise this looks like a lot of leftist mental sewage and alarmism (clickbait).