Rising Tide #160 — Louie Psihoyos on Dolphins, Plastics, and More
Academy Award-winning director Louie Psihoyos returned to the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast for a conversation as wide-ranging and urgent as his films. Host David Helvarg sat down with Psihoyos before a live audience during SF Climate Week at the downtown San Francisco studios of KALW public radio — and the exchange didn’t disappoint.
Psihoyos traces his unlikely path to ocean advocacy: a kid from Iowa, drawn early to photography and the sea, who eventually landed at National Geographic — beginning, as origin stories often do, at the bottom, sifting through a garbage dig. From there he rose to become one of the most consequential documentary filmmakers working today, a man who doesn’t just point a camera at environmental catastrophe but builds covert operations around it.
He recounts the making of The Cove, his shattering exposé of the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan — a film that required as much tradecraft as filmmaking — and discusses his latest work, Plastic Detox, now streaming on Netflix, which takes a hard look at microplastics and their alarming effects on human fertility.
The two also range across a broader landscape: adventures, causes for concern, and — perhaps most valuably in these grinding times — reasons for optimism.
It’s a talk worth diving into.
Additional Resources
The Plastic Detox — an eye-opening journey into the hidden dangers of plastic in our homes.
When six couples embark on a plastic detox within their homes, it changes their families forever. This eye-opening documentary explains what microplastics and their chemicals are doing to our health and how we can take matters into our own hands.
From hormone disruption that’s fueling a worldwide fertility crisis, to growing rates of cancer, and early heart attack and stroke, this powerful documentary reveals the shocking science behind plastic’s impact on human life.
Listen here or on Apple Podcasts.
