UCSB Sociologist and Filmmaker Richard Widick takes the audience inside the global struggle to shape the future of planetary climate — tracking the corporations, social movements, and nations through ten years inside of the UNited Nations Framwork Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) yearly Conferences of the Parties (COP) — the so-called climate COPs or ‘international climate talks’ as well as the street protests and social movements frustrated by the perceived failures and slow implementation of the UNFCCC’s2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Through firsthand participation and on the spot interviews at UN climate conferences in Durban, South Africa (2011), and then in Doha, Warsaw, Lima, Paris, Marrakech, Bonn, Katowice and Madrid (2012-2019), Widick exposes the complex intersection of corporate power, international relations and racialized US politics implicated in the failure of UN climate policies to put the brakes on the unfolding climate crisis.

Viewers will get an unvarnished, inside look at the people, places and powerful social forces currently at work preventing ambitious climate action — as well as the cacophony of mutinous, beautifully dangerous, and hope-driving faces of those who would put an end to the fossil fuel age, before it puts an end to all of us and all of our animal brothers and sisters, on whom we rely for so much and who now need us to succeed more than ever before.

Director Biography – Richard E. Widick

Richard Widick is a critical theorist, sociologist, community-engaged filmmaker, and Visiting Scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies — pictured here (far right) with the film’s executive producer Michael K. Dorsey (2nd from left).

He is author of Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars (U. of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Over the last 20 years he taught more than 30 classes at UCSB for the departments of Sociology and German and Slavic Studies, including Critical Theory and Critical Filmmaking; Dreaming the Revolution: Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; Global Ethnography; and The History of American Social Movements.

Widick represented the University of California inside the UN climate talks as an Official Observer Delegate from the Research Sector of Civil Society every year from 2011 – 2019, during which events he filmed The Edmund Pettus Bridge to Climate Justice (2021).

We are happy to present The Edmund Pettus Bridge to Climate Justice.