Kiss the ground movie: Can regenerative farming solve climate change? - Slate

Kiss the ground movie: Can regenerative farming solve climate change?

Slate’s homepage editors spend a lot of time looking for photos to put on our site. Those searches sometimes yield unexpected results: random, perplexing, and mesmerizing photos that don’t belong on the homepage, but that are too good not to share. Every week, we’ll share something we’ve found.

What search term was used to find this in Getty?

“movie theater”

What were you hoping to find?

A photo of an opulent, vintage movie theater with red velvet seats and gold accents, to accompany a piece about why entertainment and leisure activities are so much more expensive these days.

What did you find instead?

A twist on the standard movie premiere mise-en-scène, with mats of sod replacing the traditional red carpet. A man and a woman kneel reverently on the grass and kiss the ground. The woman is almost fully prostrated (quite a feat considering she is wearing a full-length gown), and the man’s lips are puckered, his expression tender yet passionate as he presses his face to the earth. They are both fully devoted to their worship.

What’s the actual backstory here?

This photo was taken at a screening of the Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground(a-ha!) on Sept. 22, 2020, in West Hollywood. The woman is Rebecca Harrell Tickell, an environmentalist and documentarian who directed the film with her husband. The man is Ian Somerhalder, an actor best known for his roles in The Vampire Diaries and Lost, who is one of the film’s executive producers.

Narrated by Woody Harrelson, Kiss the Ground features interviews with scientists, environmental activists, and celebrities. The film argues that healthy soil can be a successful antidote to climate change. The idea is that modern agriculture practices—over-reliant on monocultures, factory farming, and pesticides—damage the soil and reduce the earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When plants take in CO2 as part of photosynthesis, that carbon gets stored in the soil. But degraded soil can’t hold carbon to the same extent, instead releasing it back into the atmosphere. The film proposes that switching to soil-friendly practices, like regenerative farming and composting, will restore the soil’s ability to act as a carbon sink.

Rather than take a doom-and-gloom approach to the issue, the film presents an optimistic narrative of how to reverse the effects of our warming planet. In an interview with the Weather Network, Somerhalder called Kiss the Ground the “single most important documentary ever,” and said its proposed solutions offer “a paint-by-numbers way of how to stop climate change.”

While that claim might oversell the potential of carbon sequestration as the key to reversing climate change, it is undoubtedly true that healthier soil has a wide range of benefits and is an important part of fostering biodiversity and thriving ecosystems.

I didn’t realize Ian Somerhalder was so passionate about the environment. What else is he involved in?

Besides the obvious passion Somerhalder displayed on the green carpet above, he seems to have taken the message of Kiss the Ground to heart. His current venture is Brother’s Bond, a bourbon company he founded with his The Vampire Diaries costar Paul Wesley. The company donates a portion of its profits to “support regenerative farming projects,” and in 2021 it went a step further. In an Instagram post(which featured him smizing in a cornfield), Somerhalder announced that Brother’s Bond had purchased grain grown using regenerative methods to use in its spirits. He wrote in his caption that regenerative farming’s potential “should make us all want to JUMP UP AND DOWN SCREAMING WITH EXCITEMENT.”

Somerhalder seems like a true believer in the cause. I am skeptical of bourbon grain being the answer to our planet’s woes, but I sure appreciate the enthusiasm.

Why is this the weird photo of the week?

In the filmmakers’ argument, stopping climate change seems like a complicated mystery, but it actually has an elegant solution. Similarly, at a glance, what’s happening in this photo seems baffling and inexplicable. But the movie is called Kiss the Ground, so they kissed the ground. This is very satisfying; it’s simple.