Bob and the Trees: Netflix, Climate Change, and the Economy in the Berkshires

Screened in notable film festivals around the world including the Maryland Film Festival, Hamburg Int. Short Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro Int. Short Film Festival, and the Sundance Film festival, Diego Ongaro’s Bob and the Trees (2015) expands on Bob's compelling narrative, adding environmental themes to its economic message. Set during a winter in rural Massachusetts. Bob and the Trees details the evolution of Bob (Bob Tarasuk), a 50-year-old logger with a soft spot for golf and gangsta rap. Struggling to make ends meet in the merciless logging industry, Bob makes a bad investment that threatens the family business and, according to the production notes, begins to heed the instincts of his ever darkening self. 

Although Bob the Trees does highlight Bob’s journey from hubris in a verité neo-realistic style, for us the low-budget film does more. With its close ups of ants feeding on rotten wood, radio announcements about global warming, and references to rabid skunks attacking livestock, Bob the Trees touches on climate change and environmental destruction caused by habitat collapse.  

Bob’s bad investment underpins much of the film’s narrative and broaches the fragility of both the economy and environment in 21^st century Massachusetts. Instead of taking a share of a client’s trees, Bob pays the owner a lump sum that far surpasses the amount he can earn when he and son Matt (Matt Gallagher) discover many of the trees are rotted and full of ants.

Although Matt blames the ants on the wet landscape, a radio broadcast the family listens to around the dinner table connects this ant infestation with climate change. And a Harvard Forest study confirms this connection, arguing, “Projected atmospheric warming will lead to increases in abundance or range extensions of ant species at the cooler, northern extent of their ranges in the US.”

The reference to rabid skunks also emerges during a dinner conversation, and the solution ends up being slaughtering the livestock, since the farmer cannot afford to sustain them for the six-month quarantine.

These scenes are brief but powerful environmental messages, and they are heightened by the top-notch cinematography using the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. The film left me thinking about these environmental issues. But it also prompted me to look up at the trees with Bob.