Metamorphosis - a lesson in how to stop consuming everything in sight

Unrestrained economic growth and unrestricted resource extraction like that encouraged by Bill 5, will exponentially accelerate the destruction all life as we know it. Metamorphosis will help save us.

Metamorphosis poster Credit: Photo provided by NFB

Who knew the fallout from climate change and environmental devastation would include beauty, creativity, sustainable ingenuity, uncomplicated survival, and hope? Viewers of Metamorphosis will.

With increasing frequency, forest fires consume entire communities, species become extinct, and entire ecosystems collapse. Unrestrained economic growth and unrestricted resource extraction like that encouraged by the Ford government’s Bill 5, Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, voted into law on June 5, 2025 by the Conservatives, will exponentially accelerate the destruction of all life as we know it. Fortunately, filmmakers Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper discovered experts with insight and transferable skills who are turning this crisis into opportunities for sustainable transformations.

Filmmakers (L to R) Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper Credit: Photo provided by NFB

This minimalist film superbly documents how an insatiable appetite for economic growth has increasingly ravaged the natural world while simultaneously detailing the birth of a slower, more adaptive, environmentally workable ways for humanity to evolve a new definition of civilization.

Shapeshifters, in the form of environmentalists, artists, children, landscape architects, farmers, economists, architects, poets, photographers, and green energy specialists, offer hope to biodiversity under siege and humans facing certain futurelessness.

Take Phoenix, Arizona, a virtual graveyard of unused swimming pools that are being repurposed into self-sustaining ecosystems capable of feeding the families living in this veritable food desert.

Meanwhile, northern Mexico is being invaded by Earthships. These self-sufficient homes fashioned from repurposed everyday recyclable materials reuse every drop of water several times over before eventually irrigating all of the food grown within these incredibly creative autonomous environments.

Italian architecture incorporating vertical forests Credit: Photo provided by NFB

Meanwhile, architects in Milan, Italy have created a way to diminish impending environmental harm by designing urban towers covered with trees and bushes. These modern apartments effectively reduce carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, and bring new life to urban landscapes simply by integrating vertical forests.

Then there’s the artist helping to replenish decimated coral reefs in the Caribbean. Over the past 50 years, more than 80 per cent of the natural coral reef in this region has been destroyed. Concrete cast in human forms construct the base for the regenesis of these reefs.

Not all changes are large scale. Teams of volunteers are installing free solar panels in underserved neighbourhoods in Los Angeles. This not only provides cleaner energy to individual families who would not be able to afford it, but positively impacts the entire global community as well.

Common milkweed plant Credit: Doreen Nicoll

While planting milkweed gardens helps the perennially struggling monarch butterfly thrive in the midst of habitat destruction and climate change while teaching kids about environmental empathy and activism.

From the deep ecological connection humans share, a radical form of optimism emerges. These stories of creative, flexible, versatile and systemic solutions offer hope for a livable future.

Metamorphosis cinematically delves into humanity’s transformation to beautiful, sustainable ways of living in tune with nature while staving off the environmental crises capitalists, oligarchs and corporate fascists have created.

Metamorphosis (85 minutes), a Clique Pictures/Transparent Film/NFB co-production, is available for free on the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) site.

*A version of this article was first published on rabble.ca.

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