With a Grand Jury prize for the documentary Restrepo, the Sundance Film Festival noticed that Sebastian Junger is a media master who capably and compellingly telescopes attention on whatever worthy topic captures his focus. In this case, he and photographer Tim Hetherington spent a year chronicling on film the daily life of a platoon of US soldiers in Afghanistan, reminding us that the currency used to underwrite war is both monetary and human.
“This country is at a very painful moment,” Junger said in his Sundance acceptance speech. “We would like it if our movie could help this country go forward.”
“We were beyond stunned,” he said later in an email of the honors for his first foray into film.
Junger’s companion book War, about the same soldiers and the honor and trust that bonds them in such a dangerous and remote military outpost, will be published May 11. He is, of course, best known for writing The Perfect Storm, where he trained his keen narrative skills on the human cost required to get a swordfish steak on a plate. The nonfiction tale is still a top seller on Amazon.com for books about sea adventures 13 years after it was first published.
In the halcyon days of that runaway bestseller, Junger first established the Perfect Storm Foundation and donated proceeds from book sales to support the children of fisherman. What is lesser known is that his media outreach extends beyond print and film to social media, as well, and that his commitment to the environment and the ocean’s resources remains true to this day.
Recently, for example, Junger pledged to protect a plot of the ocean in a social networking site called the Live Blue Initiative created by the New England Aquarium in Boston, an internationally-renowned leader in ocean conservation, education and research. The Live Blue campaign encourages people to live blue, as the new green, and to adopt a plot in one of ten particularly-fragile ocean areas ranging from the Antarctic to the New Zealand coast. Junger adopted a cubic-foot plot in Tierra del Fuego off southern Chile, explaining, “I live blue because water is the lifeblood of the planet.”
Although he was approached to join as a celeb sponsor, anyone can join and it’s free. Sometimes, words speak volumes about character. Sometimes actions do. With Sebastian Junger, it’s both.
Photo by mtkr via Flickr