Advocates

BENJI BACKER The Organizer

Benji Backer is a born organizer who came up through conservative politics, built the American Conservation Coalition from a college dorm room into the country’s largest conservative environmental organization, and then did something unexpected: decided it wasn’t enough. His move to found Nature Is Nonpartisan — a movement that asks Americans across the political spectrum to find common ground on conservation — marks a pivot from partisan champion to something harder to categorize and more interesting to watch. In the film, he is both strategist and true believer, working out in real time whether persuasion can outpace polarization.

LINKS:  Nature is Non Partisan   |   Instagram   |   Twitter

RAY GAESSER The Farmer

Ray Gaesser left Indiana in the late 1970s chasing the best soil in the country, bought a farm in Iowa, and never looked back — farming, he’ll tell you, is all he ever wanted to do. Deeply embedded in Republican agricultural politics — he’s run for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and served as President of the American Soybean Association — Ray brings a pragmatist’s eye to conservation: sustainable farming practices aren’t an ideology, they’re how you protect the land that feeds your family and your community for the next generation. In the film, his matter-of-fact commitment to stewardship, rooted in decades of working the same Iowa soil, makes the case that conservation and conservative values were never really separate to begin with.

LINKS:  Solutions From The Land

JESSICA MOERMAN The Evangelist

A paleoclimatologist and pastor originally from Tennessee, Jessica Moerman serves as President of the Evangelical Environmental Network, making the case that caring for creation is not a political position — it’s a biblical one. She moves between the language of deep climate science and the language of scripture with equal fluency, reaching communities that neither traditional environmental organizations nor mainstream media have been able to touch. Together with her husband Chris, she co-leads Grace Capital City Church, bringing that same conviction into the pews — and in the film, her faith-rooted environmentalism represents something harder to dismiss than policy: a calling.

LINKS: Evangelical Environmental Network   |  Twitter   |  Instagram

FRANCIS SUAREZ The Mayor

As Mayor of Miami — one of the American cities most acutely threatened by sea-level rise — Francis Suarez spent his tenure governing a frontline city while navigating the gap between national party orthodoxy and the water literally lapping at his streets. Smart, pragmatic, and politically ambitious, he represents what happens when the abstract becomes undeniable and a conservative politician decides that protecting his city matters more than protecting his party credentials. In the film, his story is the one hardest to dismiss: not a matter of belief, but of geography.

LINKS: Twitter   |  Instagram