“Our film focuses on the arid lands of the mid-Columbia Basin, but in that landscape you find patterns that repeat themselves in communities all across the country. We hope the film encourages viewers to think about geography—a dry, academic subject—in a way that is personal. When you start thinking that way, you see that geography is not just a catalogue of mountains and rivers. It’s a cultural force that affects all of us in our daily lives.” - Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert

Arid Lands is a documentary feature about the land and people of the Columbia Basin in southeastern Washington state. Sixty years ago, the Hanford nuclear site produced plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and today the area is the focus of the largest environmental cleanup in history. It is a landscape of incredible contradictions.

Coyotes roam among decommissioned nuclear reactors, salmon spawn in the middle of golf courses, wine grapes grow in the sagebrush, and federal cleanup dollars spur rapid urban expansion. The film takes us into a world of sports fishermen, tattoo artists, housing developers, ecologists, and radiation scientists living and working in the area. It tells the story of how people changed the landscape over time, and how the landscape affected their lives.

Marked by conflicting perceptions of wilderness and nature, Arid Lands is a moving and complex essay on a unique landscape of the American West.