Chris Palmer ties loose ends with $50,000 scholarship
BY MATT GETTY
School of Communication (SOC) distinguished film producer in residence Chris Palmer has been an energy policy analyst, an environmental filmmaker, and now a professor at AU. While that might seem like a life with a lot of different threads, according to Palmer, he tied up any loose ends this summer when he established an endowed SOC environmental filmmaking scholarship in his parents’ names.
“The idea that their names will forever be associated with this scholarship and the Center for Environmental Filmmaking is a real thrill for me,” says Palmer on the Mavis and Sidney John Palmer Scholarship fund. “It’s like tying a bow on my life and connecting the loose ends of my past and my future.”
To understand what pledging the $50,000 endowment means to Palmer is, in a sense, to understand Palmer himself. In his life of apparent hairpin turns from Capitol Hill to the great outdoors to AU, two things have remained constant—his desire to serve a greater cause and his beloved parents’ influence.
Having built a successful policy career with posts as a congressional energy advisor, a presidential EPA appointee, and the director of energy and the environment at the National Audubon Society, Palmer changed careers in his thirties because of the Fonz.
“Some of you may remember the Fonz on ABC’s Happy Days,” Palmer says today when speaking about his life. “On one episode, he signed up for a library card. The next day, libraries everywhere were swamped by millions of kids applying for cards of their own.”
So began a wildlife filmmaking career in which Palmer has produced more than 300 hours of nature documentaries for television and large format (IMAX) film, earning two Emmys and an Oscar nomination in the process. Struck by this simple example of mass media’s power, the self-described policy wonk, who admits he’d never even been fishing, leaped into a career that had him swimming with sharks, camping with wolf packs, and learning the ropes in a new field.
As crazy as it may have looked, the career move made perfect sense to Palmer, whose goal was still, as he puts it, “to provide a better future for my children with clean air and clean water.” “When I started making films a lot of people thought I’d changed careers, but to me I hadn’t changed at all,” he explains. “I’d just changed tools.”
Though the goal remained the same, the job demands obviously changed, placing Palmer, who was then a young father, on shaky ground. “At one point it actually got a little scary, because I realized I was caught in the middle,” he remembers. “I’d sort of given up on energy policy, and I was really out of that loop. So here I was now a struggling filmmaker with a young family . . . There was a point I remember thinking, ‘God, this is risky.’”
What pulled him through, however, was his parents’ influence. “The ability to stick to it long enough to get things going really came from them,” Palmer recalls. “My mother and father had always taught me that you have to commit yourself entirely to something if you want to be successful.”
More than two decades later, Palmer’s continued commitment to environmental filmmaking brought him to AU, where he has dedicated himself to the field’s future as he continues to produce new documentaries. Last year, he launched SOC’s Center for Environmental Filmmaking to unite students, filmmakers, and environmental organizations in an effort to define the future of the wildlife documentary genre.
“The challenge for environmental films today is, how do you break through the vast amount of trivial information that washes over people each day?” he explains. “How do we reinvent the genre? How do we produce films that actually make people vote differently or motivate people to go out and support a local wetland organization?”
Beyond dedicating his time to the cause as the center’s director, Palmer recently donated the funds to help attract the “best and brightest” students to the center. Accordingly, just as the Mavis and Sidney John Palmer Scholarship highlights his parents’ impact on his career as advocate, filmmaker, and teacher, it also demonstrates Palmer’s commitment to this new position that unites his ongoing work as advocate, filmmaker, and teacher.
“By putting up my money in addition to my time and energy it should really show how much faith I have in the center,” Palmer explained. “This isn’t just some fly-by-night thing for me. I’m not going to be at AU for a few years and then move onto the next place. I’m here forever.”
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