The Oyster farmer - live on wild commons

We recently launched a new YouTube channel with our friends over at Impact Media Lab to help solve a huge problem that many independent filmmakers are experiencing - a lack of distribution options! Many amazing nature, environmental and science documentaries have successful festival runs, then just sit on a hard drive never to be seen again. The industry has changed, and we needed to find a solution that supports creators and allows them to continue their craft.

So, we co-founded Wild Commons - a YouTube channel which, through a shared platform with shared marketing efforts, gives these films a home and a way for creators to get paid. So, if you want to watch amazing films and support the people who made them, head to our YouTube channel and click subscribe! We release a new film each month, and short films between. If you don’t want to miss a thing, subscribe to our newsletter here.

Anyway, onto the films…

The Oyster Farmer

When an industry begins to collapse, one farmer turns to science to fight back.

At the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on the Oregon coast, millions of oyster larvae began dying overnight. For hatchery manager Alan Barton, this wasn't an abstraction. It was an immediate crisis threatening his business, his livelihood, and the future of shellfish farming across the Pacific Northwest. Determined to find answers, he partnered with scientists to investigate a force that most people hadn't yet heard of: ocean acidification.

The Oyster Farmer documents what they discovered, and what they did about it. Ocean acidification, driven by climate change, was quietly reshaping the chemistry of the water that shellfish depend on, disrupting the earliest and most vulnerable stages of marine life. But the film is not a story of collapse. It is a story of adaptation. Through collaboration between farmers and researchers, new monitoring systems and practices emerged that not only saved the hatchery, but helped build a practical roadmap for resilience in a rapidly changing ocean.

Why this film matters

For many communities, climate change stopped being abstract a long time ago. For Alan Barton, it arrived overnight, in the form of dying larvae and mounting losses. The Oyster Farmer captures that moment of reckoning, and the response it can catalyse when scientific expertise meets lived experience. It is a reminder that the future of our oceans depends not only on understanding what is changing, but on building the relationships capable of responding to it.

Head to the Wild Commons website to learn more about the project, why it’s necessary, and explore the films that are currently live.