SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

NEW FILM

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL follows a rural community battling a massive luxury development that threatens a critical wildlife habitat and puts residents’ lives at risk in a fire-prone landscape.

This story serves as a lens into a larger issue unfolding across California, where new housing mandates push cities to approve dense, mostly luxury projects, often bypassing environmental review and silencing local voices. Set against intensifying wildfire risks, residents and experts confront the precarious balance between development and preservation, asking: who decides the future of California’s communities and environment?

“Luxury hotels, high-end housing units, and state mandates. Small elite cities are being plopped down in the middle of rural communities against their wishes. Who stands to benefit in today’s high-stakes game of real estate development in California? Small is Beautiful is a sweeping indictment of how one local community and its ecology are being overrun by big money and misguided public policy in the Sonoma Valley under the guise of affordable housing.”
– Bob Johnson, Professor of History, National University, Author, The Colonial Climate: Remaking Nature in San Diego

Small is Beautiful poignantly illustrates an all-too-common story of rural marginalization, from cozy relationships between policymakers and private developers to insistence by the powerful that local landscapes, folkways, environmental values, and infrastructure needs are unimportant. It also shows the bravery, solidarity, and persistence it takes for a community to stand up and fight back.”
– Ann Eisenberg, Patrick D. Deem Professor of Law, West Virginia University

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL – now screening in local venues and film festivals.

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be. – E.F. Schumacher