California on the Edge is a documentary feature film, currently in production, that explores how climate change and other environmental crises are damaging ecosystems and upending lives along the California coast. The project is helmed by Blue Lab founders Barron Bixler (writing, direction, cinematography) and Allison Carruth (writing, production). Narrated in a lyrical key by Bixler and Carruth, the film travels from Fort Bragg in the north to the Port of Los Angeles in the south and follows the stories of people who, confronting this environmental inflection point, are rolling up their sleeves to protect, repair and salvage the places they love and call home.

The stories that commingle throughout California on the Edge invoke, but also resist, a worst-case climate future—one in which California's marine and terrestrial ecosystems collapse, its sacred places are destroyed or defiled, and only the most affluent and powerful lay claim to what remains of the coast’s natural riches and cultural meanings.

The people at the heart of California on the Edge are staking out provisionally more hopeful futures rooted in generative ideals of community, ingenuity and the profound meaning of work, often alongside feelings of grief, anger and futility. Through their small-scale acts of world-making and world-salvaging—which cumulatively are a force to reckon with—the film poses an urgent question: What future are we going to build from the wreckage of our climate-changed present?