A new film by Birmingham's Hunter Nichols, From the Mountains to the Coast, which screened at both Birmingham's Sidewalk Film Festival and the Fairhope Film Festival can now be seen on YouTube.

The short film provides a stunning and meditative portrait of Alabama as seen from above, with long, lingering shots of some of the most beautiful places in the state. Nichols, one of the best nature photographers working in Alabama today, does most of his work from a canoe. His earlier film, River Dreams, won a slew of awards at film festivals around the country. In it, Nichols paddled from Birmingham to the Gulf Coast, his camera capturing the good, the beautiful, and the ugly, which took the form of industrial pollution.

His new film focuses purely on the beautiful. As his camera ghosts across an empty landscape, the sweeping vistas of fog covered mountains, purling rivers lit with glowing lilies, or long curling tendrils of marshland, transport the viewer to a world few would recognize as Alabama. But there it is, our state in all its glory.

With moody and evocative music by his new wife, Cat Porter, From the Mountains to the Coast tells its story without a word being spoken. Just a handful of words appear onscreen at the tail end of the film.

"Less than half the places in this film are protected," reads the first sentence. "At 3.7 percent, Alabama has less public and protected land than any other state in the Southeast."

Those words leave a haunting impression, one of a world we must do more to preserve.

"I hope the film spurs more focus on preserving natural lands in Alabama and the work of The Nature Conservancy, Forever Wild, and other groups working towards those goals," Nichols said. "After I made this short it dawned on me that about half of the places in this film are not under any permanent protection or open to the public. They're beautiful places but very vulnerable to development of all sorts."

Nichols' photographic portfolio includes plenty of images of subdivisions and industrial waste, but those are not the scenes in this film, which is rather a celebration.

"A lot of my favorite river shoals and mountain bluffs now have big homes plopped on top of them. They can quickly lose what makes them so special and dear to us all," Nichols said. "Public access to these places can also become more limited or shut down completely. This is why it's always going to be important to support the Forever Wild Land Trust, our state lands protection program, and its partners like the Nature Conservancy in Alabama. Some folks are always going to try to steal funding from Forever Wild but it's a popular program that stands the test of time for a reason. These two groups recently partnered with many others to completely protect a large area of coastal Alabama from Bayou La Batre, AL to Mississippi. Several of those coastal areas were featured in the film. At one time there were plans to develop the area into casinos similar to Biloxi. That would have destroyed such a beautiful and biologically important place. Now these areas will be forever wild and open to the public for recreation."

You can follow Ben Raines on Facebook, Twitter at BenHRaines, and on Instagram. You can reach him via email at braines@al.com.