The Environmental Documentary: Cinema Activism in the Twenty-First Century 9781441176110, 9781501300370, 9781441122490

Citation preview

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The Environmental Documentary

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“John A.  Duvall’s The Environmental Documentary:  Cinema Activism in the Twenty-​First Century offers a wealth of information on the content, production, and distribution of a selection of recent environmental documentaries ranging from The 11th Hour to Rebels with a Cause. The book also provides readers with succinct overviews of the critical debates around key terms such as ‘documentary’ and ‘environment.’ It will be useful to students at the high school and college level and to everyone else interested in environmental documentary film.” Alexa Weik von Mossner, Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Klagenfurt, Austria “John Duvall has produced a grand catalogue of environmental documentaries made at the start of the twenty-​ first century. Contemporary students of documentary and environmental studies can find here a wealth of information on themes, styles, and production conditions. Looking back historians will find in his accounts of the films a significant resource logging the deep concerns of activist communities and their passionate attempts to get them into mainstream debates using all the resources that documentary can offer.” Helen Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Surrey, UK “The Environmental Documentary: Cinema Activism in the Twenty-​First Century is a well-​researched journey through significant films of activist documentary producers and directors. Documentary students brimming with idealistic fervor and eager to intervene should benefit from the extensive real world detail on production narratives and audience reception for major environmental documentaries. I believe this book will be spectacularly useful and inspiring in any documentary curriculum.” John Hewitt, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University, USA and co-​author of Documentary Filmmaking, a Contemporary Field Guide “Does our environmental movement address effects more than causes? Does it chart feasible alternatives? Duvall’s book examines the cream of environmental documentaries to answer these and other crucial questions in this comprehensive, engaging book.” Bill Nichols, Visiting Professor, Colorado University Boulder, USA

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The Environmental Documentary Cinema Activism in the Twenty-​First Century John A. Duvall

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © John A. Duvall, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Duvall, John A. author. Title: The environmental documentary : cinema activism in the 21st century / John A. Duvall. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016047931 (print) | LCCN 2017007481 (ebook) | ISBN 9781441176110 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781441122490 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781441197283 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Environmental protection and motion pictures. | Documentary films–History–21st century. | Environmentalism in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E78 D88 2017 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.E78 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047931 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7611-0 ePub: 978-1-4411-9728-3 ePDF: 978-1-4411-2249-0 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Film Gasland (2010), Hbo/Wow/REX/Shutterstock Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Introduction 1 Documenting the Environment 2 Ecocritical Perspectives 3 A Brief History of the Environmental Documentary 4 General Environmental History and Concerns 5 Climate Change 6 Peak Oil 7 Pollution and Waste 8 Food and Water 9 Animals and Extinction 10 Direct Activism and Community Conclusion References Index

1 7 25 35 49 85 127 151 195 231 257 317 321 345

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Introduction

The environmental crisis is the epochal challenge of our times. In the long view, the very survival of human civilization is at stake, as also of the ecosystems that sustain countless other species. Yet to most of us, this is an invisible crisis. Unless we are among those unfortunates who drink from a polluted river, lose our harvest due to extreme drought, or breathe the acid air of a belching power plant or refinery, we may move about our daily lives with little consciousness of the ecological cancers that are ultimately eating away at all of us. The commercial news media, upon which we rely to warn us of such dangers, are largely silent. There is the occasional report of a major environmental crisis such as an Exxon Valdez oil spill or a Deepwater Horizon explosion, but such events are framed as infrequent accidents against a background of a world dependent on abundant energy to keep its economy moving forward. Major corporate media have little to gain by frightening their audiences with the consequences of the very practices that keep people gainfully employed, living in comfort, and buying consumer goods promoted by advertisers. So who will serve as the voice crying in the wilderness, alerting the citizens of the world to the vast array of environmental threats, in time for meaningful action to be taken to halt or reverse them? The opening decades of the twenty-​first century have witnessed an explosion of documentary film and video productions on environmental issues. These programs have focused on issues like climate change, peak oil, pollution, corporate control of food and water, species’ extinction, social inequity, strategies of environmental activism, and renewable energy technologies. They display a variety of rhetorical forms and modes of representation. The producers of these films have ranged from major Hollywood studios and cable television networks to environmental organizations and first-​time, self-​financed filmmakers. Their proliferation has resulted in part from of the lack of attention given to

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environmental issues by public media outlets, but may also be explained by the miniaturization of professional quality video production technology, and by the expanding diversity of windows of distribution (including theatrical screenings, film festivals, television cablecasting, DVD sales, and online streaming). This book represents my attempt to survey many of the outstanding examples of recent environmental documentary films. Who is my intended audience? First and foremost, I have written for members of the general public who seek to learn more about our environmental crisis. Within these pages readers will find a wealth of information concerning a wide array of environmental threats, as well as activists’ strategies for confronting them. My avowed goal is to raise awareness of these mostly little-​seen films for a wider audience, with the goal of clarifying the varieties of environmental documentaries, the changing landscape of the production process, and the impact of such programs on sociopolitical discourse. While nothing can substitute for actually watching a film, I attempt here to summarize many of the scientific facts and sociopolitical arguments contained in these programs. My hope is that readers will take the next step and actually watch some of these informative and important films. Second, students and teachers at the high school or undergraduate level who study environmental issues and/​or documentary media will find here a vast amount of information on a wide variety of environmental subjects, as well as thoughtful consideration of how these topics may be effectively covered through the documentary form. This book could serve as a text for the study of such films; the programs discussed herein represent a variety of specific content areas, levels of sophistication of production, and structural modes of argument and styles of presentation. Third, documentary filmmakers considering producing an environmental program may find guidance here on how to plan, structure, promote, and distribute their productions. Interviews with several of the filmmakers track the course of their films’ development: conception and scripting, budgeting and preproduction, assembling a crew, shooting logistics, style of editing, and planning and executing a strategy through all the diverse networks of distribution. The goal here is to provide some testimonies from experience to aid fledgling documentarians in their own production planning. This book’s genesis was two conference presentations made by the author. “The Environmental Documentary” was a presentation at the annual conference of the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) at Emerson University in Boston, Massachusetts in August 2011. “Sub-​ Genres of the

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Environmental Documentary” was a presentation at the Documentary and the Environment Symposium at the University of Surrey in Guildford, United Kingdom, in September 2012. These presentations grew out of my doctoral research and related video production titled Peak Oil and Transition (2011), which in turn was inspired by some of the films discussed here. I also taught one class, Environmental Crisis through Film, at my academic home, Dominican University of California. So it is fair to say that I have lived with some of these films for over a decade, witnessing their direct impact on people in groups both formal and informal, in classrooms, theaters, churches, and family living rooms. I have spent over four years surveying the field of environmental documentaries, researching online lists, festival screenings, Academy Award winners and nominees, and innumerable books, articles, and reviews on the subject. This book specifically discusses forty-​four films, all of which I  have fully watched and researched, offering an in-​depth description of their purpose and content, their aesthetic and structural design, their production process, and the critical response they received. Some are feature films that were released theatrically and reached a wide audience; others are short films that, while not widely known, had a profound impact on smaller groups of concerned citizens and activists. Measuring the influence of any given documentary can be a challenging task. One may look at obvious barometers like awards and nominations, theatrical box office receipts, festival exposure, and the extent of critical reviews. However, films with a very limited audience may still have a profound impact by inspiring smaller groups of viewers and motivating them to take action. The productions discussed here display a wide variety of subgenres. Some are “environmentally focused”—​directly addressing environmental topics from a scientific and/​or activist point of view. Some are “environmentally related”—​ primarily concerned with issues of politics, social equity, or economics in the context of the natural environment. Some embrace traditional documentary forms such as the “expository/​compilation” model, structured through interviews with recognized researchers and activists and supplemented with original or stock “B-​roll” footage. Others consist of mostly original footage filmed around a particular issue, activity, or environmental struggle. Still others focus primarily on the beliefs or actions of a particular individual or group engaged in environmental research or advocacy. I am concerned here primarily with films and television programs that attempt to express a critical point of view about environmental problems and promote an activist stance in response to them. Many excellent environmental

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documentaries serve to educate their audiences about the natural world, without taking into consideration threats to ecological balance and their social, political, or economic consequences. While programs like March of the Penguins, BBC’s Life and Planet Earth series, Ken Burns’s The National Parks, or the satirical cultural criticism of Werner Herzog’s documentaries, might have a place in a longer tome, this book will confine its analysis to films that take a more overtly activist stance. This book also does not aspire to be an exercise in ecocriticism. It will not venture deeply into a discussion of critical analytical frameworks such as phenomenology, ecological psychology, emotive/​affect theory, or cognitive communication theory of cinema, except in passing. Our primary obligation here is to the content of the films themselves. Furthermore, this survey does not presume to be comprehensive. Most of the films discussed here are English-​language films produced in North America or Europe. I am certain that there are scores of high-​quality, important productions that I have overlooked, especially those from Asia and the Southern Hemisphere. I extend my apologies in advance to the producers of those many excellent films and television programs that have not found their way into these pages. On the other hand, I survey here a wide variety of films, unlike most articles and anthologies that engage a more limited number of films with a deeper theoretical analysis. It has been my goal to present as wide an array of different environmental topics and formal approaches as I could, within my constraints of length and time. There are literally hundreds of films and video programs on topics involving environmental activism, but I have chosen to review as many as I  could in some depth. I  have interviewed the directors of fourteen of my selected films, based on my evaluation of their significance, the availability of the filmmakers, and my own familiarity with the subjects of the films. Those interviewed included the following: Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson (What a Way to Go); Helena Norberg-​Hodge (The Economics of Happiness); Ron Bowman (Six Degrees Could Change the World); Gregory Greene (The End of Suburbia); James Jandak Wood (Crude Impact); Joe Berlinger (Crude); Deborah Coons Garcia (The Future of Food); Chris Paine (Who Killed the Electric Car?); Faith Morgan and Pat Murphy (The Power of Community); Oliver Hodge (Garbage Warrior); Mark MacInnis (Urban Roots); Gary Marcuse (Waking the Green Tiger); Emily James (Just Do It!); and Ryan Mlynarczyk and Amanda Creighton (Within Reach).

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This book also seeks to examine the reasons behind this abundance of environmental productions. Among the factors that have contributed to this phenomenon are general advances in scientific research concerning environmental issues; the debate over these issues in the political arena; the proliferation of television channels in the era of cable and satellite distribution; the miniaturization and digitization of video production and postproduction, rendering the production process much more accessible to independent filmmakers; the expansion of film festivals, including those specifically focused on environmental films; and the migration of video distribution to the internet, affording innovative methods of financing, marketing, and streaming of video productions. We will attempt to evaluate how these trends have converged to create a favorable ground for environmental documentary filmmaking, but have also posed new challenges for documentarians. In our early chapters, we will undertake a historical commentary on how film scholars define “documentary” and how society has come to understand “the environment.” Both terms are the products of an ever-​evolving process of social construction. We will then examine some fundamental principles of critical analysis in understanding how these films visualize their subjects and structure their rhetorical arguments. We will proceed to track the evolution of the environmental documentary film from the earliest days of cinema, through the innovation of television, up to the recent developments in digital production and distribution. With this context established, we will move on to discuss specific films, their contributions to environmental understanding, and their aesthetic approach to telling their stories. I have arranged these chapters by general subject matter rather than by considerations of formal or structural genre, because I think such organization will be the most user-​friendly in helping readers to reach the material to which they are most drawn. Finally, I  wish to express my profound appreciation to those who have supported me in this endeavor:  my publisher’s representative Katie Gallof, who encouraged me to write the book and shepherded it every step of the way; Dr.  Helen Hughes, who hosted the Documentary and the Environment Symposium in the United Kingdom and compared notes with her own work; my Dominican colleague Arthur Scott, with whom I co-​taught the Environmental Crisis through Film course; and my loving partners Cascade Cook and Zhahai Stewart, who endured my stress and neglect for years while giving me nothing but encouragement.

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I hope this book will serve to further raise awareness of these films and the crucial issues that they discuss. Every year many new environmental documentaries emerge to inform the public about the threats—​known and unknown—​to the environment and their lives. These programs will continue to offer innovations in content, form, style, and strategies for distribution. Our relationship with our home planet is becoming extremely precarious, and the time remaining to heal that relationship is becoming very short. Let us hope these environmental documentaries keep on coming.

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What qualifies as an “environmental documentary”? A nature series like British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Life that describes the natural world from a scientific viewpoint? A  film like An Inconvenient Truth that employs persuasion to forward a sociopolitical viewpoint? A film like Just Do It! that chronicles the activities of a countercultural environmental activist organization in Great Britain? When we propose to talk about environmental documentaries, we first need to confront two challenging questions. First, what makes a film a documentary? How do we define the broad category of documentary in all its varied manifestations, from ostensibly value-​neutral educational programs to overtly activist works of propaganda? Second, how do we define the environment? What subject matter identifies a program as environmental, as distinguished from programs whose focus is more essentially political, economic, social, or even philosophical? How has the public understanding or social construction of the environment changed over the decades? Both questions involve a long history of debate and development, and neither is a particularly easy question to answer. So let us define our terms before we proceed to select and analyze our films.

What is a documentary? A vast body of literature, roughly spanning the past eighty years, has attempted to define the term “documentary” in relation to cinema. We will make no attempt here to summarize all of the debates, but a brief review is in order. The first use of the term in relation to film is generally attributed to British filmmaker John Grierson, who defined documentary as “the creative treatment

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of actuality” (Kerrigan and McIntyre, 111). This definition attempts to reconcile the subject matter of a film—​something that exists in the real world, as distinguished from fiction, wherein characters and settings are the product of a screenwriter’s imagination—​and the vision of the filmmaker, whose art demands the creative interpretation of reality through the filter of a personal, subjective point of view, and whose craft requires innumerable technical decisions in the creative employment of the film medium and its production processes. To some critics Grierson’s phrase seems an oxymoron, a futile attempt to reconcile the romantic subjectivity of the artist with the faithful representation of reality. A  less ideologically rigid, more pragmatic perspective might conclude that if one defines the ideal documentary as a completely indexical reproduction of reality, such a production would prove theoretically impossible to produce, through the medium of cinema or any other. The cinema is an art form that requires conscious selective aesthetic judgments, but this fact shouldn’t erase the distinction between programs that depict avowedly fictional stories and those that address real-​world topics without relying on the artifice of studio sets and actors’ performances. Documentary film thus enjoys a privileged status as a mediated representation of reality compared to fiction films. This distinction is not lost on viewers, who approach documentaries with a different frame of mind compared to fiction. Documentaries represent what Weik von Mossner (“Emotions,” 2014) calls “discourses of consequence,” meaning that viewers expect documentaries to potentially convey a message or have an impact on their actual lives, or at least on their understanding of the real world. This expectation is not diminished even though documentaries may evoke emotional responses in addition to presenting factual information. For decades debates have raged regarding the most desirable or appropriate forms of documentary to bridge that gap between photographic reproduction and the reality it captures. Favoring “objectivity” or “realism” are the stylistic approaches represented by cinema verité and direct cinema, wherein the filmmaker merely records what he sees, with a minimum of narration, reenactment, or manipulative filmic techniques. By this standard, the purity of a documentary depends upon how sparingly the filmmakers inject themselves into the portrayal of reality. This approach to documentary is exemplified in the works of filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers, D. A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman, and Richard Leacock.

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At the other extreme is the “essentialist” viewpoint, which categorizes a film as a documentary primarily on the strength of the filmmaker’s own intention to represent reality. A film may present a selective or even distorted view of reality, employing the most manipulative techniques of camera composition and editing, but if it represents the genuine vision of the filmmaker—​if it is not intended to be received by an audience as fiction—​then it still meets the criteria for being considered documentary. From this viewpoint, even blatantly propagandistic films like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will or Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine meet the definition of documentary. In framing their documentary projects, filmmakers make a series of choices on how to approach their topics. In general, these choices are driven by the nature of the topic, the rhetorical strategy of persuasive argument, and judgments about the receptivity of the audience. How broad or narrow should their subject be? How should factual information be balanced with emotional appeal? What is the most effective stylistic approach to the topic? How long should the program run? Should it be designed to persuade neutral viewers or to motivate “true believers” to take action? Many variables play into this decision-​making process, including the framing of the topic, the sponsorship of the production, and the experience and personality of the filmmaker, among others. No artist is an island. Besides filmmakers and their production teams, there are other players in this process. Filmmaking takes place within a particular social context, assuming a certain level of awareness and congruence of values within its audience. The nature of a film’s reception depends to a great extent upon the expectations, knowledge, and values of its viewers. So a filmmaker frames her approach to a topic based on the audience’s anticipated knowledge of and predisposition toward her topic. Beyond those concerns, the design of the film’s narrative may be influenced by other social or cultural elements, such as its sponsorship by an organization, the degree of collaboration with its subjects, or coverage of the topic (attitudinal preparation) in other forms of media. Finally, in seeking an audience, a filmmaker must survey the field of “windows of distribution,” including but not limited to theatrical release, cable television networks, film festivals, DVD/​Blu-​Ray distribution, and online streaming. Despite this wide variety of considerations—​artistic, ideological, sociocultural, technological, or practical—​there seems to be broad consensus on what a documentary is NOT. Unedited video footage from a security camera is not a documentary; although it preserves a continuous, indexical relationship to a certain frame of reality, it lacks any coherent thematic development. On the

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other hand, unedited handheld footage of the 2011 Japanese tsunami, encompassing several minutes of action and including a number of shifts in camera position and reframing of the field of view, does have a documentary quality, even though shot by an amateur observer. At the other extreme, shots in fictional films could be not considered as documentary, even though they may possess an indexical relationship to what was in front of the camera at the time. The artificial structuring of these shots and their placement within an avowedly fictional narrative strips them of any claim to documentary status. The condensation of events and characters that occurs in “docudramas” likewise disqualifies such works from being considered documentary in terms of genre. The basic series of events they represent may have occurred historically, but the restaging of these events with actors and artificial sets deprives them of serious consideration as documentary. There are films that are clearly fictional that nonetheless have a strong affinity for documentary. The neorealist films of Rossellini (Open City, 1945), de Sica (Bicycle Thief, 1947) and Pontecorvo (Battle of Algiers, 1966), while structured as fictional narratives with actors portraying fictional characters, nevertheless gain a feel of authenticity from their use of realistic locations, unknown or nonprofessional actors, and contemporary social themes. Also treading close to the line are films like Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948), which tells a very naturalistic but still fictional story of a Cajun boy set against the very real world of the Louisiana oil fields; or Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which mixes actual documentary footage with reenactments involving Hollywood actors, in a documentary-​style investigation into the real-​world mystery of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Few would be likely to assign these films to the category of documentary. Nevertheless, there are many styles of representation that lead into more ambiguous territory. One somewhat controversial issue involves the question of dramatic reenactment. Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), which investigated the possible innocence of a very real man convicted of murder and on death row in Texas, was regarded as too controversial for an Academy Award consideration in the Documentary Feature category, primarily because of the reenactments it contained. Twenty-​five years later, such reenactments have become commonplace in documentaries to a great extent, because audiences are assumed to be sophisticated enough to recognize that reenactments are a convention not intended to fool the viewer but to creatively visualize events that actually

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happened in the past but were not or could not have been filmed or videotaped at the time. Digital creation and re-​creation of images or events, made possible by advances in computer technology over recent decades, present another problematic issue for documentary theory. Many television programs designed to be accepted by audiences as nonfiction employ digital imagery to visualize everything from the world of the dinosaurs to the speculative apocalyptic future portrayed in the cable series Life without People. Again, the central ethical question seems to be whether the filmmaker’s aim is to mislead the audience about whether something actually happened, or instead to portray a speculative reality that cannot possibly be photographed through ordinary means. The crucial questions seem to be how the audience will receive the audiovisual information, and whether the filmmaker’s creative vision is supported by credible research or testimony. Since the birth of the medium, film theorists have sought to understand how cinema constructs and conveys its messages. But an awareness of how cinema communicates its messages to audiences is critical to understanding the nature of documentary representation, since presumably the representation of the actualities of the world should be held to an even higher standard than the cinema of the imagination. The basic aesthetic elements of cinema may be summarized as visual composition, lighting, movement, color, direction of action, editing, sound (dialogue, sound effects, and music), and special effects. These elements of film craft may represent aspects of actual subjects in the real world, but they may also embody subjective perspectives communicated by the filmmaker. For example, the angle of a shot may make a subject appear more or less powerful; a long take may convey a deeper sense of continuous reality than a series of quick cuts; and juxtapositions of shots through editing may imply new associations and meanings through the comparison or contrast of images. Sound effects recorded in postproduction may add realism and emotional resonance to footage shot in the field without sync sound. Adding a musical soundtrack may lend an emotional tenor to a scene, reinforcing the message of the imagery. Even in direct cinema— the most pure mode of documentary style, which often relies on long takes and neutral camera angles—​the filmmaker still makes decisions about where to put the camera, when to move it, and when to make a cut. There is no avoiding the conclusion that, as an art form, cinema molds its own reality as much as it presents that of the world.

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Many documentarians engage in persuasive argument, desiring to convince the audience to adopt a particular point of view toward the subject matter. Toward this end, filmmakers employ age-​old strategies of rhetorical argument to engage and persuade their audiences. Following Aristotle, documentarians employ three primary rhetorical styles: (1) Logos—​the use of factual evidence and reasoning—​ through logical argument, empirical visual representation (e.g., photographs or original footage), and statistical evidence (e.g., charts and graphs) to embody or clarify ideas; (2) Ethos—​the reliance on authority, expertise, and ethical stature, established through testimony from recognized experts or those who speak from personal experience; and (3) Pathos—​the appeal to values and emotions, often through cultivating an identification with sympathetic subjects, or feelings of anger toward their antagonists. The world of film and video documentary inherits many nonfiction models of narrative form and rhetoric from the long traditions of writing, among them the historical account, persuasive essay, investigative report, biography, personal testimonial or diary, and sociological or anthropological study. These tried-​ and-​true methods of storytelling find analogues in the rhetorical and structural modes of the audiovisual documentary, making them more narratively and emotionally accessible to viewers, and serving as elements in the process of identifying and elaborating genres. Documentary films certainly qualify as forms of communication or “speech,” but it is crucial to respect the differences by which a viewer receives an audiovisual presentation, in contrast to a written or spoken address. Speeches based on factual evidence or appeals to authority are primarily left-​brain, analytical activities. The listener weighs the evidence and reaches a conclusion, similar to the process in a jury trial. However, an image is “worth a thousand words”; it may appear to offer the strongest evidence of a state of affairs, as well as convey an emotional feeling, thus involving both analytical and intuitive mental faculties. For example, the juxtaposition of two images may establish an implicit link between them that creates a sort of “visual logic.” The combination of an image and a musical theme may engage one’s logical and emotional faculties simultaneously. The skillfulness of a persuasive documentarian often rests in his ability to weave these rhetorical threads together seamlessly. Bill Nichols (1991, 2010) has identified six different “modes” of documentary representation: expository, observational, interactive, poetic, reflexive, and performative. These modes define the relationships between the subject matter, the filmmaker, and the viewer, in terms of interaction and stylistic

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interpretation. Briefly, the expository mode is what we often think of as the traditional or conventional documentary: an objective, didactic style of presentation, often structured through a compilation of interviews and supplementary “B-​roll” footage, linked together by a voiceover narration. Although this mode may seem old fashioned in the light of more recent experimental innovations in documentary form, it remains true that the unfiltered realism and emotional honesty of people’s voices and faces can make a powerful impact on viewers. The observational mode embodies the stylistic values of ethnographic documentary or direct cinema (exemplified by the works of Pennebaker, Wiseman, Leacock, and the Maysles Brothers), which convey meaning through observation minimally interrupted by interviews, stock footage, or interpretation by narration. Any editorial commentary is implied through the choices of camera composition and editing. The interactive mode, exemplified by the cinema verité of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, mixes observational footage with direct engagement between the filmmaker and his subjects. This style maintains a sense of immediate interaction with the everyday world, but in a manner that includes the filmmaker in that interaction. In the poetic mode, the visual canvas is composed of images linked together (sometimes naturalistically, sometimes with editorial intent), while the soundtrack is carried primarily by natural sounds and music. In films of this mode—​influenced by experimental and “art film” movements—​the form and mood carry as much expressive weight as the content. Poetic documentaries sometimes dispense with vocal commentary entirely—​both that of interview subjects and of narrators—​although some poetic documentaries are guided by a single narrator. The style of the poetic mode tends to carry viewers along in an almost trancelike state, so that the task of interpretation is largely left to them. The reflexive mode, on the other hand, includes references to the filmmaker and/​or the filmmaking process itself as part of the film’s central subject matter, implicitly inviting audience members to engage in a more critical viewing, reminding them that they are experiencing a cultural production with its own context, values, and purposes. This somewhat ironic mode is analogous to the Brechtian approach to live theater, wherein self-​references to the production are intended to evoke an audience reaction more akin to critical reflection than emotional empathy. The performative mode puts the very act of production at the center of the documentary; the subject of the film is either the film production itself, or the active participation or performance of the filmmakers. These

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six modes should not be considered as exclusionary; many if not most documentaries are hybrids, embodying elements of multiple modes. Finally, there are different categories of narrative, varied approaches to telling a story or expressing a theme. Some messages are most effectively conveyed through the conventional compilation style with expert interviews combined with supporting footage. In these programs the narrative tends to be topical, moving from one aspect of the subject matter to another in a logically structured sequence. When understanding a sequence of events is crucial, a chronological mode of storytelling may be the best approach, following the events in the order they occurred. Sometimes the story of a particular event or person can metaphorically represent a larger theme or struggle; in such a case, the film may take a biographical or ethnographic approach to an individual or a group. When immersing the audience in an unfamiliar world is the goal, a more poetic or observational style may be more successful; when the filmmaker’s personal experience is at the core of the message, a diary form may be the most effective narrative approach. Much theoretical research of late has been devoted to the viewer (the receiver of the documentary message) and the evolving technologies of production and distribution. These two topics have a close relationship. In earlier times films were usually viewed in public theaters as a collective experience. Since documentary films always struggled to compete with fictional films in the theatrical marketplace, broadcast television offered a more comfortable and private venue for documentaries, either as long-​form television journalism (e.g., PBS’s Frontline or CBS’s 60 Minutes) or as an extension of entertainment programs (e.g., Disney’s True Life Adventures). Expansion of cable media channels created new audiences for a wider variety of documentary messages and forms (e.g., so-​called reality programs). In recent times, exposure through film festivals, distribution through DVD sales, and online streaming have afforded viewers new forms of access to documentary programs. Recent advances in distribution technologies served as an outlet for more controversial viewpoints, which previously had difficulty overcoming barriers put up by “mainstream” media channels. Media acquisitions by larger corporations had made them more resistant to messages that challenged existing sociopolitical and economic values and structures. On the other hand, this diverse media universe has collapsed the wider public audience of the broadcast era, reducing the reception of common messages and the consensual understanding that might emerge from them. This lack of common mediated sources of

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information has resulted in a “postmodern consciousness,” in which all notions of truth come to be regarded as subjective. Interpretations of reality become reduced to “social constructions,” and this relativism reinforces “the denial of the possibility for the representation of the real, (including) the claim that documentary is entirely constructed and fiction-​like” (Hughes, 128). The mindset that the viewer brings to the program is a crucial element in the communication process of documentary. Every viewer embodies a different constellation of values and “mental maps” of reality. A given viewer may simply be seeking to learn more information about a topic, but she may also be seeking to reinforce an already existing personal set of values: political preferences, economic and cultural attitudes, spiritual/​religious beliefs, and gender or sexual orientation. The viewers will thus respond to a film through the prism of their own constellation of beliefs and values, as well as their individual level of critical thinking. Any documentary production is thus a complex tapestry that integrates content and form into an effective presentation of the filmmaker’s vision, presented to an audience in a manner that hopefully will be received as informative and deeply felt, through the filter of the worldview that a viewer brings to the program.

What is the environment? Producing environmental documentaries poses unique challenges, because in the end, “the environment” is not a concrete object that is subject to facile visualization. What we call “the environment” is both a complex natural ecosystem, and a socially constructed abstraction. Many of its fundamental relationships are neither readily visible to the naked eye, nor intuitively understood by the intellect. So how shall we define “the environment” for purposes of this study? To answer this question, let us briefly survey the historical evolution of the “intellectual construction” of the relationship between humanity and nature. Spiritual, mythical, and philosophical perspectives toward the natural world have ranged from regarding it as a romantic paradise to a fallen world set apart from the transcendent realm of the divine. The cognitive split between humanity and nature—​indeed, between the spiritual world and the material—​derives from the very earliest religious texts. The book of Genesis attributes to human beings a divine spark apparently not possessed by animals, which are viewed as

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created primarily to serve human endeavors. Events in nature, whether b ­ eneficial or catastrophic, are interpreted as fulfilling the purposes of a transcendent deity. The human species seems to be unique in its ability to cognitively disassociate itself from the natural world. Writes Willoquet-​Maricondi (“Shifting Paradigms,” 2010):  “We have erected a social structure, a civilization based on a perceptual error regarding the place of humans in the biotic community” (54–​55). Rust and Monani (2013) assert, “Environment is not just the organic world . . . it is the whole habitat which encircles us, the physical world entangled with the cultural” (1). History has been significantly marked by the ability of humankind to control natural processes and resources to serve its energy needs—​in the beginning with fire, wood, water, wind, and metals, later with fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The rise of mercantilism and imperial conquest established the supremacy of societies that could excel at invention in the fields of exploration and weaponry. Indigenous peoples that hacked out a meager existence with minimal disruption to their natural habitats could not withstand the onslaught of invaders whose superior technologies offset their disadvantage in numbers. The opening of vast new lands encouraged a vision of nature as the repository of inexhaustible natural resources, along with the promise of limitless growth and wealth. The dominance of humanity seemed to rest with those who could master technological innovation, and this tendency became even more pronounced during the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial revolution. (Diamond, 1997). In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, a pessimistic vision of a world in which food production could not keep pace with population growth. But his doomsday predictions failed to materialize, in large part because he couldn’t foresee the full extent of the coming Industrial Revolution and its impact on both industry and agriculture (Tverberg, 2012). Malthus’s flawed legacy has haunted all subsequent theorists who have questioned the limits to growth of population, resource exploitation, or economic expansion. With the rise of mechanized industry and agriculture and the consequent mass migrations from farms to cities, large segments of the population of industrial societies became progressively detached from the natural world, and the figure/​ ground relationship between nature and society shifted to become even more unbalanced in favor of human civilization. Intellectual movements countering this trend—​for example, the romantic movement of Blake and Wordsworth and

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the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau—​have always seemed to be minority protests against the irresistible onslaught of industrial “progress.” As technological innovation spurred more powerful methods of harnessing energy in the service of production and economic growth, the discoveries of science appeared to be fully allied with the push toward industrialization. More cheap energy begat more inventive technology that begat more diverse and comfortable means of livelihood. But during the mid-​nineteenth century, a few important thinkers began to sound cautionary notes. The ornithologist John James Audubon decried not only the indiscriminate massacre of birds and wildlife, but also its impact on indigenous peoples. Perhaps the first systematic challenge to the vision of technological progress emerged in 1864 with George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Marsh wrote one of the earliest explications of the ecological principle, noting the destructive effects of human activity on the natural world throughout history. The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 also brought into question the prevalent notion in the Judeo-​Christian tradition than man was a creation separate from nature, encouraging people to think of humanity as embedded in the natural world rather than standing apart from it. By the late nineteenth century, the dangerous effects of air pollution from coal-​burning factories became widely recognized, as was the increasing intrusion of human settlement into the most beautiful wilderness areas of the United States. From the visionary moral leadership of Sierra Club founder John Muir and the political support of avid outdoorsman President Theodore Roosevelt, the US Congress passed a series of laws creating a system of national parks. This “first wave” of environmental activism focused on conservation and preservation, recognizing that America’s natural resources were not as inexhaustible as previously believed. (Shabecoff, 1993) However, Roosevelt’s conservation advisor Gifford Pinchot fought for a balance between “progress” and the preservation of wilderness that became known as “wise use” approach to America’s natural resources. Pinchot’s view ultimately carried the day, beginning with the damming of part of Yosemite Valley in order to build the Hetch Hetchy dam to provide water to the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl brought environmental challenges to the forefront of the political agenda. Faced with massive unemployment, President Franklin D.  Roosevelt created several New Deal programs—​ the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), and the Tennessee Valley Authority

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(TVA)—​all designed to simultaneously put people back to work and help revitalize the land. The dire economic conditions temporarily resolved the perceived conflict between preserving wild spaces and stimulating the economy through job creation. Thus in the public mind, the natural environment came to be perceived not just as something to be preserved by the government, but also something that the government had become actively engaged in managing for the improvement of both natural systems and human society. Early in the twentieth century, scientific innovation and social progress were inextricably linked in the public mind. Until World War II, technological progress was widely regarded as an unchallenged good, and natural resources were seen as virtually unlimited. However, the devastation wrought by the machines of war, culminating in the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, began to shift the popular optimism regarding the inherent links between science, technology, and progress. The atomic age unveiled a vision of worldwide destruction, not only through warfare but also through radioactive pollution, causing many people for the first time to think beyond their views of inevitable technological progress and narrow nationalistic interests. The seeds had been planted for a rethinking of the relationship between scientific innovation and cultural progress, leading to treaties in the 1960s to limit the testing and production of nuclear weapons. During the post–​World War II period of conservative politics and economic expansion in the United States, environmentalism again took a back seat in the public mind. But beneath the surface, important thinking was going on. Aldo Leopold, author of Sand County Almanac (1949), developed his concept of a “land ethic,” a scientifically based re-​visioning of the relationship between humanity and nature that altered man’s role from conqueror of the land to citizen upon it—​just one living species among others in an interconnected web of life. Biologist Rachel Carson, whose 1951 book The Sea around Us was adapted into a feature-​length documentary film, also wrote Silent Spring in 1962, documenting the threats posed to humans and other species by pesticides, and bringing ecological issues to the attention of a broad public as well as the government. These thinkers and many others challenged the dominant paradigm of infinite growth and human hubris, increasingly regarding society in terms of systems thinking instead of ideological economic or political orthodoxy. Heading into the decade of the 1970s, two important events helped to focus the public imagination on the environment and encourage holistic environmental thinking. The first was the moon landing in 1969, accompanied by photos

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of Planet Earth from space—​Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot.” Seeing the Earth as a unified whole, dominated by blue oceans with land undivided by national borders, led the Earth’s residents to look at their planetary life in a more integral way. One manifestation of this new vision was the first Earth Day in 1970, which for perhaps the first time brought together all the related issues of conservation, consumerism, energy usage, pollution, and species extinction into an interwoven context. The most pivotal literary/​scientific publication of the decade was The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), which utilized emerging computer technology to make systematic projections for the future of the world’s consumption of resources in relation to population and economic growth. The book’s “business as usual” scenario indicated that the availability of the world’s nonrenewable resources would begin to limit growth early in the twenty-​first century, if measures were not undertaken to change the world’s patterns of resource consumption. The Limits to Growth received strong blowback from critics, especially from think tanks representing entrenched political and economic interest groups, and its projections were generally dismissed for decades. However, as of this writing, those scenarios are beginning to appear increasingly prophetic. (Meadows et al., 2004; Bardi, 2011) During this period, many new groups dedicated to addressing environmental problems came into being. Organizations founded across the 1960s and 1970s included Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the League of Conservation Voters, among others. Greenpeace, Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front focused on direct action, employing nonviolent resistance and in some cases illegal tactics in pursuit of their environmental goals. During the Nixon and Carter administrations, the founding of OPEC and the oil embargo forced Americans to recognize for the first time the limitations of the power of US energy resources and policy. As a consequence, people began to experience anxiety around two issues that were intricately linked—​the need for energy to fuel economic growth, and the desire to reduce environmental pollution linked to industrial output. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, many specific environmental crises highlighted by the media impacted public awareness of environmental threats, among them fires from oil pollution on Lake Erie (1969); acid rain decimating the trees of the Appalachian mountains (1970s); the deaths of thousands after the explosion of a chemical plant in

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Bhopal, India (1984); nuclear power accidents at Three-​Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986); cancerous pollution in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal (late 1970s); the discovery of an expanding hole in the ozone layer due to the release of chlorofluorocarbons or CFC’s (1985); and the release of thousands of gallons of oil from the tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound (1989). It seemed that hardly a year could go by without the revelation of a new environmental disaster. In the wake of these environmental emergencies, governments in the United States and around the world began to respond with laws and regulatory structures to protect the public from environmental degradation. In 1970, President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), creating a division of the executive branch of government to deal with problems of pollution. In the United States, laws were passed and administrative offices founded during the following decade:  legislation promoting clean air and water (e.g., the Clean Air Act of 1973); the Endangered Species Act (1973); the Superfund legislation (1980), requiring cleanup of polluted sites; laws controlling pesticides; laws requiring environmental impact statements for major construction projects; and laws expanding protected parkland and recreational areas (e.g., the Alaska National Interest Lands Act, 1980). Most of this legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was favored by the public at large. For a decade the protection of the environment became an almost unchallenged good in the eyes of both the people and their elected representatives. However, after the economic chaos and international challenges of the late 1970s, the momentum for governmental environmental intervention hit a wall. The administration of President Reagan, with its favoritism toward corporate interests and skepticism toward environmental science, began putting the brakes on environmental regulation, in what New York Times environmental journalist Philip Shabecoff (1993) called a “counterrevolution.” The energy resource extraction industries began to exert powerful political and financial influence to fashion government policies that eased some of the restrictions that had been imposed upon them. President Reagan’s appointees to head the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency were hired to regulate the same industries that had previously employed them, and they predictably moved to reduce the regulations established in the previous decade. The overconsumption of the world’s resources and pollution of the environment by industrially developed nations put increasing pressure on the so-​called developing nations that longed for a higher standard of living. Third World

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nations moved to nationalize the assets of private energy corporations within their borders, a trend that had been forestalled since the 1950s by diplomatic and military pressure from the United States. At the same time, the globalization of corporate trade began to erode job markets, pay scales, and workplace protections for workers in industrialized countries. Lax environmental regulations in many countries in the developing world provided an attractive alternative for corporations seeking to escape both high wage rates and environmental restrictions in their nations of origin. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, an increasing tension developed between the politics of energy and environmental protection. In the 2000 presidential election, the nomination of environmental spokesman Vice President Al Gore—​author of Earth in the Balance (1992)—​raised hopes that the United States might be ready to assume a leadership role in the battle against climate change. But Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in a disputed election, followed by the 9/​11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, took the United States on a very different path: one of denial and overt suppression of the scientific consensus about climate change, and commitment to wars in part intended to guarantee to the United States access to Middle Eastern oil. At a critical time, these policies set back the American role in the fight against climate change by at least a decade. Instead of moving forward in pursuit of sustainable energy technologies, the United States committed its blood and treasure to extending its dependence on fossil fuel energy. It has become increasingly clear that environmental threats do not end at a nation’s borders. Pollution from accidents like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the 2011 tsunami that caused the meltdowns of nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan, threatens the health and safety of sea life as well as of human beings over vast areas. Climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from industrialized countries, affects temperatures and sea levels worldwide, often most severely in those countries least responsible for those emissions. Disruption of patterns of rainfall has led to more intense storms, floods, and droughts, resulting in famines, migrations, and conflicts between various nations and cultural groups over food and water resources essential to life. Competition for increasingly scarce resources like water and fossil fuels has motivated civil struggles and international wars. During the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-​first, the failure to rein in anthropogenic climate change has symbolized the incredible challenge of overcoming the self-​interest of nations and

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corporations to work for the greater good of the human species. In 1988, the United Nations assembled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in order to aggregate and assess the worldwide scientific data on global warming. In Rio de Janeiro (1992), the United Nations sponsored the Earth Summit, the first of (to date) eighteen international conferences intended to formulate treaties with the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous disruptions of the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol set some binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but important countries did not meaningfully participate. The United States signed the treaty but failed to ratify it; China did not participate in the conference; Canada signed on but withdrew from the treaty in 2011; and many other countries failed to reach their reduction targets, or, in some cases, to make any reductions at all. Subsequent conferences, including the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, equally fell short in overcoming the conflicting aims of the industrialized nations like the United States and developing nations (especially China and India) in terms of reducing energy consumption while maintaining economic growth. The most recent UN climate conference, the 2015 COP-​21 in Paris, did succeed in achieving a nonbinding agreement encompassing all major greenhouse gas emitters, with stronger targets for reductions and a clearer plan for implementation than previous agreements. But many critics believe this agreement to be too little, too late. Meanwhile, the world has drifted through several years of stagnant economic growth, characterized by unpredictable prices and rates of extraction of energy resources, and instability among the world’s economic partnerships. The stakes seem to rise ever higher as nations are caught in a vice between their people’s expectations, a precarious supply of energy resources, and the closing circle of climate change. Despite laws and other efforts to protect endangered species, the rate of extinction continues to rise at an alarming rate—​up to 1,000 times the historical rate—​particularly due to habitat loss on the land and pollution in the seas. As these multiple environmental, economic, and social crises accelerate, it has begun to appear to many observers that the world is approaching serious tipping points. The social and political organization of society—​including even the mediated delivery of information—​takes us ever further away from the immediate experience of living in nature. In economic terms, Hageman (2013) noted, “the current ideology of capital sets the limits of how we can think (about) ecology, so we don’t know what being ecological might be in a non-​capital world”

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(65). Hughes (2014) asks, “Is it possible for democracies as they are run today, dependent on strong economies and on constant growth, to confront the issues raised by environmental concern?” (113) Ecologists feel the world’s climate has entered a new geological era, dubbed the Anthropocene, wherein the most powerful influence on world climate is the actions of humanity itself. Others note that the high and rising rate of extinction constitutes the sixth mass extinction in the planet’s history (Kolbert, 2014). It is against this historical background that we turn to the role played by environmental documentary films and video programs in framing the challenges of the brave new world of environmental crisis in which we find ourselves.

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Ecocritical Perspectives

In the rising field of academic ecocriticism, one finds passionate debates about many aspects of environmental documentary films. What defines a documentary as environmental? What are the proper goals of such films? What narrative forms and aesthetic techniques do filmmakers employ to achieve those ends? What internal contradictions may exist within them? What influences mold the process of message development between filmmaker and spectator? Ingram (2014) asserts that “a good film theory will be based on defensible philosophical principles, will account for all relevant aspects of film spectatorship, and, if possible, generate informative textual interpretations of individual films” (24). Among the philosophical approaches that provide insight to such principles are psychological studies in phenomenology, cognition, and emotion; process philosophy; linguistic studies of signs and representation; questions of postmodernism; and media studies in political economy. Let us examine, if ever so briefly, some of the implications of this research for the analysis of environmental documentaries. First, let us provide a rough outline of how an environmental documentary comes into being. Cinema as a technology and art form is a product of modern industrial civilization, based upon a combination of mechanical and chemical discoveries, which has reached audiences through the evolution of different venues of distribution based on other technological inventions (theaters, television, DVDs, and digital streaming). At some point, an artist (or a combination of artists and technicians) creates a vision for a story that they hope will connect with an audience. The filmmaker must then create a compelling script or narrative, raise funds to produce the film, execute a production plan through a countless stream of aesthetic or technical directorial decisions, find a means of publicizing and distributing the film, and then await the response of critical reviewers and audiences.

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This portrait of a film’s creation may strike the reader as obvious. However, at every point in the process, all manner of objective and subjective factors come into play to determine the content, form, and reception of a film, any of which may affect its impact as a cultural product and its success as a work of artistic communication. As Turvey (2005) notes, “the film scholar has to undertake a traditional humanistic investigation into the intentions of the group of filmmakers—​into the specific historical context in which they are using the conventions, how they understand their use, and the reasons they have for using the stylistic conventions that they do” (29). This critical inquiry also calls for a bridging of the two cultures of academic research—​the humanities and the sciences—​so that recent research into human physiological and psychological response may be included in the interpretive process, ultimately promoting a new form of interdisciplinary study with the academy. The term ecocinema has a dual meaning, referring simultaneously to the realm of the films themselves, and to principles of criticism regarding such films. Ecocinema, says Willoquet-​ Maricondi (“Shifting Paradigms,” 2010), has “consciousness-​raising and activist intentions, as well as responsibility to heighten awareness about contemporary issues and practices affecting planetary health. Ecocinema overtly strives to inspire personal and political action on the part of viewers, stimulating our thinking so as to bring about concrete changes in the choices we make, daily and in the long run, as individuals and as societies, locally and globally” (45). Skeptical critics, however, question whether a cinema wedded to the technological world could ever be an adequate medium for healing humanity’s alienation from nature; Hughes (2014) notes, “The materiality of a medium such as film shares in the toxicity of industrial development” (11). Ingram (2013) asserts that the centrality of environmental threats on human society in most environmental films “affirms rather than challenges the culture’s fundamental anthropocentric ethos” (44). Even the use of panoramic shots taken from helicopters (presumably increasing the production’s carbon footprint) may inspire a cynical response from some critics. Hageman (2013) argues in favor of a dialectical critique, “a process aimed at locating and analyzing contradictions in cinematic representation of ecology and ecological issues” (64). Ivakhiv (2013) presents a compelling analysis of the multiple ecologies of environmental documentaries. First he identifies cinema’s ecology in terms of its objects of representation. Cinema is anthropomorphic in representing the human, geomorphic in spatially organizing its “object-​world,” and biomorphic

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in animating its interpretive forms. In relational terms, these ecologies may be identified as social, material, and mental (or perceptual): “Various forms of film theory interrogate aspects of this set of relations: phenomenology addresses its perceptual and embodied dimensions, psychoanalysis its intrapsychic dimensions, cognitivism (and) its neuropsychological correlates, Marxist and feminist analysis its class and gender politics, and so on. An ecocritical film theory rooted in process-​relational philosophy can place all these within the broadest frame of reference: that is, within our dynamic relationship to the world” (89). Ivakhiv also describes the event of viewing cinema as a relational process. The ecology of viewership encompasses the external or spectacular, referring to the immediacy of viewer’s response in the moment; the narrative, defined as recognition of a temporal sequence; and the exo-​referential, the understanding of meaningful reference to the world outside the film. Regarding the relationship of film to the natural world, ecocritics cite many obstacles for filmmakers in successfully bridging this gap. As an audiovisual medium, cinema has obvious limitations in providing kinesthetic and tactile experience of a place. Rust and Monani (2013) note its limitations in representing long-​term natural processes:  “Environmental science deals in effects that are often too vast, too slow, or too dispersed to be observed photographically . . . in the increasing use of charts and diagrams in films like An Inconvenient Truth there is a cinematic move towards rendering the world as visual data” (9). Time-​lapse photography and animated sequences may provide visual support, although that film’s use of an animated sequence of a drowning polar bear received criticism from some critics. Finally, even the basic experience of viewing a film in a theater or home environment reinforces the viewer’s separation from the natural world. The subjective response of viewers is another area of discussion and controversy among ecocritics. Ingram (2014) notes that “each viewer will have his or her own response to a film, based on personal memories and experiences,” and that these associations will be different from both those of the filmmaker and of other viewers (26). Those attending environmental films are usually self-​ selected; they bring to their viewing experience certain expectations, often aiming to reinforce their existing beliefs rather than challenge them. A  vigorous debate in ecocritical circles involves the primacy of cognition vs. emotion in the reception of cinematic messages. Hughes (2014), following Kollmuss and Agyemen, notes that environmental awareness itself includes both a cognitive, knowledge-​based component and

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an affective, perceptual component. Cognitive response is limited by the non-​ immediacy, gradualness, and complexity of environmental change. Emotional response is limited by lack of awareness, contradictory information, and emotional counterreactions such as denial, apathy, and resignation. Additionally, Hughes asserts that “the separation between reason and emotion or between cognition and feeling has been broken down in studies that demonstrate that reasoning does not function properly without the motivational elements provided by feeling and emotion” (118). Smith (2003) offers an associative model that links cognition and emotion and to some extent dissolves the distinction: “Filmic cues that can provide emotional information include facial expression, figure movement, dialogue, expression and tone,” among other visual cinematic techniques (42). Ingram (2014) distinguishes between “affect”—​“A viewer’s automatic, visceral response to a film,” rooted in a phenomenological perspective—​and “emotion,” which “includes a cognitive element in addition to a bodily feeling” (23). Emotion in this sense might include feelings based on cultural values or personal beliefs. From a phenomenological perspective, Ingram also notes, “Taking into consideration subjective responses to films, including personal variations on those responses . . . tends to put affect, or the viewer’s own bodily responses to a film, at the center of film analysis and appreciation” (26). As Weik von Mossner (“Emotions,” 2014) notes, “one of the things that give the documentary genre its emotional power is viewers’ belief in its non-​ fictional nature and their understanding of the consequential nature of what is presented on the screen” (9). On the other hand, the narrative strategies and structures of environmental documentaries may enhance their persuasive power by borrowing dramatic techniques from fictional films, demonstrating that the emotional power of cinematic techniques can work across modes and genres. Ecocritics question how viewers’ experiences with fictional films may condition their reception of documentaries. As Ivakhiv (2013) observes, “films are finite in that they have clear beginnings and endings, and between these the world of the film unfolds in temporal, if not necessarily linear or chronological, sequence” (93). Ingram (2014) observes that “a narrative film usually works by establishing the viewer’s emotional relationship with the protagonist’s goals and actions” (44). As Hughes (2014) notes, environmental documentaries sometimes utilize viewer identification with a protagonist to evoke a personal response: “The film in effect is an attempt to make an audio-​visual version of the personal intuitive process

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of coming to a point of view (by) linking the argument of the documentary with the life story of a presenter or participant in the film” (119). Examples include global warming crusader Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, dolphin advocate Ric O’Barry in The Cove, or the environmental activist groups in Just Do It! The question of viewer identification becomes trickier when considering environmental documentaries about animals. As noted earlier, such documentaries often employ anthropomorphic analogies or metaphors to describe animal behavior as human-​like; such portrayals often seem superficial or even preposterous. However, as Welling (2014) notes, recent scientific research has established interesting evolutionary links between human biochemical reactions and those of other species, making those “emotional” analogies between species more plausible. Historically, “nature” films of the past century rarely ventured beyond the veneer of educational objectivity—​with an occasional foray into experimental artistic forms—​to enter directly into the realm of ecological activism, with all its political, economic, and social implications. But the past couple of decades have witnessed a radical shift in this regard, and critical research for the reasons behind this change invokes the political economy of the media. In an era of increased corporate control over media companies and the consequent focus on entertainment and reduced news reporting budgets (including even so-​ called documentary channels like National Geographic, Discovery, PBS, etc.), documentarians concerned with the environmental crisis have been forced to turn to alternative media strategies. The growth of environmental film festivals has been accompanied by an increasingly alarmist tone among these films. Smaill (2014) observes, “Documenters serve not only to observe but to intervene. This mode of filmmaking . . . seeks to participate in social and political transformation (and) endeavors to rally and construct a public, a constituency that . . . recognizes a need for change” (104). Hughes notes, “In a context where television represents the ‘prime real estate’ of communicative possibility, campaigning groups have developed a tactic to infiltrate the highly protected public sphere through the development of high profile events to attract news attention . . . Activist documentary film making has been profoundly influenced by the media tactics pursued by radical environmental groups” (120). However, this departure from journalistic objectivity, combined with the limited reach of film festivals and isolated television or theatrical releases, makes reaching a mass audience an almost insurmountable challenge, unless a film enjoys the prominence of a spokesperson like Al Gore or the suspenseful drama of The Cove.

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Yet another topic for ecocritical researchers of documentaries involves the various aesthetic techniques of the cinematic medium and their special applications for environmental films. Regarding shot composition, Hughes (2014) includes a chart (50) that lists the use of different kinds of shots in environmental films: shots from satellites and helicopters to convey holistic and spectacular views of the earth and its landscapes; long shots that dwarf human figures amidst their surroundings; and close-​ups that emphasize subjects’ emotional expression. Vivanco (2013) notes how the use of handheld camera movement in cinema verité style reinforces the realism of the action and places the viewer within it, as do long takes that reinforce the continuity of both time and space. Weik von Mossner (“Emotions,” 2014) notes how color stimulates both universal physiological responses and culturally conditioned associations. Hughes (2014) mentions that editing between shots of objects or subjects may establish associations between them that have cognitive or emotional impacts. Finally, many elements of a soundtrack make important contributions: voiceover narration may complement the visuals and add to their coherence; postproduction sound effects enhance a shot’s realism; and the musical score may contribute to a scene’s cultural context or provide an emotional accent to a scene. Animated visuals, charts, and graphs may serve to provide images that cannot be shot live or to visualize abstract information or data to render them visual for an audience. Perhaps the most obvious way to identify subgenres of environmental documentaries—​and the approach we will adopt in this book—​is by subject matter or topic. Some of these films take a very broad view, examining the most general impacts of human civilization on the ecosphere. Others focus on more discrete areas of ecological dysfunction, such as global warming, peak oil, pollution and waste, food and water, species extinction, and social inequity. While all of these areas of concern inevitably overlap, the central emphasis varies significantly from film to film. Each subgenre has its own subcategories: for example, the broad subject of energy may be broken down into oil, coal, natural gas, the electric grid, renewable energy, and so on. Furthermore, a film may focus on a general subject (e.g., anthropogenic climate change in An Inconvenient Truth) or on a more specific example of environmental destruction (e.g., the negative impacts of oil pollution on an indigenous tribe in Ecuador in Crude). Some films intend primarily to raise alarm about ecological threats, while others investigate potential solutions to environmental problems, from the development of alternative energy technologies to ways of changing personal lifestyles. Still other films strive to motivate viewers to engage in direct activism.

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Another perspective for categorizing environmental documentaries is in terms of their structural modes and rhetorical styles of presentation (see Hughes, 2014). A common form of environmental documentary follows the expository or compilation model, which intercuts interviews with recognized experts on a given subject with either original or stock footage to add visual support to the interviews. There may be budgetary considerations concerning this approach, depending on the availability and cost of stock footage. A generic shot of a deep-​ sea oil platform should not be hard to find, but a photo of a particular meeting of activists in an African country that took place a decade ago might require a long and thorough process of audiovisual research. Similarly, a film dealing with a well-​researched topic of long standing (such as the accumulation of garbage over decades) may be easier to visually document than the impacts of more recent technological developments (such as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”) or a practice where footage is hard to shoot live (such as animal abuse in food preparation). The compilation model of documentary has both strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, it may bring together a wealth of research and opinion from a wide variety of expert testimony. But the attention of viewers may flag over time if they are presented with an overwhelming amount of scientific testimony, or if the program loses focus by spanning too broad an area of subject matter. Regardless of the level of interest in a topic, viewers can only watch a series of talking heads for so long before their eyes begin to glaze over. For example, the limited box office success of The 11th Hour has been attributed to its attempt to cover too broad an array of topics, without some structural thread to frame the narrative and engage the audience emotionally. Perhaps a film hosted by an actor (Leonardo DiCaprio in this film) failed to achieve the gravitas of one focused on a former vice president and environmental author (Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth). On the other hand, Gore’s political history may have alienated potential viewers of the opposing political persuasion, who might have otherwise been more receptive to the film’s message. In expository documentaries, interviews with experts may involve cinema verité–​style interaction with the filmmaker, or they may be presented as testimony without interaction. Films may include narration by the filmmaker or another selected narrator or “host,” or they may be purely observational, without the injection of any narration, just letting the images speak for themselves. Each mode has its own distinct strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes a filmmaker’s prospects for success in reaching an audience may be enhanced by framing the

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film’s topic in terms of a story, either by following the activities of one individual or group, or by injecting the quest of the filmmaker into the film itself. One of the most successful environmental documentaries, at least in terms of reaching its intended audience, was An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which explained the case for global warming through the personal focus on former Vice President Al Gore and his travelling slideshow. The film oscillates between following Gore’s personal story—​how he came to learn about climate change and his political rise and fall—​and the information he conveys visually in his presentations. So the film strikes an effective balance between telling a personal story and conveying a lot of factual information. Another method of engaging an audience is telling the life stories of important historical figures in the environmental movement. Biographical films like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (American Experience, 2007)  and Green Fire (2011), a biographical film about ecology pioneer Aldo Leopold, frame environmental philosophy and research in a personal context. In The Island President (2011), Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the island nation of the Maldives, fought to persuade advanced polluting countries to reduce global warming to keep his homeland from disappearing under the sea. Such compelling stories promote audience identification with an activist figure. In some environmental documentaries, the story of the film becomes the story of the making of the film. These films reflect aspects of Nichols’s interactive, performative, or reflexive modes of cinematic rhetoric. In Gasland, viewers accompany director Josh Fox as he travels the United States, interviewing families about their struggles against hydraulic fracturing of natural gas and oil in their communities. In The Cove, viewers become coconspirators in the direct actions of the “guerrilla” filmmakers themselves as they plan and execute an activist action to expose the massacre of dolphins. Finally, there are the poetic or lyrical modes of environmental documentaries; such films make their statements not through any rhetorical style of argumentation, but through the sheer force of pure cinema—​the meditative power of images, their suggestive juxtaposition through editing, and the emotional power of music. Environmental documentaries are distinguished by certain notable styles of rhetorical address or argumentation. Since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, environmental writers have often assumed an apocalyptic tone when describing the potentially calamitous effects of certain environmental threats; their intentions were presumably to frighten the public and its governmental representatives into taking urgent action to prevent the

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worst from happening. But after half a century of overwrought predictions of ecological disaster, audiences have naturally become skeptical of environmental messengers who too closely resemble religious prophets on street corners screaming “The end is near!” Fortunately, there are other rhetorical typologies that may serve environmental communications as well, including the scientific (focusing on factual information about the environment), the utilitarian (discussing the environment as a human resource), and the aesthetic (evoking the spiritual wonder of nature). Most contemporary environmental activists, including filmmakers, have come to realize that they must temper their apocalyptic tone with authoritative evidence and testimony, and offer their audiences some measure of emotional uplift and a call to positive action to improve the situation. One tactically innovative style with the potential to relieve a documentary’s strident tone is the use of irony and/​or reflexivity. Irony, according to Hughes (2014), is “a useful way to express the contradictions that are endemic in modern societies created by the divisions between society and nature and between science and politics” (88). Seymour (2014) cites “corrective ironies” that “reveal situational ironies in order to shame their targets into repentance” (67), for example, by showing oil company officials making claims that are later shown to be lies. Self-​reflexivity (again via Hughes) is “part of the Brechtian tradition that links the concept of industrial alienation with political theater” (106). Both may evoke humorous responses, and both have the potential to break through the veils of scientific denial and postmodernist relativism that often infect conversations of ecological collapse. However, Hughes concedes that the use of irony may also be confusing and distancing to some viewers. The addition of “special features” to DVDs that chronicle a film’s production process, or commentaries wherein filmmakers reflect on the production of the film, add still another level of reflexivity that may further blur the boundaries concerning what really qualifies as a documentary. To shift from a theoretical mode to a historical one, let us now trace the evolution of the environmental documentary genre from the birth of cinema up to the dawn of the twenty-​first century.

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Cinema itself is a product of the technological era, combining the chemistry of still photography with the inventions of electrical generation and the electric light bulb, along with other mechanical advancements. So this art form is very much part and parcel of the industrial revolution, arguably the supreme example of the marriage of technology and art. The first short films screened for audiences in New York and Paris in the mid-​1890s were snippets drawn from everyday life, such as train arrivals, baby feeding, and military marches. The Lumière Brothers sent cameramen out across the world during the first decade of motion picture production, who brought back many short films of natives from primitive regions that today would be considered the first ethnographic observational films. One Lumière cinematographer, Kamil Serf, recorded what was likely the first footage of oil industry derricks, shot in the oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1896 (Rust and Monani, 2013). Still and motion photography of Antarctic expeditions appeared theatrically in newsreels as early as 1911–​1912 (Vivanco, 2013). But by the dawn of the twentieth century, it had become clear that the direction of cinema lay primarily in the arena of fictional entertainment. The one-​reel slice-​of-​life films from Edison and the Lumières were rapidly supplanted in the preferences of audiences by imaginative fantasies. However, one genre of documentary that continued to engage the public during the silent film era was the ethnographic film. Robert Flaherty’s classic Nanook of the North, released in 1922, introduced filmgoers to the hard life of an Eskimo family whose existence was a constant struggle for survival against the natural elements, and viewers were fascinated to learn about this primitive culture. Flaherty used a single Eskimo family as a prototype for the larger culture, somewhat distorted to resemble an American nuclear family and portrayed

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Figure 3.1  Nanook of the North (United States, 1922, Robert Flaherty) transported viewers into the life of an Inuk family in the Canadian Arctic.

through conventional styles of characterization and narrative structure. He employed staged reenactments, often for technical reasons, which until recently would be considered a violation of documentary ethics. Flaherty’s subsequent films, from Moana (1926) through Man of Aran (1934) to the semi-​fictional Louisiana Story (1948), always portrayed their subjects’ struggles for survival in the context of both their natural and cultural worlds. Nanook was followed by other important silent documentaries—​notably Grass (1925), produced by Melville C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, later the creators of King Kong (1933). Grass followed the migration of nomadic Persian tribes; it was panoramic in scope, but lacked the focus on individual characters that made Nanook so appealing to audiences. Such films dealt with the struggles for survival of primitive peoples at the mercy of the cycles of nature, but the commentary of Grass was limited with regards to the impact of human actions on the environment. Early documentaries that focused on urban environments, such as the German Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) and the Russian Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), remained enamored with the bustle of urban life but ignored its context within the natural world. However, these films—​and others like Joris Iven’s Rain (1929)—​displayed an avant-​garde

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style of composition and editing that strongly influenced the poetic subgenre of contemporary environmental documentaries. The work of biologist-​turned-​ filmmaker Jean Painlevé, which included early underwater photography and abstract compositions of natural objects, also contributed to this tradition. Some British films of the 1930s, such as Housing Problems (1935) and Coal Face (1936), were among the first documentaries produced with an overtly activist political purpose to call attention to social problems. Coal Face in particular dealt with the difficult life of miners, but although the mining industry existed at the intersection of natural resources and energy production, the film’s focus was still on the human element. The most prominent British documentary producer of the era, John Grierson, working in the service of his government, was more concerned with promoting the effectiveness of government services in films like Night Mail (1935) than in looking at any stresses between industrial society and the environment. Unlike in many other countries, in the United States the government had wanted to avoid accusations of “socialism” in the production of films, and thus had not engaged extensively in filmmaking that could be viewed as pro-​government propaganda, although some little-​noted short films were produced in the early decades of the twentieth century by the Civil Service Commission, the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, and the War Department. However, in 1935 the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt engaged Pare Lorentz, a news columnist with no filmmaking experience, to produce films for theatrical release in order to publicize New Deal programs. The two most famous Lorentz films were The Plow that Broke the Plains (1935), focusing on the agricultural crisis in the Great Plains, and The River (1937), documenting the attempts to control flooding in the Mississippi River Valley (Snyder, 1968). These half-​hour films were among the first prominent documentaries to specifically address environmental challenges created by man’s abuse of the environment. The Plow dealt with the devastation in the American plains states that became known as the “Dust Bowl,” caused in large part by practices of poor land management and over-​farming, while The River examined the problems of flooding in the Mississippi Basin and how government-​directed dam projects might prevent human suffering while generating electricity to enrich society. The rhetorical style of these films was didactic, promoting a political agenda in line with New Deal policies. An authoritative narrator acted as the “voice of God,” and the presentation of the films’ arguments conformed to the expository

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Figure 3.2  The Plow that Broke the Plains (United States, 1936, Pare Lorentz) showed how poor farming practices led to the Dust Bowl and helped establish a genre.

mode, yet these films often waxed quite poetic. Their striking visual compositions, and the way the readings of the narrator synced with the rhythms of the editing and the musical score, appealed as much to the emotions as to the intellect. Lorentz’s films were among the first that might be properly deemed environmental documentaries. Both films received positive critical reception and were widely distributed theatrically. During World War II, the concern in the 1940s shifted to supporting the war effort rather than dealing with environmental or social problems. After the war ended, the US government largely pulled out of documentary film production, under pressure from political conservatives and Hollywood producers that both opposed government intrusion into the motion picture marketplace. In Europe however, even as the war raged but remote from it, Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff made a series of short films with natural subjects, including striking footage of wild animals. His masterpiece was the feature-​length Great Adventure (1953), which followed the interactions of a boy with many animals, offering realistic, unromantic views of nature that included scenes of sexual mating and predators capturing prey. Another important European work of this era was Frenchman Georges Rouquier’s Farrabique (1946), which

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followed life on a farm through lyrical montages including some early time-​ lapse photography (Barnouw, 1993). In 1951 marine biologist Rachel Carson, who would later write Silent Spring, published her second book The Sea around Us, a scientific and poetic history of the sea that became a best seller and won a National Book Award. In 1953, science fiction film producer Irwin Allen made a one-​hour documentary film based on this book that was distributed theatrically and won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (a category first introduced by the Academy in 1944). The film displayed innovative technologies of human exploration of the ocean depths, as well as microscopic photography of sea life, and effectively portrayed both the beauty and the savagery of the marine world. The focus was on the struggle for survival and the symbiotic relationships between species, occasionally enlivened by humorous interactions among the animals. Narrator Don Forbes provided a forceful, scientifically informed commentary, while montage segments of nature photography were allowed to stand on their own without narration. The Sea around Us portrayed mankind’s exploitation of the sea as a natural phenomenon, whether for food or animal capture for zoo display. The description of the sea’s domination of the world’s climate may have been the first cinematic hint of the possibility of global warming. Although Carson was disappointed in the filmic adaptation of her book, The Sea around Us was one of the few environmental documentaries of the 1950s to enjoy theatrical distribution, and established a template for the genre of the scientific nature documentary that would be imitated over and over in the following decade. In 1948 Walt Disney, who had built his reputation on animated fantasy films, began producing a series of nature documentaries under the moniker of True Life Adventures, opening up a new direction for Disney’s studio. All of the early films in this series were directed by James Algar, coproduced by Roy Disney, and narrated by Winston Hibler (one of the classic voices in nature film narration), providing a strong continuity in style from film to film. Photographers literally lived with animals in their natural settings for long periods of time to become part of the environment so that the animals would become accustomed to their presence. Heavy machinery was sometimes required to reveal underground animal habitats for the cameras. Disney produced six feature-​length documentaries and innumerable short films, receiving nine Academy Awards and four other nominations for live action films with natural themes. The films were later recycled on Disney’s television programs and as educational products. Given the popularity of Disney’s programming, these films helped to define the natural

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world for a generation of young children. While they no doubt inspired thousands of future science students, they also presented a sanitized and romantic vision of nature. Seal Island, the first True Life Adventure released in 1948, was a 27-​minute short subject released in theaters. Its subject was the annual mating season of seals on an Alaskan island, including the battling of males for beach position to establish their polygamous harems. Of course, there was no actual footage of seals mating, nor of graphic conflict or death. Seal Island opened with an animated map sequence that dissolved into live footage, a stylistic transition linked to Disney’s signature films. The film attempted to present a serious ecological portrait of animal behavior, including excellent close-​up photography of animal activities, cleverly edited together into dramatic sequences with just enough anthropomorphic narration to keep things entertaining. The audio track combined voiceover narration (to frame action and provide information), sound effects of animals and environmental backgrounds, and music to create an emotional tone. The film won an Academy Award in 1949 as Best Short Subject, Two-​Reel (before the Best Short Live Action category was introduced in 1958). Disney’s follow-​up to Seal Island was The Living Desert (1953), feature-​length at seventy-​one minutes. Portraying the “ancient drama of the struggle for existence,” the film examined life in the American desert east of the Sierra Nevada range—​a saga of death and destruction accompanied by birth and rejuvenation. It presented a dazzling array of desert fauna, including lizards, toads, rattlesnakes, roadrunners, tarantulas, bats, rats, red-​tailed hawks, wild pigs, bobcats, wasps, and ants. Attention was also paid to the flora and geology of the region. Audiences witnessed scene after scene of predatory conflict, but rarely did they see predators actually capture their prey, so the duels to the death were sanitized to avoid offending the sensitive viewer. From the highly artificial lighting, the critical viewer could be forgiven for suspecting that some nightly encounters might have been staged under controlled conditions. The film contained a lot of anthropomorphism in the narration, giving proper names to animals and comparing animal behavior to human behavior in order to make its tales more entertaining (for example, by attributing dialogue to toads). The musical score reinforced this approach, by accompanying a mating dance of scorpions with country-​dance music. A sandstorm was accented by musical effects reminiscent of Disney’s Fantasia; the pace of musical selections was carefully matched to the rhythm of animals’ movements. These reservations aside, the film was highly effective both as entertainment and as

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Figure 3.3  The Living Desert (United States, 1953, James Algar), the first nature documentary from Disney, established a bridge between educational and popular entertainment.

educational vehicle, and won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The next year (1954) Disney again captured the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for The Vanishing Prairie. The film’s opening sequence contextualized the setting in American history, from Native Indian drawings of prairie wildlife to settlers’ wagon trains rolling through seas of grass. The film’s structure and style followed the recognizable formula of mixing serious ecological themes (the decline of the buffalo herds, threats to extinction of the whooping cranes) with sequences more designed to entertain (a montage of diverse bird mating rituals, edited to a playful musical score, including humorous analogies to human gender roles). The Vanishing Prairie took baby steps toward more explicit representation of basic biological acts, for example by showing the birth of a buffalo calf. The theme of the struggle for survival is again paramount, but the audience does not witness the predators’ attacks, only their aftermath. Yet despite the film’s title, there was scant meaningful discussion of the “vanishing” of the prairie, except for this idealistic closing expression: “Mankind, in turn, is beginning to understand nature’s pattern, is helping her to replenish and

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rebuild, so that the vanishing pageant of the past may become the enduring pageant of the future.” Meanwhile, an actual natural scientist was beginning to use film to document his undersea explorations. In 1956 French ecologist and champion of marine conservation Jacques-​Yves Cousteau, in alliance with young filmmaker Louis Malle, produced The Silent World (Le Monde du Silence), its title derived from Cousteau’s 1953 book The Silent World:  A  Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure. The feature-​ length film (eighty-​ six minutes) brought the world of deep-​sea exploration to the public for the first time, introducing Cousteau’s ship Calypso and the deepest underwater photography to date. The production required the development of special Technicolor cameras, underwater lighting setups, and deep-​sea time-​lapse still flash cameras that were designed especially for the film—​a reminder that advances in filmmaking technology have always been important in gaining recognition for nature documentaries. With his endearing French accent, Cousteau provided most of the narration in the English language version. The film humanized the crew by presenting the challenges of life on the boat, from recovering from “the bends” to fighting rough seas. English dialogue was dubbed over the original French for live action sequences. There was amazing footage of schools of porpoises following the Calypso and montages of unusual deep-​sea fish; the cameras surveyed fascinating life forms on the sea floor, as well as the sunken artifacts of encrusted shipwrecks brimming with fish. The film documented some memorable incidents, most prominently a tragic collision between the Calypso and a sperm whale. A herd of over two dozen whales came to the aid of their wounded comrade, including one baby whale that collided with the ship’s engine, was deeply lacerated and had to be killed out of mercy. A large group of sharks showed up to feed on the dead carcass; the images of the sharks devouring the dead baby whale were more graphic than anything from Disney’s films. The Silent World had a creative musical score combined with effective sound effects, but the music was used sparsely except for the longer montages of fish swimming in the deep. As with Disney’s films, sometimes the music tended toward cuteness, such as the waltz music that played as divers swim through schools of fish, and the film displayed some of the same anthropomorphic projection as Disney’s (e.g., the “sorrow” of a turtle after laying its eggs). But overall The Silent World was a seminal achievement, and in 1956 won both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (1956) and the Palme d’Or at the

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Cannes Film Festival. Cousteau went on to have a long and prominent career in environmental documentary filmmaking, including two more Academy Awards and numerous Emmy nominations. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw the birth of several television series—​ most of them on public television networks in the United States and Canada—​ that would make some of the first important contributions to raising awareness of current environmental threats through audiovisual media. The first was The Nature of Things in 1960, produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC). This program was “one of the first mainstream programs to present scientific evidence on a number of environmental issues, including nuclear power, and genetic engineering” (“The Nature of Things”). From 1979 until the present, noted scientist David Suzuki served as host for the program. In the United States, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) carried several programs that addressed the harmful impacts of human activities on the environment. Nova, created for WGBH Boston in 1974 by Michael Ambrosino (still in production as of this writing), is a scientific documentary program that considers ecological issues as threats to human health and the environment. Bill Moyers Journal, produced by WNET New York and first aired in 1972, focused primarily on political topics, including the failures of government and corporations to grapple with serious environmental dangers, and issues of environmental equity with regard to pollution and the underprivileged. Frontline, created by David Fanning for WGBH Boston, carried hour-​length in-​depth documentaries on many public affairs topics including environmental threats. During the period between the creation of public broadcasting in the 1960s and the diffusion of cable television in the 1980s, PBS and CBC were the prime venues for environmental news coverage on North American television. In the United Kingdom, David Attenborough was building the Natural History Unit (NHU) at the BBC with series programs like Life on Earth (beginning in 1979). As of this writing, this unit is still going strong, having recently produced Blue Planet (2001), Planet Earth (2006), and Life (2009), environmental documentaries in the educational mode that utilizes innovative state-​of-​the-​art advances in cinematographic techniques. Back in the theaters, a new breed of high-​profile environmental film was evolving, a poetic and lyrical style of documentary. These films departed from the educational-​ scientific tradition of environmental documentary in two important ways. First, they relied primarily on visual images, camera movement, and editing to convey their meaning, with a minimum of narration and a virtual

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absence of scientific data. Second, their central subject matter was the relationship between nature and civilization. Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971) was a pathfinder in this new direction, the first in Herzog’s series of documentaries “exploring the megalomaniacal tendencies in humankind and the traces of human folly left on postcolonial landscapes” (Hughes 2014, 109). This film is a poetic montage of images shot in the Sahara desert and primitive towns of North Africa. The term “fata morgana” means “mirage,” and it is an ambiguous allusion, suggesting that human civilization may be little more than a fleeting moment in the natural world. Many of the images display the detritus of civilization—​an unfinished factory in the middle of the desert, abandoned World War II tanks half-​buried in sand dunes, thousands of gasoline drums left after atomic tests. The towers of energy and industry rise above the wilderness like mirages, remote and mysterious reminders of a civilization that seems to have vanished. The soundtrack, never directly referential to the visuals, includes spoken passages from the Mayan holy book Popul Vuh, commentary from anti-​Nazi film scholar Lotte Eisner, the hauntingly downbeat songs of Leonard Cohen, and holy chanting. As always with Herzog, there is a visionary sensibility behind the concrete images—​a mystical yet unsentimental view of nature. Around a decade later, director Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke brought forth Koyannisqatsi (1983), the first of a trilogy of lyrical montage-​driven films. The title is a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance,” and the film uses a variety of visual techniques—​sweeping natural panoramas shot from helicopters and slow-​motion and time-​lapse images of both nature and civilization—​to mold a disturbing vision of a technological civilization disconnected from the natural world. Here there is no vocal narration whatsoever, only a signature electronic musical score from Philip Glass, and a droning repetitive chant of the word “Koyannisqatsi.” The film is an exercise in pure cinema, a visual poem in which the images speak for themselves in an implicitly apocalyptic narrative. The editing pace is very slow; some shots are held for so long that watching the film becomes a meditative, even hypnotic experience. Reggio and Fricke went on to make Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation (1988) and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War (2002) in a similar style; Fricke also directed Chronos (1985), Baraka (1992), and Samsara (2011), all poetic/​lyrical documentaries. Another style of environmental documentary began to emerge in this period as well: politically and socially critical, overtly activist, and propagandistic. The

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Figure 3.4  Koyannisqatsi (United States, 1982, Godfrey Reggio) used slow-​motion and time-​lapse photography to evoke emotional responses through a combination of documentary and art film genres.

Animals Film (1981) was a breakthrough film addressing animal abuse, produced in the United Kingdom by Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux and narrated by actress Julie Christie. The film takes the audience inside factory farms, and contains a lot of very graphic footage, having been produced before animal farm management got wise to the damage of allowing their processes to be photographed. So rather than seeming dated, it provokes a more visceral response than more sophisticated recent films that encountered barriers to documenting these practices. The filmmakers also did an incredible job of obtaining classified footage, from multiple governments, of brutal animal testing, an amazing achievement before the dawn of the Internet. The film’s audience views cows shipped off to industrial-​scale feedlots, confined in pens and fattened on high-​energy grains, their over-​milked udders becoming infected and requiring disinfectants. Veal cattle are kept confined for their entire 100-​day lives, tied in crates so small that they cannot even turn around. Many cattle die during transport due to inadequate ventilation, food, water, and rest. Antibiotics used to prevent disease, produced and marketed by corporations like Bayer and Wellcome, find their way into the human food system and may be one reason why human resistance to antibiotics is growing. Special criticism is reserved for scientists who exploit animals for experimentation; the film estimates that 300 million animals die in laboratories each year. After over

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Figure 3.5  The Animals Film (United Kingdom, 1981, Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux) used disturbing footage to take a strong activist stance against animal abuse in industry and scientific research.

thirty-​five years, The Animals Film still rates as one of the most disturbing films about animal abuse. In the 1980s, the expansion of cable television gave birth to new programming networks. Environment-​related programs screen often on cable news networks like CNN. US cable networks that have prominently featured environmental documentary programming include Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), Science Channel, Animal Planet, Biography Channel, and Documentary Channel. Several of these networks distribute their programming internationally as well. Environmental programs outside the United States were broadcast on BBC One and Four (United Kingdom), the Knowledge Network, and Canal D (Canada), Channel Four (France), and the Viasat channels (Sweden). Over the years much of this programming has drifted away from conventional documentary to speculative fiction and reality programs, but one may still find documentaries concerning climate change, peak oil, and species extinction, along with speculative science series such as Life after People that have environmental themes.

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Beginning in the 1990s, environmental documentary feature filmmaking enjoyed a renaissance in France, particularly in the poetic/​lyrical mode. Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou directed Microcosmos, or Le Peuple de l’herbe (1996), a microscopic study of the lives of insects with minimal narration, set to a musical score by Bruno Coulais. Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats, and Jacques Perrin produced the largely un-​ narrated Winged Migration, or Le Peuple Migrateur (2001), with its cameras following a great variety of bird migrations across thousands of miles, from the Arctic and the Himalayas to the tropics, often with airborne slow-​motion photography; teams of photographers spent four years filming it, allowing birds to become familiar with the filmmakers and their equipment. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Renowned French filmmaker Agnès Varda produced The Gleaners and I (2000), a personal film documenting in cinema verité style her interactions with poor wanderers who survive by collecting discarded fruits and vegetables to eat or sell. While the film most centrally addresses issues of social inequity in an ethnographic mode, questions of how people in vulnerable life situations obtain their food reflects an environmental subtheme. The explosion of activist environmental documentaries in the United States also began in the latter 1990s, establishing the basic approach to “environmental deterioration as sociopolitical crisis” reflected in so many of the films to be considered here. Cadillac Desert: Water and the Contamination of Nature (1997) was broadcast on PBS station KTEH, now an affiliate of KQED in San Francisco. Based on the 1986 book by Marc Reisner, its subject matter was the transformation and disruption of the natural order of water in California by the forces of politics and money. Another 1997 gem was Affluenza, a one-​hour PBS program produced by KCTS-​Seattle and Oregon Public Broadcasting, which explored the social and environmental costs of materialism and overconsumption. Film festivals have always been important in gaining recognition for documentary films, and in the past few decades, environmental film festivals have been popping up like mushrooms all over the world. The earliest environmental film festivals date back to the late 1970s and 1980s, but the two decades bracketing the turn of the new century saw an explosion of environmental festivals, not only in major urban centers but also on university campuses and in small towns seeking to establish their ecological identity. The most prominent of these, the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC, was founded in 1993. North American festivals of note include Jackson

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Hole Wildlife Festival (established 1991); Planet in Focus in Toronto (1999); Wild and Scenic Festival in Nevada City, CA (2000); and San Francisco Green Film Festival (2011). Under the leadership of Robert Redford, the Sundance Film Festival, along with its companion Sundance Channel on cable television, has contributed significantly to the highlighting of environmental films and programming. Monani (2013) discusses in depth how different environmental film festivals specialize in their appeal to different audiences: general public spheres, corporate trade shows, and alternative public spheres. General public sphere festivals attract films about the natural world that appeal to broad audiences and may or may not have an activist edge (e.g., the Environmental Film Festival in DC). Trade show festivals cater to a higher-​end audience of environmentally oriented corporate and media organizations (e.g., the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival), while alternative public sphere festivals offer environmental documentaries with a stronger activist edge (e.g., the San Francisco Green Film Festival). Taken together, these festivals afford the most direct opportunity for an environmental documentary film to reach its intended audience, in the hopes of gaining positive reviews and reaching either theatrical or television distribution. In summary, most of the environmental documentaries of the twentieth century were framed as encounters with the world of nature through modes that attempted to combine education with entertainment. As the century wound down, however, innovative programs ventured into modes that were more pointedly critical of the failures of modern civilization in protecting the environment, were more poetic and artistic in style, and sometimes both. Now turning the page at the cusp of the twenty-​first century, we will begin a more in-​depth analysis of some of the best and most significant environmental documentaries of the recent past. These films have benefited from advances in scientific research, as well as innovations in cinematic technologies and storytelling forms, to visually portray their subjects with more flexibility and economy, and to reach wider audiences through an ever-​expanding variety of channels.

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General Environmental History and Concerns

Most of the films surveyed in this book deal with defined areas of concern—​ climate change, fossil fuel depletion, food and water, species extinction, and so on. Of course, all these topics are ultimately interrelated in their impacts on human civilization and the planet’s ecosystem, so some documentary films try to tackle them all at once. Thus perhaps an appropriate beginning for our inquiry is to examine a few of these generalist films. Some of them take a historical approach, tracing the evolution of humanity’s developing environmental consciousness. Others discuss multiple problems and raise warnings about their cumulative impacts. Still others offer poetic visions that embrace both the beauty of the natural world, as well as the complex and disturbing impacts of human actions on our planet. In this section we will examine the strategies employed by these films in attempting to present a holistic perspective on humanity’s environmental threats and challenges, and reflect on the relative effectiveness of their selected modes of rhetoric and form. NOTE: I have attempted to determine the availability of these films on various online video sites, but be aware that this availability may change over time.

The 11th Hour The 11th Hour is an incredibly ambitious film that attempts to tackle a vast array of human-​caused environmental challenges, among them resource extraction, climate change, pollution, species extinction, deforestation, and depletion of the oceans. The last quarter of the film offers strategies for reversing the imbalance between humanity and nature. Coproduced and narrated by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, the film interviews an impressive array of over fifty renowned scientists, activists, and politicians, among them scientist Stephen Hawking, economist

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50 Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

The Environmental Documentary 2007 92 min. Leila Conners Peterson, Nadia Conners Leonardo DiCaprio, Leila Conners Petersen, Chuck Castleberry, Brian Gerber Tree Media Group/​Appian Way/​Greenhour Warner Independent Pictures Leonardo DiCaprio Expository United States http://​www.warnerbros.com/​11th-​hour Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

Figure 4.1  The 11th Hour (United States, 2007, Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners) covered a variety of threats to the planet’s ecological systems through a wide survey of interviews with prominent experts.

Herman Daly, environmentalist Paul Hawken, scientist/​media producer David Suzuki, biologist Janine Benyus, writer/​broadcaster Thom Hartmann, former CIA director James Woolsey, and former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. The film opens with a visual montage ranging from the microcosm (a fetus in vitro) to the macrocosm (vast acres of deforested landscape and powerful storms). Cut to a series of brief and diverse testimonials echoing the theme of Koyannisqatsi—​that the relationship between human civilization and nature is

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out of balance, and that the collapse of our planet’s ecosystems puts the survival of our species at risk. The introductory segment of on-​screen narration by Mr. DiCaprio leads into the first series of interviews, which emphasize the complex web of relationships between the earth’s resources, its atmosphere, and the life forms that inhabit it. Contrasting against this synergistic perspective is the cultural meme that mankind somehow stands separate from nature and was meant to have dominion over it. In the present era, most humans live surrounded by an environment so completely of human creation—​the fruits of the industrial revolution and the ubiquity of fossil fuel energy—​that we forget the deeper natural processes upon which our survival ultimately depends. There are significant problems with living off fossil fuels:  they are nonrenewable resources, which means at some point they will run low. The pollution they cause brings largely hidden external costs (air and water pollution, health problems) that only become apparent as the environment deteriorates. The testimonies of these interviewees become visual through archival footage and nature photography both beautiful and terrifying. The extent of climate change is increasingly felt in severe droughts, forest fires, storms, and floods. As in An Inconvenient Truth, animations are used to chart the process of the greenhouse effect that warms the atmosphere through higher emissions of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. The destruction of ecosystems around the world, both terrestrial and aquatic, is leading to a decline in population of species everywhere. For example, the chemical-​based fertilizers and pesticides that flow down the Mississippi River from the US agricultural heartland have created a “dead zone” where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Toxic chemicals like mercury concentrate in sea life and either kill fish or are passed along to the people that eat them. Deforestation is another terrible problem; in the United States and elsewhere, 95 percent of the old growth forests have been cut down. When tropical rainforests are decimated, their low-​quality soil often turns to desert. Of the world’s agricultural land, 35 percent has been seriously degraded through erosion and insufficient recycling of minerals. The ecosystems that support life on earth are unraveling, but what are the forces that are blocking change? Corporate globalization is an obvious target, as corporations exploit resources that are unprotected by any effective legal framework. In the law, “you’re either property or you’re a person”; corporations are considered legal persons, while nature’s resources are considered property. New

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legal and constitutional systems must be created that will protect natural systems and the rights of powerless populations and other species; but in the contemporary political world, the fossil fuel industry has such overwhelming financial influence that summoning the political will to make the necessary changes seems simply impossible. A large part of the problem is that our economic models ignore both the benefits of the inputs from nature and the costs of the externalities—​the pollution excreted into the open sewer we call nature and its cleanup (if any). David Suzuki estimates that the annual inputs from nature, in economic terms, would be worth $35 trillion per year—​almost twice the annual GDP of the entire world—​yet in the “madness of traditional economics” these contributions are not even in the equation. But the blame cannot be laid only at the feet of politicians and economists; the demand of the public for consumer commodities and the convenience and prestige that they provide, is a powerful engine that drives both governments and corporations to supply that demand. As we view the lights of the earth from space by night, Stephen Hawking observes, “Human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit, but human demands and expectations are ever increasing.” Mr. DiCaprio issues a generational challenge to Americans to help green the future. Thom Hartmann says that we need to utilize our knowledge of science, technology, and culture to design a society that will sustainably work with nature instead of against it. Design of human infrastructures is one area where great promise exists—​design that values efficient use and recycling of materials and renewable energy—​in other words, mass utilization in place of mass production. The principle of biomimicry—​integrating the patterns of nature into human products and processes—​is a crucial element in this redesign. If this sounds impractical, James Woolsey points out that societies can change very rapidly if they have to, citing the American mobilization during World War II as a prime example. The challenge is less in developing the designs and technologies for change than in summoning the political and societal will to do what needs to be done. Thus the film ends on a note of hope, with emotional pleas for love and healing and an additional section on possible solutions. The 11th Hour took about three years to produce, and was funded significantly by Mr. DiCaprio. He had been active in environmental issues for a decade with organizations like the National Resource Defense Council (NDRC) and Global Green. Thus he had already established relationships with many of the

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experts who appeared in the film. Although DiCaprio served as the film’s narrator, his brief appearances were primarily transitional and unobtrusive; he saw his role as asking questions, and letting the experts give the answers. He also kept a low profile in publicizing the picture, giving relatively few interviews. Although production began before the release of An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour came to be viewed as a sequel that was more ambitious in scope, looking at a wider number of environmental issues beyond climate change, and offering more in the way of proposing solutions. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was released theatrically in August of that year. Warner Independent Features released The 11th Hour as its response to Paramount’s An Inconvenient Truth, no doubt in the hope of achieving comparable recognition and success. That hope was disappointed, however, as the film only grossed a little over $700,000 in the US theatrical market, and disappeared from theaters very quickly. Audiences for the most part failed to respond to the film, which must have been a major disappointment to the filmmakers. Critics received the film fairly positively, with some reservations. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis (2007) called the film “an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary” and praised its “astonishing capacity for hope,” but deadpanned that it was structured “like a term paper.” Although praising its content and intentions, the environmentally friendly Roger Ebert (2007) found the visual imagery disconnected from the interviews and in general felt that the film was boring and ineffective in motivating action. The most dismissive review came from Mike D’Angelo (2007) in Village Voice, who stated that the film was “so earnest and moth-​eaten that it should be seen on filmstrip during fourth period social studies,” and found Mr. DiCaprio’s narration to be “so dourly humorless that even Gore 2000 looks effortlessly charismatic by comparison.” In comparison to An Inconvenient Truth, some reviewers praised The 11th Hour’s attempt to be more comprehensive and to offer more solutions, but others felt it fell short in its cinematic technique and narrative effectiveness. Among the explanations were Al Gore’s stature as a former presidential candidate, and suggestions that the film was too conventional in style and cast too wide a net. Thus The 11th Hour served as a reality test that, despite the success of An Inconvenient Truth, audiences could not be expected to flock to environmental documentaries, which sent prospective filmmakers back to the drawing board to understand why one succeeded and the other did not.

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What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2007 123 min. Timothy S. Bennett Sally Erickson Vision Quest Pictures Vision Quest Pictures Timothy S. Bennett Participatory/​Expository United States http://​www.whatawaytogomovie.com/​ Amazon (DVD), YouTube, Vimeo, Free Speech TV

What a Way to Go is Tim Bennett’s first and (so far) only feature film, and the most autobiographical environmental film covered here. Because it speaks to the heart as much as to the head, its pace is deliberately slow, at times even poetic, giving the viewer a chance to feel and absorb its message. It is one of the most powerful films out there, especially for people who already have a clue how dire the human predicament has become. What a Way to Go is dominated by the driving personal narration by the author, reminiscent of the narrative style of the Depression-​era documentaries of Pare Lorentz. The film includes old and new footage of the filmmaker and his family, to root the film in the context of personal history. It also contains a lot of archival stock footage and a number of striking visual effects, creating a cinematic universe of symbol and metaphor and a deeply subjective tone. Like Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, the film begins as a meditation on suicide, with archival clips from a documentary by Dr. Karl Menninger followed by emotional and pessimistic expressions from several anonymous people. Although it contains a wealth of factual information, the film is first and foremost a stoic, uncompromising call for moral reflection and personal integration. Bennett begins with a holistic view, and only then breaks down our environmental challenges into specific categories. He interviews many scholars and experts on the topics he covers, but also ordinary people—​artists, students, and others—​ to keep the focus on the human dimension of the problems at hand. Still, the film is not completely without humor, usually dark humor—​sometimes ironically

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Figure 4.2  What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire (United States, 2007, Timothy S. Bennett) chronicles the director’s intensely personal encounters with the environmental and political failures that undermine our beliefs and threaten our future.

embodied in outdated stock footage and intentionally cheap animation—​that relieves to some extent the unrelenting sense of doom in its narrative voice.

Part One: Waking on the Train “I was born into stories” grounds the narrative in the magic of childhood, and the belief systems of mid-twentieth century America: positive attitudes toward God, country, nature, and society. Then viewers are jolted with graphs charting the larger invisible context: the creation of nuclear weapons, the rise of oil production, the population explosion, rising CO2 emissions, mass extinctions, all arising amidst expectations of boundless, inevitable progress. In the 1980s, vague rumblings about global warming and the ozone hole shook this worldview and began to slowly turn the vision of the future from hope to fear. In particular, the technological and biological inventions created for defense came to pose some of the greatest threats to human survival. As it traces all the stresses and strains on the natural and human environment, the narrative becomes apocalyptic in tone. “And all of this is wrapped tightly inside a culture of denial of lies and absurdities so complex and so powerful that we can barely see through the smog . . . hoping that our leaders will find some answers, awakening . . . to the shapeless realization that they will not.”

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Bennett cites Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, and Thomas Berry as writers who have influenced him in identifying the stories, based on religion, politics, and economics, that have led us into this predicament—​stories that separate mankind from nature, proclaiming the virtue of unlimited growth. He employs a “runaway train” metaphor, as if we’re all on a train hurtling wildly down the tracks, held in place by powerful cultural stories, fueled by our desperate consumption. He also juxtaposes narration and image for ironic effect—​for example, old family home movie footage of building a sand castle on the beach, with a voiceover discussing how he managed to live in denial about the immediacy of the threats for so long.

Part Two: The Train and the Tracks This segment opens with a memorable image—​gazing out of a train car window with a montage of historical photos running by, again visually mixing everyday reality with the historical context. In this section Bennett confronts four crucial issues: peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, and population overshoot. Peak oil is the point at which the worldwide production or extraction of oil cannot be increased, leading to unstable prices and shortages. Flattening supply combined with rising demand from a growing population leads to serious problems in having sufficient energy to power growing economies. Worldwide oil discovery peaked around 1963, and as of this writing, the world is extracting four or five barrels of oil for each new barrel discovered—​basically using up the inheritance. Over thirty countries have already passed their peak of oil production, including the United States that crossed it around 1970. Global oil production could likely peak in the next few years. What would the end of plentiful oil mean for the world? We depend upon an expanding energy supply to support transportation, agriculture, globalization, and other activities crucial to our way of life; without it, the very basis of world capitalism could collapse. In particular, our food system is vulnerable. Roughly ten calories of fuel are used to produce and consume each calorie of food we eat. From fossil fuel–​based fertilizers and pesticides to fuel for food transport and cooking, energy scarcity could have disastrous impacts on both food supply and prices. Rationing could be required to guarantee minimal nutrition for the masses of people. Ultimately, when energy becomes scarce enough to threaten

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political instability, resource wars will become likely as nations fight over the scraps of the fossil fuel age. Climate change:  The increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases being emitted from human activity are raising worldwide temperatures and melting glaciers and polar ice. Levels of CO2 have risen from around 280 ppm in the late 1800s to over 400 ppm today, heading toward a projected 550 ppm by 2050. Climate change is expected to cause rising sea levels, stronger and more erratic storms and droughts, and severely altered living patterns for both flora and fauna. Heat absorbed by the oceans is raising acidification, impacting plankton at the bottom of the marine food chain. In some areas plankton have already decreased by one-​third, impacting fish populations and other species that survive off fish. Phytoplankton produce half of the oxygen humans breathe, but when they die they release even more carbon, further exacerbating climate change. Scientists believe we may be approaching tipping points that could lead to abrupt shifts in the climate instead of gradual ones. A prime example is the ocean’s conveyor belt; if it shuts down, some geographic regions could experience radical climate changes within a decade or so. Positive feedback loops can accelerate climate change. The melting of polar ice leads to less reflection of solar heat and more heat absorption by the oceans, and the melting of permafrost could dramatically increase the release of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. The very real possibility exists that severe climate change is inevitable no matter what we do. Mass extinction: We are currently in the midst of the first mass extinction in world history caused by the behavior of one species rather than by natural catastrophe. The current extinction rate is 1,000 times greater than the normal rate, and between one-​quarter to one-​half of all the species on earth are likely to go extinct by the end of this century. A primary cause of extinction is the progressive consumption of the world’s resources, especially through deforestation. We are literally “devouring the world,” consuming ourselves out of house and home. Humans consume annually vast portions of the primary land productivity of the planet. Large fish have been reduced to 10 percent of their previous population. We also consume each year around half of the available fresh water, most of it for agriculture. The pollution from industrial processes is progressively poisoning the planet. If one imagines human civilization as a building, we are chipping away at the building’s foundation, and at some point will reach such a point of imbalance that the building will collapse.

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Overpopulation:  Any species that overshoots its resource base will suffer a correction; a species may overshoot its environment’s carrying capacity for a while, but ultimately only by damaging the environment on which it is depending. The deceptive aspect of overpopulation is that the average US resident consumes seventy times more resources than the average resident of Bangladesh. So which country is putting more stress on the world’s ecosystems? Somehow population will be brought into line with carrying capacity, whether through starvation, disease, war—​or conscious planning. In the end humanity may face the same harsh fate of many of the species it has driven to near-​extinction. A  crucial part of the problem is that controlling population growth is a challenge that humanity has never faced before, so we have no road map for managing the process. Powerful civilizations have collapsed in the past, but for the species as a whole this is a uniquely new prospect.

Part Three: The Locomotive Power If we ask, “What do we do?” without asking “How did we get here?” we have little chance of success. The film compares our cultural situation to a cancer diagnosis. After fifty years of warnings, things are still getting worse. Whatever we have been doing has not been working; the same science that helped create some of the problems may not be able to offer solutions. One thing we can do is talk about how we feel, and question some basic assumptions about our cultural stories and myths. Humans survived as a stable population for 200,000 years or more as hunter-​gatherers. Some writers trace the origins of our present course back to the beginning of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago, in terms of the management of the soil, the spurring of population growth, and the origin of economic and political inequality. But the positive feedback loop of increasing food production and population growth may be reaching the limits of sustainability. The culture of cities gave birth to the culture of empire. Ecology scholar William Catton describes a city as “a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds the carrying capacity of its local environment”—​and today half the world’s population lives in cities. So cities must reach out in trade for resources, and when trade fails, conquest begins. This cycle has been going on for so long that people consider it “the way things are supposed to be,” but how can a civilization that is destroying its support system be “the way things are supposed to be”? Science

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gives us the power to control nature, but can’t tell us how to use that power. Some claim that technology is morally neutral, and others see positive and negative aspects inherent in every technology, but it’s easy to get trapped in the myth of the technofix. Technology allows us to disconnect from our own violence—​for example, by bombing people from an airplane. Some of our cultural stories cited by the film include: “There’s never quite enough.” “We’re innately flawed.” “Growth is good.” “Hard work is good.” “More is better.” “We can solve any problem.” “More stuff will make us happy.” “Subdue the earth and have dominion over it.” “We own the planet and its resources.” “Only humans have rights.” “Ours is the greatest culture ever, and everyone else should be made to live this way.” “Man is superior to all other creatures, and our lives are independent of theirs.”

Human beings may just not be genetically programmed to respond to long-​ term threats, compared to watching out for the lion lurking in the bush. A lack of response to unrecognized dangers like peak oil, climate change, and exponential population growth may have unforeseen and unintended consequences. The imperative of a perennial growth economy is doomed on a limited planet. Corporate control of the media limits our understanding and thus our choices. Social reality is based on television, which people regard as perfectly normal rather than seeing it as Orwellian. So much of what we know is mediated by machines; children are programmed by television to be part of the technological culture and are alienated from nature. Government paralyzed by partisan division seems helpless to offer any serious solutions. The educational system numbs our critical thinking skills, leaving us unprepared to question dominant cultural paradigms. People will defend to the death the sources of the food and water on which life depends; the question is whether they perceive those sources as land and rivers, or grocery stores and water faucets.

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This cultural alienation from reality—​what Bennett calls a “hall of mirrors”—​ actually manifests in a psychological dissociation analogous to a cultural mental illness; we are all like animals in cultural cages, having little contact with the natural world. Consumer culture fills our emptiness with things we don’t need, making us more and more infantile, protecting us from the pains and discomforts of life. Ours is essentially a culture of addiction, to shopping, entertainment, and sports, to substances legal and illegal. Everything in this abusive culture is set up to protect the rich, so we are conditioned to identify with our abusers. We are like addicts in deep denial who will either shift or die. Visually, the final section follows Bennett walking about in town and into nature, his voiceover meditating on what kind of people we may become as we move through the coming transition: “Remember how 30 years ago we said ‘if we don’t do something now, in 30 years we’re going to be in trouble.’ Well it’s now, and we are, because we didn’t . . . The dominant culture is not going to stop until it destroys everything—​it’s built on a foundation of faulty assumptions. I see no way that it can be reformed. It can only be discarded, so that something new can grow in its place.” When we step out of our denial, it frees our energy to become active, for example by making documentary films. Bennett refuses to do what many environmental films do—​offer a “happy chapter” assuring us that if we start doing things right, all will be well. He provides no list of quick and painless fixes, no plan that will keep the train rolling forever down this track. But he does offer a new story called the “Great Turning” (a term coined by Joanna Macy and David Korten). We have to drop the idea of economic growth, of capitalism, of corporations running things. On a personal level, Bennett calls for humility, listening to the earth, finding community, speaking out, growing your own food. Bennett quotes Andre Gide: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” The song that plays over the end titles—​Let’s Build a Boat by Brian Hall (2002)—​seems a strikingly appropriate choice. Bennett believes that objectivity is largely a myth, that we are always making personal choices shaped by the culture and the paradigm into which we are born. Facts may be debated, but how we feel—​what makes us fearful or angry—​speaks to people on a deeper level, a level that offers a better chance of actually changing behavior. Bennett explains his primary emphasis on emotion thusly: “Our feelings are the swiftest paths back to our forgotten selves” (Bennett and Erickson, 2012). He begins from a belief that most of us understand these things in our guts, but repress that knowledge under pressure from various aspects of society. Producer Sally Erickson

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agrees: “People change because their feelings about things change, not because their minds change, not because they get enough facts.” As a species and a consciousness, we may be up against something that we can’t understand with our rational minds. We may have to go deeply into the darkness in order to jettison ourselves into a new evolutionary place. Tim Bennett acquired his filmmaking experience in a Piedmont (NC) Community College program on film production and digital animation effects. His partner and producer Sally Erickson has been a psychotherapist for thirty years. Her reading of Thom Hartmann’s Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight introduced her to the concept of peak oil. Her conscious inspiration in making the film was to help wake people up, but she acknowledges that perhaps her unconscious inspiration was to dive deeply into the information in order to know how to change their own lives. Bennett brought together readings he had done over several years into one essay, which provided the backbone for the narrative. He then wrote the introductory text and found archival footage to go with it, and finally wrote passages to bridge the interview sections together. The film’s cost was only about $102,000, including distribution costs, and the gross income through 2009 was $179,000. So they made over $77,000 in profit, in large part because they produced and distributed it by themselves—​ every last bit of it. Erickson did the interviewing and Bennett worked the camera, a Panasonic AG-​DVX100p with a 24-​fps mode. Bennett did the editing on a Mac G4 with Final Cut Pro 4.5. Had they billed their labor at $20 per hour, it would have added an estimated $220,000 to their expenditures. They always travelled by train except for one airplane trip; they raised $19,000 in donations on screening tours. Most of the stock footage came from free Internet archives. The moral: “Don’t think you have to raise a lot of money to make a film you really want to make.” Erickson says laughingly: “We didn’t have a marketing plan. My marketing plan is spend as little money as possible, and it’s worked wonderfully.” Screenings were held mostly in churches and community buildings. There was no conventional theatrical distribution, only a couple of theater screenings and a few university screenings. Erickson says “We’d make a different movie today, because we’ve gone beyond the stages of grief to a less depressed place; we’d take a more spiritual perspective. We’ve moved beyond anger to that place of acceptance in seeing the loving core at the center of everything.” On the personal impact of making the film, the filmmakers say they have “totally and absolutely left the culture, so far as anybody is able to . . . We’re ready

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to live in a collapsed culture for a couple of years without starving to death. That includes stored food and the ability to grow our own; a small amount of solar capacity, including a well; and a really well insulated house . . . We have to figure out who we are as spiritual entities, what are we here to do.” According to Bennett and Erickson, some of the most gratifying personal responses came from those who said, “Thank you so much for making this film. I have felt so alone and felt so crazy, and I no longer feel alone or feel crazy.” Since it was primarily self-​distributed through environmental groups and was screened in theaters only a very few times, What a Way to Go failed to attract the notice of upper tier newspapers or journals. However, it received extensive critical acclaim from websites specializing in issues of peak oil and climate change. Kevin Moore (2007) of oilcrash.com said, “This is surely the film we have all been waiting for.” Jan Lundberg (2007) of culturechange.org called it “perhaps the most important media message of our time.” Two aspects of the film seemed to make the strongest connection with this specialized audience:  the personal and poetic style of the film, and its refusal of offer a “happy chapter” of easy solutions. Grinning Planet’s Mark Jeantheau (2007) called it “elegant and almost poetic in tone.” Mick Winter (2007) of peak oil website Dry Dipstick.com called it “a two-​hour poem of great power and beauty.” Social Contract Press reviewer Fred Elbel (2009) saw the film as “rich with metaphor, and much more than a documentary, this film is compelling in a manner similar to a work of art . . . a vision quest for the collective mind.” Democratic Underground reviewer GliderGuider (2007) called it “a low budget documentary with very high production values.” As Lundberg pointed out, the movie “is not about solutions or happy endings. Instead, it takes us to that point and leaves the task to us.” GliderGuider says Bennett and Erickson “tell the whole story, without once looking away, without even blinking.” Writing for the spiritually oriented environmental magazine Tikkum, Matthew Gilbert (2008) said, “The tendency in times like these is to look to science or religion for answers, but both have fallen on hard times as sources of hope . . . materialistic-​reductionist science has been denounced as one of the reasons we’re in this mess to begin with . . . it may be time to just keep building a different paradigm, one that starts in the center of our own hearts and minds.” By framing these issues in the context of his personal life history, and by going beyond what he thinks about these issues to how he feels about them, Bennett reaches his viewers hearts as well as their heads—​thus the high praise this film

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has received from those who are already intellectually aware of the challenges of peak oil and climate change. For that audience, What a Way to Go may just be the most powerful film among all those discussed here.

Home Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available in:

2009 119 min. Yann Arthus-​Bertrand Denis Carot, Luc Besson Europa Corp. Europa Corp./​Kering/​20th Century Fox Glenn Close (English version) Poetic/​Lyrical France http://​www.homethemovie.org/​en Netflix, Amazon (DVD/​BlueRay), YouTube, Vimeo,

France has long enjoyed prominence in the world of documentary filmmaking. The short list of significant French documentarians includes the Lumière Brothers, Alain Resnais, Marcel Ophuls, Chris Marker, and Agnès Varda, among many others. In the 1990s, the expansion of cable television gave birth to new channels featuring documentaries (ARTE, Planète), and later the World Wide Web similarly produced “Webdocs.” French theatrical documentaries like the previously mentioned Microcosmos and Winged Migration highlighted the extremely high technical and artistic quality of French environmental filmmaking. Home is the most widely seen French environmental documentary film ever, regarded as Europe’s answer to An Inconvenient Truth. The film was the creation of the imagination of famed photographer Arthus-Bertrand, whose UNESCOsponsored book of aerial landscape photography Earth from Above (la Terre vue du ciel) sold over three million copies and produced a traveling exhibition viewed by 120 million people. After spending eighteen months shooting aerial vistas on every continent, director Yann Arthus-​Bertrand molded a powerful cinematic poem contrasting the natural world with that of human civilization, in the process raising serious ecological questions about the latter’s sustainability.

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Figure 4.3  Home (France, 2009, Yann Arthus-​Bertrand), composed mostly of aerial photography, evokes both the beauty of nature and its vulnerability to environmental destruction.

With Home he translated his approach to still photography for motion pictures. The production took almost three years to complete, at a cost of $12–​16 million, and included 488 hours of footage shot over fifty-​four countries. Most of the photography was shot from the air, using high-​definition Cineflex cameras suspended from a gyro-​stabilized sphere on the base of a helicopter (Home—​2009 film, Wikipedia). The narration contains a vast quantity of factual information and statistics that accompany the visuals, inspired by the writings of environmentalist Lester Brown and his State of the World book series (Homethemovie.org). It was recorded by Jacques Gamblin in French, Glenn Close in English, Salma Hayek in Spanish, and Zhou Xun in Mandarin. Stylistically evoking memories of Koyannisqatsi, the aerial photography presents viewers with a “God’s-​eye view” of pastures, deserts, mountains, and cities. The vistas are breathtaking in their beauty and sometimes in their degradation; yet they provide the viewer with a certain detachment, an ability to see the changes wrought on the face of the earth by mankind, without being directly implicated in the carnage. The editing pace is slow and contemplative, giving the viewer time to fully take in the images and think about them. The soundtrack score by world music composer Armand Amar reinforces the theme of multiculturalism and the mood of reflection.

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The first act traces the creation of the natural world, with its volcanic eruptions, rugged mountain landscapes, arboreal forests, and glaciers birthing the world’s great rivers. The film wants to ground us in the natural world where life began, before humanity arose and changed its face beyond recognition. The eerie nonverbal singing conveys a sense of primitive emotionality, while the repetitive instrumental musical score is reminiscent of Glass’s Koyannisqatsi soundtrack. The abstract patterns of the elements—​earth, water, fire, and air—​appear like works of abstract art, as the narration traces the story of the evolution of the land and the beginnings of life: coral reefs, rainforests, and the variety of species that preceded homo sapiens. Act 2 follows the development of human civilization from its beginnings in the cultures of hunter gathering, the discovery of fire, and the agricultural revolution. As human settlement expanded, something we call civilization developed, with towns distinguished by structures for living, the need for defense, and the growth of wealth and inequality. Still, the energy available to these early cultures came primarily from humans and animals. Over those early millennia, humans began to consume more resources and design their environments with more complexity, through agriculture, irrigation, deforestation, and hunting some species to extinction. Suddenly the film jumps to the modern era. We see fires fueled by resources from deep in the earth, vast cities of skyscrapers stretching as far as the eye can see. The chaotic patterns of nature have been replaced by equally beautiful but linear and uniform city blocks and patterns of streetlights across the city by night, and every productive activity is performed by machines powered by “black gold.” Everywhere machines rip from the earth the remnants of ancient sunlight; the pumping oil derricks are “the metronomes of our hopes and illusions.” Oil and other fossil fuels have replaced human labor in advanced nations, yet 80 percent of the mineral wealth is consumed by 20 percent of the population. In the contemporary United States, only three million farmers produce enough grain to feed two billion people. The same industrial model has been applied to raising meat for human consumption, inflating the cost of grain for those who can afford little else. In Los Angeles, the number of cars almost equals the number of inhabitants, and travel that once took days is measured in minutes. We know that the end of cheap oil is imminent, but we refuse to believe what we know. Industrial production and consumption have been globalized. Global trade has increased twenty times over since 1950. Dubai is an example of a place

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virtually without arable land or natural resources that can construct an entirely artificial environment, bringing in the necessary materials from all over the world, with money from oil. Yet as a species we are depleting what nature provides; we are consuming fish faster than they can reproduce, and birds must fly ever farther to find food. Overconsumption of water has so depleted our rivers that many of them never reach the sea. In India, the water table is dropping so low that 30 percent of wells have been abandoned. Cities like Las Vegas rely on sources of water that are decreasing at an alarming rate. Wetlands have been drained and filled for human habitation, wiping out the habitat of many species. All living matter is linked. Deforestation is one of the principal causes of global warming; the Amazon rainforest has already been reduced by 20 percent, giving way to cattle ranches and soybean farms, mostly to feed people in Europe and Asia. The burning of the rainforest accounts for 20 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. In Borneo, forests are being ravaged by the production of palm oil for food, cosmetics, and biofuels. At the current rate of deforestation, its forests will have totally disappeared within ten years. Deforestation increases erosion, which impoverishes the soil and reduces its suitability for agriculture. The overpopulation of poor countries puts incredible stress on their resources; one-​third of the world’s people still rely on charcoal for cooking. History is replete with examples of civilizations that have collapsed due to exhaustion of their resources, but today human civilization has become global. What will be the consequences if we behave in a similar fashion? Despite humanity’s vast resources and trade, the gap in inequality has grown wider than ever. Half of the world’s wealth today is in the hands of the richest 2 percent of the population, while one human in six lives with precarious access to safe water, sanitation, and electricity. For example, Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil exporter, but 70 percent of its people live in poverty. Half the world’s poor live in countries rich in resources. The world’s demand for energy is constantly increasing, even while our sources of energy become more difficult and expensive to reach. In a few decades we will have pumped enough carbon back into the atmosphere to heat it up significantly. Without realizing it, we have upset the earth’s climatic balance. Ships can traverse Arctic waters where they could never go before. With less ice to reflect light and more dark water to absorb it, feedback loops kick in that accelerate the process of global warming. The oceans become warmer and sea levels rise. Our ecosystem has no borders; our actions have repercussions across the entire earth. Greenland’s ice sheets are melting, even though there is no industry

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there. Island nations face the imminent threat of being rendered uninhabitable. Thirty percent of coral reefs, an essential link in the chain of species, have disappeared. Seventy percent of the world’s population lives on coastal plains; eleven of the most populous cities sit on a coastline or river estuary. Salt water in these places will overwhelm the water table and render the water undrinkable. Over 200 million people could become climate refugees as soon as 2050. The glaciers of the Himalayas are the source of all of Asia’s great rivers; two billion people depend on them for drinking water and crop irrigation. One-​third of Bangladesh could be in direct jeopardy from projected sea level rise. Half of Australia’s farmland has been affected by drought. Forest fires are becoming more frequent and intense, and they release even more carbon into the atmosphere. In Siberia, permafrost is beginning to melt and release methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2. The final sequence of Home ends with a repeated mantra—​“It’s too late to be a pessimist”—​along with a collection of optimistic signs and potential solutions: education and research, microloans, national parks, reforestation, reduction of military spending, fair trade, carbon capture, and renewable energy sources like solar and wind. A lot has been lost, but there is still much left to be preserved. Inspired by a sense of urgency for the film’s message, Arthus-​Bertrand devised a radical method of distribution. Rather than follow the traditional stages of release—​theatrical to cable/​television to DVD and online—​he decided to debut the film on all platforms simultaneously on World Environment Day, June 5, 2009. Furthermore, thanks to the financial support of PPR CEO Françoise-​Henri Pinault, the film was distributed for free, including one presentation on a giant screen below the Eiffel Tower for 25,000 people. Four versions of the film were distributed, ranging from ninety-​five minutes for the shortest and 120 minutes for the longest. Home was distributed internationally on the National Geographic Channel and in India on STAR World Cable, and was made available for download on several online sites. Any profits from the film were to be donated to Arthus-​Bertrand’s Good Planet charity foundation (De la Baume, 2011). Because of its unusual release, Home did not play the festival circuit and did not qualify for most award presentations. For the same reason, total viewership is difficult to determine; it is believed to be one of the most-​viewed documentaries in history, but it was far more widely seen around the globe than in the United States, where it received surprisingly sparse critical coverage. On YouTube, the

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versions of Home in various languages have received over thirty-​two million views, and its screenings on the international National Geographic Channel have received high ratings. So it certainly seems to be one of the most-​viewed environmental documentaries in recent years. Critics universally praised the film’s spectacular photography for evoking a sense of awe and wonder. However, some reviewers felt the film’s beauty detracted from its message. The New  York Times’ Jeannette Catsoulis (2011) noted, “Home paints the destruction of our planet in the yummiest colors imaginable.” Commentators often found the narration too preachy and repetitive, rendering the film amenable only to the already converted. However, the film received more enthusiastic responses from alternative and environmental publications. The Ecologist’s Polly Cook (2009) found the narration “graceful” and the script “straightforward and content heavy, yet beautifully written, giving just the right amount of information exactly when you want it.” Home also received positive coverage from Audubon Magazine, Ecological Art, and some educational publications like Australian Screen Education. As with many environmental films, Home offers a teaching tool on its website, this one eighty-​four pages long. It covers everything from the history and science in the film, to a glossary of terms, to a consideration of the film as a work of cinematic art—​and of course some advice for offering perspectives to youth.

The Economics of Happiness Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrators: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available in:

2011 68 min. (20-​min. version available on Local Futures website) Helena Norberg-​Hodge, Steven Gorelick, John Page Helena Norberg-​Hodge Local Futures Local Futures Helena Norberg-​Hodge, John Page Expository/​Participatory Australia http://​www.localfutures.org/​the-​economics-​of-​happiness/​ the-​film/​ http://​streamalone.com/​play.php?movie=tt1687905, Vimeo, http://​www.localfutures.org/​the-​economics-​of-​happiness/​ the-​film

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Figure 4.4  The Economics of Happiness (Australia, 2011, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick, and John Page) reveals how globalization of trade is accelerating climate change while undermining local cultures and economies.

Produced by Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Local Futures organization, the short film The Economics of Happiness sees in globalization a convergence of crises—​environmental, economic, and spiritual. The isolated Himalayan region of Ladakh was a second home for Norberg-​Hodge for thirty-​five years; the region’s economy used to be based on farming and regional trade, with a sustainable but comfortable standard of living that included spacious homes, no hunger or unemployment, and joyful people with leisure time. But beginning in the 1970s “development” intruded, undermining the local economy and introducing western consumerism, a sense of poverty and inferiority, pollution, divisiveness, and widespread depression. In the film’s view, globalization is based on worldwide travel, communications, and deregulation of world markets. Like the overt colonialism that preceded it, globalization dismantles local economies to control nations, forcing their peoples into labor and debt. The film cites eight “inconvenient truths” about globalization: 1. Globalization makes us unhappy, increasing stress and materialism (1956 was the year of “peak happiness” in the USA). 2. Globalization breeds insecurity—​people’s identities become based on competition, comparison, and dependence on latest trends and technology, leading to separation, envy, and emulation of the American way of life.

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3. Globalization wastes natural resources, promoting the expectation of infinite growth of consumption on a finite planet, ignoring limits on resources and population. 4. Globalization accelerates climate change, through travel and transport and hidden subsidies; inefficiencies of scale (through treaties) lead countries to import and export comparable quantities of similar products. 5. Globalization destroys livelihoods. The relocation of industries destroys jobs and puts pension funds at risk; small farmers are prime victims, driven from their land into urban slums. 6. Globalization increases conflict. Unemployment displaces groups who are then pushed into competition, aggravated by religious and cultural diversity. The increasing gap between the rich and the poor creates desperation and terrorism. 7. Globalization creates handouts to big business. State subsidies for things like nuclear power, fossil fuels, and monoculture agriculture are “as far from free markets as it’s possible to be.” Deregulation of trade by organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) criminalizes small producers. 8. Globalization is based on false accounting. The measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does not reflect negative costs; things like cleanup of pollution, war, and disease count as positive elements because they involve the exchange of money. Greenwashing promises solutions that only sustain business as usual (e.g., so-​called alternative fossil fuels from fracking and tar sands); changing individual behavior won’t be sufficient. After chronicling the downside of globalization, the film explores some alternative directions. What can be done? Here are some solutions proposed in the film: 1. Employ different parameters for measuring economic livelihood, such as the Genuine Progress Index, which do a better job of tracking the costs and benefits of economic activity. 2. Localize—​remove supports favoring transnational corporations, while reducing reliance on exports and imports. Bring corporations under more democratic control, by promoting things like renewable energy and mass transit.

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3. Reorient business toward sustainability. For example, BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) keeps dollars circulating locally. Ensure that finance and banking practices avoid creating speculative bubbles. 4. Encourage consumption of local food (food sovereignty). Cut out food miles and oil dependence in agriculture, for example through permaculture and urban gardens. 5. Challenge the myth that the “Global South” needs global markets to support food production. Ensure the use of land and water resources for and by local people. Nonindustrial agriculture provides more jobs and produces three-​to-​five times more food per acre. 6. Concentrate on use of local energy. Renewable decentralized and distributed energy production provides two-​to-​four times more jobs (e.g., small hydro and wind power production and passive solar energy). 7. Promote local identity and knowledge. Self-​generated identities distinct from global media and celebrity promote more self-​respect, psychological security, and more connection to the region and the land’s ecology, as well as more leisure time and community connectivity. 8. Localize globally. Examples of relocalization include ecovillages and Transition Towns that build with local materials, create local currencies, strengthen local governments, and envision local futures. Norberg-​Hodge’s personal experiences in Ladakh and Bhutan had previously led to a book and accompanying film entitled Ancient Futures. But she has also observed similar cultural and psychological changes in her native Sweden. In terms of the prospects for democratic reforms, she points out that the economic powers—​the banks and corporations—​are “really running the show,” through control of governments and media. The corporate media assumes that if the markets are doing well then ordinary people are doing well, and that the cultures of “developing countries” are by definition somehow inferior to those of the industrial West. Politically speaking, the left is suspicious of big business, while the right is suspicious of big government, and this division acts as a barrier to meaningful reform. Decentralization of the economic system is crucial, while political decentralization can render communities even more powerless. Is Economics of Happiness an environmental film? Norberg-​Hodge considers herself part of the environmental movement, but her focus is on the

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social–​psychological impacts of globalization that promote envy, competition, impoverishment, and disease; it addresses environmental issues only indirectly. How, Norberg-​Hodge asks, can we balance the bad news with the need for optimism? She believes her film has an ultimately positive message. Yes, the dominant global economic system has led to widespread overpopulation, deprivation, and pollution. But the key change would be to have communities link up to rethink their basic assumptions, and to realize that the structural path to a more sustainable future is easier than the path we are on now, which requires massive resource consumption and waste. This new path would require less energy and consumerism but would speak more deeply to the inner needs of both people and nature. The biggest barrier to change is our assumptions, the fragmented and reductionist beliefs that have been painted in our heads through deceptive statistics and models of reality. One central obstacle is the belief that to feed the exploding global population, we need large-​scale monoculture agriculture and a complex network of supermarkets. In truth, we need smaller scale, diversified food systems, and this transition could be the foundation of all other necessary changes. However, she takes issue with the argument for vegetarianism, asserting that meat provides high-​quality protein and can be sustainable if undertaken in the context of local agriculture. Norberg-​Hodge keeps the focus in her films on regular people instead of elites from business and government, although in The Economics of Happiness she includes interviews with notable environmental figures, among them Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, and David Korten. Finding prominent interview subjects was not challenging, since she had known some of these people for a long time. But one reviewer cited the absence of interviews with conventional economists as a shortcoming of the film. The film’s production itself became pretty chaotic. The original budget was limited, initially around $100,000. But after losing its first cameraman, the crew had to shoot with as many as twenty different cameramen with different video format cameras (both NTSC and PAL), finally finishing with six different editors. Her crew shot footage in various other countries, but audiences in preview screenings became impatient with longer lengths, so she decided to keep the film short to better preserve its focus on Ladakh. Norberg-​Hodge reflects that including more emotional, personal stories might have held audience

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interest for a longer film, but the current version works better when shown to smaller groups. The total budget of final film, including promotion and distribution, wound up between $250,000 and $500,000 over six years. The chaos in the finishing stages also cut into promotional efforts. The film launched at a conference built around its message at the Brower Center in Berkeley, California in 2012. There was also a premiere at the town hall in Seattle, Washington, where crowds were so large that people had to be turned away. Norberg-​Hodge feels she was promoting relocalization a decade or two before the birth of the peak oil and transition movements, yet feels the contributions of her organization have not been well recognized. She feels the mainstream press has ignored the film, partly because it doesn’t fall into easily definable niches like “environmental film.” Due in part to its unusual length (at sixty-​eight minutes), the film received little interest from television, and failed to gain screenings at some of the high profile film festivals. On the upside, The Economics of Happiness did obtain screenings in at least a dozen film festivals, including the most prestigious environmental festival in the nation’s capital. It attracted the endorsement of many prominent environmentalists and writers, including David Suzuki, Joanna Macy, Alice Waters, and Carolyn Baker. Film reviews were mostly limited to the alternative press, but these reviews were uniformly excellent. Films for Action rated the film as third on their list of 100 World-​Changing Documentaries, after The Corporation and The Future of Food, and second on their Best Transformational Films of 2011. Yes Magazine’s Kristy Leissle (2011) praised the film for capturing “the incredible waste of global capitalism through eye-​opening examples,” and for revealing “the profound unhappiness of such a disconnected world.” Alternet’s Tara Lohan (2011) devoted four pages to a thorough outline of the film’s logic. Grist’s Jennifer Prediger (2011) praised the film for making “a connection between the economic crisis and a ‘crisis of the human spirit’—​the reality that even as our material wealth has increased, we have not gotten happier.” The Economics of Happiness makes a valuable contribution to the discussion of the complex links between the global systems of finance, food, energy, and communications, and the need of people everywhere for resilience and self-​ respect. Its analysis of the structural problems created by globalization points the way to practical strategies for relocalization. There are, the film insists, ways out of the globalization trap, if people and communities can recognize and adopt them.

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Surviving Progress Year: Length: Directors: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Inspired by: Website: Available at:

2011 86 min. Mathieu Roy, Harold Crooks (Codirector) Daniel Louis, Denise Robert, Gerry Flahive Cinemaginaire/​Big Picture Media/​National Film Board of Canada First Run Features Ronald Wright Expository Canada A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright http://​survivingprogress.com/​ (may be defunct) Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube

The opening sequences of Surviving Progress are reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: beginning with some chimps involved in experiments in a lab, followed by shots of astronauts working on a spaceship far above the earth. It’s not a coincidence, as this documentary has some expansive points to make about human evolution. What is progress? Is it always good? Is there “bad progress”? Inspired by the book A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (2006—who provides a running on-​screen narration—Surviving Progress presents a wide-​ranging meditation on our environmental crisis, weaving together strands from brain research, population ecology, technological development, global political economics, and the study of societal collapse. Although Wright’s book examined reasons for the collapse of ancient societies—​notably the Mayan and the Roman—​the film makes a critical survey of the dangers posed to modern global civilization. As Andrew Beckerman (2012) noted in his review for Film-​Forward, “Dating back to the enlightenment, the notion of progress as a good thing in and of itself has been a given. Technological and scientific achievement will lead to more advanced people guided solely by reason . . . (but) this ideal began to fall apart in the middle of the last century.” The Industrial Revolution of the past 200 years has brought us to a point of crisis. Can we learn to live within our limits? Surviving Progress is principally a Canadian production, both in terms of the production team and the interview subjects. The producers boast prominent pedigrees: Harold Crooks and Mark Achbar worked together on The Corporation

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(2003), and one executive producer is no less than cinema icon Martin Scorsese. The film follows the basic form of the expository essay, juxtaposing interviews with prominent scientists and authors with poetic interludes to inspire quiet reflection. Most of these interviews go beyond the “usual suspects” from similar documentaries, covering a wide variety of disciplines from both the sciences and humanities. The film’s focus is the destructive interaction between global economic systems and the depletion of natural resources. Characterizing global capitalism as a system that profits from debt, Surviving Progress follows the trail of how organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan vast sums of money to poor countries, which can only hope to repay the loans with interest by exploiting their vast natural resources. The film draws frequent analogies between financial capital and “natural capital”: humanity has been living on the “interest” or surplus, but now we’re eating into the “principal”—​the unsustainable exploitation of forests, fish catch, arable farmland, and minerals. In the end, nations suffer environmentally destructive exploitation of their resources and deep social dislocations, only to be abandoned when the maximum profits have been wrung out of them. On an even deeper level, the film examines how our current problems arise out of the evolutionary project that we call “human nature”—​how Homo sapiens utilize their expanded brainpower to solve problems by asking “Why?” Humans are still hunters and gatherers at heart, but cultural evolution has outpaced natural evolution. Our cerebral “hardware” hasn’t caught up with the cultural “software”; our ancestral brain mechanisms evolved before we had any concept of “the future,” and we are basically still programmed for “fight or flight.” The film introduces the concept of the “progress trap,” an apparent advancement in behavior or technology that seems advantageous in the near term but proves harmful in the long run. Progress traps run the gamut from our ancient ancestors chasing mastodon herds off cliffs (thus hastening their extinction), to emitting greenhouse gasses to the extent of heating the atmosphere; they ultimately lead to disaster because they’re unsustainable. Today’s world contains an exponentially growing population with expectations of a consistently rising standard of living fueled primarily by nonrenewable resources—​a clear prescription for catastrophe. Medical science has led to a great boom in human population that most would consider a great advance, but which has led to increased demands on the world’s resources.

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The toxic pattern of economic “progress” proceeds like this:  a civilization expands as industrial output, population, and urbanization are growing. When cities and population have expanded over the farmland, the people at the bottom begin to starve and the people at the top lose their legitimacy, leading to hunger and revolution. The Roman Empire accumulated an irreversible concentration of wealth at the top, which helped bring on the Dark Ages. However, global collapse would be different from isolated civilizational collapses in the past; it could occur on a catastrophic scale. Narrator Wright asks: “Is global civilization the ultimate progress trap?” According to environmental crisis researcher Vaclav Smil, we must seek limits on population and consumption. A person in the United States or Europe consumes around fifty times more resources than a poor person in Bangladesh. The world could simply not support the addition of a billion Chinese consuming at that level. There are still five billion people—​two-​thirds of the world’s population—​waiting to tap into the potential bonanza of health care, housing, and education. But the world can probably only support at most half the world’s present population. He concludes: “We have to use less . . . But most people are not willing to go back, because they have been hijacked by this material culture.” Faith in growth and markets has become the new religious fundamentalism. Former IMF economist Simon Johnson decries the oligarchy of economic and political power that will never let developing countries be absolved of their debts. Historically, debts often grew too high to repay, but at some point debt jubilees allowed people and nations to cancel their debts and clean the slate. But today Johnson believes that the top 10 percent would rather strip the planet and let the population shrink as long as big banks can claim their rights to minerals, forests, and water rights. African and South American activists, who are on the receiving end of these policies, agree with this assessment and fight against both environmental and financial pillage. Scientist and journalist David Suzuki complains that in conventional economics, basic environmental elements like topsoil and water in aquifers are considered “externalities”; conventional economics is so disconnected from the real world that he calls it “a form of brain damage.” Primatologist Jane Goodall asks, “Why is this intelligent species destroying its own habitat and endangering its own survival?” Will humanity prove to be the first species to drive itself into extinction by destroying its own environmental support system? What we’re up against is human nature; can we transcend our inner ice age hunter? No Impact Man director Colin Beavan urges that before

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we go around blaming other people, perhaps we should look at ourselves, at our own levels of energy use and material consumption. Surviving Progress does offer some strategies for “escaping the trap,” but they are pretty radical and perhaps not realistic within our time frame. The Internet has become analogous to the unified nervous system of the global brain; Gary Marcus thinks that perhaps a universal communication network can save us. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes that our only chance for survival is to let go of our attachment to Planet Earth and instead look to other planets as the place to carry on our evolution. DNA researcher Craig Venter suggests that genetic engineering to alter human consciousness might create new sources of food and fuel, and perhaps even alter our species to make us cooperate for survival, thus changing the future course of evolution. However, critics counter that a synthetic biology could become “a progress trap par excellence” that might lead to monopolistic control by mega-​corporations of agricultural land, seeds, and even our genes. Stylistically, the film keeps things visually interesting through a lot of creative animations of modern culture and science (reminiscent of Koyannisqatsi), and close-​ups of faces of ordinary people from around the world. The film screened in over forty film festivals worldwide between 2011 and 2012, and enjoyed a limited theatrical release in the United States and Canada. It even received a special screening at the United Nation’s 2011 Convention on Biological Diversity. For educational purposes, the producers posted a study guide on the film’s website, which summarized the harmful impacts of “progress” on the planet, and contained discussion questions regarding both issues of environmental content and media literacy. Surviving Progress was widely reviewed by major newspapers and magazines across the United States, Canada, and Europe, with nearly universal praise. It is considered to be an example of a film that tackles complex, abstract topics and succeeds in making them accessible and engaging. Variety’s Dennis Harvey (2012) wrote that Surviving Progress “does a remarkable job weaving together . . . big ideas in a crisp, coherent, easy-​to-​take fashion that somehow never becomes an informational overload . . . (The film) offers a cinematic wakeup call so cogent and non-​didactic that even Tea Partiers would be hard pressed to shrug it off.” Harvey also admired the film’s style, noting “a terrific diversity of illustrative materials here, from man-​on-​the-​street interviews around the globe to footage from NASA.” But occasionally a critic suggested that the production’s visual

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beauty somehow detracts from the seriousness of its message; Brian Johnson (2011) in MacLean’s referred to the film as “the eco essay as eye candy.” Surviving Progress is most noteworthy for stretching the understanding of our environmental crisis beyond the usual considerations of energy and politics, into the arena of human evolution and consciousness, asking whether humanity’s abuse of its own habitat was inevitable, and if so, what can be done to alter its course.

A Fierce Green Fire Year: Length: Director: Producers: Distributor: Narrators: Mode/​Genre: Country: Inspired by: Website: Available from:

2012 101 min. (55-​min. version for PBS American Masters) Mark Kitchell Mark Kitchell, Tamata Alexa (Melnick), Craig Phillips, Marc N. Weiss Bullfrog Films/​First Run Features Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende, & Meryl Streep Expository United States A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet by Philip Shabecoff http://​afiercegreenfire.com Netflix, Amazon Video, PBS.com (short version)

A tribute to environmental activism, A Fierce Green Fire investigates the environmental movement and the role of global activism over the past fifty years, highlighting five significant environmental struggles: the Sierra Club’s fight to prevent to damming of the Grand Canyon; the battle for environmental justice at Love Canal; Greenpeace’s campaign to save the whales; the struggle to save the Amazon rainforests; and the threat of climate change. Director Mark Kitchell won an Academy Award in 1990 for Berkeley in the Sixties. In “Conservation,” “saving the life wild and pure” describes the evolution of an ethic of conservation over the past century. The film summarizes the early history of conservation and environmentalism, which we have already discussed here in an earlier chapter: the birth of the Audubon Society, the battle over the Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite Valley, Pinchot’s “wise use” approach to

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conservation, Aldo Leopold’s concept of a “land ethic,” and the evolution of the Sierra Club from a hikers’ club to an environmental activist organization. Perhaps the Sierra Club’s supreme achievement was the fight against the damming of the Grand Canyon through its advertising campaign, a battle that appeared unwinnable at the outset. By rallying public opinion against the plans of the Department of the Interior, the Sierra Club had to face the wrath of the Internal Revenue Service, which tried to challenge the organization’s tax-​exempt status, but only succeeded in boosting public support that resulted in a complete victory for the group’s purpose. When David Brower envisioned a worldwide environmental campaign and was pushed out of Sierra Club leadership, he founded Friends of the Earth, opposing offshore drilling and nuclear power. “Pollution” chronicles the growing public awareness of the dangerous health effects of toxic chemicals in the environment, culminating in the tragedy in Love Canal, New York. The efforts of modern chemistry to make life better—​“Better Living through Chemistry” was a variant of a DuPont advertising slogan—​ wound up producing chemicals that instead damaged the environment for animals and humans. As noted previously, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring revealed the cancer-​causing effects of the pesticide DDT and the dangers of the misuse of chemicals in agriculture. The 1970s witnessed the creation of government initiatives like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Superfund for cleaning up polluted sites. In 1977, a woman named Lois Gibbs (later founder of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice) lived with her husband and two sick children in Love Canal, an ironically named community in northern New  York State, where 56  percent of children born exhibited birth defects. Gibbs rallied the local people to stand up to the polluter Hooker Chemicals, which had buried toxic chemicals beneath the town’s homes and schools. But it took investigative journalism to connect the dots for the residents, linking the birth defects to a school playground placed above a dumping ground for 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals. Eighty percent of the community’s men worked for the chemical industry and feared retribution or the loss of their jobs. So it fell to the housewives to organize for action, often with covert support from their men. In spite of a grim scientific analysis by the EPA, the government was reluctant to set a precedent in terms of enforcement and penalties, because there were potentially 50,000 other waste sites that might require comparable attention. So there was an attempt to minimize the problem at every level. It took years to make the case that the company’s pollution had caused miscarriages and birth defects, and still

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Figure 4.5  A Fierce Green Fire (United States, 2012, Mark Kitchell) chronicles several important battles in the history of environmental activism, based on the book by Philip Shabecoff.

the government seemed less than interested in investigating the claim. At one point homeowners had to hold two EPA representatives hostage, but in the end an EPA investigation established chromosome damage linked to the chemicals. Occidental Petroleum, the owner of Hooker Chemical, had to pay $197 million for waste cleanup and monitoring, and the relocation of families. Love Canal children’s children have also suffered as high a rate of birth defects as their parents did; they also have a disproportionally high number of female to male children, symptomatic of endocrine-​disrupting chemicals, so the impacts have been multigenerational. The fight for environmental justice became a prominent theme, challenging the locating of polluting industries and landfills in black neighborhoods, such as PCB’s in Warren County, North Carolina, and waste landfills in Houston, Texas. However, traditional environmental and civil rights organizations took a long time to get behind environmental justice issues, reluctant to blur their political focus between issues of environment, race, and class. Then in the 1980s, the Reagan counterrevolution began the push to get government off the backs of American industry, and much of the momentum for environmental reform ground to a halt. The third section looks at “Counter-​Cultural Activism.” Outside of the mainstream environmental organizations, other voices arose during the 1960s and

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1970s that promoted direct action, and emphasized responses to ecological destruction beyond conservation and governmental regulation. The Whole Earth Catalog provided rural communes with the tools for reimagining alternative futures for urban youth heading “back to the land.” The new ecology movement saw a world out of balance and asked the question: What is the proper relationship between humans and larger living systems? The New Alchemy Institute sought designs for living in nature through the development of appropriate technologies, laying the ground for the development of permaculture. Amory Lovins proposed following the “soft energy paths” of conservation and renewable energy, opposing nuclear power and founding the Rocky Mountain Institute for research in “end use/​least cost” approaches to energy use. Innovative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, designer of the geodesic dome, called for a design revolution for doing more with less on Spaceship Earth. The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) applied computer modeling to projecting the consumption of food and natural resources in relation to population growth—​ projections that envisioned the possibilities of overshoot and collapse. Founded in the 1970s, Greenpeace brought together concern for endangered species with direct action strategies from the antiwar movement in confronting whaling ships, ultimately contributing to a permanent ban on whaling. Greenpeace saw the media as the best means of impacting public consciousness through what it called “mind bombs.” The antinuclear movement also grew stronger, first in Europe and then in the United States. By coincidence, the fictional film China Syndrome was released simultaneously with the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, injecting Hollywood star power into the political debate. Seven years later an even more serious nuclear meltdown occurred at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and these accidents combined to cause a hiatus in nuclear power development for at least the next three decades. The fourth section is “Going Global.” Some scientists believe that the earth is in the midst of its sixth great extinction, and the first one caused by a living species—​humans (Kolbert, 2014). The protection of endangered species depends upon the protection of their habitat. As home to the greatest number of endangered and undiscovered species, the Brazilian Amazon is ground zero for protection of natural habitat, due to its vast expansion of mining, logging, and ranching. Deforestation also contributes to climate change and the drying out of the rainforest. Especially in the global south, the struggles of indigenous peoples to protect their environment from the intrusion of industrial and agricultural

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appropriations became the focus of international activism. The murder of native environmental activists (e.g., Chico Mendez in Brazil) consolidated the political solidarity of indigenous people. Innovative scientific approaches to agriculture, like those proposed by Indian scholar Vandana Shiva, promote organic, small-​scale agriculture over industrial-​scale, single-​crop farming methods that destroy the soil and require vast quantities of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. The loss of the commons has come to be recognized as a universal issue—​the loss of access to clean water, air, and food, and the privatization of these essential resources for life. Thus a convergence has developed between the issues of social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental issues, linked together by an expanding integrated vision of social and environmental ecology. The film’s final section addresses the problem of “Climate Change,” and the necessity of an activist movement to take on the issue. The issue of climate change is all about how we generate energy and the communities where it is generated. James Lovelock (1979) proposed the Gaia hypothesis, an understanding of the earth as a self-​regulating complex living organism. The threat of global warming (formerly called the “Greenhouse Effect”) is believed to be capable of reducing the human population by 75–​80 percent within a century, the consequence of using the atmosphere as an open sewer. One possible mechanism of this reduction could be the spread of pandemics across human society, engendering huge economic and political costs. Such extreme predictions received strong blowback from the fossil fuel industry and their political agents. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio di Janeiro, US president George H. W. Bush commented, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation” (“A Greener Bush,” 2003). The United States signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 under President Clinton, but Congress refused to ratify it. A decade later, Hurricane Katrina brought the issue of climate change back into the headlines, as did heat waves and floods in Europe; droughts in US southwest and Australia; the increasing melting of glacial and Arctic ice; and the bleaching of coral reefs. The climate monitoring organization 350.org drew a red line for CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million, the maximum concentration considered to be safe by a number of scientists. But at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the same political failures of the major powers continued to produce only voluntary pledges without real action. Climate remains the impossible issue, impossible to change but also impossible to ignore.

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The film covers some controversial activists who were forced out of their organizations, like David Brower of the Sierra Club (who had led the opposition of the damming of the Grand Canyon) and Paul Watson of Greenpeace (who departed from nonviolent principles by ramming and sinking whaling ships). Environmental activist Paul Hawken (2007) asserted in Blessed Unrest that meaningful action to address climate change would not be a top-​down process. The environmental movement has evolved from preserving wild places to saving human civilization, reinventing the way we think about our place in the natural world. According to coproducer Mark Weiss (Lopate, 2013), the book A Fierce Green Fire by Philip Shabecoff that inspired the film is a very detailed and comprehensive historical account of a century of environmental activism. The filmmakers originally envisioned a six-​part film series, but they eventually realized that they would need to select a smaller number of stories and tell them well, and this choice proved to be the key to getting the film funded. The first four dramatic stories chronicle almost impossible-​to-​win citizens’ actions against overwhelming odds, in which activists prevailed in a significant way, demonstrating how a commitment to activism grows in ordinary people when faced with dire challenges. Fortunately, a considerable amount of preexisting stock footage existed to help cover the telling of these particular stories. For example, in the case of Love Canal, journalists had played a huge part in gathering historical and scientific information. Production was a start-​and-​stop process since funding (including a Sundance Documentary Fund grant) appeared and then ran out. A couple of rounds of interviews were shot. During editing, some segments fell right into place, while others took more development or were dropped entirely. The original edit ran 135 minutes, but preview screenings indicated that further editing was required. The film premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, closed the Environmental Film Festival in the nation’s capital that spring, and played a number of documentary festivals throughout the year. A parallel rollout involved screenings at universities and environmental organizations across the United States. A shorter fifty-five minutes version was adapted for the American Experience series on PBS. The film’s limited theatrical run garnered only around $30,000 in gross revenues, and it won no festival awards. Critical reviews were generally respectful but unenthusiastic. Village Voice’s Zachary Wigon (2013) called the film “a wildly ambitious undertaking” that “puts a human face onto the . . . toll of disastrous

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pollution,” but ironically suggested that its subject matter “requires at least a miniseries to be appropriately addressed.” The New York Times’ Neil Genzlinger (2013) found the film “as sleepy as a documentary can be,” that “doesn’t really capture the urgency and militancy in the title.” Drew Hunt (2013) of Slant Magazine complimented the wealth of information it provided, but disapproved “the formulaic documentary trifecta of first-​person interviews, archival material and news footage.” Variety’s John Anderson (2012) acknowledged that there is “no denying the film’s power” but feared that “what it lacks in polish . . . will limit opportunity for widespread exposure.” But for every review that devalued the film’s preaching to the choir, there was another that felt that environmentalists would feel more galvanized into activism. However, all reviewers seemed to agree on one thing: the segment on Love Canal was the most emotionally powerful and historically significant of the stories presented. The films from this first section offer a vision of the complexity of the various environmental challenges facing humanity. Clearly there is no single magic bullet that will simultaneously solve all the problems of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, overpopulation, species extinction, unpredictable food and water supply, economic inequality, and human conflict over scarce resources. But understanding the systemic relationships between these various crises is a crucial prerequisite to knowing how to respond to them. We will now proceed to examine films that cover some of these specific issues in greater depth. But as we do, we will also seek to remember how they are all interwoven into an ecological tapestry, a synergistic, self-​regulating system that scientist James Lovelock called “Gaia.”

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Climate Change

Without a doubt, the environmental issue that dominates the attention of the world in this historical moment is anthropogenic (human-​caused) climate change. Late in the nineteenth century, some scientists began to understand that CO2 released from burning fossil fuels could have a warming effect on atmospheric temperatures. During the 1950s and 1960s, a few scientists began to warn that CO2 emissions could have a significant impact on worldwide temperatures by the end of the century, and this view gained increasing traction during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1988 NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen raised concern over global warming in testimony before Congress, and in 1992 the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made its first assessment report. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol represented the first international treaty to commit nations to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global climate change. In the intervening two decades, global climate change has become one of the most controversial issues in American politics. The vast majority of climate scientists have come to believe that atmospheric temperatures are warming primarily due to human GHG emissions from fossil fuels. Unless those emissions are curbed worldwide in a timely fashion, catastrophic climate shifts could occur that would threaten all manner of environmental and human crises, including but not limited to melting of polar regions leading to sea level rise, flooding of coastal areas leading to mass migrations, more powerful droughts and storms, disruption of agriculture, and widespread extinctions. However, fossil fuel companies and their political allies have put tremendous effort and money into contradicting or confounding these claims, resulting in a stalemate in climate policy in the United States, until recently the world’s greatest greenhouse gas emitter. While at Harvard in the late 1960s, future Vice President Al Gore studied under pioneer climate scientist Roger Revelle, whose inspiration led him to

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become a climate activist during his time in the US Senate and as vice president in the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, Gore’s tireless advocacy in warning about climate change has, despite his best intentions, led to a political politization of the issue, combined with the powerful influence of the fossil fuel lobbies. The 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, based on the audiovisual presentation that Gore delivered across the globe, became the most important environmental documentary up to that time, and set a high standard for all subsequent environmental filmmakers.

An Inconvenient Truth Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company Distributor: Narrator (Presenter): Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2006 78 min. Davis Guggenheim Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Burns Lawrence Bender Productions, Participant Productions Paramount Classics Al Gore Participatory/​Expository United States http://​an-​inconvenient-​truth.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Hulu

The “King Kong” of all environmental documentary films, An Inconvenient Truth has perhaps influenced more people on their thinking about climate change than all the IPCC reports combined. The film combines footage from former vice president Al Gore’s traveling global warming Keynote presentation with reflective segments about his biography and the development of his beliefs. The film begins with Gore’s voice reflecting on his early years on his family’s farm in Tennessee, expressing his memories of growing up in the midst of nature, visualized through shots of the farm’s river as the morning sun breaks through the trees. His recollections capture not only his individual memories, but also a deep cultural memory of earlier times, when direct immersion in nature was a common part of people’s everyday lives. Then Cut! To a montage of shots of Gore at his laptop, speaking to and interacting with audiences during his Climate Change tour, and expressing his

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feeling of failure in getting his message across. He recognizes that acknowledgement of the challenge of climate change creates a moral imperative that many politicians are simply unable to face. In his presentation, Gore grounds his thesis with images of the earth taken from space; with humorous anecdotes told in his deadpan style of humor; and with clever animated clips that keep his lecture from being too monotonous. Gore’s personal encounter with climate science came as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, when he studied under Dr. Roger Revelle, one of the earliest scientists to interpret climate data as linking the increase in atmospheric CO2 to the burning of fossil fuels. Gore uses charts and graphic animations to visualize the natural processes and data that he describes. He tracks his continued engagement in the issue through his years in the Senate and as vice president, including his book Earth in the Balance (1992) and his participation in the Kyoto Climate Conference in 1997. Particularly striking are the photographs Gore displays of the retreating glaciers of Kilimanjaro, Glacier National Park, the Himalayas, the Alps, and elsewhere. Gore introduces his audience to some of the techniques of analyzing atmospheric CO2, such as using ice cores to obtain air samples from earlier time periods. His graphs demonstrating the parallels over thousands of years between CO2 levels and global temperatures are very persuasive. For humorous effect, he uses a mechanical lift to emphasize the prospects for a rise in CO2 levels in the next 50 years, far higher than ever in the scientific record. Gore admits to a deep disappointment that the scientific testimony did not shake legislators to share his concern and take action, followed by a montage of clips of skeptical politicians, from Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush to Senator James Inhofe, calling concern for climate change “crazy” and “a hoax.” The near-​fatal injury of Gore’s young son in a traffic accident, visualized through still shots of empty hospital hallways, lends emotion to the biographical aspect of the film, and seems to have motivated an even more intense commitment on Gore’s part to understanding the impact of global warming on future generations. Also, the quiet, reflective quality of Gore’s vocal narration during the personal segments offers a compelling contrast to the didactic tone of his public performances. While acknowledging that no specific weather event can be directly attributed to global warming, Gore cites as circumstantial evidence numerous recent climatic disasters, such as the 2003 European heat wave that killed over 35,000 people, and the Hurricane Katrina devastation of New Orleans, which occurred

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Figure 5.1  An Inconvenient Truth (United States, 2006, Davis Guggenheim) follows Al Gore’s journey from politician to climate change educator and activist, including his travelling presentation full of charts, graphs, and striking images.

while the film was actually in production. Footage shot just after Katrina drives home the tragic scenes that may become more commonplace in future decades. Gore states that ten of the all-​time highest recorded average annual world temperatures occurred over the prior fourteen years. Hurricanes and tornadoes may be becoming more frequent and intense. Ocean temperatures have also been rising as predicted, with harmful impacts of coral reefs and sea life. Paradoxically, both extreme flooding and extreme droughts are on the increase. Lake Chad in Africa, once one of the world’s largest lakes, has virtually disappeared, contributing significantly to political conflict by threatening the survival of local tribal peoples. Around the mid-​way point, the film returns to Gore’s controversial 2000 election defeat by George W. Bush. It was a devastating personal blow, but it ultimately helped Gore refocus on his life’s purpose, and he returned to the road with what he called his “slide show.” We also return with Gore to his family farm, viewing his past through old photos in Ken Burns-​style pans and grainy 8-​mm style film clips. Gore says he can see the effects of climate change even in the stream than runs through his old home. Back into his presentation, Gore cites two regions that he calls “canaries in the coalmine”: the Arctic and Antarctica. The audience views startling shots of the

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consequences of melting permafrost: stands of trees leaning as if drunken, oil pipelines cracking, houses collapsing or sinking into the ground. An animated sequence shows a lonely polar bear searching in vain for a piece of ice to rest on; the frequent drowning of polar bears was confirmed by news reports while the film was in production. The average ice cap at the North Pole has diminished by 40 percent in forty years, and may be gone entirely within fifty to seventy years. This extreme change would radically decrease solar reflection and increase absorption of heat in the ocean, as well as alter worldwide ocean currents like the Gulf Stream in unpredictable ways. Positive feedback loops may be kicking in that would accelerate the effects of climate change even more rapidly than predicted by current science, disturbing ecological patterns by which many species reproduce and survive. Invasive insects and rodents are already migrating to warmer climes and posing threats to unprepared species, including bringing infectious and even new diseases into human populations. Species worldwide are already being driven to extinction at 1,000 times the natural extinction rate, and rapid climate change could significantly accelerate this trend. Back in the 1970s, says Gore, even scientists concerned about global warming thought that the sea-​based ice shelves of Antarctica would be safe for a century. So there was widespread shock when these ice shelves began to break up, and land-​based ice shelves began to follow suit. The melting of sea-​based ice doesn’t directly raise sea levels, but the melting of land-​based ice does. At the time the film was produced, the residents of some southernmost islands were already being forced to evacuate because their islands were sinking beneath the sea. According to estimates, a significant melting of land-​based ice sheets in western Antarctica could raise worldwide sea levels by around 20 feet. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would yield a comparable result. Scientists there have observed the same process of melting water seeping into cracks in the glacier, destabilizing the glacier’s base and accelerating its melting. To demonstrate the possible effects of this scale of melting, Gore employs animations to show how the maps might have to be redrawn in Florida, San Francisco, the Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh. At a minimum, more than a hundred million people would have to be relocated. Next the film follows Mr. Gore to China, where he confers with top scientists and makes a presentation at a university. Students there greet him like a rock star. China and the United States, Gore feels, face some of the same political and technological challenges in adapting to climate change, because the need to

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respond gives rise to fears of completely unacceptable consequences. Director Guggenheim says, “If we don’t figure out how to do it in China, we’re not going to solve this problem.” Gore then turns to perhaps the largest elephant in the room, the pressure of overpopulation. Just during his lifetime, world population has increased by a factor of three, from over two billion to over six billion (and over seven billion as of this writing). This vast expansion of population creates unrelenting demand for food, water, and energy resources. Gore displays a map showing the continents’ relative contributions to global warming, with the United States leading the way at 30 percent (this map has shifted significantly in the intervening years, with China surpassing the United States). In per capita terms, the United States is almost double its nearest competitor, Russia, with the European Union just behind. With another animation, Gore visualizes the well-​known analogy of humanity’s response to global warming to a frog in a pot of water. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out. But if you put the frog into lukewarm water and slowly bring the water to a boil, it will just sit there until . . . a hand comes in and rescues it. The obvious moral is that if a threat builds gradually enough, humanity won’t be moved to respond until it may be too late. Gore draws another analogy from his personal life involving tobacco, which was the staple crop on the family’s farm (visualized with black-​and-​white stock footage from an earlier time). His older sister Nancy smoked all her life and died of lung cancer. As the health dangers of tobacco came to be known, Gore’s father stopped growing it. But scientifically proving the link between smoking and lung cancer took a generation of research, and required overcoming a public relations campaign by the tobacco industry remarkably similar to the one currently funded by energy companies to discredit the science on climate change. This current strategy tries to create the impression that there is disagreement over the science, even though the scientific consensus is nearly unanimous that the earth is warming and that human activity is the chief cause. A leaked energy company memo proposed to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” This strategy has been largely successful, since a survey of articles in the popular press yielded the result that 53 percent of them regarded the science as unsettled. Successive Republican administrations were willing participants in this campaign. Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush appointed representatives from the fossil fuel industry with little or no scientific training to be

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in charge of government environmental policy. These officials compelled government scientists to rewrite their studies and often edited reports themselves to make policy appear to be in line with the science. It was a classic case of “revolving door bureaucracy”—​representatives from energy companies would enter government to the benefit of their former employers, and when they left the government, they would go right back into the energy industry. Gore quotes Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” As a senator during the first Bush administration (1989), Gore tried to shine a light on the pressure on government scientists like Dr. James Hanson of NASA to revise their reports to conform to the administration’s skepticism about climate change. Gore’s foremost goal has been to identify all the things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles to understanding climate change, and he has faith that at some point a threshold will be crossed and the tide of belief will turn in his favor. Do we have to choose between the economy and the environment, as some politicians claim? Gore demonstrates why he thinks this is a false choice. He cites the examples of auto mileage standards: auto manufacturers across the globe, whether in Europe, Japan, China, or elsewhere, simultaneously offered cars with better fuel economy and lower emissions while outperforming General Motors in the marketplace. Instead of making more efficient vehicles, American car companies chose instead to sue states like California that tried to mandate higher fuel efficiency standards. Gore then addresses the ultimate question: Even if global warming is real, is it too big a problem for human civilization to do anything about? Some people go directly from denial to despair without considering solutions. Gore asserts that we already have enough scientific, technical, and industrial knowledge to address climate problems, but it will take combination of solutions: more efficient electrical appliances and transport vehicles, renewable energy generation, carbon capture/​sequestration, and others. We have everything we need to return to 1970-​level carbon emissions, except for one thing: political will. Among the more developed nations, only the United States and Australia failed to sign the Kyoto climate treaty. Bringing his slide presentation to an inspirational close, Gore cites a long series of American achievements in overcoming adversity, from the founding of the nation to the landing on the moon, including the successful campaign to halt the expansion of the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer, which also required worldwide cooperation. Invoking the image of Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot,” Gore

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says that what is at stake is our ability to live on Planet Earth. Then, returning to the stream by the family farm, Gore asks us to listen to questions from future generations if we fail to act: “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?” Producer Laurie David had viewed a condensed version of Gore’s slideshow and was impressed enough to ask Gore if he could make a couple of presentations in Los Angeles and New York that she would film. The film’s seed financing came from Jeff Skoll of Participant Productions (now Participant Media), the company that produced fictional feature films such as Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck. From the beginning, director Davis Guggenheim was very dubious that they could successfully translate Gore’s stage presentation into a dramatic movie. What is compelling to a live audience may not play as well on a theater screen; listeners may begin to suffer from information fatigue. He couldn’t think of any similar films to use as models. But when he attended a presentation in person, Gore’s passion for the subject and the strength of the visuals changed his mind. To take the film beyond the lecture experience, the filmmakers worked to make the visuals more dynamic, to shoot to emphasize Gore’s personal charisma, and to get the audience to empathize with Gore by chronicling his personal journey over the years so they would understand why he felt so invested in this cause. Gore had to be persuaded to allow the personal narrative approach; after running for president he was sensitive about criticisms that he had exploited personal tragedies like his sister’s death from lung cancer and his son’s near-​fatal car accident. An Inconvenient Truth took only one year to produce from initial concept to opening release. The shooting phase of the film took less than six months, a very brief schedule for a documentary. The crew was composed of top-​level Hollywood talent, from the producers and director above the line, through the camera and tech crews to the editors and composer. All of these people worked well below their usual scale because they wanted to play a part in the project. The film combined as wide a variety of formats as could be imagined:  8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film; JVC 24p and Sony 30fps digital video cameras; and even the high definition digital video camera that George Lucas helped create for his second Star Wars trilogy. Mr. Gore wanted to make his live presentation straight through, without stopping and starting to accommodate production contingencies. So the film crew shot Gore’s Keynote presentation as a live multi-​camera event with several film

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cameras on Gore and his Keynote presentation run through Mac G5 computers. Director Guggenheim was a film director with no live production experience, so he relied a lot on his technical director to manage the video switching. Many of the visual images in Gore’s presentation were of relatively low definition, so they had to be reformatted for size, resolution, and enhanced color for the larger-​than-​usual three-​dimensional screen on the Los Angeles sound stage location. Innovative rear-​projection techniques substituted for the standard lecture-​room projection. Also, somewhat amusingly, the ordinary stepladder Gore usually used to climb up for his presentation was replaced with a mechanical lift, which took three takes to work correctly. The filmmakers benefited greatly from the fact that Gore had been refining his presentation for years and knew precisely what was essential to crystalizing the understanding of the audience, including the visualization of complex climate processes. Although in the end the majority of Gore’s images did not make it into the final edit of the film, he generally refrained from interfering with the editing process. One exception was the inclusion of animations of the oceans’ conveyor belts, which Gore insisted upon as crucial to understanding the systemic global impacts of climate change. The filmmakers went to great lengths to cover minute details, such as filming the research notes of Gore’s deceased former professor Roger Revelle. Gore was so well connected to the scientific community that often he would come to the producers with brand new data and photographs that they then had to incorporate into the film. But he was very meticulous in insisting that all factual claims made in the film be thoroughly verified. Gore invited the film crew to tour his family farm, shooting on locations where he had observed nature as a child. The segments that illuminate Gore’s personal journey provide a context that deepens the viewer’s connection to the presentations. Inclusion of examples of Gore’s deadpan humor was essential to enlivening the tone of the film, especially during the lecture segments. Many of the personal photos in the film came off the walls of his home. Director Guggenheim shot 8mm film around the ranch to evoke the memories of Gore’s childhood. He interviewed Gore for hours to get the personal background information that he needed. By recording biographical video and audio without a large crew, the director felt he achieved a greater sense of intimacy in their conversations and interactions. Editors took a cue from The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the musical group The Band, by intercutting the personal commentaries with the footage of the presentations.

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Ironically, the production team had planned to be in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit the city, but obviously they had to change their plans. Whether or not Katrina could be definitively linked to global warming, it offered a huge piece of circumstantial evidence to bolster the film’s credibility; on a strictly emotional level, it is hard for viewers to watch scenes of Katrina’s devastation and not see Gore’s predictions coming true before their eyes. Gore actually chartered a plane and flew some people out of Louisiana, but he didn’t tell the filmmakers because he didn’t want to appear to be doing it for self-​serving reasons. Many people, because of their desire to support the film’s purpose, permitted their images and musical cues to be used without compensation (most of the film was scored by composer Michael Brook). An aerial CG animation sequence of Antarctica was borrowed from the Paramount fictional film The Day After Tomorrow. Some locations required special permission to shoot—​in airline terminals (Guggenheim actually shot clandestinely at an airline security check and expected to be arrested) and on the airplanes themselves. The director shot airline close-​ups of Gore himself with a compact HD camera. The crew failed to get permission in China to shoot at a coal plant, so they had to obtain footage of Chinese industry from other sources. Two editors worked on finishing the film in around five weeks. The producers were wary of including political footage of Gore, including the disputed 2000 election; they really wanted to avoid framing climate change as a partisan issue. But in the end they decided that to ignore Gore’s political background, which people were familiar with, would be to create a huge elephant in the room by its absence. So they covered his political story, but kept it brief and emphasized the personal impacts on Gore’s life rather than the contentious political battles. Director Guggenheim sees Gore’s rise from the ashes after his presidential defeat as the most heroic aspect of his personal story. Many viewers wanted the film to go further in suggesting solutions at the individual level to enable one to live a carbon-​neutral lifestyle, and the producers expressed some regret that it didn’t. But a deeper exploration of possible solutions would have required another entire film. So the decision was made to use a final title sequence to offer a list of actions to take and web links for more information. Gore himself recruited singer Melissa Etheridge to write a song I Need to Wake Up, which played over the end credits. It was late into production before the producers settled on a title for the film. During an interview, director Guggenheim asked Al Gore why it was so hard to people to understand

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the truth of global warming, and Gore replied, “It’s inconvenient . . . for those of us who drive cars every day and use electricity, for companies who profit from this, it’s an inconvenient truth” (David et al., 2006). The producers had a clear goal: “To change enough minds so that we reach a tipping point and we all start demanding solutions—​solutions from ourselves, but also from our government . . . it’s going to take leadership, but government won’t change until people demand it” (David et al., 2006). The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival without benefit of preview screenings, so the filmmakers weren’t really sure what they had. Paramount Classics bought the distribution rights at Sundance, and the producers credited them with an amazing job of marketing the film, releasing it only a couple of months later. The promotional strategy ventured into innovative territories of publicity, including personal appearances by Al Gore, an MTV special, and “a barrage of online outreach including some of the very first Google video ads” (Olson, 2007, 92). Paramount Classics also “committed five percent of their domestic theatrical gross from the film to form a new bipartisan climate action group—​The Alliance for Climate Protection—​dedicated to raising awareness and grassroots organizing.” Following the film’s release, Gore founded The Climate Project, which as of July 2011 had trained 3,500 presenters worldwide (An Inconvenient Truth—​Wikipedia). In the major venues of the film world, the film met with great acclaim. It received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, and won not only the Academy Award in 2007 for Best Documentary Feature, but also a second Academy Award for Best Original Song for Melissa Etheridge’s I Need to Wake Up. The film gathered at least sixteen Best Documentary awards from other festivals and critics’ juries. It also received some special awards, such as the Humanitas Prize and the Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild of America (An Inconvenient Truth—​Awards—​Internet Movie Database). The response at the box office was equally impressive. Over two million people viewed the film in theaters alone, earning a worldwide theatrical gross of $49 million, and it became the sixth-​highest-​grossing documentary film in United States history at the time. It kept playing in some theaters for three or four months. Boosted by the film’s prominence, Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their work in drawing the world’s attention to the threats of global climate change. An Inconvenient Truth received widespread critical attention, befitting its significance and the public interest, and received very high praise from most critics.

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Roger Ebert (2006) led the way by saying:  “In 39  years, I  have never written these words . . . You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.” Australian reviewer Dave Hoskin (2007) of Metro Magazine went even farther: “I was skeptical that Al Gore was really going to change how I thought about global warming. I was wrong. I now believe that An Inconvenient Truth is the most important film that anyone will see this year.” New York Times critic A. O. Scott (2006) ironically suggested that the film “never should have been made”—​because it wouldn’t have been necessary to make it if political leaders and policymakers were doing their jobs. Richard Schickel (2006) wrote in Time Magazine that “Gore has brought all the scattered news stories together in one briskly narrated, handsomely illustrated place, and the power of his points is striking. Sobering. Ultimately alarming.” USA Today’s Claudia Puig (2006) noted, “Al Gore’s 40-​year-​long passion on the subject of global warming shines through powerfully and lights up An Inconvenient Truth . . . Gore has a gift for making scientific data digestible, understandable and intriguing.” In the Washington Post Desson Thomson (2006) called the film “a quintessentially American story of reinvention.” New York Magazine’s David Edelstein (2006) called it “one of the most realistic documentaries I’ve ever seen—​and, dry as it is, one of the most devastating in its implications. See it with your kids—​and watch closely to see who attacks it and on what grounds.” Film journals also took note of the film. Sight & Sound’s Amy Taubin (2006) wrote, “An Inconvenient Truth elicits one audible gasp after another from viewers . . . (The film) ties a life-​or-​death social/​political issue to a single crusading personality. The strategy has enormous audience appeal.” Cineaste’s Pat Aufderheide (2006) praised the cinematic technique: “The film’s production values, unobtrusively superb, bespeak the best in television sensibilities . . . Working with superbly lit performances, great close-​ups, and striking intimacy in Gore’s off-​screen narration, the editors turn the film into an emotional roller-​coaster.” Of course, critics did attack the film on a few grounds. Some felt that Gore was an inadequate messenger due to his former political identity, and that his criticisms of the Bush administration’s duplicity on environmental policy would alienate those of other political affiliations. Others felt that the film’s failure to offer plausible solutions would drive people to cynicism and despair. But environmental scientist Andrew Fildes (2006), reviewing the film for Screen Education, said, “I’ve had no luck finding any substantial arguments against

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(Gore’s) claims. There are one or two minor errors and nitpicks but none that could detract from his message.” However, despite all the praise from critics, few documentary films in history have been the subject of such intense debate and analysis as An Inconvenient Truth. Controversy immediately arose regarding use of the film as a teaching tool in schools. In the United States, producers offered 50,000 free copies to the National Science Teachers Association, but the offer was declined, likely from fear of arousing a political controversy. Several countries (e.g., Germany, Spain, and Canada) accepted the film as a part of their educational curriculum. But in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand, the film got caught up in political debates and lawsuits. As a result, the screening of the film in public schools was limited and sometimes required the presentation of an opposing viewpoint. Ironically, in the United Kingdom An Inconvenient Truth was deemed to be political (presumably on the strength of Gore’s career in government), and therefore subject to requiring oppositional material in schools, while another documentary entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007), made by a British television producer as a skeptical response to the Gore film, was judged to be a “scientific” film that therefore required no rebuttal in schools (Mellor, 2009). An Inconvenient Truth garnered more critical commentary in academic and scientific journals that any other recent documentary film. NASA scientist Jim Hansen (2006) wrote in the New York Review of Books that “by telling the story of climate change with striking clarity in both his book and movie, Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides.” Academic discussions centered primarily around two general topics: the accuracy of the film, and its methods of rhetorical presentation. GeoJournal devoted an issue to four articles by professors in earth and climate science–​related disciplines, two generally favorable toward the film and two skeptical—​despite acknowledging that in a recent Journal of Climate survey, 90  percent out of hundreds of academic respondents “felt that global warming was real and that its causes are mostly due to human influences” (North, 2007). As journal editor Gerald North noted, “The American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Statistical Association have all issued strong statements in support of the proposition that the warming is real and that its cause is largely attributable to humans. The US National Academy of Sciences has issued many reports mirroring this assertion” (North, 2007). Yet even this

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academic journal felt disposed to follow the mass media model of giving “balanced” coverage to the question. The review by Steig (2007) was the most favorable. Steig critiqued Gore for confusing or exaggerating some issues, like the relationship between global warming and Hurricane Katrina, or the time-​scale projections for sea level rise. However, he asserted, “An Inconvenient Truth gets the fundamentals right, and the factual errors that do creep into the movie are inconsequential” (6). Nielsen-​ Gammon (2007) breaks Gore’s argument down into about a dozen points, half of which he fully endorses, and half of which he takes some exception to. Despite his reservations, he concludes that “most of the major elements of the scientific argument presented (in the film) are consistent, in whole or in part, with the existing scientific consensus . . . Gore makes the tactical decision to avoid mention of climate models and projections of future climate in favor of emphasizing present signs of global warming. This maximizes the emotional impact (of the film), but also results in a scientific argument many of whose points do not stand up to scrutiny” (25). Legates (2007) presents one of the more critical reviews. A  specialist in hydrology, he focuses on Gore’s representation of issues involving water:  precipitation, floods, droughts, and storms. Legates says the film “paints a picture near scientific certainty with an overwhelming bias toward catastrophic scenarios. A closer look at the science, however, reveals that the data do not support these claims and that the scientific community is divided as to what the impact of anthropogenic climate change in the hydrologic cycle will be. Thus, the film gives a false impression of both the current state of climate change and that ‘the science is settled’ ” (15). The fourth reviewer Spencer (2007) is a prominent global warming skeptic. He runs through a number of common arguments against anthropogenic climate change: that high CO2 concentrations have not been proven to cause past atmospheric warming; that CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas compared to water vapor and clouds; that every dramatic storm or climate event is not exclusively the result of global warming; that climate change is more likely due to natural cycles than to human activity; and that any scientific consensus involves the existence of warming, not its cause. Geographic Research published a digest of a symposium held to discuss An Inconvenient Truth in Australia. The participants, all academics in related fields, praised the film as “a tipping point in advancing mainstream (read western) societal understanding of climate change,” and credited its impact, in part, to

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the fact that “climate change has become widely accepted as the most immediate challenge facing life on Earth” (Barnett et al., 2009, 204–​211) Panel members credited the film’s “truly global depictions of the social and economic impacts of climate change” and its “very un-​American emphasis of the implications of the U.S.’s failure to be part of the international community of action against climate change.” But some participants criticized its American-​centric perspective, feeling that the film fails to “convey the deeper injustice of the high vulnerability of low-​income communities dependent on climate-​sensitive resources who have contributed almost nothing to the problem of climate change but stand to lose the most” (205). They also noted that “the film’s refusal to consider the inevitable, vital and in some instances leading role that the State will have to play in facilitating emissions mitigation, climate adaptation, and the transition to a post-​carbon economy in a country as fossil-​fuel dependent as the US, is a telling omission and perhaps its most critical failure”(206). The other central focus of academic commentary involved the nature of the film’s rhetorical discourse. Much of the research exploring this topic utilized the seminal work of Killingsworth and Palmer (1996), which examined the “apocalyptic narrative” in environmental discourse as an extension of a traditional American mode of expression rooted in a synthesis of religious fervor and romantic naturalism. The primary aim of an apocalyptic narrative is “to transform the consciousness that a problem exists into acceptance of action toward a solution by prefacing the solution with a future scenario of what could happen if action is not taken, if the problem goes untreated” (22). Apocalyptic rhetoric can effectively integrate the traditional persuasive appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos; if employed persuasively, it can be a powerful tool to promote and inspire change. On the other hand, if taken to an extreme, it can alienate those who fail to be persuaded, evoking charges of self-​serving fear mongering with false claims that “the sky is falling.” Four scholars from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (Spoel, Goforth, Cheu, and Pearson, 2007), examined the apocalyptic narrative as a strategy for engaging citizens through public communication about climate change. They wanted to assist scholars and scientists who were seeking a rhetorical approach to “enable the development of public expertise on a topic of deep social and ethical as well as scientific significance; helping to give people the means to participate in intelligent, substantive conversation with others . . . about climate change” (51). “The challenge that confronts the creator of every science communication,” say the authors, is “how to distill, summarize, and analogize

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the scientific story so the non-​expert understands and appreciates what the scientist has found after a lifetime of effort” (74). The speaker must also “engage audiences in caring about what is being explained . . . It is a question of telling stories about climate change that connect the science to people’s everyday knowledge, lives, values, and concerns (53). These authors see An Inconvenient Truth as constructing an effective ethos for Al Gore, based on his well-​known stature as a political figure and his lesser-​ known identity as a speaker and author about the environment. They note how the film’s direction establishes his sense of authority with low angle shots, warm colors, and dynamic editing, similar in style to the filming of television evangelists. Gore’s effective use of photographs, charts, and video sequences provide strong visual reinforcement to the narrative logic of his arguments. As for pathos: “In the apocalyptic narrative of climate change, it is the doomsday scenario to be avoided that carries the most emotional impact, by simultaneously engendering fear that the scenario may occur, and in response to this fear, hope that it can be avoided and a sense of commitment to take the steps necessary to avoid it” (71). Johnson (2009) is a bit more circumspect about the effectiveness of relying primarily on apocalyptic narrative, believing that An Inconvenient Truth “moderates its apocalyptic tendencies with scientific rationalism and constructions of audience agency.” Discussion of climate change, she says, must involve “a mixture of rhetorics that mirrors the contentious climate of environmental politics” (29). While Gore may criticize the destructive consequences of modern industrial society, he does so without abandoning hope in science, technology, or liberal democracy. “While apocalypticism adds undeniable persuasive energy to Truth,” she adds, “it risks compromising audiences’ sense of agency by engendering feelings of powerlessness to avert the cataclysms it describes” (30). In short, says Johnson, “we must temper millennial rhetoric to render it reasonable to a modern audience . . . Ultimately, it is Gore’s promotion of audience agency that most tempers the film’s apocalypticism. Gore constructs an audience of knowledgeable activists, following in Gore’s own tradition” (41, 43). Rosteck and Frentz (2009) also look at An Inconvenient Truth as displaying a variety of rhetorical approaches to climate change. Instead of “apocalyptic narrative,” they call the film a “politicized environmental jeremiad,” but the meaning is the same: “The use of evocative strategies to persuade people to act in certain ways by means of apocalyptic predictions designed to mobilize emotions”

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(3). But the film also may be seen as biographical, tracking Gore’s journey from college student to political figure to environmental activist. As a documentary form, the film walks a line between being a “documentary as record” (presenting scientific information) and a “documentary as argument” (making a persuasive case for action). The science documentary, say the authors, “occupies a particularly crucial discursive space in contemporary culture . . . It is the translation device between the specialist discourse of science and the generalist discourse of common sense” (10). But Rosteck and Frentz go beyond consideration of the film’s rhetorical style to consider its mythical form, based on the model of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey.” The authors note that the film opens with Gore reflecting on the homeland of his youth, speaking in hushed tones. We then view him travelling on the road, undertaking his “Odyssey,” before we hear any of his lecture about climate change. Later we learn of his encounter with climate science as an undergraduate at Harvard—​his “initiation” to the subject that would define his life’s purpose. We track the trials and defeats of his “heroic quest,” from the near-​death of his six-​year-​old son to his controversial defeat in the presidential election of 2000. Finally we see Gore rise phoenix-​like from the despair of that defeat to renew his dedication and recommit to action. Then at the film’s finale, we return to Gore’s farm, completing the circular structure of the hero’s mythic return. This mythic structure carries a powerful emotional resonance, drawing from our cultural history encompassing everything from classical literature to popular films based on comic book heroes. Olson (2007) attempts to frame An Inconvenient Truth as a template of rhetorical techniques transferable to other advocates of social change. She suggests four lessons: (1) create a concrete, vivid, and compelling vision of the improved world after the desired change and of the imminent negative consequences of refusing to change; (2)  justify hope that, in spite of the problem’s magnitude, effective change is possible and within the audience’s power and that their participation is essential to success; (3) provide a model and a path for acknowledging personal guilt over contributing to the problem through mortification rather than scapegoating; and (4) one’s reputation may be known in advance or displayed in the rhetorical act, but ethos is recreated in each encounter by the relationship that the speaker develops with the audience through his or her rhetorical choices (94–​101). Self-​deprecating humor is helpful in inviting an audience’s identification, as is anticipating and planning a non-​defensive response to charges that a speaker’s efforts are incomplete or hypocritical.

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Finally, one interesting study took a quantitative experimental approach to evaluating An Inconvenient Truth. Beattie, Sale, and McGuire (2011) showed several informative and emotional clips from the film to groups of subjects, and measured their mood states as well as their social attitudes and cognition on five critical scales: message acceptance, motivation to activism, empowerment, shifting responsibility, and fatalism. They hoped to reach some conclusions about how affective reactions guided their subjects’ rational information processing and judgment (105–​106). They concluded that the clips did have significant affective, social, and cognitive effects. Specifically, subjects evidenced sadness, empowerment, and motivation to do something about climate change. However, the film’s segment on China also promoted some shifting of responsibility. The authors recommended more long-​term study to confirm whether these cognitive and social effects were lasting or not. An Inconvenient Truth was definitely a pivotal film in the evolution of the environmental documentary. Its critical, financial, and cultural achievements serve as a benchmark for other filmmakers to strive for. But it also served as something of a Rorschach test, because viewers’ responses depended so clearly on their predetermined attitudes toward Al Gore. For a couple of years after the film’s release, the polls indicated a positive shift in public beliefs about climate change, but the film’s ultimate influence is yet to be determined.

Six Degrees Could Change the World Year: Length: Director: Producer: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Based on: Available on:

2008 90 min. Ron Bowman Ron Bowman National Geographic Channel Alec Baldwin Expository/​Speculative United States http://​channel.nationalgeographic.com/​channel/​videos/​ six-​degrees-​could-​change-​the-​world Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) by Mark Lynas Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

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Six Degrees Could Change the World is a speculative documentary that presents a “What if ” scenario regarding how the Earth’s climate might change, degree by degree, if the pessimistic forecasts of the 2007 report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should come to pass—​a rise in average temperatures of almost six degrees Celsius (ten degrees Fahrenheit) over the next hundred years. Both the book (by science journalist Mark Lynas) and the video documentary were produced by National Geographic, in a sense making them two parts of a coproduction. Lynas based his predictions on peer-​ reviewed articles in leading scientific journals, because he wanted his portrayals to be supported by sound evidence. The film opens with a set of dire predictions: the melting of glaciers could deprive billions of needed water; the melting of ice sheets could raise ocean levels and flood coastal regions; rainforests could be transformed into arid savannahs; firestorms during drought years could move from the bush into cities. A difference of six degrees may not sound like much, but it is the average difference between this century and the last ice age. At present the earth is one to one-​and-​a-​half degrees warmer than just a century ago. The pace of climate change is increasing, approaching certain tipping points. The narrative follows a step-​by-​step process, portraying what would likely happen after a rise of one degree, then two, and so on, supported by brief interviews with experts like James Hansen and author Lynas, to explain crucial points of physics or chemistry—​for example, how burning fossil fuels releases CO2 and methane into the environment. At +1 degree worldwide, the Arctic ice sheet would open up for half of the year. Thousands of coastal Indian homes begin to flood, and stronger hurricanes hit the southern Atlantic Ocean. In the US, deserts in the Southwest are expanding, reducing ranch land and leading to higher food prices. There is a depopulation of sled dogs in the Arctic regions. England is warming, becoming more favorable for Mediterranean-​style agriculture. What’s causing the rise? Burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), which produces 90  percent of energy worldwide and releases CO2 and methane. At +2 degrees, we reach clear tipping points from normalcy. Polar bears struggle to survive. Insects migrate to newly warming climates, killing forests and upsetting ecosystems. Islands begin to be lost under rising tides. The bleaching and loss of tropical coral reefs accelerates with the acidification of oceans. Over 500,000 species are lost to extinction, many of them near the bottom of the

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Figure 5.2  Six Degrees Could Change the World (United States, 2008, Ron Bowman) portrays degree-​by-​degree scenarios as to how climate change could threaten the natural environment and human civilization.

food chain. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet proceeds at a rate twice faster than a decade earlier, and could be entirely gone in fifty years. Coastal cities around the globe experience frequent flooding. At +3 degrees, global warming becomes a runaway train. The Arctic becomes entirely ice-​free for the first time since the Pliocene era, and most of the world’s glaciers melt entirely. Photosynthesis breaks down in some plants. In the Amazon, the rainforests begin drying up and burning, creating positive feedback loops and destroying the world’s primary oxygen producer. Coastal flooding has become the status quo. More severe El Niño temperatures disturb ocean currents. Extreme summer heat waves assault the Mediterranean region. There is a high increase in death tolls during the summer. One hundred–​year storms like Hurricane Katrina—​category five and six hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods—​become common every five years. At +4 degrees, lowland countries like Egypt and Bangladesh become inundated. Antarctic ice sheets begin to collapse. The Himalayan glaciers are retreating 100 feet per year. Many of the world’s rivers, like the Ganges and the Nile, essentially dry up, causing the deaths of millions of people. Lower Manhattan sinks underwater and the loss of its subterranean infrastructure shuts down the city. Protecting it would require over three billion dollars to construct sea gates. At +5 degrees, all the world’s glaciers are disappearing, creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees. World civilization moves toward total collapse. Poorer

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nations experience a massive die-​off. At +6 degrees, life in the oceans is dying. Great cities sit flooded and abandoned. Mass extinctions continue, of animals and also of humans. This dire scenario presupposes a “business as usual” response, that the nations of the world will fail to respond with a united climate change mitigation plan until the tipping points have been passed and global warming proceeds out of control. If this happens, the changes that the film predicts could come to pass within a century. Lynas believed that the growth in global emissions would peak by 2015, so we have over a decade of history by which to judge the accuracy of the film’s original projections. What possible solutions does the film propose? From a personal perspective, mobility is a key to preparedness, being ready to move at short notice if one resides in a vulnerable location. Home adaptation is a good plan: having an energy-​efficient house, including a solar roof. Not driving cars can help reduce GHG emissions considerably. For the larger society, renewable energy sources like solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal could make significant differences. Six Degrees was the first attempt by the National Geographic Channel to make a film dealing with climate change. It was planned as a high-​profile special event, to be supported by significant promotion and a tie-​in to National Geographic Magazine. Only one year after the release of An Inconvenient Truth, National Geographic was feeling some pressure to make a statement about the issue. So the budget was pretty much already in place, running somewhere between half-​ a-​million and a million dollars. Producer/​director Ron Bowman was a veteran of many high-​quality nonfiction entertainment programs, not only for National Geographic but also for PBS, ABC News, and the Discovery and History Channels. He was chosen to produce and direct as a veteran network producer with previous experience on environmental topics. He cowrote the script with Lynas and spent about a year in production. Bowman describes the style of the film as similar to science fiction (Bowman, 2012). The presentation is graphic, including scenes containing special effects, computer animation, and dramatic reenactment. Stylistically, Six Degrees can be considered a predecessor to later speculative documentaries such as Life Without People. In terms of shooting, the film is more than 80 percent original footage, shot in several countries. Filmmakers turned to stock footage mostly for high-​definition shots of the energy industries. Only one scene involves a dramatic reenactment—​of a family’s escape from a fire in Australia—​and the script for that reenactment followed closely a description of an actual event.

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The producers felt that An Inconvenient Truth had made the case for the reality of global warming; there was no attempt to retrace those steps. This film was intended to visualize what the world would look like if nothing were done to halt the process, based on the best science available—​what Bowman called “the most rigorous fact-​checking of any science-​based network.” Network executive producers were involved in the validation process every step of the way, from treatment through rough cut to final review. National Geographic followed the old-​fashioned journalistic test of requiring three sources to confirm the truth of a proposition. So even though some of the scenarios visualized in the film may strike some viewers as fantastic, the production’s claims to accuracy reflected the current state of scientific knowledge more than many documentaries made by advocates with less critical self-​discipline. Six Degrees Could Change the World was broadcast on the National Geographic Channel in February 2008, and the DVD was marketed from its website. This airing of the program was the primary venue of distribution, publicized with a high-​profile ceremony at the company’s headquarters. A website was launched for the film, with links to a substantial press packet and materials for educational outreach, including the book and the video. Senator John Kerry’s office reportedly sent copies of the DVD to every member of Congress. Sadly, Bowman believes that National Geographic would never produce such a documentary in today’s media environment. Chasing the successes of other networks, National Geographic has largely moved away from long-​form scientific specials, toward reality programs that portray unique characters and subcultures that draw higher ratings and provoke no controversy—​possibly in part a consequence of FOX/​News Corp.’s current ownership of two-​thirds of National Geographic’s company. The film’s web link (no longer actively maintained on the National Geographic website) provided a guide for student activities, reporters, and project organizers, focusing on community actions. Six Degrees was submitted to several film festivals but did not enjoy great success. In spite of the painstaking research that went into the film, both producers and audiences began to develop a sense that, after a series of apocalyptic documentaries, the “doom and gloom” approach to environmental messaging had reached the limits of its effectiveness. Most viewers either found such predictions incredible and rejected them, or else succumbed to a fatalism that did not necessarily motivate behavioral change. The critical response to Six Degrees was limited but generally good, although some reviewers believed that the film’s message was too strong. The New York

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Times’ Mike Hale (2008) called the film “bombastic, superficial and alarmist,” but conceded that “maybe that’s what we need to get us going.” Few other major newspapers or journals reviewed the film, but a number on online environmental sites appreciated its contribution to the climate change debate. Alternative Energy Magazine, Earth, Wind & Power Blogazine, Must-​See Movies, and Vision Magazine all praised it as important, informative, sobering, and impactful in its real-​life representations of the consequences of climate change. Its descriptions of a global warming future may seem alarming, but its images stick in the mind for a very long time.

The Age of Stupid Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2009 89 min. Franny Armstrong Lizzie Gillett Spanner Films Dogwoof Pictures Pete Postlewaite Participatory with Fictional Frame Structure United Kingdom http://​www.spannerfilms.net/​films/​ageofstupid Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube

Shot in seven countries over three years, The Age of Stupid is an environmental documentary with a fictional frame, aimed at attracting an audience beyond “the choir.” In the narrative metaphor that structures the film, actor Pete Postlewaite, playing the lone survivor on Planet Earth, scans through an imaginary electronic archive located north of Norway in 2055, designed for preserving the knowledge of past civilizations (a metaphor that a critical viewer might suggest undercuts the film’s premise about the collapse of technology). However, the video segments that he plays back consist of actual documentary footage and interviews shot for the film. Most of these interviews are with ordinary people instead of experts, to demonstrate the effects of climate change on individuals in various regions and communities. Thus the bulk of the film qualifies as genuine documentary, in spite of the fictional frame structure.

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Figure 5.3  The Age of Stupid (United Kingdom, 2009, Franny Armstrong) presents a fictional dystopian narrative looking back on the destruction of civilization wrought by climate change.

The film begins with the Big Bang and the creation of the universe and the Earth. In quick succession we observe the receding glaciers of Mt. Blanc, Shell oilrigs off the Louisiana coast, and the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina—​seen through the eyes of a man who lost his home, who said that losing everything helped him enjoy his daily life without falling back into his old consumerist habits. In Nigeria we are introduced to the “resource curse”—​the environmental damage, political corruption, and economic inequality that results from exploitation by the oil industry. In the United States, the film looks back at the pattern of urban design that eliminated urban rail transit and made it almost impossible for anyone to get around without driving a car. There is dark humor in the warnings about global warming that went unheeded, in the race to use up the last of the world’s oil, and in some of the futile, symbolic things that people did to lower their personal carbon footprints. As more energy allowed for greater populations, and more people required more energy, a vicious cycle developed, leading to demand for more resources of all kinds. Clever animated sequences summarize the historical conflicts over natural and economic resources. Colonial powers raped Africa of its precious minerals as well as slaves. The powerful influence of the oil industry on the US government was undeniable—​to quote the film, “The oil industry isn’t just in bed with the government, it IS the government.” We hear former Federal Reserve

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chairman Alan Greenspan admitting publicly before Congress that the war in Iraq was all about oil, while we see Iraqi kids playing at war after watching American soldiers. Archivist Postlewaite occasionally takes a pause from scanning through the archives to share his personal reflections of living through this period, with its food riots and plagues, including the struggles of his children and the deaths of his grandchildren, long after the cultural story of “progress” faded into history. This dismal fate contrasts with absurd cultural practices, such as leaving lights on overnight in skyscrapers, paying inflated costs for water in plastic bottles, and even skiing in Dubai. China was building a new power station every four days, but one-​quarter of that energy went into producing consumer goods for Western nations. For visual contrast, the film shows us a French subsistence farmer whose land sat astride a highway, cars and trucks passing him by. The worldwide images from the media filled Third World children with an insatiable desire for American-​ style consumerism, a desire that the film says would take “five earths” to satisfy. The film cites the rise of the airline industry in India as an example of the developing world’s growing but unsustainable consumerism. As it points out in an amusing animated sequence, “Capitalism’s only goal is ever-​expanding growth, but ever-​expanding growth on just the one not-​expanding planet is impossible.” A family in Cornwall, England, decided to get serious by calculating their carbon emissions; their strategies included producing half of their own food and reducing their meat consumption. Their car ran on biofuel and they produced some of their own electricity via wind. But one cross-​Atlantic flight would blow their entire carbon budget for over three years. A “not-​in-​my-​backyard” problem developed with building wind farms in England, as even self-​identified environmentalists opposed having them placed nearby, and some threatened sabotage; thus only 10  percent of the planned projects had been approved and moved forward. A former oil worker provided evidence of his internal struggle, as he tried to reconcile his career in drilling oil with his environmentalist values—​a concrete example of the cultural inertia that prevented change from happening fast enough to make a difference. It became evident that no fundamental transition could take place without mass protests and direct action by the general populace. Postlewaite’s Archivist reflects, “We had an unspoken collective pact to pretend climate change wasn’t happening, as though as long as we ignored it hard enough it couldn’t be true.” As the film winds down, he reviews estimates that

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scientists had made about how to cap fossil fuel production by setting emissions quotas to avoid calamitous climate change, by increasing the worldwide cap to almost zero by 2065. Unusually severe flooding and heat waves gave people a taste of what was to come. Individual carbon rationing became a real possibility. As we scan the years back toward 2055, we hear of a destroyed New Orleans not being rebuilt, nations running short of drinking water, tens of millions of refugees fleeing their homes while nations close their borders, people eating their pets, the Amazon rainforest burning, and the worldwide suicide rate increasing. As Postlewaite closes down his computer, he asks, “Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?” He confesses that he has constructed this electronic archive not for humans, but for whatever beings might find his recordings in the future. Then as he ejects it into space, we pull back from the depopulated earth through the orbiting space junk that makes our planet resemble Saturn. Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees and scientific adviser to The Age of Stupid, reflected in the film on the difficulty of getting people to think seriously about the effects of behaviors that won’t be felt for thirty or forty years. He said that keeping average temperatures from rising more than two degrees above preindustrial levels was the tipping point; after that, positive feedback loops like the melting of permafrost could keep driving temperatures up no matter what we do, ultimately threatening most of life on earth. He cited 2015 as the target date for stabilizing GHG emissions, a date that the film assumes we will have missed. Lynas (2009) also wrote independently that “all the science in the film is based on peer-​reviewed papers, together with the latest predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” Dr. Richard Betts (2009), a climate scientist not involved with the film, stated, “The changes to our climate depicted by the Age of Stupid are certainly not science fiction, but they are unlikely to occur in the timeframe shown in the movie. However very real changes are already taking place to our environment and those detailed above are just some of the anticipated changes we are most likely to see by the middle of this century.” The Age of Stupid introduced an innovative production-​ marketing-​ distribution model that Reiss (2009) called “the future of film,” crediting the producers with doing “with limited means what corporations spend millions of dollars trying to do: create a world wide cinematic event.” The film was the first feature documentary to use the crowd-​funding model; its premiere occurred in a specially designed solar-​powered tent in London’s Leicester Square (“Dedication’s what You Need,” 2009), and later premiered in 550 screens in forty-​five countries

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(Reiss, 2009). The film won Best Documentary awards in five film festivals, all in Europe, and was successful in gaining a large audience worldwide. Critics responded positively to the film’s emotional urgency, its gallows humor, and its use of an apocalyptic science fiction frame. Many reviewers considered it a more passionate counterpart to An Inconvenient Truth and more appealing to a general audience. Holden (2009) wrote in the New York Times that “its use of science fiction is also both effective and emotional.” On the other hand, Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (2009) found the premise “a touch annoying and teenagery,” and felt the film “does not have the focus and weight” of Gore’s film. The Los Angeles Times’ Gary Goldstein (2009) basically agreed with both: “Though this narrative device can feel a bit gimmicky and grandiose, it also provides a visual and emotional power that drives home this absorbing film’s crucial cautionary message.” Others remarked that the film contains enough solid journalism to offset its fictional dressing, so that the audience comes away more informed but also more energized. Eye for Film’s Donald Munro (2009) felt that the various personal stories were genuinely interesting and offered differing outlooks on our complex relationship with oil. TimeOut London’s Dave Calhoun wrote, “Armstrong’s prognosis is apocalyptic, but her journalism is solid, instructive and pleasantly thoughtful.” MovieTime’s Ruth Hessey noted, “The documentary is so tightly constructed and dynamic that you leave the cinema energized rather than terrified and depressed.” Two scientific reviewers offered unique perspectives. Social systems scientist Steven G. Brandt (2009) found the film’s innovative marketing impressive, but found the film itself to be, well, stupid: “Global warming isn’t going to be prevented by some higher form of protest march . . . It’s going to be ended when the focus becomes not What do we want to stop? but What do we want to start?” Communications researcher Rachel Howell (2011) studied the attitudes and behaviors of a group of UK viewers. She selected the film because of its combination of styles of documentary, fiction, and animation. Her conclusion was that the film “does seem to have had some success in raising levels of concern and motivation to act immediately after seeing the film,” but that after several weeks “heightened levels of concern and motivation were no longer in evidence” (185). This study may have relevance not only for The Age of Stupid, but perhaps more broadly for all environmental documentaries. Any objections aside, Armstrong’s film is without doubt one of the most widely seen and popular of all the films considered here, and made a huge

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impact not only because of its themes but also due to its innovative production and distribution strategies.

Chasing Ice Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Country: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

2012 90 min. Jeff Orlowski Paula DuPré Pesmen, Jerry Aronson National Geographic Submarine Deluxe United States Performative/​Observational United States http://​www.chasingice.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

In the spring of 2005, when National Geographic recruited noted environmental photographer James Balog to head to the Arctic to document the Earth’s changing climate through images, Balog considered himself a skeptic on the question of global warming. To express that irony, the film begins with several clips from news reports questioning or denying the reality of climate change. But Chasing Ice became the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of the impacts of climate change. On viewing the evidence with his own eyes, Balog became so passionate and committed to telling the story that he put his own health at risk by struggling against the elements and overcoming painful injury, injecting human drama into the environmental story he was portraying. Building upon the aphorism that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” first-​ time director Jeff Orlowski’s film seeks to demonstrate visually concrete evidence of global warming by tracking the retreat of Arctic glaciers with time-​lapse photography. The project for which Balog was originally engaged was called the Extreme Ice Survey, intended to produce a photographic record of the impact of climate change on the Arctic regions. Orlowski, a friend of Balog, offered to tag along for free to film the project’s work. Balog’s technically complex method was to design and deploy a series of time-​lapse cameras with optical remote sensing

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technology in subzero temperatures across a wide expanse of Arctic glaciers to record a multiyear record of their changes—​a total of thirty-​four cameras combined on sixteen glaciers across Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and Montana. But the project ran into serious problems: “Windswept rocks smashed the cameras, microprocessors failed, batteries exploded, and foxes chewed on the cables” (Jenkins, 2012). So Balog had to go through a second generation of camera designs and placements. Orlowski admitted, “At the beginning of this project, I had no idea how big it would eventually become . . . It grew to a scope and a scale that was beyond the original goal, and it was so much more work than we originally expected” (ChasingIce.com). The second time around, everything worked to perfection. The hauntingly beautiful time-​lapse images compressed years into seconds, showing the mountains of ice flowing in motion as they disappeared at a breathtaking rate. Sometimes the team had to move the cameras because the glaciers were retreating even faster than anticipated. As Balog states, “the story is in the ice.” According to Jenkins (2012), “These startling images are irrefutable, showing glaciers losing size and bulk as their meltwaters flow into the ocean, raising global sea levels.” The spectacular climax comes when members of the team observe a huge ‘calving,’ during which a melting glacier the size of lower Manhattan suddenly cracks and collapses into the ocean—​the largest glacier breakup ever recorded on film to date. “In Hollywood,” noted Jenkins, “such epic transformations are rendered with computers . . . Chasing Ice demonstrates how much more powerful it is to capture the real thing.” Chasing Ice includes some expert scientific testimony, occasionally extending to related issues like the mass extinction of species. There are also some very suspenseful sequences that provide moments of high drama, such as the failure of a helicopter engine miles from nowhere, and a dangerous descent into a glacial crevasse or “moulin.” The Arctic photography is stunning, including some dynamic helicopter photography, and the soundtrack supports the action with everything from the team’s footsteps crunching in the snow to the mysterious, ominous cracking of the glaciers. Since the chronicle of the making of the film is part of the film itself, it can be a challenge to distinguish between the film’s content and the process of its production. In terms of mode, Chasing Ice is performative—​a movie about the making of the movie, documenting the complex challenges of placing cameras and tracking technical failures and successes—​with an “observational” aspect, as in “watching the glaciers.” Like An Inconvenient Truth, it is a profoundly personal

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narrative, including clips of Balog making presentations to audiences about his journeys of discovery. At one point Balog had done so much damage to his legs that he had to climb glaciers with walking sticks, and when he could no longer even do that, he had to send his photographers out without him. His determination to complete the project, even at the risk to his own health, conveys a powerful message about having a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. According to Orlowski, Balog “wants people to realize that these images are visual evidence of climate change. His time-​lapses capture that process in action. It’s really hard for the average person to see the impact that humans have on the planet . . . (The film is) something that people can see and feel that represents what the science has concluded” (ChasingIce.com). Climate change, Balog explained, “is kind of abstract; a lot of it’s based on statistics and measurements and projections. But in ice, you really see climate change in action.” This is important, urges Orlowski, because “in Washington, they’ve got six lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, at least, for every member of the Senate and the House. So they’re hearing a very, very different skewed story on the reality of the situation” (“Chasing Ice: New Film”). The result of the team’s exhausting and perilous efforts was an award-​winning film—​over thirty awards at documentary film festivals around the world, including Sundance—​that has had a powerful effect on audiences. The film enjoyed a modest theatrical exhibition but became even more popular when viewed in smaller screenings by environmental activist groups in churches and schools. Chasing Ice was widely reviewed and praised in the press. CineVue’s Patrick Gamble (2012) called it “a fascinating and powerful movie . . . so eye-​opening and socially important that it demands to be seen . . . Balog’s imagery wonderfully encapsulates the fragility of nature whilst simultaneously presenting us with its awe-​inspiring scope and majesty.” Roger Ebert (2012) said, “At a time when warnings of global warming were being dismissed by broadcast blabbermouths as ‘junk science,’ the science here is based on actual observation of the results as they happen . . . scientists are seeing climate change happening right now—​and with alarming speed. Here is a film for skeptics who say ‘we don’t have enough information.’ ” Blog4Film’s Terry Mulcahy (2012) noted, “Despite being his first feature-​ length film Orlowski demonstrates a mastery of editing and pace . . . It may be the most shocking, disturbing film that you’ll see all year, but it’s one that will surprise you with cinematography you’re unlikely to have ever seen the likes of.” The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen (2012) called the film “a sharp mix of

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portrait doc, landscape film and pointed activism . . . The before and after imagery of Balog’s project speaks for itself, with the power and strange beauty of the evolving landscape strong evidence that something is indeed happening, now and fast.” Chasing Ice presents the kind of firsthand observation that makes jaws drop and challenges skepticism about climate change in a much more immediate way than any series of charts, graphs, and projections. The ability of cinema to bring to the issue of climate change both visual spectacle and human drama makes the film a great vehicle for both persuading the unconvinced and motivating activists.

Years of Living Dangerously Date: Length: Directors: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrators: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2014 540 min. (9 episodes) Eight Directors Credited Joel Bach, David Gelber, James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Palumbo, and 30 others Filmrise/The Years Project Showtime Networks Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Thomas Friedman, and 12 others Participatory United States http://​yearsoflivingdangerously.com Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

Years of Living Dangerously was an ambitious attempt to combine celebrity spokespeople with a wide-​ranging study of how anthropogenic global warming is impacting the planet in present times. This series was a mammoth undertaking, consisting of nine hour-​long episodes, shot all over the world, and cablecast on the Showtime network. Each episode interweaves two or three distinct stories into a tapestry that links various ecological and sociopolitical themes together. The series was a product of some of the most prominent movers and shakers in Hollywood, including Avatar director James Cameron, producer Jerry Weintraub, and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Also on board were

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veteran 60 Minutes producers Joel Bach and David Gelber. This team hoped to engage a wider audience than a documentary might usually draw by including well-​known celebrities and journalists as hosts and investigators. By examining climate change from a variety of viewpoints with a worldwide perspective, intercutting stories with each other to create variety in content and pace, the producers hoped to create a program that would present climate change in all of its complexity, but in a way that would be both accessible and personal in its message. Here is a brief summary of each episode and the stories described within each one: Episode 1—​Dry Season: Actor Harrison Ford speaks with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists about how the planet is warming, then heads for Indonesia to see first-​hand the devastating impacts of deforestation for the purpose of palm oil production. A combination of corruption and political impotence has failed to halt the spreading deforestation. Even after the establishment of Tesso Nilo National park, elephants are being poisoned and over three-​quarters of the park is ravaged for palm oil production. Actor Don Cheadle visits Plainview, Texas, where a multiyear drought has closed down the local Cargill plant and put thousands out of work—​but where people attribute their problems to natural cycles or God’s will instead of climate change. An important witness is Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, who is both an Evangelical Christian and a climate scientist, and thus more able than most to convey her knowledge of climate science within faith communities. New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman travels to Syria, where an unprecedented drought has driven farmers into the cities, causing widespread hardship and anger against an unresponsive government, ultimately leading to civil war. Risking his life, Friedman interviews ordinary people inside and outside of Syria who have suffered economic deprivation and political persecution in committing to fight against their government. One Syrian town Friedman visits falls to Al Qaeda shortly after his departure. Episode 2—​End of the Woods:  During his terms as California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger saw the “fire season” expand to entire years. Every year temperatures get warmer, more water evaporates and the ground cover gets dryer, preparing the forests for greater fires in the future. Schwarzenegger has become a rare Republican who acknowledges human-​caused climate change. For the film he accompanies a team of “hot shot” firefighters to fight a huge blaze near Superior, Montana. The fire spreads rapidly over several days, aggravated by a heat wave. The firefighters succeed in protecting the town, but they know it’s

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a temporary reprieve. At another fire in Arizona, nineteen of twenty “hot shots” died while fighting a fire. It’s a vicious cycle: more warming, more and greater fires, more beetle-​caused tree deaths, and then more carbon heading into the atmosphere to create even more warming. Back in Indonesia, Harrison Ford visits a refuge for animals, especially orangutans, displaced by the devastation of the forests. Fully half of Indonesia’s forests, which used to cover 80 percent of the country, have been sacrificed to the palm oil industry. Ford interviews the head of the oldest and largest palm oil company, who made a commitment to environmental sustainability only after a direct challenge from Greenpeace protesters. The head of the Forest Ministry, who had promised years earlier to fight illegal deforestation, offers only blatant evasions to Ford’s questions. After meeting with the Indonesian president, Ford departs wondering if there is just too much pressure on the government for environmental laws to be enforced. Ford’s investigation closes with a few hopeful signs—​the firing of the Tesso Nilo supervisor, the ejection of three illegal companies from the park, and a more explicit commitment from the company to limit unsustainably grown palm oil. Episode 3—​The Surge: MSNBC reporter Chris Hayes studies the human and political issues emerging from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy on a New Jersey coastal town. He follows the tragic story of a woman who lost both her daughter and her husband as flooding brought her house down around her, and who now struggles to get help from the government to obtain permanent housing. Her congressman Michael Grimm was a global warming skeptic, but the impact of extreme weather on his own constituents causes him to question his beliefs. Hayes also relates the tale of former South Carolina Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, who lost his seat to a Tea Party opponent primarily because of his belief that humans are causing climate change, and his commitment to encourage fellow conservatives to look at the science. Reporter M.  Sanjayan describes the research of a scientist on Christmas Island in the mid-​Pacific Ocean. She studies coral reefs to understand how El Nino temperatures have varied over the centuries, to see if they will reflect the warming of El Nino in recent times. Her conclusions confirm her theory that human-​caused carbon concentrations have indeed made recent El Ninos warmer, reflecting sadly that the very island on which she conducts her research may be inundated by rising sea levels in the coming decades. Episode 4—​ Ice & Brimstone:  Correspondent Ian Somerhalder tracks Anna Jane Joyner, University of North Carolina graduate in Environmental

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Figure 5.4  Years of Living Dangerously (United States, 2014, multiple directors) was a nine-​part Showtime series featuring prominent experts and celebrities making firsthand reports on people around the world affected by climate change.

Communications and daughter of famed Evangelical preacher Rick Joyner, in her attempts to persuade her father and members of his congregation to be concerned about climate change. She arranges meetings between her father and Dr. Kayhoe, Rep. Inglis (both of whom we’ve met earlier), and former climate skeptic Dr. Richard Muller. They also pay a visit to an oyster fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico, who speaks first hand about the 50  percent decline in oyster catch due to the warming waters and climate. Meanwhile, 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl visits Greenland to observe the calving of glaciers and the melting of the ice into huge lakes. Scientist Heidi Cullen explains why most of the fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change, even as all the Arctic nations are gearing up to take advantage of Arctic melting to develop gas and oil reserves—​perpetuating the cycle of greenhouse gas emissions and climate destruction. Secretary of State John Kerry asserts that only a mass movement will break the grip of perceived economic and political interests. Episode 5—​True Colors: Actress Olivia Munn follows Democratic governor Jay Inslee of Washington, who made fighting climate change a top priority of his new administration. After struggling to craft compromise plans with Republicans, he had to resort to executive actions, much as President Obama

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has done at the federal level. He also is caught between pressures to lay pipelines and open West Coast coal export terminals, which could exacerbate climate change but would provide his labor union supporters with more jobs. Columnist Mark Bittman examines what the Dutch system of flood management might have to offer the New Jersey’s coastal towns in terms of preparation for sea level rise. He further investigates the politics that continue to promote coastal development and obstructs New Jersey’s governor Christie from acknowledging the part that climate change may have played in the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Episode 6—​Winds of Change: Actress America Ferrera visits Greensburg, a conservative Kansas town virtually destroyed by a tornado, to learn how it rebuilt its energy infrastructure using wind and solar energy, in a state where energy policy is strongly influenced by the climate change skepticism of the Heartland Institute and the Koch-​backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Meanwhile, Mark Bittman investigates the claimed benefits of extracting natural gas through hydraulic fracturing (fracking), while evidence is mounting that leaks of methane gas—​a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2—​makes the process as great a contributor to global warming as coal. Episode 7—​ Revolt, Rebuild, Renew: Actress and green businesswoman Jessica Alba tracks the efforts of young Climate Corps volunteers as they work to help businesses in the United States utilize renewable energy, and increase efficiency and sustainable management to improve their bottom lines. In a couple of “sequel” sequences, Thomas Friedman explores the international impacts of how a drought in the United States led to shortages and higher prices of wheat in the Middle East, contributing to the tensions that resulted in the Arab Spring. Chris Hayes continues his investigation of the impacts of Hurricane Sandy on another community, Far Rockaway on Long Island, New York. Looking at one woman’s story as a case study, Hayes describes the impacts on an individual family’s life from the interruption of employment, housing, education, and transportation as a result of the storm’s extended aftermath. Episode 8—​ A Dangerous Future:  Actor Michael C.  Hall travels across Bangladesh in South Asia, one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. As many as 150  million Bangladeshis could be displaced by a rise in sea level of only two or three feet; migrations from low-​lying lands have already begun with no end in sight. Cities like Dhaka are already overburdened with migrants forced into dangerous working conditions, and millions are also illegally crossing the border into India, resulting in political and military tensions.

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Actor/​screenwriter Matt Damon stays at home in Los Angeles, following medical researchers who try to determine whether the deaths of many local residents were precipitated by heat waves. Their conclusions are that many deaths attributed superficially to heart attacks and strokes may have been directly influenced by heatstroke and dehydration. As global warming increases, the death rate within vulnerable populations may be expected to increase. Thomas Friedman continues his travels in the Middle East to Yemen, considered to be the country whose water supply is most vulnerable; the Yemini president tells him that the entire country could basically run out of fresh water. Friedman travels to a rural region where tribes are literally fighting to the death over well water. Since Friedman’s visit, the Yemini government has been overthrown and a multi-​faction civil war has broken out between forces backed by Al Qaeda, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, amidst great suffering among the general population. Episode 9—​Moving a Mountain: Michael C. Hall’s travels in Bangladesh conclude with a visit to the most vulnerable areas in the south, the 17 percent of the country expected to ultimately be submerged. His host is a young man who was badly injured in an industrial accident after migrating north, who takes him to visit his family still living in the south. The life of this individual represents a story that will be told many times over as sea level rise makes life in Bangladesh ever more precarious. M. Sanjayan’s personal challenge is even greater:  he climbs one of South America’s highest mountains with a team of climate scientists, to take ice core samples from a glacier, which are expected to reveal important information about the composition of the atmosphere during earlier eras. The team must overcome physical injuries and altitude intoxication, but their quest is successful. The ice cores reveal, according to one scientist, more information that he had been able to collect in forty years of research—​and confirm the impacts human activities are having on the atmosphere. Back in the United States, Thomas Friedman interviews President Obama in the White House about climate change. Obama stresses the priority he places on urgently dealing with climate change, stressing the threats to civilization it poses and the necessity of leaving a majority of fossil fuels in the ground. He expresses optimism that progress can be made, but recognizes that dealing with climate change is a long-​term challenge that people may only fully wake up to when the effects become evident and undeniable. David Gelber and Joel Bach conceived of this project while working at 60 Minutes. They felt that the isolated environmental stories produced for the program

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didn’t convey the bigger picture, and that using prominent Hollywood actors would attract the larger audience they wanted to reach. Motion picture mega-​producer Jerry Weintraub signed on as executive producer and saw television as the venue to maximize the audience. With Weintraub on board they were able to connect with James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the basic team was together. The next step was to select actors who had demonstrated a passionate commitment to environmental issues, and experienced journalists who brought their established credibility to the reporting. They also needed to enlist qualified experts like Joseph Romm to serve as science advisors. Producers spent a year searching for the best stories to tell, visually compelling “people stories” that would connect with American audiences but also demonstrate the worldwide nature of the problem of climate change. They made a priority of including representative skeptics who could honestly express their questions and beliefs. An estimated thirteen million viewers watched the series in part or in full, and millions more viewed it via DVD, Netflix, Hulu, and television stations across the globe. Still, the producers were not satisfied. A second season of the series aired in Fall 2016 on the National Geographic Channel, which is owned by 21st Century Fox. The irony is hard to miss, but James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn have established reputations as sustainability advocates. Years of Living Dangerously won the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, and has won or been nominated for awards at numerous documentary film festivals. It was widely and thoughtfully reviewed by many mainstream newspaper and journals. Mike Hale (2014) of the New  York Times mentioned the potential conflicts between conveying scientific information while engaging casual observers, but noted that some of the celebrity interviewers asked intelligent questions that were as good or better than those of the seasoned journalists. Andrew Revkin (2014), also in the New York Times, said the series “deserves plaudits for taking a compellingly fresh approach to showing the importance of climate hazards to human affairs . . . and—​perhaps more important—​revealing the roots of the polarizing divisions in society over the issue.” Revkin appreciated the series’ “refreshingly unscripted feel,” and the way it structured its narratives by “asking questions and driving the story through inquiry.” The Guardian’s reviewer, scientist John Abraham (2014), called the series “perhaps the most important climate change multimedia communications endeavor in history.” Said Abraham: “Climate change really is a made-​for-​TV story. It has all the drama of Hollywood, with real-​life villains and heroes thrown in . . . It is great to see communications experts come in and accomplish what

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scientists alone cannot.” He also noted the people-​centered nature of the stories, and quoted producer Gelbert’s long-​term goal: “We’re also implementing an engagement campaign that will extend this effort beyond the broadcast to encourage our global leaders in politics, business and religion, as well as concerned citizens, to state where they stand on key climate issues and take action.” Time Magazine’s Bryan Walsh (2014), in the “Science and Environment” section (as opposed to the “Entertainment” section), suggested, “The project will only make a difference if it can convince climate skeptics.” He invokes Ezra Klein’s explanation of “cultural cognition theory,” which asserts that “we all belong to tribes that might be defined by our political or cultural leanings, and that we’ll do almost anything to avoid conflict with those tribes—​even ‘subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.’ ” “As long as the partisan gap on climate change keeps growing,” Walsh suggests, “the kind of broad national action that would make a difference will never happen.” Consequently, Walsh believes that “a messaging strategy based primarily around solutions would have better luck dislodging that skepticism . . . We need to do what we can to slow the pace of global warming, but we also need to build a more resilient society, one that can absorb the superstorms and megadroughts of the future, bending without breaking.” Accordingly, these are the exact targets on which the second season of Years of Living Dangerously will attempt to focus.

This Changes Everything Date: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Inspired by: Website: Available from:

2015 89 min. Avi Lewis Avi Lewis Klein Lewis Productions/​Louverture Films Abramorama Naomi Klein Participatory Canada/​USA This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein http://​thefilm.thischangeseverything.org Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

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Strictly speaking, the film This Changes Everything was not an “adaptation” of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2015), since the film was shot concurrently with the writing of the book. The film’s director Avi Lewis and Klein are husband and wife, and their vision from the beginning was to tell the story of the relationship between climate change and capitalism through two different mediums that communicate in different ways. “Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years,” according to its website, “This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-​imagine the vast challenge of climate change” (TCE-​Press-​Kit, 2015). Klein is a Canadian writer and political activist best known for her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine:  the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), which describes how neoliberal capitalist forces have exploited political or natural crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too disoriented by upheavals to mount effective resistance. In her new book and film, she focuses on anthropogenic climate change as the result of centuries of an economic system that regards nature as little more than a source of resources to be exploited, without regard for the environmental or social consequences. Says Klein in the film: “What if human nature isn’t the problem? What if even greenhouse gases aren’t the problem? What if the problem is a story, one we’re been telling ourselves for 400 years?” Klein admits to being bored by the relentless pessimism of most climate change documentaries. Said Lewis: “If you’re going to embrace hope . . . it has to be a credible hope. It has to be a hope that’s actually based on something and it has to be a hope that’s mitigated by an acknowledgement of how bad things are. And that is the very fine balance that I tried to strike in the film” (Queally, 2015). Lewis and Klein hoped to make a film that would leave the viewer with a desire to “seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.” They aimed to achieve this goal by visiting activist movements around the world who are, with some success, opposing assaults from fossil fuel companies on their local environments. Lewis notes, “The thing that a film can do much better than a book . . . is really bring us into the heart of the social movements” (TCE-​Press-​Kit, 2015). They also wanted to make nature “a character in the film,” so viewers could experience the beauty of the planet being violated by rampant industrialization. At the forefront of the struggles portrayed in the film are people from “sacrifice zones,” the marginalized communities that have been written off for centuries as the collateral damage of the Industrial Revolution. They include an

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indigenous leader in the tar sands country of Alberta; Montana goat ranchers protesting a broken pipeline in Powder River Basin; a Greek housewife fighting environmentally destructive mining projects forced upon Greece by austerity demands from the European Union; an Indian matriarch opposing a coal-​fired power plant that threatens wetlands; and Chai Jing, a journalist raising awareness of the smog crisis in China (her film Under the Dome is covered later in this book). The tactics of resistance vary from physical blockades, to divestment from fossil fuel companies, to promotion of renewable energy. Klein and Lewis also interviewed prominent climate change deniers, including Mark Morano (profiled in the 2014 film Merchants of Doubt). The filmmakers acknowledge the challenges of distribution for environmental and political documentaries, a question that “goes to the very heart of how films can be part of social change.” According to the film’s website, “Today’s rapidly changing film distribution landscape is opening new opportunities, allowing us to pursue a hybrid model that includes traditional deals in the mainstream, while at the same time making the film available to a specific niche audience of educators, activists, and others who are connecting the dots between climate and economic issues” (TCE-​Press-​Kit, 2015). This Changes Everything was the first runner-​up in the documentary category at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. However, the critical response to the film has been mixed. Most reviewers were sympathetic to the film’s goals, but some didn’t feel that it met its expressed aim of going beyond other similar films on the topic. The New York Times’ Jeannette Catsoulis (2014) felt that “Ms. Klein’s super-​sweet narration . . . in trying to avoid hectoring, too often coats complex issues in a deceptive simplicity.” Village Voice’s Simon Abrams (2015) wrote, “ironically, This Changes Everything is at its best when it’s most like other climate docs . . . when it uses the same scare tactics.” Variety’s Joe Leydon (2015) was more positive: “This Changes Everything is genuinely stirring as it details improbable victories and green-​economy opportunities (and is) an unsettling but ultimately encouraging documentary about global warming and grassroots activism.” He concedes, though, that it isn’t likely to convert unbelievers, doubting “that any climate change deniers would ever watch it in the first place.” Interestingly, Rob Hopkins (2016), on the Transition Culture website, was skeptical of the film’s rhetorical approach to the subject: “It felt to me like this film set up a very powerful good vs. bad dynamic . . . But it is my experience that it is in the mid-​ground between these polarities that the really interesting stuff lies in the pursuit of climate action . . . What is missing in the film are the

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dialogues, the discussion that take place within families, in organisations, in our own heads.” Taken together, the films from this section provide a multilayered introduction to the questions of climate change: its scientific basis; the variety of ways it may be explained, visually and through stories; how deeply it is the result of our political and economic structures; what threats it poses, both globally and locally; and the various cinematic styles and rhetorical modes through which it may be portrayed. Furthermore, it is impossible to reflect on the subject of climate change without consideration of other important aspects of our energy crisis: peak oil—​the inevitability of fossil fuel depletion and the end of the age of oil—​and other forms of pollution from fossil fuels, which have devastating impacts on our environment that are distinct from climate change. Let us now move on to examine some of these related topics.

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6

Peak Oil

The concept of peak oil expresses the belief that crude oil is a nonrenewable or finite resource and will logically at some point begin to run low. After maximum production is reached, whether due to geological or economic forces, production will inevitably begin to decline, until at some point oil will become uneconomical to extract, at which point world oil production will essentially be over. This basic principle is true as well for other fossil fuels and rare earth minerals. The first authoritative prediction of peak oil came from American geophysicist Dr. M. King Hubbert in 1956, when he noticed a bell-​curve pattern of the growth, peaking, and decline in oil production, first in individual wells, then in regions and nations, and finally for the world. Hubbert predicted that conventional oil extraction in the United States would peak around 1970, which proved correct. He predicted a worldwide peak around the end of the twentieth century; this prediction failed to materialize, in part because of large oil discoveries like the North Sea, and in part because rising oil prices made so-​ called alternative oil production profitable—​for example, oil sands in Alberta and tight oil in the United States produced through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. An important principle for understanding peak oil theory is “Energy Return on Energy Invested” (EROEI), or “Net Energy.” It takes energy to produce energy, so a true measure of the value of fossil fuel production (or any means of energy production, for that matter) should subtract the amount of energy inputs from the total energy produced. However, this calculation can be highly complex and subjective. When calculating energy inputs into oil production, should one include the energy that went into building the road to an oil field, or into the manufacture of the tankers that haul the oil to service stations? The complexity of such calculations can prove almost impossible, and they depend greatly on whose interests are being served.

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Although conventional economics asserts that energy production is a relatively small portion of the total economy as measured in GDP, over 90 percent of the products and services in the consumer economy depend upon oil inputs for manufacture, transport, or both. Without oil, the entire economy would grind to a standstill within weeks. Also, a significant amount of financial and stock investments involve the energy sector. Thus facing up to the impacts—​ economic, political, and social—​of the potential end of the age of oil will be a daunting challenge. It should be noted that, although both climate change and peak oil involve crises concerning energy, in some ways they represent opposing tendencies. Climate change will worsen if we keep emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Peak oil theory predicts that in the not too distant future we will experience shortages of oil, which could likely reduce GHG emissions. Either of these developments could prove catastrophic, but their effects would be very distinct and follow different timelines. Although climate change may ultimately represent a greater threat to life on earth, peak oil may represent a more immediate risk for human civilization. The following films portray the challenge of peak oil—​of explaining the dilemma, of speculating on the impacts, and of imagining strategies for mitigation of and adaptation to the end of the age of oil.

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator/​Host: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2004 78 min. Gregory Greene Barry Silverthorn Electric Wallpaper Co. Electric Wallpaper Co. Barrie Zwicker Expository Canada http://​endofsuburbia.com Netflix, Amazon Video (DVD), YouTube, Vimeo

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The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream was one of the most influential environmental documentaries of the first decade of the twenty-​first century. But few people saw it at a local theater or on their favorite cable network. Instead of influencing mass audiences, The End of Suburbia lit a fire under small but committed groups of citizens and activists. Unlike An Inconvenient Truth and its concerns about climate change that stretch into future decades, The End of Suburbia addresses a question that poses a more immediate threat to the present generation: When will oil production begin to decline, and what will be the social, economic, and political impacts of that decline? The general premise of the film is quite straightforward. The structures of world civilization in the past century, in terms of population growth, transportation networks, industrial agriculture, and energy generation, have been based on the expectation of cheap energy—​oil being the most efficient, dense, and transportable of fossil fuels. But the history of oil production over the past half century shows that discovery of oil reserves has markedly declined, and production (or extraction) may be expected to decline along a similar curve, as has already happened in many places, including the United States. When world oil production reaches a peak and begins to decline, an increasing gap will open between supply and demand, especially as demand in the developing world continues to rise exponentially. The conclusion: patterns of

Figure 6.1  The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (Canada, 2004, Gregory Greene) was a groundbreaking film about the peaking of oil production and its implications for the American suburban lifestyle.

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population growth (urbanization and suburban sprawl) and systems of fossil fuel–​dependent energy, agriculture, and transportation are simply not sustainable, and will collapse sometime in the not-​too-​distant future, leading to potentially calamitous social, economic, and political crises. The film is divided into several segments, punctuated by a commentary by on-​camera host Barrie Zwicker. The film gets a lot of mileage out of quaint old video clips from advertisements, public relations films, and television programs. Their upbeat promises about post–​World War II suburban living, along with their bouncy, even kitschy musical scores, provide a humorous and ironic counterpoint to the film’s pessimistic message. The basic explanations of “peak oil” and its impacts rest on interviews with authors like James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Kenneth Deffeyes, Michael Klare, Matthew Simmons, Colin Campbell, and others. The film’s basic premise is that the American way of life—​where we live and work, and how we get around—​is predicated on the presumed availability of cheap oil, and cheap oil will be going away within the next few decades. Some historical perspective is offered (via stock footage with voiceover narration) on how, in the post–​World War II era, the GI bill’s assistance with housing and education combined with an economic boom to get millions of people moving into newly constructed middle-​class housing developments on the periphery of cities. This development was marketed to people to appeal to their nostalgia for the rural countryside that previous generations had left behind when they had migrated into the cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Subsequent decades saw the expansion of the federal interstate highway system and the triumph of automobile culture over mass transportation systems. Shopping and business centers moved away from inner cities, allowing them to sink into decay. What was left behind in this mass migration were walkable neighborhoods and mixed-​use building infrastructure. After almost a century of suburban living and dependence on automobiles, Americans have come to regard cheap gasoline and heating oil as their birthright—​overlooking the obvious fact that fossil fuels are nonrenewable resources. People regard service interruptions like oil boycotts and power blackouts to be unnatural breaches of the natural order of things. But back in the mid-​ 1950s, Shell oil geologist M. King Hubbert predicted—​based on his study of the historical patterns of oil extraction—​that US oil production would peak around 1970. We know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Hubbert proved astonishly accurate. Hubbert also predicted that world oil production would peak

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around the turn of the century, and without a decade of energy conservation following the founding of OPEC, that prediction might have been realized as well. In the film, energy experts like Matthew Simmons raise serious questions regarding the oil reserves in OPEC countries, since there is no independent auditing of those countries’ reserves estimates. Technological advances that improve oil extraction may be only speeding up the rush toward the oil peak. Politicians are not in the business of delivering bad news, so they are not likely to be honest in preparing their constituents for an oil peak and the consequent contraction in their lifestyles. The recent vast expansion of globalized trade will likely begin to reverse as well. What scenarios might unfold if oil supply begins to shrink and prices rise significantly? Political and social discord may be one answer. The behavior of desperate people whose basic needs are being frustrated, and who feel they have been lied to by their leaders and the media, may become hostile and unpredictable. If civil unrest expands, restrictions on civil liberties could likely follow. As energy resources become scarcer and nations begin to see their economic growth at risk, international tensions over energy reserves will increase, very possibly breaking out into open military conflicts. Some of those interviewed in the film suggest that the 2008 Iraq War may be one of the first examples. Beyond transportation, another crucial sector of the economy largely based on fossil fuels is food production. Much of the expansion of industrial agriculture in the twentieth century was based on fossil fuel–​based fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. Soil erosion and degradation led farmers to turn to oil and gas products to continue to grow their food. But this dependence on fossil fuels puts mass agricultural production in jeopardy. Without oil, agriculture might well become more labor intensive again, as it was in the past. And what about all the oil required to transport and cook food? A lot of adaptation may be required in these areas as well. Are there any solutions out there to avert these catastrophes? The experts interviewed are skeptical of some proposed alternative energy sources put forward, such as hydrogen or biofuels, either because they are too experimental or because they don’t deliver sufficient energy return on energy investment. The most optimistic scenario envisioned involves a return to the philosophy of the New Urbanism that was popular a few decades earlier. New Urbanism was an approach to urban planning involving the construction or adaptation of mixed-​use, higher density urban spaces more amenable to walking and bicycling that do not require vast expenditures of energy by individuals or families. But as host Barrie Zwicker says, “Within our lifetimes, the growing energy

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demands of the American dream here in suburbia will eclipse our planet’s ability to provide it.” The genesis of this film occurred when producer Barry Silverthorn and cinematographer Gregory Greene produced a video recording for the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) in Paris in May 2003 (Greene, 2012). Founded by retired oil geologist Colin Campbell in 2000, ASPO was a network of energy scientists and analysts whose goal was to raise awareness about the future decline of oil production, based in part on Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert’s research from the mid-​1950s. What Silverthorn and Greene heard at the conference shocked them profoundly. Here was news of an imminent threat to world civilization that was virtually unknown to the general public. On returning to Canada, they immersed themselves in the recent literature on the subject, including Heinberg’s The Party’s Over (2003) and Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere (1993). Convinced of the importance of raising public consciousness on the subject of oil depletion, they began to conduct preliminary interviews in order to compile a demo reel for appealing to potential funding sources. In this effort they were very disappointed. According to Greene, all the production companies and broadcast networks they approached “asked where our happy ending was,” and they couldn’t provide one. So they proceeded to fund the project themselves, with the aid of a few small short-​term loans. In the end, the production cost only around $9,000. For expert testimony, they interviewed Kunstler in New England and Heinberg and Julian Darley (cofounder of the Post Carbon Institute) in California, with Canon XL-​1 and Sony DV Pro cameras. Combined with footage shot at the Paris ASPO conference, these interviews formed the bedrock of the film’s narrative. Much of the rest of the film consists of stock footage, mostly obtained from Rick Prelinger’s archives, including clips from early television sit-​coms and propagandistic public relations films from the 1950s that glamourized suburban life, often accompanied by bouncy, banal music. Greene firmly believes that activist films need to retain a sense of humor, because strident films that rely entirely on fear as a motivational force for change will turn off everyone but true believers. So while the tone of the film was sobering, the clips from the 1950s programs gave The End of Suburbia a humorously satirical tone, softening the moralism in the message. Once completed, The End of Suburbia was immediately screened by Silverthorn’s network, Vision TV, a Toronto interfaith station. The immediate reaction was very strong, both pro and con. A conservative Toronto newspaper, the Financial Post, published an editorial condemning the film, allegedly without even having previewed it. The film gained entry into a number of festivals,

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but its expository narrative style may have seemed too conventional in a market looking increasingly for character-​centered content or experimental forms. The producers engaged a mainstream distributor, but the film was never successful through regular distribution channels to theaters or television networks. Instead, the primary means of distribution came through the Post Carbon Institute and other activist organizations, so awareness of the film grew organically—​as Greene said, “the right message framed in the right way at exactly the right time” (Greene, 2012), the first film to deal directly with the issue of peak oil. Riding almost entirely on this “underground” method of distribution, the film grossed over one million dollars, even after being packaged mostly in discounted bulk sales. So from a strictly financial point of view, The End of Suburbia has proven incredibly profitable. Contemporary events seemed to reinforce the film’s message and relevance. The northeast power blackout of 2003 undermined people’s confidence in the electric grid, and the US invasion of Iraq during that same year was interpreted by many as a war of conquest for Iraqi oil. Also supportive was the publication of several contemporaneous books on peak oil—​among them Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight (1998), Kenneth Deffeyes’s Hubbert’s Peak (2001), and Paul Roberts’s The End of Oil (2004), as well as follow-​up books by Heinberg (Powerdown, 2004) and Kunstler (The Long Emergency, 2005). Equally significant was the growing influence of online blogs like The Oil Drum (http://​ www.theoildrum.com, now inactive) and Energy Bulletin (now http://​www. resilience.org), which posted articles by energy researchers and industry insiders with strong credentials. With the appearance of these books and blogs, along with films like The End of Suburbia, public awareness of the threats from peak oil began to grow exponentially. The End of Suburbia screened in at least five film festivals, including the prestigious Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC. Despite the lack of a significant theatrical release, The End of Suburbia was reviewed by several newspapers and journals, including Variety’s Dennis Harvey (2005), who stated that although the film “may sound alarmist, it’s convincing in its basic argument, and assembled with straightforward competence.” It also received coverage from many environmental organizations, including Transition Culture, Resilience. org, and the Sierra Club, which offered a set of discussion questions for member screenings. However, what really elevated The End of Suburbia to cult status was simple word-​of-​mouth. Most of its audiences assembled in church meeting rooms, activist organizations, and living rooms. Few films have enjoyed as wide or as passionate a distribution by DVD. More than any other factor, The

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End of Suburbia introduced the issue of peak oil to American and international audiences. Some critics complained that the film did not offer many solutions to the challenges of peak oil, beyond redesigning our cities along the lines of the New Urbanism. Greene responded by producing a sequel entitled Escape from Suburbia (2007), with a focus on proactive adaptation to peak oil by following the stories of a few individuals who were changing the way they lived, such as moving into an intentional community or working an urban garden. That film never connected with audiences the way End of Suburbia did, and Green learned some important lessons from that process. First, it’s important to find characters with stories that appeal to the broad public outside the realm of “true believers.” Second, it’s important to avoid falling into the trap of anti-​urbanist romanticism; we live in an urban culture, and part of any real solution to peak oil includes making our cities more habitable, because that’s where most of the people live now and they are probably not going anywhere else. Looking to the future, Greene has some trepidation about the future of documentaries. Distribution is migrating from DVDs to the Internet—​from websites created to market films to YouTube—​where it is even more difficult to make money and protect intellectual property. So obtaining financing for expensive projects will likely get increasingly difficult. On the other hand, websites can move beyond the producer/​audience model of communication, to create interactive online communities that may in the end be more effective in promoting social change from the grass roots.

Crude Impact Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2006 97 min. James Jandak Wood James Jandak Wood Vista Clara Films Docurama Films Natalia Bortolotti Expository United States http://​crudeimpact.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

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Figure 6.2  Crude Impact (United States, 2006, James Jandak Wood) presents a far-​ ranging study of the devastating effects of both the world’s dependence on oil and the potential consequences of its exhaustion.

The environmental film that gathered the widest audience and the most awards in 2006 was An Inconvenient Truth, which focused on climate change. But in that same year, another excellent film expanded the discussion of oil consumption to include the more immediate threat of peak oil, first introduced to film audiences by The End of Suburbia two years earlier. Crude Impact—​written, produced, and directed by first-​time filmmaker James Jandak Wood—​emphasizes the vast dependence of human society on oil, explains the case that worldwide oil production may soon reach its limit, and asks what the impacts of such a peak might be. In classic expository mode, Crude Impact tells its story by intercutting stock footage with expert interviews, punctuated by clips from television programs and movies, sometimes for comic relief (one clip from Young Frankenstein is particularly amusing). The film makes its points through the authoritative testimony of experts and researchers such as Matthew Simmons, William Rees, Richard Heinberg, Kenneth Deffeyes, Michael Klare, Thom Hartmann, and others. Crude Impact opens by placing the human use of fossil fuels—​particularly crude oil—​at the center of the expansion of industrial and population growth over the past two centuries. Director Wood establishes the centrality of fossil fuel in transportation and the production of goods, but perhaps most crucially in the production of food through the use of fertilizers and pesticides. The abundance

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of cheap energy has led to an addiction to consumption and the delusion that having more stuff will lead to happiness, nowhere more than in the United States. Although the first President Bush famously stated, “The American way of life is not negotiable,” the rejoinder is that nature will not negotiate either—​and perhaps neither will rising nations like China and India that are striving to gain their share of the world’s energy pie. What are the consequences of this oil addiction? Political scientist Michael Klare (Blood and Oil, 2007) points to the strained overextension of US military forces around the world to guarantee access to oil in unfriendly or unstable regions. Oil extraction has left a trail of ecological and social devastation among many indigenous and powerless communities, and caused political and military instability in poor nations whose primary source of wealth is oil. Most of this damage is invisible to the consuming public, since only the most catastrophic environmental accidents get widespread publicity in the media, not the everyday examples of pollution and health risks among indigenous people in underdeveloped nations. In part, this dereliction of duty may be traced to the decline of television news from a public service to a profit center, filled mostly with trivial “infotainment.” The lack of public awareness of the widespread destruction wrought by the fossil fuel industry on their behalf inhibits the growth of political pressure on governments and industries to reform their destructive practices and policies. But these are only the near-​term consequences. The long-​term consequences may prove to be even more catastrophic. As a result of global warming, the shrinking of the world’s glaciers imperils the security of water and food production for billions of people. The melting of ice caps on the poles and in Greenland portends the rise of ocean levels, threatening the survival of islands and coastal cities and populations. The heating of the atmosphere, and its consequent effects on the conveyer systems of the oceans, will likely lead to more severe storms and more frequent droughts, especially in equatorial regions, and the spread of new or more virulent diseases. Shifts in climate patterns will accelerate the already rapid rate of extinction of species, possibly leading to the first great mass extinction linked directly to the activities of living species. This is not a futuristic hypothetical; even now, 90 percent of big ocean fish and a quarter of mammal species have either disappeared or are facing extinction. Taken together, these changes may, over the remainder of this century, undermine the basis of civilization and even survival for a significant percentage of the world’s human population.

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Viewers have to wait through two-​thirds of the film to get to a direct outline of peak oil theory. In the 1950s the United States was the world’s largest petroleum producer and had the largest known reserves. When in 1956 Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that US conventional oil production would peak by the early 1970s, his prediction was vilified but proved precisely accurate; by 2006, US production had declined by around one-​third. Furthermore, world oil discovery peaked in 1963 and has subsequently declined in fits and starts. As of this film’s production, oil production had peaked in fifteen of the top thirty oil producing countries, including some of the top oil producers like Russia, Venezuela, Kuwait, Libya, and Iran. How much extractable oil is really left? The US Geological Survey estimates of world oil reserves tend to be greater than most other estimates. OPEC’s policies allow a member nation’s oil production to be proportional to its reserves, which encourages OPEC nations to overestimate their reserves; thus it is hardly a surprise that most OPEC countries’ estimated reserves doubled in the 1980s without any meaningful new data on discovery. Since in most cases reserve estimates are not vetted by independent reviewers, the world really has no reliable information on what proven reserves OPEC nations really possess. The world is now moving from cheap abundant oil to scarce and expensive oil from deep-​sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and the mining of tar sands. The danger is rising of resource wars, energy-​related political instability, and a broad nosedive of the world economy. In Alaska (United States) and Alberta (Canada), oil extraction processes threaten clean water supplies and endanger and displace indigenous peoples, The limits to growth were never based solely on fossil fuel depletion, but also that of topsoil erosion, rare earth minerals, fish catch, and other resources. Without changes in our assumptions of infinite growth, humanity’s future is grim. What positive steps may be taken? The power of women in developing cultures is one of the most crucial elements. Conservation via energy efficiency is another crucial element; 75–​80 percent of all energy consumption could be reduced by improvements in building insulation, energy transmission, motor efficiency, and so on. Seventeen percent of the US energy budget goes into food production and distribution, so more local organic agriculture would provide a great benefit. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) can make communities more resilient in food supply. International legal frameworks must be crafted and agreed upon to reduce fossil fuel use. There are many possibilities, but the world’s nations have to move with a sense of urgency. The film’s website includes a discussion and activities guide for educators (http://​crudeimpact.com).

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Crude Impact is an astonishingly good film, especially for a novice producer/​ director, a fine example of the straightforward, classical style of expository documentary filmmaking. Wood’s inspiration for making the film was a trip to the Ecuadoran rainforest as part of a group from the Pachamama Alliance, an activist organization that creates partnerships between people from industrial nations and indigenous peoples for the purposes of pursuing environmental sustainability and social justice. He was shocked and incensed to witness the hardships suffered by the people of the forests from the abuse of their lands by oil companies and the Ecuadoran government (Wood, 2012). On returning to the United States, Wood read several books about the oil industry. He had no experience as a filmmaker, but he wanted to tell the world about what he had learned, and saw film as the best medium for reaching the widest audience. Initially he planned to make a film about Ecuador, but ultimately chose to pursue a wider vision of the place of oil in modern society, with a particular focus on the impacts of climate change and peak oil (see the later discussion of the film Crude, which focuses exclusively on the struggle of the indigenous people of Ecuador against pollution from the oil industry). To prepare for directing the film, Wood immersed himself in an in-​depth analysis of famous documentaries in much the way as Orson Welles had prepared for Citizen Kane. He timed shots out by the second, deconstructing the narratives and editing patterns, until he had developed his own vision of a filmic style. He shot and edited for a somewhat leisurely pace, allowing viewers to linger on images, avoiding what he calls the “MTV feel” to ensure that the film conveyed both a thoughtful and emotional tenor. Wood’s primary crew—​ cinematographer Sharon Anderson and sound designer Pamela Spitzer—​were equally new to feature filmmaking, though they had experience in television production. The selection of shots, the use of creative animation to convey statistical information, the excellent narration by Natalia Bortolotti, the subtle musical score by John Deborde, the interweaving of stock footage with original interviews—​everything about the film is polished and professional, with a clear and comprehensive narrative and aesthetically pleasing photography and editing. Wood managed to obtain interviews with the authors of a few of the books he had read, among them some of the earliest writers to alert to public of the threat of peak oil: Richard Heinberg (The Party’s Over), Thom Hartmann (The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight), and Matthew Simmons (Twilight in the Desert). He won these experts over

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for interviews by displaying his familiarity with their writings and the issues at stake. Wood was the first to admit that he was a novice when it came to distributing his film, and he didn’t make much money from it. Crude Impact had a limited theatrical release, Porchlight Entertainment handled the television marketing and distribution, and The Video Project covered the educational market. The film has a quality website (still active as of 2014), with biographies of the interviewees and quotes from reviews. It also contains a very effective Discussion and Activities Guide for educators and discussion groups, including suggested activities and discussion questions involving categories of Interconnection, Sources of Fossil Fuel Addiction, Foreign Policy Impact, and Earth Impact and Future Impact. Crude Impact screened in over thirty international film festivals and won awards or nominations in twelve of them. Audience feedback was also extremely positive. The film was shown on television in Australia, Sweden, and the United States, at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) in Boston in 2006, and received brief theatrical screenings in San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland. With the relative scarcity of theatrical screenings, the film wasn’t widely reviewed, but the reviews it received were very favorable. Although she still had reservations about the film’s alarmist tendencies, Chicago Tribune’s Tasha Robinson (2007) compared it favorably to The 11th Hour, saying, “Where 11th Hour shallowly addressed a wide variety of topics, Crude Impact goes deep and expansive on the political, environmental, and cultural costs of American dependence on oil.” Author Lynne Twist called it “One of the most powerful documentary films I have seen . . . focused on what is probably the most important topic of our time. It is unforgettable, riveting, insightful, shocking, compelling and profound.” Crude Impact was widely reviewed by environmental and energy websites. Chris Vernon (2006) of The Oil Drum called it “the best documentary I have seen on the subject.” Transition Culture’s Rob Hopkins (2006) called it an “extremely well-​made film” and “a very powerful tool in our attempts to break our collective addiction.” However, he felt the film spread itself too thin: “a more ruthless editor might have drawn a more focused and concise film.” Mark Jeantheau (2006) of Grinning Planet praised the film for “correctly asserting that the solution is a reorganization of society and economics away from the corporate-​dominated, energy-​intensive consumer culture of today.”

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Tipping Point: The End of Oil Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2012 90 min (45-​min. version for TV) Tom Radford, Niobe Thompson Niobe Thompson Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Clearwater Sigourney Weaver Expository Canada http://​tippingpointdoc.ca YouTube, http://​www.cbc.ca/​natureofthings/​episodes/​ tipping-​point (Canada only)

Tipping Point takes viewers inside “the David and Goliath struggle playing out within one of the most compelling environmental issues of our time” (“Tipping Point,” 2013). The largest proven reserves of oil in the world are in Alberta, Canada, deep in the wilderness of Canada’s northern forests near a town called Fort McMurray; they already provide more oil to the United States than any other foreign source. American refineries are processing more heavy oil than ever before, mostly from Alberta. According to the film’s website, “every major oil company on earth is in the tar sands—​BP, Shell, Total, Satoil, Exxon, Chevron, and China’s Sinopec” (Tippingpointdoc.ca). This oil production pumps an estimated $20 billion per year into the Canadian economy and employs 450,000 people. However these reserves do not consist of conventional oil that gushes out of the ground from derricks. They are called “oil sands” or “tar sands,” and have to be extracted through large mining operations that more resemble coal mines than traditional oil fields. The world’s “total liquids” oil supply has only been growing by 2  percent annually, but worldwide demand for oil is growing by 7 percent annually. Since conventional oil production may be peaking or has already peaked—​that is, reached the point that increasing worldwide extraction is no longer physically or economically possible—​the world’s economies increasingly turn to unconventional oils like tar sands and tight oil (the latter obtained through hydraulic fracturing or fracking) to make up the difference. Some experts in the film estimate that 80 percent of the world’s remaining recoverable conventional oil may be extracted by 2050.

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Tipping Point was directed by Tom Radford and Niobe Thompson, both Albertan natives, for their Clearwater Documentary production company. Radford is one of the most honored CBC filmmakers; Thompson is an anthropologist and filmmaker with a PhD from Cambridge. They produced two versions of the film, one feature-​length at ninety minutes, and one forty-​five minutes in length for screening on CBC’s prominent scientific series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. Given Canada’s economic reliance on the oil sands, the program was bound to generate controversy, and it did. The Canadian government promotes tar sands as a cleaner alternative to conventional oil since it produces economic advantages by reducing imports and helps to provide greater energy security. However, there are significant downsides to mining tar sands. Nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxides escape into the air, leading to widespread air pollution. The local river carries toxic chemicals like lead and arsenic downstream from the mining regions. A marked increase in various rare cancers has been documented among native Indians living and working around the area of the Alberta tar sands (see the commentary on the film Elemental elsewhere in this text). The habitat of many animals is being destroyed; natives’ rights to hunt and fish are meaningless if there is no healthy game. Deformed fish turn up in their catch, so native peoples have ceased fishing, which was previously their primary method of sustenance. In 2008, thousands of migrating ducks got stuck in oil from the tar sands operations. One doctor who raised concerns that toxins from the tar sands was the cause of cancers in native communities had his license removed by Alberta’s College of Physicians. The Canadian National Health Service had refused to conduct its own health and water studies, instead accepting studies from oil industry–​ funded agencies. Monitoring of water quality had been conducted by the oil industry, and the results were the property of the industry and had been kept kept confidential; the industry claimed that natural water runoff is causing most of the observed water pollution. The industry has also promised that reclamation will heal the environment, but others claim that the costs of genuine reclamation would be so high that it would be prohibitive. Finally, Canadian universities began doing independent health and chemical studies. Renowned ecologist Dr. David Schindler did the first independent research on water pollution in the mining region, and found lots of pollutants in the snow in circumstances where they could only have come from the air. Many cancers are linked to hydrocarbon products, and Schindler’s research found cancer-​causing chemicals throughout the ecosystem, including mercury,

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cadmium, arsenic, lead, and others. His reports were published in the prestigious Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences and presented in a public forum, along with a response from the Canadian government. Even the government’s study confirmed the high rates of local cancers—​30 percent higher than expected. But the government proceeded to ignore its own findings when it came to exercising any regulatory action, despite precedents in Canadian law for protecting native land claims. The age of innocence for the oil sands was ending. Native residents of Fort Chipewyan decided to begin taking action regardless of the consequences. In 2009 tribal elder François Paulette attended the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference on behalf of Alberta’s indigenous peoples. In Kyoto, in 1993, Canada had promised to cut its GHG emissions by 6 percent, but as of 2012, they had actually risen by 26 percent. Although that conference called for restrictions on carbon emissions, North American governments sought to weaken emission standards. Canada signed the Copenhagen Accord, which was a nonbinding agreement, but in 2011 withdrew from the Kyoto Accord, which had binding targets. On a percentage basis, tar sands release three times as many carbon emissions as comparable oil wells. Climate activist Bill McKibben says in the film that the world is on target for a three-​degree warming by the end of the current century. Canadian film producer James Cameron (who appears in the film) patterned the industrial sites in his film Avatar after the tar sands, and made public statements regarding the necessity of independent scientific research on their impacts on health and environment. Tar sands production has been anticipated to triple by 2020, with investments from both private oil companies and other countries like China and Norway. But Canada could wind up suffering the fate of the “oil curse” that has befallen many Third World nations that are rich in natural resources but poor economically; pollution, corruption, brutalization, and chaos often ensue when a nation becomes dependent on oil exports. From the film’s perspective, modern energy technology is an ideological pathology. Capitalism is all about exponential growth, almost a religious idea with a global reach—​but geopolitical chaos will ensue as the world crashes up against the limits to growth. This is truly a recipe for the collapse of civilization. Are there alternatives to dirty oil? According to the film, one possibility is turning sugarcane waste into ethanol as has been done in Brazil for decades. Tipping Point screened in several film festivals, mostly in Canada, and won a few awards, but it was not marketed very intently outside of Canada and thus

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was not widely reviewed in the press. Canadian blogger Janet McNeill (2011) wrote that the film was “utterly essential viewing . . . I think ALL Canadians have a duty to watch this documentary! To learn what is now driving the Canadian economy. And the price that is being paid . . . And our government’s shocking complicity in the scandal.” The feature-​length version screened on the CBC in 2011. Afterward, the network received a complaint that Tipping Point was biased and unbalanced, thus violating the network’s policy of balanced reporting, requesting that it not be rebroadcast and that a video with an opposing view be aired. CBC’s ombudsman undertook a study and determined that the film was independently produced (and thus not representative of any special interest organization), that the information it presented was accurate and not exaggerated, and that those with opposing views had been offered an opportunity to participate but had declined. Thus he concluded that there had been “no violation of CBC journalistic standards and practices” (LaPointe, 2011). Beyond all the discussion of the carcinogenic health effects of the tar sands, or the corrupt collusion between the fossil fuel industry and the Canadian government, what viewers will remember most vividly from Tipping Point are the aerial shots of the vast expanses of denuded forestland, laid bare by the mining operations and oil-​soaked pools, that stretch out seemingly forever toward the horizon. In collaboration with award-​winning conservationist photographer Garth Lenz, the filmmakers’ visual images portray an unforgettably searing panorama of how totally humanity is willing to deface the natural world in order to extract the energy to power its lifestyle. Postscript:  Many further developments have occurred since Tipping Point was produced. In 2013 another study by a different team of scientists, headed by Dr. John Smol, confirmed the conclusions of Schindler’s report that the oil sands had been sending toxins into the air and water for decades. In 2015 US president Barack Obama decided to oppose the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was intended to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries in Texas for potential shipping out of the Gulf of Mexico. Also in 2015, Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau replaced Conservative Stephen Harper as prime minister, ending almost a decade of Conservative leadership in Canada, and weakening the grip of the oil industry on political power in Canada. Finally, in May of 2016, a huge wildfire swept through Fort McMurray, causing an evacuation of the town’s entire population of 80,000 and bringing the production of oil sands almost to a halt, reducing Canada’s oil exports significantly. Combined with the decline of

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world oil prices over almost the past two years, these events left the future of the Alberta oil sands very much in doubt.

Pump Date: Length: Directors Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrated by: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2014 88 min. Josh and Rebecca Harrell Tickell Rebecca Harrell Tickell, Darius Fisher, Eyal Aronoff, Yossie Hollander Fuel Freedom Foundation Submarine Deluxe Jason Bateman Expository United States https://​www.pumpthemovie.com/​ Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

A graduate of Florida State University’s film school, Josh Tickell is a prolific and talented environmental filmmaker. His films move at a rapid pace without losing clarity, effectively employing music and animation to speak to both emotions and the mind. His first film Fuel (2010) combined a historical survey of humanity’s fossil fuel dependency with Tickell’s personal approach to our energy dilemma. Having grown up in Louisiana amidst the refineries, and experiencing relatives dying too young, he began a search for a different energy lifestyle, and became noteworthy for driving around the country in a “Veggie Van” fueled by biodiesel obtained from restaurants. Tickell became an evangelist for biodiesel in trucking, mass transportation, even for the military. But then the blowback against biofuels began—​concerns that they cause deforestation and make food too expensive in poor countries. So he spent another year shooting new footage for Fuel and reediting the film to include the controversy over biofuels and survey other renewable energy options that might exist, including “next generation” biofuels like algae and cellulosic ethanol made from organic waste streams. Combined with wind and solar technologies and more conservation and efficiency, some scientists believe we could provide 100 percent of America’s needed electricity and energy for transportation.

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In many ways a sequel to Fuel, Pump (2014)—​produced in conjunction with the nonprofit Fuel Freedom Foundation—​presents an analysis of American dependence on fossil fuels, then follows it up with an exploration of alternative renewable energy options that updates developments of the past decade. The film covers some prime points in the history of US oil dominance, including the destruction of America’s electric public transportation system by a monopolistic consortium of oil and transportation companies; the impact of the OPEC oil boycott of the 1970s on the American economy; and the ways in which the United States’ dependence on oil has driven and militarized its foreign policy. By 1890 John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the US oil business, and he became the richest man in America. In 1911, when the Supreme Court affirmed Standard Oil’s violation of antimonopoly law, the company was broken up into thirty-​four independent companies. The United States used to have the best public transportation system in the world—​until Standard Oil, Mack Truck, Firestone, Phillips 66, and General Motors conspired together to buy up and destroy America’s electric trolley systems and replaced them with motorbuses. They were even convicted of conspiracy, but the damage was done. Thus in the twenty-​first century, the United States has no meaningful public transportation system to put pressure on oil prices or avert the consequences of shortages. With only 4.5 percent of the world’s population, the United States consumes 20  percent of the world’s oil annually. Americans associate automobiles with freedom, and that freedom depends upon affordable gasoline. The OPEC oil boycott devastated the American economy, causing mass unemployment and anger that overflowed into politics. OPEC countries sit on 78 percent of known conventional oil reserves. But instead of diversifying its automobiles and fuel sources, the United States has responded by building military bases near every oil installation in the Middle East—​at the cost of half-​a-​trillion dollars per year. While oil is a major problem today, it’s about to get much worse. Global demand is skyrocketing. Worldwide demand is around eighty-​eight million barrels per day; the US demand is 18 million barrels per day, of which it produces only eight million barrels per day—​less than half of what it consumes. In 2009 General Motors sold more cars in China than in the United States; Chinese car sales have increased more than a million per year since 2000. In China, car ownership is even a factor for a man’s status and eligibility for marriage. Thus China will take great measures to insure future supplies of oil. One expert projects that the world will run out of oil before it runs out of Chinese wanting to buy cars.

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The American response has been to turn to hydraulic fracturing of tight oil from shale rock in places like North Dakota, which went from the number nine oil producing state in the United States to number two. The number of shale wells rose from around 4,000 in 2000 to almost 27,000 in 2013. The fracking process has been known for years, but improved technology has made it affordable if oil prices are high enough. Fracking also raises questions about water pollution from toxic chemicals used in the process. But since fracking is a more expensive extraction process, this expanded production doesn’t have as much positive impact on the economy as anticipated. On July 11, 2008, the price of oil hit an all-​time high at $147 per barrel, having risen over 10 percent in only three months. Just two months later in September came the aftershock, the financial crash when the stock market fell a record 777 points in a single day. Since production and transport of almost everything requires oil, rising oil prices rippled through the economy at every level; prices of virtually all commodities rose proportionately. Higher food prices led to food riots in twenty-​two countries. In the United States, middle-​class families saw their disposable income shrink and their buying choices reduced. As consumers moved to smaller, more fuel-​efficient cars, General Motors filed for bankruptcy (along with its home city, Detroit) and had to be bailed out by the government. Studies show that the values of the S&P 500 stocks track closely with the rising and falling of oil prices. When prices rise too high, economic growth stalls, unemployment rises, demand shrinks, and oil prices began to come down again, in a seemingly never-​ ending cycle. The conclusion of the film’s experts: this is the end of the oil age. The time has come for our leaders to recognize the dysfunction of our addiction to oil and come to grips with its consequences. The oil monopolies that control oil resources control the United States. But the way to break up a monopoly is with competition, to give people choices. This is where the film moves on to the question of energy alternatives. Some of the earliest cars ran on electrically charged batteries. Nicola Tesla invented an electric motor, but coming out of World War I, the auto industry adopted the internal combustion engine as the standard for motor vehicles. Inventor Elon Musk has adopted Tesla’s name for his luxury electric car. Currently lithium ion batteries power electric cars, and estimates are that within a decade battery prices will be cut in half. However, in 2014 most of America’s electricity comes from coal (37  percent), natural gas (30  percent), and nuclear power (19  percent), and all come with environmental problems attached. Renewable energy

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provides only 10.5 percent of electricity as of this writing. Finally, turnover of the nation’s auto fleet from gas to electricity could take decades. So is there a transition fuel to bridge this gap? During the oil crisis of the 1970s, Brazil (which imported 90 percent of its oil at the time) turned to ethanol produced from sugarcane to offer an alternative to its auto drivers, and, combined with the development of “flex fuel” cars, created the most successful gasoline replacement program in the world. Brazil’s progressive government under President da Silva was a prime mover in this transition. A regular gasoline car can be adapted into a “flex car” (to run on 100 percent ethanol) for around $150. So in Brazil consumers actually have choices regarding which fuel they prefer. In terms of the economy, the ethanol industry creates eight times more jobs than the oil industry. Furthermore, ethanol from sugarcane doesn’t force a “food-​or-​fuel” competition as corn ethanol does in the United States. What’s stopping America from taking a similar path? In the early days of auto production, Henry Ford made his early cars as flex fuel vehicles, and saw alcohol as the fuel of the future. A great variety of plants can serve as a basis for alcohol production, even in areas of the world not well suited for agriculture. In the United States today, 10 percent of auto fuel is made from ethanol, mostly from corn. Biofuel production has soared since the steep rise in the price of oil in 2007–​2008. The rise in worldwide food prices, the film suggests, was due more to the high price of oil rather than the competition between biofuels and foodstuffs. Instead, ethanol was simply a good way to absorb surpluses in US corn production; furthermore, animal feed can be made from the by-​products of ethanol production, so there are no “losers” in ethanol production. Methanol, or wood alcohol, could even be produced in outer space, wherever there is water and CO2. It can be produced from a wide variety of natural waste products (biomass), as well as from geothermal heat sources. Methanol is less polluting, and racecar drivers prefer it as more economical and safer. Indeed, after the oil shocks of the 1970s, there was a movement, led by California, to make methanol available as a fuel alternative, but as the crisis passed, oil companies found other methods of smog reduction that pushed methanol out of the marketplace. Currently US production of methanol comes from natural gas, which is still plentiful, so the film projects that by 2020, half of US gas consumption (conservatively) could be replaced by methanol—​saving, among other things, tens of billions of dollars spent on military operations to protect oil imports. As of 2014,

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there were nine million flex fuel cars on American highways, able to run on any mixture of ethanol and gasoline. Also, the addition of a small computing device or a software update can convert any gasoline car to a flex fuel car, alterations that may be performed by the consumer. Pump sees the path to scaling up biofuels is not through auto manufacturers or the government but through the initiative of American consumers. Perhaps the biggest barrier is the relative scarcity of fueling stations; only 3 percent of US stations currently offer biofuel alternatives. E-​85 gas is 85 percent ethanol. But here again, modern communications technology can offer drivers GPS station maps and apps to help. Hopefully, alternative fuel entrepreneurs will build an infrastructure to provide choices for consumers. Compressed natural gas (CNG) is another alternative fuel of the future. CNG conversion is more expensive, running into thousands of dollars. But CNG is economical for long-​distance fleet vehicles, because the cost of fueling can be 80 percent less, along with reduced emissions. Franchise contracts prevent many station owners from considering CNG, but consumer demand for ethanol could push independent stations (around one-​third of the total) to offer ethanol alternatives, along with electric car charging stations. A legal approach would be an Open Fuel Standard law, which would break up gasoline monopolies by requiring automakers to make flex fuel cars. Proposed laws have never made it out of Congressional committees, perhaps because legislators have received over $32 million in contributions from big oil companies. Furthermore, most of those solutions offered earlier for converting a car to flex fuel are technically illegal. It’s here that Pump truly shifts into an activist gear, urging people to take action themselves instead of relying on government or corporations to help them—​not only to save money but also to save the lives of those we send abroad to “defend our freedom.” People need to start channeling their anger into action. Says one expert: “We need fuel democracy and fuel choice, not fuel monopoly.” A mega-​economic benefit would be the reversal of the flow of wealth to oil producing nations. Free choice is a fundamental American value, and “the choice for a better future begins at the pump.” Reviewers noted that unlike the Tickells’s previous films, Pump is “free of either the directors’ personal lives or any well-​meaning famous people . . . the film looks like a standard 21st century issue documentary: fast cutting, lots of talking heads, and a mix of stock footage and crisp location shots” (Lapin, 2014). However, he complained that “the Tickells cram so much into

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their ninety-​minute cause machine that nothing really sticks.” Most reviewers appreciated the film’s attempt to steer clear of partisan ideology in framing its arguments; Kenigsberg (2014) wrote that “the movie goes beyond alarmism with solutions that on the surface would seem to find common ground between environmental advocacy and unfettered capitalism.” Tsai (2014) credited the film with being “exhaustively research, interviewed and documented.” Overall, Pump presents a good overview of the challenges of transitioning to a sustainable energy system for transportation, but it leaves a lot of the larger energy dilemmas unaddressed.

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Pollution and Waste

Beyond concerns over climate change and peak oil, the effluents and waste products from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels have profoundly harmful effects, whether from the smog in Beijing, the streams and rivers of Ecuador, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or toxic chemicals in the groundwater beneath fracking fields from Pennsylvania to Texas. Furthermore, global consumer society also contributes its share of waste products, from the plastics and medical waste that washes up on our shores, to the discarded remnants of outdated computers deposited in Third World countries, to the chemicals that run through our bodies from medicines and household goods. In this section, we will examine environmental documentaries that focus on these topics, with a focus on the impacts of pollution on people’s health and livelihoods, and the issue of environmental racism and “sacrifice zones.” From the leeching of dangerous chemicals into the mountain waters of West Virginia to the disposal of cancer-​causing waste in indigenous lands of Bolivia, from the fouling of the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon spill to the deadly smog that envelops Beijing, the costs of global industrial civilization increasingly threaten to outweigh the benefits, and cause the most immediate harm to those who benefit the least.

Burning the Future Burning the Future opens by taking viewers on a brief trip into a West Virginia coal mine, revealing the religious perspective of the miners and creating sympathy for the generational culture of miners and their families. There is a lot of effective stock footage from the early days of mining. The strategy of the film is to let people speak for themselves, and thus it includes interviews with both

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Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor:

2008 90 min. David Novack David Novack & Alexis Zoullas Firefly Pix Mongrel Media, Specialty Studios Entertainment, Pop Twist Entertainment Observational/​Participatory United States http://​www.burningthefuture.org/​show.asp?content_​ id=14089 Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

sides—​mining opponents and proponents. The film even includes public relations advertisements from the mining companies, including one humorous animation portraying people’s dependence on electricity. West Virginia forests are the second most diverse forest ecosystem in the world, after only the Amazon rainforest, in terms of varieties of flora and fauna. Mountaintop removal began here around 2003, changing everything in the local region. One million acres have been targeted for mountaintop removal mining; seeing the mines’ devastation from the air makes a strong visual impact of the extent of the devastation. Mountaintop removal was sold to local residents as more efficient, but it contributes to flash flooding that wipes out homesteads: “There is nothing left here to absorb the rain,” said one resident. Company officials claim these floods are “acts of God.” Electrical generation plants in the United States burn around 23,000 tons of coal per day, enough to fill up to 230 rail cars of coal. Every American uses the electrical energy equivalent of five tons of coal every year. West Virginia coal provides electricity to Washington, DC, West Virginia’s utility American Electric Power, and exports to Korea and India, underwriting to a large extent the state government of West Virginia. According to coal company spokesmen, “No one ever proposes an alternative to coal”; they mention all the new technologies that are dependent on electrical energy, such as computers and cell phones. They also claim that “coal is not the dirty old fossil fuel of the past,” asserting that clean coal technology being promoted by politicians promises 250 more years of coal energy with no emissions. A Sierra Club spokesman responds that “There is no way to get away from coal immediately. But there is no political vision on how to move away from

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coal in long run.” Environmental officials claim that “clean coal” will emit just as much CO2, almost as much mercury, and somewhat less sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, but would remain the worst polluter of greenhouse gases leading to global warming. As one environmentalist muses, “We’re entrusted with the custody of these plants and animals, and we’re not doing a very good job of it.” Using present-​day technology, coal plants reduce the impurities in coal by 85 percent through processing. But local residents claim that mine companies dump the sludge into abandoned mines, from where it seeps out into local well water. According to environmentalists, refuse and slurry in dams are in direct contact with surface and ground water, “turning one of world’s best freshwater supplies into crap.” There are over 130 slurry pools in West Virginia and Kentucky combined; local well water is no longer safe to drink, so local residents have to buy drinking water. Environmental officials test ground and well water for contamination, which has risen to dangerous levels since strip and mountaintop mining began. Aquatic life in local streams is gone. One family demonstrates the pollution of their household water by releasing some well water into a clean filter and watching it darken with polluted water. Water straight from the tap is brown, and poor residents can’t afford to buy bottled water or fill water jugs from tanks. They attribute rashes all over their bodies to showering in such water. Some develop tumors and fear dying and leaving their families unprotected. There is a virtual epidemic of gall bladder and liver problems, and the common factor is the water. Says one resident: “All West Virginia is turning into is a slurry dump of chemicals.” A doctor runs down a litany of gastrointestinal and neurological diseases and syndromes among local populations, due to water problems by implication from coal pollution. The mobility of people over time makes a firm determination of the source of people’s health problems difficult to prove. One man interviewed has to take thirty prescription drugs, across-​the-​counter medicines, and supplements daily for his health problems. Coal silos exist right next to schools, and fifty-​three out of sixty households in one town have children with health problems. But some parents fear the closing of the town’s school (situated next to a coal waste site) more than they fear the pollution itself. The coal companies’ strategy for maintaining power is to pit neighbor against neighbor. They aren’t likely to change their approach until it is no longer successful for them.

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The film shows how extensively the coal industry culture permeates West Virginia. Coal is promoted at kids’ baseball games, and the coal company takes young students to visit a generation plant as an educational lesson. Pro-​coal rallies portray critics of coal as anti-​jobs, although the number of coal jobs has decreased by over 90 percent over the past two generations. Many local residents who have long identified with mining are now rebelling in significant numbers against the polluters; the world they hoped to pass down to their children is disappearing. The loss of forests and clean rivers is deeply felt and leads to widespread protests and legal actions, often dividing communities. Conflicting pressures from Clear Air and Clean Water acts have actually increased the chemical processing of refuse. Also, accidental spills have released millions of gallons of coal slurry that clearly have caused deaths. The Ohio Valley Environmental Association has questioned the permitting process of mines, finding that government regulators are not following existing laws. But instead of enforcing the law, government officials choose to change the rules to allow the industry to keep polluting. Permits come so fast that it is impossible for opportunities for public comment to keep up. Local residents know that the wealth generated by coal doesn’t trickle down to most of the people. Should citizens of West Virginia just be resigned to accept their lives and health as “collateral damage,” so the rest of America can “live in the style to which it’s become accustomed”? The film follows the story of one mother of three with multigenerational roots on the land who becomes a community organizer of protests. She says, “They intend to make a toxic dump out of southern West Virginia unless we stop them.” One father says that it’s hard to live with knowing that “we let our kids drink poison. Something had to be done, and if we wait for the Environmental Protection Agency to do it, it will never be done.” The only positive development during the making of the film was the laying of a new series of water pipes to pump clean water to homes from a central water tank. At the film’s conclusion, a local citizens’ group makes a trek to speak at a conference of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. One participant says, “People are still living under that intoxication that we live in a land that is limitless in resources . . . I am happy that somebody in the UN or in the world is saying we need something sustainable now.” Another says, “They want to take coal and turn it into gas, they want to take coal and turn it into oil, they want to take coal and supply the world with electricity, and not

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for five seconds do they consider the fact that coal, in its extraction process, is killing people.” The group pays an impromptu visit to the New York residence of the CEO of a major coal company, without gaining an audience. The most poetic sequence in the film shows a female protester gazing out on the Statue of Liberty. As she watches the water she flashes on images of her home, followed by a series of explosions preparing the mountain for coal removal, and a montage intercutting images of the extraction process with the glowing nighttime lights in Times Square. Burning the Future received a wide and favorable critical response. New York Magazine’s David Edelstein (2008) wrote, “All you need to see is mountaintops blown off, sludge pouring out of faucets, and little kids weeping every time it rains for fear their houses will be swept away by flash floods, to conclude that the most fitting sentence for those responsible . . . is life without parole in the hills of West Virginia.” Edelstein noted that the film has such a rich sense of place that it affects the viewer in ways that less-​rooted documentaries don’t. Variety’s Ronnie Scheib (2008) echoed these sentiments, calling the film “a strong indictment of mountaintop removal mining and its disastrous effects of the environment—​a case made all the more convincing by the coal industry’s propaganda to the contrary.” Scheib added, “Moving seamlessly from individual experience to overview, (the film) stresses the difficulty residents encounter in getting any sense of the big picture . . . they find themselves up against the unceasing promotion of coal as patriotic savior of the region and the country.” Only the Village Voice’s Aaron Hillis (2008) was unimpressed, writing that director Novack’s “inability to tell a compelling story makes it difficult to summon outrage,” and that the film “neglects to offer any practical solutions.” Environmental journals also praised Burning the Future. The Sierra Club and the Rainforest Action Network gave the film high marks for calling attention to the subject in compelling fashion. Earth Island Journal’s Audrey Webb (2009) noted that the film “cleverly and humorously juxtaposes words and images to get its message across.” She added, “If public outrage about the horrific environmental destruction occurring in coal country doesn’t turn the discussion around, the future for West Virginia—​and indeed for all the US—​will be as black as the coal the country currently runs on.” Nature’s Emma Marris (2008), however, faulted the film for failing to give further context by discussing climate change or even worse mining methods practiced elsewhere.

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Crude: The Real Price of Oil Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Distribution:

2009 104 min. Joe Berlinger Joe Berlinger, Michael Bonfiglio Red Envelope/​Entendre Films/​Radical Media/​Third Eye Motion Picture Company, Inc. First Run Features Observational/​Interactive United States http://​www.crudethemovie.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

Joe Berlinger’s Crude (2009) is a classic David-​and-​Goliath story of seemingly powerless indigenous peoples against giant multinational corporations, and of the price paid by the victims of environmental racism and imperialism. The film opens with a map over the title credits, to inform the audience where Ecuador is located, with an animated blackness spreading across the country. This title sequence is followed by an indigenous tribal woman signing a song about the trials of her people. Then comes an introduction to its main subject—​a lawsuit against Chevron brought by Ecuadorian activists, and Chevron’s disclaimer that the litigants are con men who are only in it for the money Flashback to two years earlier: Ecuadorean lawyer and activist Pablo Fajardo speaks to a small rural gathering, trying to enlist support in a lawsuit against Chevron/​Texaco. The locals listen attentively and mourn the loss of their traditional lifestyle. Later we learn Pablo’s brother had been murdered in the early 1990s, possibly because he had been mistaken for Pablo. The backstory is explained through title cards:  30,000 Ecuadoreans had filed a class action lawsuit against Texaco in 1993, which Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001. Chevron-​Texaco succeeded in delaying the trial for nine years and moving the case to Ecuador for trial, where they believed they would have the advantage. The first phase of the trial involved field inspections at alleged contamination sites. The Chevron representative defended the operations as normal for worldwide oil production, and claimed the lawsuit was brought for money for activists and lawyers instead of environmental cleanup. The attorney for the lawsuit called Chevron’s claim a lie

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Figure 7.1  Crude: The Real Price of Oil (United States, 2009, Joe Berlinger) follows the struggles of indigenous Ecuadorean tribes to hold multinational oil companies accountable for the environmental destruction to their rainforest ecology.

and argued that over a billion gallons of toxic waste had been dumped into the local marshes and rivers. Stock footage is used to portray the history of oil operations in Ecuador, including old Texaco PR films and shocking footage of fires and smoke. Overlapping testimony from natives chronicled the coming of oil industry operations and the immediate onset of oil spills in the river, which were followed by a sudden rise in illnesses and deaths of children. Later we see a child with rashes all over her body; a doctor says that 75–​80 percent of local babies have this condition. Others adults have cancer themselves and no money for treatment, to receive which they must travel for a full day. Even the animals they raised for food or money die. Ultimately, the pollution threatens the very existence of the indigenous Cofan nation. Next the film introduces Steven Donziger, the plaintiff ’s consulting attorney in the United States—​covered in cinema verité style—​talking about the case on the phone and rehearsing the trial testimony with the plaintiffs’ representatives. The audience is also introduced to Amazon Watch, a human rights/​environmental organization, and views their satirical animated video disparaging Chevron. This group has come to Houston to confront Chevron at its annual shareholders meeting. From here on the film jumps back and forth between activities in Ecuador and the United States.

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Texaco had turned its operations over to the national oil company PetroEcuador in 1991. The Ecuadorean government and PetroEcuador did bear some responsibility for the situation, in the designation of the industrial area, the displacement of the Cofan people, and the lax regulation of pollution—​but how much? Texaco’s lawyer claims that PetroEcuador has a poor operational record of eleven spills. However there are many oil waste pits that drain into the streams and rivers left from Texaco’s days in charge. In cinema verité style, we follow handheld camera coverage of the Ecuadorean advocate Fajardo as he travels to and from the region, studying English and conferring with the American lawyers. He had actually worked for Texaco as a youth, but became disillusioned with the acts of social injustice and environmental damage he witnessed, which motivated his desire to become a lawyer. He considers his life to be at risk; thus the audience views this struggle very much through the eyes of the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs’ legal team had run up $100,000 in debt (as of 2006, the thirteenth year of the case), so money became an issue for them, including expenses like hiring technical experts and transportation between Ecuador and the United States. Its lawyers acknowledge that part of Texaco’s strategy is to bankrupt the plaintiffs, since the American firm is not taking the case pro bono and hopes ultimately to make money on it. Director Berlinger made an honest attempt to represent both sides of the trial, warts and all. But his more intimate access to the plaintiffs—​revealing their private thoughts, feelings, and doubts—​inherently makes them more appealing than the representatives of Chevron, who are interviewed for the most part in static “talking heads” interviews delivered without much emotional expression. Chevron’s environmental spokeswoman insists that there hasn’t been an increase in death rates from cancer, or that there is any proven link to oil production. She also claims the water meets safe drinking water standards and has only trace concentrations of hazardous minerals, and blames the children’s rashes on the absence of sewage treatment in the region. Finally, she points out that people everywhere are exposed to hydrocarbons on a daily basis, so the question is, what level of exposure is safe? Of course, the huge oil pits sitting astride the Ecuadorean village make a mockery of this argument. Texaco’s representative expresses more respect for the plaintiff ’s attorneys, asking only for the same justice they ask for. He is the only representative of the oil company’s team that appears to speak with any conviction.

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In order to undermine the plaintiff ’s lab tests, Texaco requests and receives an order to inspect the lab where the plaintiffs had their tests analyzed. The plaintiffs see it as a corrupt attempt to intimidate the lab and perhaps get it shut down, so they bring in cameras to record their interview with the judge who issued the order. In response to the claim that he is being used by Texaco’s lawyers, he rescinds the order to have time to study the matter more thoroughly. When Texaco’s lawyer arrives, a very personal confrontation transpires, with lawyer Donziger calling Texaco’s lawyer corrupt to his face. The plaintiffs’ attorneys raise the issue of whether Texaco is trying to corrupt the Ecuadorean legal process. The election of progressive Rafael Correa as Ecuador’s president gives hope that the government will no longer be an ally in lockstep with multinational corporations such as Texaco and Chevron, and that a judicial decision by corruption will be less likely. The public relations push moves forward, with an article in Vanity Fair’s “green issue” in the United States and radio interviews in Ecuador, followed by a press conference at San Francisco City Hall. However, a Chevron video attempts to put the blame on PetroEcuador. Chevron had conducted a $40 million cleanup operation before turning over control in the 1990s and being released from further liability by the Ecuadorean government, but there is inconsistency in these arguments; having first claimed that there were no major environmental problems, Chevron now argues that the problems were all the fault of PetroEcuador. President Correa, visits a contaminated site, and asserts that this particular site was never operated by PetroEcuador. He also states that any Ecuadorean officials who enabled this pollution would be subject to litigation. Texaco responds with visual documentation of the site-​by-​site cleanup process that was certified by the earlier government. However, current inspections suggest that this cleanup was cosmetic, with pits of oil refuse lying beneath the houses in the village. Celebrity help comes from Trudie Styler and her husband, the musician Sting, who have long identified with issues of indigenous peoples. Styler visits the villages to get a firsthand look at the lives of the indigenous people, and promises to take their message back to England, seeking anticipated monetary support for a health treatment plan for local residents. Over Chevron’s objections, the judge ends the inspections and appoints an independent expert to assess the validity of the plaintiffs’ claims and make a nonbinding recommendation to the court. In a montage building up to the climax, the central arguments from both sides are repeated (mostly in voiceover).

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Sting and Styler invite Pablo Fajardo to address the press in conjunction with the Live Earth concerts (Concerts for a Climate in Crisis) and Styler witnesses to what she saw in the Amazon. Their Rainforest Foundation joins with UNICEF and the Amazon Defense Front to provide filtered drinking water to the affected region. The independent court-​appointed expert recommends that Chevron pay up to $27 billion in damages for environmental remediation, excessive cancer deaths, impacts on indigenous culture, and unjust enrichment from their operations. Chevron disputes the report, the qualifications of the expert, and the bias of the Ecuadoran legal system (which Chevron itself had chosen for a venue). The Ecuadorean Chevron attorney is indicted for fraud over the remediation process, along with seven government officials. Chevron unsuccessfully lobbies the US government to revoke trade agreements with Ecuador if the lawsuit is not dismissed. Unless there is a settlement, the case could drag on for ten more years of appeals. Crude was a film that director Berlinger was initially resistant to making. When plaintiff lawyer Donziger approached him and described the story, Berlinger had several concerns: that he was coming into the middle of the story, a problem for a cinema verité–​style filmmaker; that Donziger was an interested party, and Berlinger didn’t want anyone else to have editorial control over the film; and that he was doubtful whether he could raise funding and find a market for a film about Ecuador that was mostly in Spanish (i.e., Was this a story that anyone would want to see?). He accepted an exploratory trip to the rainforest without making any commitments (Berlinger, 2012). That trip was a real wake-​up call for him—​to the extent of environmental pollution and the plight of the indigenous people—​and served as a call to action, a “tap on the shoulder from the universe” that said, “you’re the guy.” Berlinger broke some of his personal rules, like beginning a film without a budget. Most US networks (his usual funding sources) were afraid of the story, not least because of the advertising power of Chevron and Texaco. So he raised 75 percent of the $1.2 million budget from private investors (mainly from Hollywood), with the other 25 percent coming from Red Envelope Entertainment, Netflix’s production arm at the time. Berlinger made several trips down to Ecuador and began shooting with a small crew—​himself, a soundman, a producer, and a local production assistant. He later brought on an Ecuadorean photographer and soundman to cover

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events when he couldn’t be present. Original shooting was on a Sony HVR-​Z1U HDV first generation digital tape camera—​the first time Berlinger had shot a film with a small format camera, making it possible for very small crews to shoot in difficult and low-​light situations, and to shoot with a second camera (a big help for editing). Berlinger claimed that making Crude changed his life: “We are in a survival battle for the planet—​on a path of no return—​and I think the extractive industries are a huge roadblock to an environmentally sound planet. After I made the film and came back to my oil-​consuming life, I felt like I was part of the problem of what happened in the Amazon . . . We all need to be part of changing the system, but until there is an economic incentive. I don’t think the system will change until we get off of fossil fuels” (Berlinger, 2012). Berlinger considers himself as more of a storyteller and social advocacy filmmaker. He tried to use a different approach to an environmental topic than many environmental filmmakers would, adopting the observational mode of cinema verité and trying to show both sides of the conflict. He feels that the film doesn’t take sides in the lawsuit itself, that it presents the arguments of Texaco and Chevron. But he also believes that in the larger picture, the treatment given to the indigenous people and their environment has been an injustice. Berlinger’s style of direct cinema follows the model pioneered by Pennebaker, Leacock, and Wiseman. He films actual events as they are unfolding without voiceover narration, and presents to the audience the real-​time experience he had in observing these events. However, he also uses interactive interviews to provide information that can’t be otherwise obtained. He doesn’t regard the filmmaker as objective, because a director makes thousands of subjective decisions, all of which influence the presentation; he thus regards his films as truthful, but part of that truth is subjective. Structurally, the lack of a narrator framing the action helps to avoid a partisan viewpoint and makes the film more neutral or objective. For a documentary audience, it’s a rare experience to be presented with both sides of an argument and asked to weigh the pros and cons. Berlinger says a filmmaker has to “trust the viewer and hope that the moral truth rises to the top.” It puts viewers in a more active viewing mode, and forces them to consider both sides and come to their own conclusions. Berlinger says it’s “the best of times and the worst of times for nonfiction filmmakers.” Digital technology has democratized the filmmaking process and

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led to more nonfiction (read: reality) programming, but it means more people are making films. In the old days, every ten minutes of film would cost $300 just to get to the editing room. Now for $3,000–​5,000, you can get broadcast-​ quality video shooting on a card, and edit the movie on a laptop. So the cost of entry is significantly lower, but it also lowers what the networks are willing to pay. There are certain networks where the budgets are so low that Berlinger wouldn’t know how to work for them. For low budget productions, there are crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter. But Berlinger needs to raise between half and three-​quarters of a million dollars per film, and doubts that one can do that on Kickstarter. On the other hand, there’s a demand for more salacious, voyeuristic material, so intelligent, long-​form documentaries that examine urgent social problems are harder to finance. PBS is a shadow of its former self; HBO is one of few networks that will still fund long-​form documentaries. Hollywood has flirted with long-​form documentaries, but there is an ebb and flow to the public’s interest. Independent film companies will finance a documentary they think can work, but those are few and far between. Grants have dried up, and the 2008 economic crisis scared away a lot of the private money. One bright spot is Participant Media, started by Jeff Skoll who made his fortune on eBay, which not only finances Hollywood movies with a social conscience but also big documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth. Regarding festivals and markets, Berlinger cites Hot Docs in Toronto and Good Pitch/​Brit Doc as pitching forums for novices. Documentary film markets include ITFA in Amsterdam and the European Film Market (Berlin Film Festival). Some corporate brands want to associate themselves with certain issues, but obviously an oil company isn’t going to fund a film like Crude. According to Berlinger, it’s the most important time ever to persevere and make documentaries, specifically because of corporate control of the media. There is a lack of investigative journalism in the United States; print newsrooms have been gutted because of the Internet, television newsrooms are increasingly interested in infotainment, and corporate ownership of the media and fear of offending advertisers has kept a lot of important stories off the air. So the last bastion of independent reporting is coming from the documentary community. A key part of Crude’s distribution strategy was to launch the film at Sundance. It premiered there and got a lot of positive attention, but only a few tepid distribution offers from smaller companies. Then on an airplane coming back from the Berlin Film Festival, Berlinger sat next to a representative of First Run Features,

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and after seeing the film FRF agreed to release it theatrically and on DVD. In its limited theatrical release, the film was a disappointment, grossing only about $200,000, and a bit more from DVDs. It then screened on the Sundance Channel and was seen on television. Berlinger was already a veteran award-​winning filmmaker when he produced Crude, and it was no surprise that Crude performed well on the festival circuit. It won “best film” awards in nine environmental or documentary film festivals, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in the Sundance Film Festival (imdb.com-​Crude). It won twenty-​two awards, the only one of Berlinger’s films that has won prizes from human rights and environmental organizations. From a critical standpoint, the film was a major success; the response to Crude was extensive and laudatory. Many reviewers simultaneously praised both the film’s balanced presentation of the conflict and also its powerful emotional impact. A. O. Scott (2009) of the New York Times said that “while Mr. Berlinger’s sympathies clearly lie with the oddly matched pair of lawyers . . . he is fair-​minded enough to include rebuttals from the company’s executives and in-​house environmental scientists . . . (and) does so with a welcome sense of human foible and contradiction.” The Washington Post’s John Anderson (2009) added, “Crude is that rare thing in fiction or nonfiction cinema, a movie that relies on its audience to draw the right conclusions.” The film’s style also came in for praise. Scott (2009) also noted that “Mr. Berlinger has both a strong narrative instinct and a keen eye for incongruous, evocative and powerful images.” Han Shan (2009) of Alternet said, “(Crude) not only tells an important story. It tells it in an inspiring, powerful, engaging, and dare I say it, entertaining way.” Stephen Holden (2009) in the New York Times raved, “Rarely have such conflicts been examined with the depth and power of Joe Berlinger’s documentary Crude. These real characters and events play out on the screen like a sprawling legal thriller.” Other reviewers used words like “powerhouse,” “devastating,” and “heartbreaking” to convey its dramatic impact. Even aspects of the film that might have been expected to come in for criticism, like the inclusion of celebrity activists Trudie Styler and her husband the musician Sting were given a positive light by David Edelstein of New York Magazine, who commented how depressing it is that “our last best hope isn’t the courts but the fickle attentions of glossy magazine and the noblesse oblige of celebrities.” The experience of making the film became a cautionary tale for anyone taking on controversial issues when Berlinger and the film became involved in a

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lawsuit of their own. He was not sued for defamation or libel; he believed his film was libel-​proof. Instead he was sued for access to his dailies, including footage not included in the final film. He had filmed privileged conversations and meetings, and Chevron hoped that they would be able to find footage they could use to counter some of the charges in the lawsuit against them. Berlinger believed on principle that, like a reporter’s notes, film dailies should be protected by the journalist’s privilege. Chevron countered with the charge that, since the film had been solicited by the litigants’ lawyer Donziger, the court should not consider that the film qualified as objective journalism. Berlinger feels his efforts at impartiality were lost on Chevron in their lawsuit against him. Unfortunately he lost the case in the Manhattan District Court and in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, so he had to turn over the footage—​an alarming turn of events, which Berlinger sees as an ever-​growing tilt toward the rights of corporations in this country. The only positive thing resulting from the settlement was that Berlinger was able to negotiate the right to continue to show the film without fear of further legal action, so at least he was able to gain an assurance that Chevron would not attempt to prevent the release of the film. Berlinger worries about an extreme chilling effect that the successful subpoenaing of his footage will mean for future filmmakers or whistleblowers. Over 200 documentary filmmakers signed an open letter from the International Documentary Association calling for more legal protection for journalists in the light of this judicial decision. The Chevron lawsuit cost a lot of money as well. So from a business standpoint the film was a failure, but from a reputational standpoint it has been seen by a reasonable number of people, making him believe that it was an important thing to do. As Berlinger (2012) says, “It’s as much a human rights film as an environmental film . . . Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, we have destroyed the livelihoods of the very people we need to be listening to, the people who lived in harmony with nature. We as a Western society have basically eradicated their way of life.” There is a sad postscript to this story. In 2014, a US District Court in Manhattan found that the legal effort of Donziger’s law firm was marred by fraud and corruption for ghostwriting an environmental report and bribing a judge; the decision barred the attorneys from profiting from the case, “making it increasingly likely that that the oil company would be ultimately successful in beating back the legal and financial challenge” (Krauss, 2014).

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The Big Fix Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2012 90 min. Josh Tickell Rebecca Harrell Tickell Green Planet Productions Lions Gate Josh Tickell Interactive /​Performative /​Expository/​ United States http://​thebigfixmovie.com Amazon Video (DVD), YouTube, Hulu

In April 2010, a BP deepwater oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, costing eleven lives and creating an oil spill on the Gulf floor that was not sealed for over three months. This accident was considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, and had a toxic effect on both marine and wildlife habitats and the residents of the southern Louisiana coast, not to mention the local fishing and tourism industries. The Big Fix takes an on-​ the-​ground look at the aftermath of this disaster. The film opens with a review of the historical background of British Petroleum (BP) in Iran, chronicling how the British government attained majority control so their warships could be run on oil according to Winston Churchill’s innovative policies. This flashback continues through the election of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1952, describing how Iran’s seizure of Iranian oil fields led to his overthrow by Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavī (assisted by the American CIA), and on through the Islamic revolution of 1979 and BP’s exit from Iran. The film moves on to an examination of the history of the oil industry in Louisiana, with this quote: “The southern United States was sort of the rehearsal for US imperialism.” Tickell establishes his bona fides as a Louisiana native with deep genealogical roots and a family history of leasing land to oil companies. He references Huey Long’s opposition to big oil in the 1930s, using oil profits to build the state’s infrastructure, and how since Long’s demise the state government has marched in lockstep with the oil industry. One commentator asserts

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that the oil industry controls the government: “Louisiana isn’t a state, it’s an oil colony.” BP CEO John Brown “greenwashed” BP by rebranding it as “Beyond Petroleum,” despite its reputation for risky oil drilling and the worst safety record of any major oil company. Examples include a 1967 tanker accident in English Channel; a 2005 Texas refinery explosion that cost fifteen lives; a production platform that nearly sank in that same year; and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak in 2006. Tony Hayward, the BP CEO at the time of the Deepwater Horizon accident, had replaced Brown. Director Tickell combines interviews of local academics and authorities, who speak to the environmental and political impacts of the oil industry, with interviews of local residents who chronicle their personal health and financial struggles. Virtually all interviewees speak from a regional base, which lends credibility to their commentaries. Tickell attempts to use film star and coproducer Peter Fonda as an entry ticket to overcoming barriers to information access set up by BP and the government, but this strategy proved unsuccessful and Fonda departed back for California. The second strategy was to use a boat to survey the area of the oil spill, but his boat was intercepted by authorities and forced to turn back. Tickell’s third strategy was to attend local meetings and speak with local fishermen, since Louisiana produces 30 percent of the seafood for the United States. Local residents exposed to river water began to have ulcers, sores, and resultant scars on their skin; these illnesses derived not only from the oil spill itself, but also from the chemicals sprayed on Gulf waters to disperse the oil. By carpet-​bombing from airplanes, BP distributed the toxic chemical dispersant Corexit, formerly used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and known to damage human red blood cells. That accident caused health damage that is still being felt by Alaskan residents and those who used the dispersant. Exxon successfully employed a strategy aimed at preventing the federal government from investigating the health impacts of the Valdez spill, and BP followed a similar strategy in the Deepwater Horizon event. Corexit is considered the most toxic of all dispersants. Some independent sources say that BP used twenty times as much dispersant as it claimed. Around four to five million people may have been exposed to the dispersant, but according to the film, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) did not bother to investigate its effects on local residents. Hugh Kaufman, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analyst, tried to raise concern over the dispersants, which are

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really only useful as a cover-​up to hide the amount of oil that was released. Tickell actually interviewed BP’s dispersant commander, but BP denied use of the interview in the film. The mainstream media covered the story, showing oil-​laden birds and interviewing local fishermen. But when the well got capped and authorities tamped down concerns over serious environmental damage, the story basically died. After the headlines faded, academic research teams ran tests in the Gulf waters and found plumes of oil as big as islands on the sea floor, killing all life there. Whether in water or on wetlands, all the creatures that researchers found were dead. By early 2011, scores of miscarried baby dolphins began to wash ashore. Just before he died, energy expert Matthew Simmons publicly expressed concerns that the damage was much more extensive than reported. Some scientists held out the possibility that the entire Gulf marine ecosystem could yet collapse. Four Gulf area universities received grants totaling $35 million right after the Deepwater spill, and some professors actually changed their opinions after receiving these grants. Dr. Edward Overton of LSU undertook a media tour to minimize concerns, and President Obama’s energy advisor Carol Browner supported these claims. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal admonished the Obama administration for even putting a moratorium on gas drilling in the Gulf. The filmmakers decided to sneak out onto the beaches at night to film dead animals; they also caught BP spraying dispersants after they had claimed they had stopped. After two years of working on the film in the Gulf, coproducer Rebecca Harrell Tickell (Josh’s wife) began to have blisters, rashes, and respiratory problems, and saw a local doctor who said he thought her problems were due to chemical exposure. The doctor himself had also experienced respiratory problems that he attributed to Corexit. Over a year later, fresh evidence surfaced that the capped well was probably still leaking oil; Corexit was still being sprayed near beaches and across fishing areas. People are still experiencing respiratory problems and skin rashes from current exposure. According to the Associated Press, BP (as of 2012) had fully paid only ONE of the 91,000 claims against it. (Big Fix, 2012). The film then turns its attention toward problems at the national level regarding regulation of the oil industry and its accidents. Tickell asserts that our whole system of predatory capitalism depends upon oil—​plastics, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and also the banking and financial industries: “The corporation

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as we know it was created as an instrument to control and colonize the resources of other people. It is an instrument of wealth transfer from the many to the few.” Billionaires can contribute money to political campaigns with no disclosure whatsoever. For example, the Koch brothers have donated $200 million to pro–​ fossil fuel organizations including the Tea Party and Americans for Prosperity. The US Congress subsidizes the fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries, but consistently blocked subsidies for alternative energy. Says Vermont senator Bernie Sanders:  “We are giving unbelievable power to a handful of people to control the politics and the nature of our democracy.” Journalist Chris Hedges states, “The market sees everything as a commodity—​human beings and the natural world.” The film asks whether anything changed with Obama’s presidency. The process of governing tends to change people, and whoever has the most money still rules. Obama’s administration made no changes to the spill response plan in the Gulf of Mexico, and it began issuing permits for new drilling in the Gulf by January 2011, only months after the accident. Perhaps BP’s being the largest oil contributor to the Pentagon was a factor, and the fact that oil revenues are the second largest contributor to federal coffers after the IRS. As Tickell said in an interview (Willis, 2012): “On the surface, the movie is about an oil spill . . . Underneath the surface it’s about a system for extracting energy . . . of government and corporate behavior that work in collusion . . . and how that’s rigged or fixed . . . to deflect any momentum toward true alternative energies.” He further asserts:  “This is not a one-​time thing. This is what our world is going to look like more and more as we go down this slope of running out of fossil fuels . . . Are we okay with living on a planet that’s being annihilated, toxified and destroyed by these types of disasters?” Still, the film offers one tiny ray of hope—​a Louisiana resident who has installed solar panels and batteries on his home, and now lives off-​grid on only a $300 investment. The film ends with a montage of faces of local residents who fought back in a battle they know they can’t win. But Tickell’s narration urges that “history has shown us great changes can be made, monumental shifts can happen when people realize the power they possess, and they unite and take a stand. In the struggle for true justice and a better world, where do YOU stand?” Creator of Fuel (2008) and Pump (2014), Josh Tickell is one of the prime investigative video journalists currently producing documentary films. He directs and narrates in an avowedly activist participatory manner, encouraging

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audience identification with his perspective. His style of filmmaking is very well crafted, with an effective mix of archival footage, contemporary news footage, a quick editing pace, and a varied musical score that complements the content, sometimes ironically (as in matching Leonard Cohen’s song Everybody Knows to a montage about corporations and government). Clever counterpoint editing of interviews from state officials, environmental advocates, and energy experts follows the mode of classic agitprop—​for example, by juxtaposing quotes about a destabilized society with images of a decaying amusement park that has broken statues of superheroes. The Big Fix screened in at least thirteen film festivals. It was an official selection in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, played the DC Environmental Film Festival, and—​in a controversial selection—​opened the New Orleans Film Festival. But the film failed to get significant theatrical or television distribution, so for the most part it found its audience through DVD sales and environmental organization screenings. Since the film was not extensively seen, most of the reviews came from New York, Los Angeles, and environmentally oriented organizations and websites. But the reviews it did receive say as much about the fatalistic state of mind of Americans as they said about the film. More than one reviewer, after disparaging the film’s doom and gloom mood and its corporate-​government conspiracy theories, went on to say that everything that the film asserted was probably true—​yet somehow these criticisms of the film are allowed to stand. Sometimes it feels like the film’s truth-​telling is held against it. As Tickell himself admits: “The majority of the information that we put in the film about the oil spill, came from the President’s commission on the oil spill. Turns out that very few people read the document” (Willis, 2012). Reviews opined that the most effective sequences were those that involved local Louisiana residents who had lost their health and livelihoods; Ms. Tickell herself encountered health problems likely caused by her work on the film. Some commentators respected the way the film broadened its discussion to the corruption of the political system by oil money and power, but others saw this movement toward a wider analysis as a distraction from the film’s central focus. Some critics felt that the film offered little in the way of new information, citing Jeff Goodell’s (2010) article in Rolling Stone that covered much of the same territory. But of course no journalistic report, no matter how well researched and written, can have the same impact as people’s faces as they tell their own stories of personal tragedy.

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Gasland Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2010 106 min. Josh Fox Trish Adlesic, Molly Gandour, Josh Fox, David Roma International Wow/​HBO Documentary Films Docurama Films Josh Fox Participatory/​Performative United States http://​www.Gaslandthemovie.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

Gasland is one of the most influential activist environmental documentaries of the early twenty-​first century. The film’s mode is basically participatory/​ performative with an observational camera style. Filmmaker Josh Fox shows people in their homes telling their personal stories, with some voiceover narration and expert testimony mixed in. He employs a lot of shaky and out-​of-​ focus shots, a variety of cameras with different levels of image resolution, and sometimes disorienting complexity editing sequences to keep viewers alert and engaged. In the film’s introduction, Fox says, “I am not a pessimist. I’ve always had a great deal of faith in people, that we wouldn’t succumb to frenzy or rage or greed, that we’d figure out a solution without destroying the things that we love.” After this opening quote, the film begins with a series of clips of testimony from energy company representatives before a Congressional committee on the vast potential for oil and natural gas production in the nation’s shale plays—​including claims that hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) could provide 99 percent of the nation’s energy needs, that this process is sufficiently regulated, and that no research has proven that this technique endangers underground water supplies. Then Fox introduces his personal story, told through old photos and home movies, of a rural resident of Milanville, Pennsylvania, living in a house that his “hippie” father built. Immediately we are in David versus Goliath territory—​the lone individual against the paragons of economic and political power. His formative influences included Pete Seeger playing “This Land is Your Land,” and growing up in the environmentally progressive 1970s.

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In 2009 Fox received a letter in the mail advising him that his home sat on top of the Marcellus Shale, and offered him a signing bonus of almost $100,000 to lease his land. But what he did not know (at the time) was that a 2005 energy bill had exempted the oil and natural gas industries from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund Law, and about a dozen other environmental regulations. One of the prime beneficiaries of this regulatory relaxation was the Halliburton company, former employer of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose Energy Task Force—​composed almost entirely of energy company executives—​had a large hand in writing the second Bush administration’s energy laws. At the time of the film, fracking operations had been established in thirty-​ four states. The process of hydraulic fracturing injects a mixture of water and chemicals into the shale below the surface, breaking up the rock and releasing the gas or oil. Fracking fluid includes up to 596 chemicals—​some known carcinogens, and some unidentified due to proprietary legal protections. As long as these chemicals remain secret, there is no legal basis for investigating their effects. Each new well drilled requires one to seven million gallons of water; each successive fracking operation requires the same, and one well may be fracked up to eighteen times over its life span. Adding up the total known already-​existing fracking operations, Fox estimates that many trillions of gallons of water will be polluted by dangerous fracking chemicals. Next comes a humorous interlude—​a montage of filmmaker Fox making a large number of telephone calls attempting to interview any energy company official, from a Halliburton representative to oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, all to no avail. Not one single energy company representative agreed to be interviewed for the film. Fox then drives to pay a visit to the region of the fracking well nearest to his home that was already in operation. Dimock Township (PA) neighborhood residents had noticed that their well water was bubbling and fizzing, had a metallic taste and looked brown; many people were suffering from new health problems, and some had pets that were vomiting and losing their hair. A chemist sent by the energy company advised one family not to drink the water, shower in it, or wash clothes or dishes in it. Other company representatives visited the homes and insisted that the water was safe, but refused offers to actually drink it themselves. If these residents’ problems proved to be typical, Fox realized that fracking would have a transformative and negative impact on the ecology of all the regional river basins.

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Then the film takes an even darker turn, as an aura of paranoia begins to envelop Fox’s investigations. Some residents are willing to talk but refuse to be photographed out of fear of the repercussions. He starts to get anonymous calls from people who are afraid to speak out, and suggest that he should be as well. One resident gives him a jar of water and asks him to have it analyzed. Fox is finding is harder to be merely an objective reporter and is being increasingly drawn into the drama. One filmmaking technique Fox utilized was to record his own telephone communications—​perhaps partly to personalize the film, but perhaps also to preserve a record for posterity, should something unfortunate happen to him. Expanding his investigation to a wider geographic frame, Fox visits Weld County, Colorado, where he films a now-​famous scene of a man putting a matchstick to his kitchen faucet and watching the water catch fire. The same man had also tied a plastic bag over his wellhead and watched it fill with gas. An attempt to interview a state environmental administrator who had rejected this family’s queries meets with a refusal (though a camera secretly recorded part of the conversation). Local news stations begin to cover a number of other citizens with health problems whose water is flammable, and the public begins to notice that fracking may cause real problems. Some families have been given reverse osmosis filters by energy companies to clean their water (after signing nondisclosure agreements intended to keep people from speaking publicly about their problems); but these filters do not remove all of the toxic chemicals in the water and their health problems persist. Ranchers have no choice but to feed their cattle water they know is polluted with poisonous chemicals—​and in a year or two, says one farmer, they’ll be on somebody’s dinner plate. The brazen dishonesty of the energy companies offends the basic sense of moral decency of these people. Local landowners have no effective legal recourse, and believe the energy companies don’t mind if they go out of business or pack up and leave. As one woman says, “the less people they have to deal with, the more they can drill.” Another farmer laments the loss of his way of life. There is nowhere to go, he says, because fracking is happening everywhere; the only way to fight back is to “get together and stand up speak with a unified voice.” Fox interviews Weston Wilson, a twenty-​year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who asked Congress to investigate reports of pollution from fracking when EPA representatives with conflicts of interest refused to do so. The EPA, says Weston, is asleep at the wheel—​it is simply not prepared to answer legitimate questions from American citizens. Under Bush/​Cheney, the

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Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was persuaded to lease vast areas of public lands for oil and gas exploration and drilling—​perhaps the greatest transfer of public lands to private hands in history—​despite the Bureau’s mission “to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.” Drilling for each fracking rig requires over a thousand truck trips for transporting equipment, chemicals, and water, and in most areas the roads, not built to carry that kind of heavy traffic, deteriorate rapidly. Before water can be removed from a site, it sits in “flowback” filtering pits, which allow a lot of toxic liquid to seep back down into the ground. Bubbling from gas seepage sometimes occurs in local streams, which can even be set on fire. Evaporation from the pits only serves to spread the pollution into local air, where it may fall back in the form of ozone and acid rain on the grasslands. This pollution coincides with significant decline of the population of local antelope and other species. Fox dons a gas mask just to film these pits, and in a gesture toward surrealism, plays his banjo in front of a fracking rig while wearing his mask. Fox interviews Dr. Theo Colborn, former EPA advisor and winner of many environmental awards, who has managed to identify 596 different chemicals in 900 different chemical products used in oil and gas drilling. She asserts that all

Figure 7.2  Gasland (United States, 2010, Josh Fox) follows the director’s personal journey as he interviews families and whistleblowers about the negative impacts of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on the environment and public health.

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of our environmental laws are being ignored, and that the neurological health effects of these chemicals are insidious and often irreversible by the time they are diagnosed. Symptoms may range from the loss of sensory perception (e.g., smell or taste) to general disorientation to excruciating pain and cancers. Beyond the health effects, Colborn states that every time land is fracked, the breaking of the shale rock causes a mini-​earthquake. The accumulated impacts of hundreds of fracks in a local region can cause earthquakes that are more than “mini,” causing the uncontrolled release of shale gas. Fox drives through Texas, where the fracking boom began on the Barnett Shale. The entire area around Dallas/​Ft. Worth is a virtual pincushion of over 10,000 fracking wells; rigs and pipelines are even being built in urban areas. Air pollution researcher Dr. Al Armendariz estimates that the total emissions from fracking operations in the region exceed the emissions from all passenger vehicles in the United States. A  study in one town found amazingly high levels of known carcinogens and neurotoxins in the air, fifty to hundred times the public health standard levels. Dr. Armendariz laments the fact that governments have not committed to regulating the energy industry like other major industries such as food production. He also states that once an aquifer becomes polluted, it is one hundred times more expensive to clean it up. So the lesson from Texas is that you can’t wait a decade or more to address the environmental problems from fracking, because it will simply be too late. The mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana has been the recipient of effluents from the US fossil fuel industry for over sixty years, and it has created a permanent contamination situation. Fox finally gains an interview with a public official with Pennsylvania’s Department for Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger. Hanger admits that fracking is not benign to the environment, but claims that every household that has suffered contamination has been helped. He further suggests that his real-​world responsibilities lend his views more substance than those of filmmakers who can “wash their hands” of the difficult issues. Only months after this interview, the Pennsylvania DEP had 25 percent of its budget cut and hundreds of staff were laid off. Returning to his home base, Fox examines the pressures on the Delaware River basin that provides unfiltered water to New York City, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. But when public hearings were held in New York City to discuss the threats from fracking, no representatives from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) made an appearance. A press conference

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failed to draw any press coverage. In Washington, DC, New York representative Maurice Hinchey proposed removing the exemptions for the fossil fuel industry from the Bush/​Cheney energy law. When a Congressional committee met to discuss the issue, most of the witnesses were representatives of the energy industry who denied that there was a major problem. From a point of view of legal regulation, whether at the state or federal level, any progress toward ensuring the safety of fracking or limiting its expansion is very uncertain. On the horizon is the possibility that hydraulic fracturing might expand to Europe or Africa, so Gasland could eventually become GasWorld. Gasland enjoyed a brief theatrical run, grossing only about $31,000, but then was cablecast on Home Box Office (HBO) where it enjoyed a large audience. The film was screened in many festivals and won at least a dozen prizes, including a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and an Emmy for Best Non Fiction Directing. It received nominations for the 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (losing to Inside Job) and the Writers Guild Award for Best Documentary Screenplay. The film gained much recognition and notoriety for Josh Fox, who appeared on many television interview programs to promote the film and its cause. Most environmental documentaries are generally ignored by the targets of their activist protest. It is therefore a testimony to the effectiveness of Gasland that it received widespread blowback from the fossil fuel industry and conservative publications supporting that industry. Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Joe Richter (2011) offered a “Reality Check” column asserting that the film’s claims of water contamination and lack of regulation were exaggerated. In The Economist, “Sorting Frack from Fiction” (2012) cited the “Gasland effect” in claiming that Europe’s concerns over shale gas were largely unjustified. Former Pennsylvania energy regular John Hanger (2011), interviewed in the film, wrote for Business Wire that the film’s perspective was “distorted,” in part because it doesn’t consider the upside of natural gas when compared with coal or oil. National Review’s Kevin Williamson (2012) referred to the film as “fraudulent,” citing all of the standard arguments in favor of fracking—​the goal of energy self-​reliance, the economic benefits to landowners, a preference for local over federal regulation, and the necessity of providing energy for consumers and the economy. However, the article displays its prejudice by equating environmentalism in general with “ideological nihilism.” Neither did Gasland escape the notice of actual energy industry publications. Energy Daily (Johnson, 2011) cited statements by America’s Natural Gas

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Alliance (ANGA) and Energy in Depth (EID) decrying the film’s nomination for an Academy Award as a promotion of propaganda. Petroleum Economist (Robertson, 2011), which interviewed director Fox, damned the film with faint praise by calling it “well shot.” But it also described the film as sensationalist, unbalanced, anecdotal, and personal, and echoed the criticism that Gasland failed to address the alternatives to natural gas. There was even an oppositional documentary—​FrackNation (2013), produced by documentarian Phelim McAleer—​that challenged Fox’s credibility, especially on the basis that gas seepage has always been present in areas with shale rock. This film follows the basic format of Gasland in interviewing both experts and landowners. McAleer also produced a film challenging An Inconvenient Truth. Some of his films have been financed by fossil fuel companies, although FrackNation was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that was in turn promoted by fossil fuel lobbyist organizations. As for the conventional field of film reviewers, the critical response was generally very positive, sometimes enthusiastically so. Variety’s Robert Koehler said, “Gasland may become to the dangers of fracking what Silent Spring was to DDT.” He further expounds, “For all of its engaging information, the film itself is a piece of beautiful cinema, rough-​hewn and poetic, often musical in its rhythms . . . The marriage of sound and image . . . veers between nightmarish moods and lyrical reveries.” The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever said, “Fox makes for a warmhearted and darkly humorous road-​trip companion . . . Gasland is one of those documentaries that will send you into the Google quagmire in search of some answers.” Sam Davies (2011) in Sight & Sound opined, “Fox builds up a riveting portrait of near-​apocalyptic environmental damage and a corporate mindset willing to ruin water resources irrevocably for the sake of a few years’ profit.” Along with other reviews, Sight & Sound evokes the shadow of Michael Moore in saying that “the closest Gasland gets to Moore’s broadbrush symbolism comes when Fox dons a gasmask and plays a banjo to emulate 1960s protest singer Pete Seeger, while in the background fracking drills and condensate tanks fume hellishly.” John Johnson (2011) in the Journal of Appalachian Studies addresses substance more than style: “Fox excels in his presentation of evidence related to the science behind the detrimental effects of the (fracking) industry . . . Fox raises many questions for social scientists . . . What is the role and state of democracy in an age of destructive energy extraction? Why are citizens forced to prove their cases while the extractive industries are protected behind a veil of assumed

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innocence?” Writing for AREA, a publication of the Royal Geographical Society, Gavin Bridge (2012) noted that as a medium, “film is particularly good at documenting this ‘epistemology of experience’—​the way . . . that polluted tap water bubbles, hisses, tastes and smells, the feelings of nausea and headaches residents associate with the release of chemicals from condensate tanks.” Bridge goes on to say, “What makes Gasland work . . . is that it does not stay confined to this register of personal experience. Instead, intimate testimonials are juxtaposed against other ways of seeing and knowing nature.”

Gasland Part II Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2013 125 min. Josh Fox Trish Adlesic, Josh Fox, Deborah Wallace International Wow Docurama/​HBO Josh Fox Participatory/​Performative United States http://​www.Gaslandthemovie.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

Fox’s sequel Gasland Part II opens by demonstrating from news clips that there is no discernable difference between the two political parties in terms of promotion of natural gas. We hear Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton speak words that could just as easily come from the mouths of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. Next comes a brief synopsis of director Josh Fox’s history and an update on the state of fracking in the Delaware Valley, followed by an ironic reference to sequels and The Empire Strikes Back. The visual style of Gasland Part II is even more dynamic and frenetic than the first film, employing more creative visual effects in its photography and editing. But there is a problem with a sequel on a topic like fracking. If one has seen the first film, one must sit through an awful lot of repetition; if one has not, everything goes by so fast that it’s hard to follow and absorb it all. But one point is immediately clear: Gasland Part II will be as much about the battle over media

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messaging as about environmental threats, and about the damage fracking has done to the lives of families. The film asks why the increasing body of scientific evidence and public protest against fracking has had a minimal impact on governmental policy or public discussion. If anything, Fox’s second film is even more challenging and perhaps depressing to audiences, because as concerned as it is with the harmful effects of fracking, it is even more troubling that in our current legal and political environment, there is little or nothing that can be done to stop it. This sequel does raise some fresh issues. Pro-​drilling landowners had leased over 80,000 acres in Dimock County, including the land across the stream from Fox’s homestead. But after accepting payments for leasing their land for fracking, some homeowners began to fear that their property value may have depreciated by more than the amount of those payments; if they decide to move away, they can’t sell. Reports of undrinkable water became so prevalent that even pro-​fracking Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell had to take notice and requested his liaison Lance Simmens to come up with a solution. The new plan was to run a municipal water line to the polluted neighborhoods and sue the energy companies to pay for the cost. Soon towns and municipalities all over Pennsylvania began to draft moratoriums or outright bans on fracking. New York State passed a one-​year fracking moratorium, and the EPA Secretary said that the federal government would enforce regulations if states would not. Clean water and clean air have come to be regarded as civil and human rights, but these rights are endangered by the inability of the laws and government agencies to effectively protect the public from water and air pollution from energy company operations. The gas industry donated $1.6  million to the 2010 gubernatorial campaign of Republican Tom Corbett, and Cabot Oil and Gas supported an “Enough Already” campaign to convince Dimock voters that their water was safe and that fracking opponents wanted to kill jobs and raise taxes. Corbett was elected governor, and plans for the water pipe to provide Dimock with fresh water at Cabot’s expense were cancelled. The Corbett administration also repealed the drilling moratorium on state lands and forests. Several outgoing members of the Rendell administration, including Rendell himself, gained employment in lobbying or legal firms with ties to the oil and gas industry. A return visit to Ft. Worth, Texas, reveals that even wealthy people who live in mansions are not protected from having horizontal fracking wells drilled

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beneath their property. One such individual lights the water from his family hose on fire. The EPA subsequently stepped in on this situation, warning that the house might actually explode. But the family still had to pay $1,000 per month out of pocket for clean water delivery. Another wealthy family had their health negatively impacted by toxins in the air from over twenty fracking wells around their home. Some political conservatives have begun to rebel against the Texas Republican Party for their willingness to allow energy companies to run roughshod over people’s individual private property rights. Energy companies counter with so-​called educational campaigns that can only be called insidious. They produce cartoon books for young children showing fracking in a positive light and donate them to school libraries. Even worse, a recording from an energy industry conference reveals that energy companies manipulate domestic public opinion by employing the same PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) that the army uses on foreign populations during wartime. In the Chesapeake River basin alone, Chesapeake Energy has over 100 operatives working in local communities to define activists opposed to their goals as “insurgents,” as if they were a foreign enemy. An energy company PR representative actually recommends downloading the US Army Counterinsurgency Manual; energy companies literally see themselves in a psychological war with the American public. The Department of Homeland Security shares information with the oil and gas industry to help identify anti–​fossil fuel activists and define them as potential terrorists. While politicians and industry representatives continue to claim that there is no proof that fracking is unsafe, Cornell Professor of Engineering Tony Ingraffea states that 5 percent of all cement casings crack almost immediately, which means that around 5,000 fracking rigs in Pennsylvania alone are leaking dangerous chemicals into the water tables. The film shows documents from energy conferences and company publications that demonstrate how and why 35–​50 percent of fracking wells leak over time. The history of public relations firms’ disinformation campaigns is well documented, from the bogus science that claimed that cigarettes did not cause cancer, to current attempts to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change. The strategy is simple: create the impression in the public mind that the science is unsettled, that there is substantial debate or disagreement, so the public will not know what to believe and needed regulation may be forestalled. Fire exploding from an Australian water well demonstrates that fracking is not only an American problem. The Obama administration has promoted a

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worldwide shale gas initiative, mapping shale plays in over thirty countries on every continent except Antarctica. Australia has the driest water table in the world, so its aquifers are extremely vulnerable. Democratic governance itself is under threat in many countries because of the financial power of energy companies and their ability to steamroll citizens’ groups in political campaigns and in the courts. Fracking has been linked to an increase in earthquake activity in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, and even Great Britain. But now fracking is spreading even to urban areas like Los Angeles, which sits on several earthquake faults. California’s central valley, which provides 40 percent of America’s produce, sits astride both the Monterey Shale play and the San Andreas Fault. Other natural disasters like the flooding from hurricanes Irene and Sandy can also spread polluted water beyond its anticipated range. One scientist challenges the commonly accepted myth that natural gas contributes less to global warming than other fossil fuels. Although burning natural gas emits only half the amount of CO2 of coal, the huge amounts of methane leaked during various stages of the fracking process more than offset those gains, methane being an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Are there genuine alternatives to powering our society with fossil fuels? Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson (2009) coauthored a study that determined that the projected demand for energy worldwide could be met completely by renewable energy sources, without reliance on fossil fuels or even nuclear power. Only a few members of Congress were willing to be interviewed for this film. All Democrats, they stressed the powerful influence of the fossil fuel industry on legislators, and the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions on the ability of corporations to influence the political process. In the 2012 elections, fossil fuel companies contributed over $150 million to various campaigns, and they spent $747 million on lobbying efforts to support the “Halliburton exemption” for hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Beneath the surface of simple political corruption, the picture gets even more complex. According to the film, by 2012 “the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had received over twenty applications to build liquefied natural gas ports to ship American gas overseas.” Perhaps as much as 40 percent of US production is intended for export markets—​in Asia and elsewhere, where prices are significantly higher than in North America. The plan is for shale gas to be the new world energy source.

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Inevitably the prospect arises of thousands of miles of pipelines to be built across the United States to connect gas refineries to power plants and export terminals, while more and more rural families will have to buy water because their well water is no longer safe to drink. An invisible migration has begun of families moving away from fracking sites but unable to publicly discuss their stories, keeping silent because of nondisclosure agreements with energy companies. A combination of health problems and declining property values lead the residents of entire neighborhoods to abandon their homes—​at losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars—​and sue the energy companies. The pain in the faces and voices of these people conveys a powerful emotional impact. Director Fox states that there is something inhuman about forcing people out of their homes and then preventing them from telling their story. In 2011 an EPA study revealed high levels of cancer-​causing compounds in the aquifer sites in Pavillion, Wyoming, and determined that the pollution was the result of hydraulic fracturing. Tests in Fox’s home county of Dimock also revealed large numbers of toxic chemicals in the water of the majority of homes. But then election-​year politics entered the picture, and the EPA declared Dimock’s water to be safe without releasing the results of the tests to the public. Fox even interviewed a man who insisted that an EPA representative told him “off the record” that he shouldn’t drink his water, but that he couldn’t say it publicly and would deny it if he were quoted. After the election of 2012, documents revealed that the EPA and energy companies knew of the truth about water pollution all the time. EPA director Lisa Jackson resigned. In Dimock, corporate lawyers threatened to sue the families for their attorney’s fees, and the families’ own lawyers urged them to settle. Even corporate promises of settlements often were not kept. The House of Representatives’ Committee on Science and Technology convened a hearing to attack the EPA’s findings in Wyoming. Director Fox followed the protocol for signing up to record the hearing, but was barred from filming; when he asserted his constitutional rights, he was arrested over the objections of some committee members. Fox may have been the first journalist arrested in Congress for simply doing journalism. Fortunately another member of his crew was present to record the arrest. Fox recounts: “I felt like I could see a horizontal well bore snaking underneath the Congress, shooting money up through the chamber at such high pressure that it blew the top off of our democracy.” Gasland Part II premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and screened on HBO. It does not appear to have screened theatrically, received only two festival

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awards (an Environmental Media award and Best Film in the Wild & Scenic Festival), and did not receive extensive review coverage in the mainstream press. Most of its distribution appears to have been through activist and community screenings, which probably means that it’s been viewed much less than its predecessor. If so it’s too bad, because the sequel delves more deeply into some topics that the first film only hints at. In Grist, Sarah Laskow (2013) noted, “In the years between Fox’s two films, that fight (over fracking) has intensified. Big environmental groups (like the Sierra Club) that once worked with the natural gas industry started pushing back against fracking. The Obama administration strengthened its support for the development of natural gas resources. New York keeps delaying its decision on whether to allow fracking; Pennsylvania keeps letting the industry get away with doing pretty much whatever it wants.” Alternet’s Alison Rose Levy (2013) describes Gasland II as “a travelogue through a land of broken promises, abandoned homes, and extinguished rights.” The film “continues Fox’s exploration by offering textured, in-​depth profiles of half a dozen or so families in geographically diverse locations . . . we watch them move from disbelief to indignation to disillusionment, as they learn that no one’s willing to make industries accountable, even when a town loses its water . . . A  government once so proud of its democracy it sought to export it, now overrules the rights of its citizens.” Looking at the film as cinema, Laskow (2013) says, “Fox plays a new role in Gasland Part II, one he’s more confident about. He identifies himself as a journalist and a storyteller. When he’s on screen, he is often playing the part of the documentary filmmaker, camera in hand.” The New  York Daily News’ David Hinckley (2013) described Gasland II as “a cinematic primal scream,” noting that the film “couches its anger in the measured tones of someone who is trying to suppress that anger long enough to explain to outsiders why the situation is so outrageous.” Newsday’s Verne Gay (2013) felt that the sequel lacks the “pure narrative clarity” of its predecessor, asserting, “Fox is on to something. But he’s on to too much of something, and that sprawl . . . tends to dilute the story he set out to tell.” As for its message for the future, Levy (2013) of Alternet says: “As the film makes clear, shale gas is no bridge to a renewable energy future. It’s a detour away from renewables, a dead-​end . . . the technology for renewables has evolved so thoroughly that 100% of U.S. energy needs could now be supplied by wind, complemented by some use of solar and water energy.”

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Trashed Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2012 92 min. Candida Brady Jeremy Irons, Titus Ogilvy Blenheim Films First Pond Entertainment Jeremy Irons Participatory/​Expository United Kingdom www.trashedfilm.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube (by subscription)

Trashed follows actor/​producer Jeremy Irons around the world as he studies the impacts of garbage and chemical pollution on the world’s species and ecosystems. The film begins with views of the earth from space, and then moves in for some spectacular shots of people digging through trash dumps amidst a smoky haze. The photography announces immediately that the film will demonstrate a high level of production value. Irons speaks with people in person on location, and also presents interviews with scientists and experts in a more conventional expository form. This is very much Irons’s film, visually and through narration, but shots of him walking on trashed beaches sometimes begin to become repetitive. He’s also kind of goofy and doesn’t always ask the most intelligent questions, but in a way that’s good for the film—​he asks the questions that the audience might ask. Visiting Lebanon, Irons asks why the beaches are covered with trash. When did they stop burying it? In a dump outside Beirut, over 80 tons of garbage is dumped astride the Mediterranean every day, onto a “trash mountain” over 40 meters in height. Toxic chemicals leech into the ground, while a cloud of methane blows across the town’s inhabitants. Water runs off directly into the sea, affecting the fish and the livelihood of local fishermen. Rubbish from this dump travels as far as the coasts of Cypress and Turkey. Annual dumping worldwide includes 200 billion plastic bottles, fifty-​eight billion disposable cups, and untold billions of plastic bags. In Yorkshire, England, a toxic dump sits in close proximity to a town center and a hospital. Despite tighter regulatory standards than many countries, this

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dump violates them with regularity. Space for waste has run out in dumps from Beijing to New York State. Before the Industrial age most waste was biodegradable, but in the past 150 years waste has become more resilient (e.g. synthetic plastics) and more toxic (e.g. radioactive materials). Also, clay barriers to prevent the leeching of waste chemicals are now known to fail almost universally. Since waste sites are not comprehensively mapped, no one can predict how coastal erosion and sea level rise will affect the release of dangerous waste products. Lawsuits and associated tests of dust contamination around waste sites always find elevated levels of dangerous chemicals—​but also always seem to conclude that they don’t pose a significant risk to human health. However, independent tests often find contamination levels thousands of times higher. A major study covering twenty-​one major landfills in five countries found significantly higher rates of birth defects among those living within 3 kilometers of a waste site. However, even studies like this one fail to call for concrete actions steps to reduce the risks. Incineration is the clearest alternative to landfills. There are at present 190 known municipal incinerators in the United States, and may be as many as 800 in the world. The island nation of Japan has at least 469. There are plans in the United Kingdom to quadruple the number of incinerators, adding ninety-​one to the thirty existing ones. Incinerators have been redubbed “waste-​to-​energy plants” to green their image. One scientist who originally favored incineration changed his mind completely after reading studies about the dispersal of toxic chemicals like dioxin from smokestacks. Estimates say that between 50 and 80 percent of the dioxin pollution of the entire planet is the result of emissions from waste incineration. Dioxin is particularly cited as a cause of birth defects, but its effects may not become evident for years or even decades. A prime example is the effect of Agent Orange in Vietnam, where birth defects still occur with uncommon frequency forty years after the end of the war; Irons’s visit to meet some Vietnamese children is heart-​wrenching. However, virtually all of us have low levels of dioxin in our bodies, and even low concentrations have potentially harmful effects. One study estimates that if dioxin pollution stopped tomorrow, it would take six generations for it to be undetectable in humans. Cows eating grass containing dioxin emissions may absorb as much dioxin in one day as a person would get from breathing contaminated air in fourteen years. One farmer in Iceland living downwind of an incinerator faced the prospect of putting down his entire herds of cows and sheep; his cows’ milk

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sometimes contained a strange residue. Although his farmland is now considered worthless, he has to date been offered no compensation by the government. In one French town, twenty-​four out of eighty residents on a street next to its incinerator developed cancer, and 350 farms and their animals and agricultural products were ruined. But the lawsuit representing these citizens was dismissed in court; the judgment asserted that the links between their problems and dioxin pollution could not be “proven.” Filters to screen out toxins are very expensive and undependable, since some nanoparticles cannot be filtered out. So efforts to filter out toxins are often abandoned for financial reasons. In fairness, it should be noted that some municipalities have been driven deep into debt and even bankruptcy because of the costs of incineration. Incinerators in Iceland, Argentina, Canada, Scotland, France, and the United States have been cited for violating their emission limits hundreds of times without penalties being invoked. Even after incineration, there is burnt ash that is often extremely toxic and must be disposed of. Mr. Irons suggests that where potential environmental harm is involved, governments and businesses should proceed according to the precautionary principle—​a practice should be determined to be safe before the public is put at risk. An unusual consequence of global warming is that toxic chemicals that have become concentrated in Arctic ice are beginning to be released back into the ecosystem as the ice melts. One scientist urges that in order to stop emitting more toxic substances into our environment, we need to turn to cleaner alternatives. Returning to the beaches, Irons begins picking up trash, focusing particularly on cigarette butts, which he describes as toxic time-​release capsules. Plastics are another huge problem; annually we produce 260 million tons of plastics, consuming 8 percent of world oil production in the process, and 80 percent of it is thrown away within a year. In the developing world, the waste situation is even worse. For example, in Jakarta, Indonesia, waste is dumped directly into the local river, whose banks are populated by a million poor Indonesians, with no organized waste collection. Yet people drink its water and bathe in it. When trash reaches the sea, it poses a diverse range of grave threats to sea life, both large and small. One test of deep-​sea crabs revealed that over 80 percent had plastic in their bodies. Of even more concern is that, as plastic decomposes, it attracts other chemicals, absorbing dioxin, herbicides, pesticides, and flame-​ retardants. This absorption increases the toxicity of plastic fragments by several orders of magnitude. It is almost impossible to make a mile’s trawl anywhere in the world’s oceans that is plastic-​free. One test in the northern Pacific Ocean

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yielded six times more trash than plankton; in this “garbage patch,” covering 20 million square kilometers, the trash is about as dense as the water itself, a plastic soup of mostly tiny fragments of plastic. This patch is created in a convergence zone encircled by ocean currents that draw in trash from America on the east and Japan on the west. There are four other garbage gyres in the world—​one in the southern Pacific, two in the Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean. Beyond their carcinogenic properties, synthetic chemicals have other negative impacts too. They may mimic hormones that influence how our organs form and function, suppress our immune systems, and decrease reproductive rates. Chemicals rise up the food chain, from plankton to small fish and crustaceans, to larger fish and mammals, finally concentrating in top predators in large amounts. The bodies of killer whales have to be disposed of as toxic waste. Projected population declines among these species are very high and perhaps unsustainable. How can society begin to deal with the problem of waste? One good starting point would be reform of packaging: companies need to think more creatively about end-​of-​life recyclability. Consumers need to change their habits, to think about the packaging as well as the product when they shop; using refillable containers is one strategy. Globally, humans throw away around 1.3 billion tons of food per year; discarding food wastes all the energy that went into growing, transporting, and cooking that food. Composting and anaerobic digestion are inexpensive processes that can produce organic fertilizers and biogas for energy generation. The combination of reducing trash inputs and recycling more efficiently could save billions of pounds in the United Kingdom alone. In San Francisco, 75 percent of homes and businesses participate in the city’s three-​stream Zero Waste Initiative, now over a decade in development. A recent documentary, Racing to Zero (2014), focuses specifically on this topic. The city’s recycling center utilizes both humans and magnets to sort through the waste stream. The waste is ultimately crushed into bales and shipped abroad (e.g., to China) where it is fashioned into new products. San Francisco also composts food waste on an industrial scale, reducing methane emissions. As a bonus, these operations also employ a large number of people, and could employ millions if adopted on a national basis. As Irons says, we are at a tipping point. The small-​scale solutions that actually exist now need to be scaled up; they need to become the norms instead of the exceptions. Trashed screened at forty environmental and documentary film festivals, receiving prestigious coverage at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the Tokyo Film

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Festival (where it won the Special Grand Jury Prize), and the UK Green Film Festival. It was shown at a meeting of the European Parliament, where the producer and director appeared on a panel to discuss the issue of waste disposal. It had a limited theatrical release but did not achieve significant box office receipts. Producer/​narrator Jeremy Irons actively supported the film with several public appearances and interviews. The headline on the New York Times review of Trashed summed up the critical reaction: “Gloom and Doom for the Planet” (Catsoulis, 2012). It is hardly a shock that a film composed mostly of images of garbage and pollution failed to generate much excitement among audiences or critics, but in general the response was respectful. Reviews from both Hollywood Reporter (Young, 2012) and Sight & Sound (Rizov, 2013) expressed that the film did not present a balanced exploration of the issues it raises or identify where to place blame. Other reviewers appreciated the crisp digital cinematography and editing, as well as the positive though limited solutions offered in the film’s finale. The Good Energy Blog (“Trashed,” 2013) praised the film highly, calling it “a brilliant, intelligent documentary that has gone to extreme lengths to provide its viewers with information that is un-​ignorable.” One point of universal agreement was that the on-​screen presence and sincere commitment of Jeremy Irons elevated the film’s entertainment value. To quote Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer Neil Young (2012):  “This slightly bumbling, mildly eccentric Englishman makes an ideal audience surrogate as he asks various scientists and experts complex scientific matters in layman’s language.”

Under the Dome (Qiongding zhixia) Date: Length: Director: Producer: Narrator/​Host: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2015 104 minutes Chai Jing Chai Jing Chai Jing Performative/​Expository China None YouTube (https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM)

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“Few documentary makers anywhere in the world,” wrote Dan Edwards (2015), “would dare dream of attracting 300 million viewers—​especially for an exclusive online release. Fewer still would imagine reaching an audience of that size within a week.” Yet Chai Jing’s Under the Dome (2015) may have achieved that lofty goal. Most people in the United States have never heard of this program, but in historical perspective it will likely eclipse Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as the most influential environmental documentary of the early twenty-​first century. Chai Jing is a well-​known and respected investigative journalist and former news host on China Central Television. Time magazine included her in its list of the world’s 100 most influential people (Ma Jun, 2015). Her recent autobiography Insight sold over one million copies. In 2014 she undertook an independent investigation of the environmental problems engulfing China and produced a self-​financed documentary based on her research. Filmed in a “TEDx talk” format similar to Gore’s presentations in An Inconvenient Truth, it consists of a casually dressed Chai Jing speaking to a large auditorium audience while walking to and fro in front of a huge screen, upon which she displayed short montage videos, interviews, and charts to support her talk. Ironically, Chai borrowed the title from a US cable television series This program was released online on Tencent, China’s most viewed Internet portal service, on February 28, 2015, just before the commencement of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The film received support from China’s Environmental Protection minister Chen Jining, and from director of the Beijing-​based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs Ma Jun, and it was streamed by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party. In China, as noted by Edwards (2015), “the rise of the Internet since the turn of the 21st century has played a crucial role in the ongoing dissemination of views, stories and cultural objects not sanctioned by the authorities.” Despite China’s formidable online censorship, the film was allowed to be seen, at least in part, by around 300 million viewers within a very short window of time. Then, after three days, the Shanghai Propaganda Department ordered the film be taken down and forbade the media from publishing articles about it. What could have motivated such an extreme and immediate reversal of policy by the Chinese government? At the beginning of the film, Chai Jing tells the story of her daughter’s operation for a brain tumor in the context of air pollution, and of having to keep her daughter inside her home for half of the year due to smog levels. She thus establishes her identity as a mother as well as a reporter, putting the focus on future

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generations and making the political personal. She also displays her experience as a journalist, interviewing workers and children who lived in smog-​shrouded mining regions where they never see a blue sky, stars, or clouds. What is smog? Chai seeks to offer a scientific description of an invisible enemy that can be measured. One scientist verifies that smog contains at least fifteen chemicals known to be carcinogenic, including benzo{a}pyrene, the world’s most harmful carcinogen, at twenty times the national average. Chai carried a test device on her person for a day in Beijing, and it became totally blackened by the invisible particles in the air. The concentration was measured at almost 306 mg per cubic meter—​over four times the average of China, and over twelve times the World Health Organization’s standard. Chai Jing asks to have tests run on her in an experimental chamber, but doctors refused, saying that exposing her to pollution in an experiment at the levels of ordinary daily exposure would be a violation of medical ethics—​even though China’s citizens breathe that smog every day in the streets of Beijing. Asks Chai: “Each one of us lives our entire life in an open experimental chamber, and what will be the result of this experiment?” Tests on ordinary people living in the city reveal pollution levels likely to cause respiratory inflammation and cardiovascular disease. Almost half of China’s 1.35 billion citizens are affected by a significant level of pollution. The film uses a clever animation to show how these particles disrupt the body’s cellular processes, wherein smog particles attack humans and break down their immunity system. To visualize the consequences, Chai Jing filmed a surgical procedure for a woman with lung cancer; viewers can see the accumulation of black particulate matter in her lungs and, despite not having a history of smoking, her lymph nodes are black. Today when Chai goes outside, she first checks the air index and the direction of the wind, and then she wears a mask. Chai went to NASA for a visual history of smog over northern China, which clearly shows severe smog over the past decade, during which people were not even aware they were being exposed to toxicity. One study documented correlations between smog and lung cancer as far back as 1976–​1981. But at the time, people were only dimly aware of the smog, and accepted it as the price of “progress.” Recent data indicates a correlation between hospital admissions and high smog levels, especially among the most vulnerable populations of young and old. Exposure to pollution and smog early in life results in reduced lung function later in life; it does NOT cause adaptation. The

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Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that pollution causes an average premature death toll of half-​a-​million people per year. Where does smog come from? Mostly from human activity: burning coal and oil (60 percent), biomass, industry, cultivation, chemical fertilizer, and airborne dust. China burns three to four times more fossil fuels than Europe; in 2013 China burned more coal than the rest of the world combined. Chai visits England to recall the impact of burning coal on English life in the mid-​nineteenth century. She recognizes that China’s current fossil fuel consumption (and India’s as well) is caused by a desire to catch up with the West economically. But China’s coal is mostly lignite—​poor-​quality coal—​and use of lignite has been increasing over the years. Other countries like Germany and England also burn lignite, but they clean most of it, while China washes less than half. Three Chinese provinces produce more steel than the entire United States. Shutting down steel factories is unthinkable, as China needs steel and its factories employ hundreds of thousands of people. There is a close correlation between China’s GDP and its steel production. Cement plants also contribute significantly to smog. During the decade 2002–​2012, the number of cars in China grew by five and a half times. Today cars are responsible for almost one-​third of Beijing’s air pollution. The lack of public transportation aggravates pollution in China’s cities due to so much idling in congested traffic. Chinese trucks lack emission control devices, and thus pollution levels are high even in mornings before rush hour. Trucks using diesel fuel account for only 17 percent of vehicles, but they emit 70 percent of vehicular emissions, and their emissions are relatively more toxic. Other significant sources of pollution are oceangoing shipping, small boats, and airplanes. There are legal regulations for vehicular emissions, but they have never been enforced. Chai interviewed many officials from government and industry, but no one ever seemed to believe they had real authority to enforce their regulations. In China the petrochemical companies effectively set the standards, unlike most other industrialized nations that have environmental regulatory agency oversight. As elsewhere, the biggest reason for avoiding or not enforcing environmental regulations comes down to cost. Many energy and steel companies have serious overcapacity and struggle to make a profit; some only survive due to subsidies from the government. After recounting the projections for growth over the coming decades, Chai Jing utters this dire warning: “This means that even before we exhaust our natural resources, we will have exhausted the capacity of our environment. This

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means that for China, the pollution has only just started.” Yet in order to get back the blue sky of the past, China would have to cut its overall emissions by 50 percent. Clearly these two futures are utterly incompatible. Chinese environmental officials are not unaware of the need to forge a green, low-​carbon, circular economy, but it must be done in a shorter time frame than it took London to solve its nineteenth-​century pollution. This is the point where Under the Dome shifts into “solutions” mode, offering a menu of techno-​fixes, behavioral change, and enforcement of regulations and fines on individuals and industries—​including many models of action that have proven effective in the West. Replacing coal and oil with natural gas where possible is one priority. Letting the market work by ending government subsidies for “obsolete, backward-​thinking, polluting, and unprofitable industries” is a key element. Perhaps the most important factor is pressure from the public for information transparency and clarification of environmental laws, including citizen lawsuits when necessary. Chai cites a few individual actions she herself has taken against violators. She says that “the fact that a person knows they’ve made a tiny contribution, that they’ve actually made things a little better, can make them feel more at ease.” She acknowledges that government has taken positive steps in measuring pollution, but that it must do a better job of making such information publicly available, in part by utilizing modern communications technology like cellphone apps and websites. Under the Dome concludes with an inspirational montage with a stirring musical score, urging citizens to take action, and ends with Chai again invoking her concern for her daughter’s future, and her desire to protect the entire world. Hatton (2015) of BBC News wrote that Chai “worked to gain government approval for the documentary before its release . . . she sent the documentary script and interviews to the National People’s Congress—​China’s parliament—​ and the government office working on China’s new oil and gas laws.” She also edited the film down from its original four-​hour length and deleted some material that questioned China’s developmental model. She and her collaborators also declined interview requests from foreign journalists in order to avoid the appearance of criticizing China from abroad. What factors influenced the film’s initial release and subsequent suppression? Some speculate that Chinese President Xi Jinping wanted to establish support for his commitment to environmental reform, but then balked when the response was so widespread as to encourage serious unrest toward the government. The

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New York Times’ Daniel Gardner (2015) noted that the film “may have provided a safe ‘public’ space for Chinese citizens to vent collectively about government corruption and incompetence in addressing the toxic air they breathe each and every day.” The fact that the film was allowed to be screened at all just before a major party congress, and that it received favorable reviews from Chinese environmental regulators (including new minister of environmental protection Chen Jining), led reviewers to speculate that it may have enjoyed covert support from top government officials, who may have changed their minds after the explosive public response, fearing too much political blowback. Under the Dome received criticism on various accounts. An oil company official attacked Chai’s level of knowledge and her intelligence. Some attacked her patriotism for having her baby delivered in the United States; others suggested that she received foreign financing for the project, despite her claim that she spent $160,000 of her own money to finance the film. Unsurprisingly, in the West commentary on Under the Dome tended to appear more as news items than entertainment reviews. Gardner (2015) called it “China’s ‘Silent Spring’ moment,” noting that China “is by no means monolithic,” and that the film “threw its weight behind those ministries and interests that favor a definitive shift away from economic development or ‘G.D.P. worship,’ and towards stewardship of the environment.” The Washington Post’s Steven Mufson (2015) wrote: “In the end, Chai does something few Chinese ever do publicly: She calls for action, urging her fellow citizens to ‘stand up,’ report violations of environmental laws and demand change.” He adds: “In China, the problem isn’t an absence of regulatory structure, it’s the wholesale failure of that structure, in which Chinese industry, much of it state-​owned, disregards regulations, sets its own standards, and manages to play off different parts of the bureaucracy against one another.” Sense of Cinema’s Dan Edwards (2015) offered an excellent analysis of Under the Dome’s formal structure in the context of the history of Chinese documentary narrative. “In constructing her film as an illustrated lecture,” noted Edwards, “Chai is drawing on a very long history of didactic verbal address in Chinese documentary. During the Maoist era . . . the expository mode was employed to the exclusion of almost any other.” He cited as predecessors the film River Elegy (Heshang, Xia Jun, 1988), which contributed to nationwide protests leading to the Tiananmen Movement, as “a classic example of the expository mode, relying on the voice of a narrator we never see to make sense of its visual content . . . It appropriated the ‘voice-​of-​God’

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narration so long aligned with the nation and/​or Party, and placed it in the service of a particular social group seeking to involve itself in arguments playing out at the highest levels of government.” Edwards also cites the more recent Beijing Besieged by Waste (Laji weicheng, Wang Jiuliang, 2011)  as a direct precedent for Under the Dome, mostly observational in visual style with information conveyed through voiceover narration. “In personalizing and embodying the expository voice of her documentary, and aligning her own subjectivity with that of her audience,” wrote Edwards, “Chai mirrors broad global developments in documentary . . . In China, this shift has been led by films produced outside official channels—​particularly of an activist nature—​in a small but vibrant independent production sector that has been primarily facilitated by the rise of domestic digital video technologies.” Only time will reveal the ultimate impact of Under the Dome on China’s environmental consciousness and policymaking. But without a doubt, Chai Jing’s film exemplifies the spread of activist documentary filmmaking—​with its goals, values, and forms—​beyond the cultures of the West to challenge political systems with different historical and cultural roots. This film is an historic marker for how both liberal values of free speech and the spread of accessible video technology have the potential to change the face of global communications.

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8

Food and Water

The two most fundamental human needs are food and water, yet access to safe and abundant food and water is becoming more precarious across the globe. Industrial-​ scale farming has become dependent on fertilizers and pesticides based on increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuel resources; aquifers and fertile soil are being depleted by the excesses of modern monoculture agriculture; climate change threatens to turn croplands into deserts; and both food production and regional water supplies are suffering from monopolistic incursions of corporatism, whether by increasing concentration of control over the food supply, genetic modification of foods that introduces unknown threats into agricultural ecosystems, or private control of water supplies previously regarded as common resources. In many cases, potential solutions to these problems are obstructed by the interwoven connections between the corporate and political worlds, which privilege money and power over local control and welfare. The films in this section address these problems, which often threaten to undermine healthy ecosystems in irreversible ways.

The Future of Food Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

2004 88 min. Deborah Coons Garcia Deborah Coons Garcia, Catherine Butler Lily Films Lily Films Sara Maamouri Expository United States www.thefutureoffood.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

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A lot has changed in the practice of agriculture over the past half-​century or so, much of it dangerous to the public’s health and food choices. Deborah Coons Garcia’s The Future of Food begins with the origins of those changes—​in the introduction of chemical agriculture via wartime chemicals like nitrogen-​based fertilizers and pesticides developed from nerve gas—​and then moves forward to the recent technology of genetic engineering. Along the way Garcia describes the impacts of corporate agriculture on our environment, our political and legal systems, and on individual farmers who are forced to adapt to the new regime or perish. A little over a century ago, the large majority of people still worked and lived off the land, but today in the United States less than 2 percent of the population are farmers. Large-​scale monoculture farming led to a reduction of diversity of crops and greater vulnerability to pests and disease; 97 percent of the varieties of vegetables grown just over a century ago are now extinct. The increased use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that fostered the Green Revolution greatly expanded food production across the globe, but also increased costs for farmers and created health risks for the public (DDT is a prime example). In the 1970s, the Monsanto Corporation released Roundup, a powerful herbicide that became ubiquitous across the agricultural landscape. Then in the 1990s, gene-​splicing techniques allowed Monsanto to create “Roundup Ready” seeds that would not be negatively impacted by Roundup. So, increasingly, farmers had to go to Monsanto for both their chemical support systems AND their seeds. Many genetically modified (GM) products went to market without any serious attempt to study their impacts on either human health or the environment. Furthermore, based on a 1980 Supreme Court decision, genetically engineered biological products were allowed to be patented, reversing two centuries of legal precedent. Pesticide companies proceeded to buy up seed companies, patenting even seeds that had not been genetically modified, thus increasingly monopolizing the market for seeds. Today Monsanto owns an estimated 11,000 patents. But a big problem arose, because the wind doesn’t have much respect for the law. The obvious disconnect is that once a GM product has been unleashed into the environment, it would spread uncontrollably, blowing across property boundaries, and farmers would wind up with GM crops on their land without their knowledge or intent. Lacking a record of purchase, farmers could be taken to court for patent infringement. Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser ran afoul of Monsanto when Monsanto detectives found evidence of their seeds on his land,

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Figure 8.1  The Future of Food (United States, 2004, Deborah Koons Garcia) critically examines the intrusion of genetically engineered foods into our ecological, economic, and political systems.

despite his not having purchased them. He was only one of as many as 9,000 farmers to feel the power of Monsanto’s legal threats. By suing some farmers, Monsanto sends out a message of intimidation to all farmers, the message being: buy GM seeds or we may come after you. Fighting Monsanto in court is likely to result in farmers losing their life’s savings and even their land; this is basically what happened to Percy Schmeiser. Most farmers, facing expensive legal bills with little chance of winning their cases, will surrender to demands to pay settlements and sign nondisclosure agreements that prohibit them from discussing their settlements. By being forced by these settlements to destroy their own (contaminated) seeds, they essentially become vassals to Monsanto. The end result of this situation could ultimately be to legally compel all farmers to become Monsanto customers. This company has essentially declared a war of conquest on traditional agriculture, a war it is winning. The Future of Food then turns toward an explanation of the science and history of genetic engineering. The film credits medical biotechnology with creating many life-​saving products. But unlike these products, which are kept contained in laboratories, GM plants are released into the environment and cannot be controlled. In the natural world, bacteria and viruses are experts in cell invasion, and thus have been the focus of genetic engineering. Genetic modification works by taking a gene from one organism and depositing it into the cell of

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another organism, resulting in recombinations of DNA. There are various techniques for achieving this goal; in the film, these processes are visualized through animations accompanied by explanatory narration. But there are unanswered questions and potential dangers in introducing these substances into nature and the human population. Could GM products be playing a part in the increasing resistance of humans to antibiotics? The future interactions of strands of GM DNA are entirely unpredictable. Microbial ecologist Dr. Ignacio Chapela describes the biotech revolution as “the largest biological experiment that humanity has ever entered into.” An early variety of GM corn was introduced into some commercial products around 2001 and some people began to have serious allergic reactions. Three government agencies are responsible for the safety of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is responsible for assessing the environmental impacts of GMO crops and regulates their field-​testing. But as of the film’s production, not one single environmental assessment had been requested by the agency for over 900 GMO field test applications. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates insecticides, including the natural insecticide BT that is engineered into all BT crops. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for food safety; any novel substance in food is supposed to be tested. Genetic engineering companies try to avoid regulation by insisting that their GM products are “substantially equivalent” to products already in the marketplace. As such, these products would fall into the GRAS category of regulation, or “generally recognized as safe,” and thus require no special testing or labeling. On the other hand, companies want to patent their products, and to obtain a patent, in theory they must be different in some way from other products. So these corporations try to have it both ways, depending upon which branch of the government they are dealing with at the time. Over twenty-​ five other countries, including all fifteen countries in the European Union, require labeling of GM food. But in the United States, attempts to pass laws or public referendums to require GM food labeling have been continually frustrated by multimillion dollar campaigns financed by GM corporations, primarily based on the arguments of opposing excessive government bureaucracy and higher costs to farmers and manufacturers. But not labeling GM foods not only means that consumers are uninformed; it also means that potentially negative health effects cannot be traced back to the GM products. Without traceability, regulatory agencies and scientists cannot compile a

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database on health effects; once databases are created, corporations could be held to have liability for negative health effects. Perhaps the most prominent reason put forward for using GMOs is that GM products will increase crops yields. However, a 2000 study at the University of Arkansas found one GM crop suffered an impairment of its roots system of 25 percent, which could translate into a decreased crop yield under stressed conditions such as drought. Roundup-​ready soybeans may have a decreased ability to fix nitrogen. Some “superweeds” have developed a resistance to Roundup, forcing farmers to spray even more dangerous herbicides than they did before they began using Roundup. The administration of President George H. W. Bush, through Vice President Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness, insisted that GM products be introduced into the marketplace essentially without regulation, over the intense objections of FDA scientists. The administration responded by appointing Michael Taylor, former senior counsel for Monsanto, as FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy, continuing the pattern of the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the corporations they are supposed to regulate. Former Monsanto executive vice president Linda Fisher became deputy administrator for the EPA, and has exchanged positions three times. President Bush nominated former Monsanto attorney Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. President Clinton’s secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor served on Monsanto’s board of directors—​ and there were numerous others appointed to administrative positions with ties to Monsanto. Beyond that, Monsanto has made large campaign contributions to politicians running for Congress. Today government agencies rely to a great extent on voluntary testing done by the companies themselves. For GMO manufacturers, the foxes were now guarding the henhouse. The result is predictable: the number of acres planted with GM canola, corn, soybeans, and cotton has gone from zero in the 1980s to 100 million acres as of 2003. Mexican agriculture has been trying to stem the GMO tide; in 1998, the import of GM crops was banned. Mexico has hundreds of varieties of corn, each adapted to its niche geography and climate, and this diversity provides natural protection against pest infestation. One strain of corn from Mexico helped to ease the 1970 corn blight in the United States. But because the United States subsidizes corn production, it is actually cheaper for Mexico to import corn from the United States than to grow it at home, and by the year 2000 GM corn had found its way into Mexican fields. By 2003, the United States had sold millions of pounds of GM corn to Mexico. This development threatens the diversity of

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Mexican corn, as well as raising questions as to how GM producers will respond to legal issues of infringement. Some Mexican authorities are not inclined to recognize US patents on traditional knowledge, or even to concede that life forms should be patented at all. Many nations have refused to accept GMO crop imports from the United States, including Japan, Indonesia, Iceland, and the European Union. The loss of corn exports to Europe runs to around $300  million per year. Farmers are being squeezed financially from banks and suppliers on one end and shrinking markets on the other; they often have to work off-​farm to break even, and thus have little time to work on improving their knowledge of actual farming practices. They could not stay in business without government subsidies, which thus indirectly support the GMO industries. In short, they have become little more than hired hands for their bankers and chemical manufacturers. The next big debate involves GM wheat. The potential for contamination already exists from research plots in North Dakota, and GMO wheat was discovered in a shipment from the United States to Thailand. Biotech companies have become deeply involved with educational institutions. A company that patents a gene that causes cancer may limit the ability of other researchers to seek cures. Companies have sued university researchers for doing experiments with genes that the companies own. The common wisdom in the United States is that “biotechnology is progress,” and there is little support for faculty or students who raise questions about that basic judgment. Biotech corporations fund research, but their vast amounts of money can intimidate researchers who challenge the impacts of GMOs. Renowned scientist Dr. Arpad Pushtai at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, was suspended after announcing the results of his research on the suppression of immune systems in rats that ate GM potatoes. Cornell researcher John Lozzi’s research on caterpillars that died when fed BT corn pollen was denigrated by the biotech industry. The journal Nature retracted a peer-​reviewed paper by Dr. Ignacio Chapela (a consultant to this film) when biotech supporters challenged his findings. Says Chapela: “Biology was a very diverse field of inquiry. But because of the advent of this technology, we are seeing a narrowing down and a trimming off of all those branches of biology, just to the benefit of this one side, and I very much want to fight against that. Just as we are losing genetic diversity, we are losing intellectual diversity that we are going to find very needed in the future.”

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Crucial to a complete understanding of the future of food is the consolidation of industries. Eighty percent of US beef products are processed by only four companies. Four “clusters of companies” control the majority of seeds. Corporate control over genetic engineering extends well beyond agriculture; corporations have plans to produce genetically engineered fish, livestock, poultry, insects, and trees. Within a decade, all of the world’s food retailing could be controlled by six companies. Since biotechnology brings no real nutritional benefit to the consumer, it is being sold as a way to feed the world’s starving people—​despite the fact that most of these impoverished people were subsistence farmers before globalized economic forces drove them from their land. A prime strategy for gaining world food supremacy is to standardize patent laws across the world. International patents can provide the basis for a sort of genetic imperialism, whereby multinational corporations can go into a country, patent a plant or a tree, and then charge that nation’s citizens for using it. Finally, the existence of terminator genes in GM seeds would also seem to contradict any beneficent impulse toward poor countries on the part of biotech corporations. And what will happen if terminator genes pollute non-​GM crops around the world? The film’s last section asks: “What would it take to change the American food system to make farming sustainable and improve public health and environmental quality?” Some basic principles would be to work within local ecologies, move away from the industrial monoculture model of agriculture, and get off of fossil fuel inputs. Organic farming, farmers markets, and community-​supported agriculture are good models. In 1997 the USDA tried to revise the definition of “organic” to include irradiation and GMOs. After a massive backlash from consumers, the USDA relented. In the United States purchases of organic produce have risen from $1 billion to $13 billion in little over a decade; consumers are making much more conscious food choices, but conscious choices depend upon the quality of our information. For change to happen, people (and especially farmers) will have to demand it. Producer/​director Deborah Coons Garcia always displayed an interest in biology, having won first place in a Cincinnati Science Fair while in high school. She began making films in college along with developing an interest in social justice. As she learned more about GM food, she made it a central focus in what she called “the first film about the food system.” More than just promoting guilt or fear, she wanted audiences to come out of the film with a better scientific understanding of food and nutrition (Garcia, 2012).

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Garcia avoids the Los Angeles–​style commercial aesthetic and celebrity spokespeople, choosing to focus her interviewing on scientists and real-​world people. She doesn’t approve of the tendency to make filmmakers the stars of their own films, referring to those with on-​camera narrators as “cult of personality” films. She prefers to be invisible, to let the film speak for itself, thus raising the question of whether an on-​camera producer-​narrator helps or hurts a film’s impact, whether the viewer identifies with him/​her or not. She wants to use film to “turn power back to the people.” The Future of Food’s strengths include the depth and clarity of the scientific information, and the integration of so many different aspects of the topic—​ political, social, ethical, and governmental policy. Garcia’s approach is: “Don’t dumb down, smarten up. How do you distill complex content so it’s really clear but still true? In science, you have to use the right word, or it stops being true.” For example, she challenges the claims of Monsanto that genetic engineering is just the same as traditional hybrid breeding, by explaining exactly how it IS different (for example, by mixing gene strings from different species). She wants to present material that is accurate enough to be used in a classroom. Garcia sees the partnership between the US government and the corporations as a huge problem. Corporations are destroying the environment while the government is not stopping them. This collaboration is visualized in the film by the “revolving door” image. What people need to do is rethink what government does. You can’t have an organic field next to a GMO field, because the GMO field will contaminate the organic field. If the government doesn’t limit corporate power, corporations will “just continue eating our lunch.” Farmer Percy Schmeiser’s personal story represents the human side of the conflict, but the patenting story is also an important angle. Garcia tries to imagine what questions an audience would ask and then proactively answer them. One challenge is to present a complete picture but make it an emotional experience. If a film is too long and people are waiting for it to end, it loses that emotional impact. How does a filmmaker strike a balance between scaring the audience and giving them hope? Says Garcia: “I don’t think that fear and guilt work. People will just turn off.” People have to be made aware of the reality of problems, but once that’s achieved, then the tone needs to change: “You have to give people a way out.” She’s talked to people who quit their jobs or went to law school as a result of seeing her film. Part of the problem with films about global warming, says Garcia, is that the problem is just too big for people to know what to do about it. But grassroots movements are not enough; policies must be changed.

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Does sitting and watching a film change anything? Films about suffering people on other continents may be emotionally moving, but do they offer the viewer a course of action for change? Or does a viewer just feel virtuous by sympathizing with the plight of the suffering? Garcia notes that it’s very hard to get funding for documentaries, and some organizations have simply quit funding them. Money often comes with strings attached in terms of control. A filmmaker usually needs to have some footage to get a grant, and then has to wait for years to get the money. Currently, a significant amount of documentary funding comes from the San Francisco Bay Area, especially through ITVS (the Independent Television Service). Garcia has worked with the same editor, Vivian Hillgrove, for twenty years, so they have a close collaborative relationship. Garcia estimates that over 80 percent of the film is original footage, and the animations were produced directly for the film. The only stock footage used was individual shots (e.g., helicopter shots, shots from the Andes and Africa); the only non-​original sequence was the farmer in a tractor whose wife shot footage of him; despite Monsanto’s settlements, farmers could talk about the cases, just not their settlements. The Video Project served as an excellent distributor to educational markets, and Garcia has been happy with her distributors for international television. However, her only attempt to employ a mainstream domestic distributor—​to package her film with other documentaries for big box store sales—​turned out to be a money-​loser. In fact, that distributor refused to pay her anything for five years, making her a strong opponent of conventional distribution methods. She was particularly distressed to see all the protections that she had written into her contract thrown out during arbitration. So in the future Garcia plans to act as her own distributor, feeling that she knows her markets better than anyone else. The film received a lot of support from reviews and publicity from food journals and organizations, and Garcia did hundreds of interviews and presentations. She admits to being an “organic fanatic,” having been vegetarian since 1970. Sometimes Garcia would invite organic food organizations to have a presence at screenings; often they would assist with publicity and media contacts, on occasion going so far as preparing organic meals. How can one measure the impact of a film? Garcia feels The Future of Food helped jump-​start the movement of farmers markets, organic farming, community gardens, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). The roots of this movement go back to the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s; it gave people specific things they could do and choices they could make.

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The Future of Food enjoyed a very successful worldwide release, premiering at the Film Forum in New York, followed by a tour of over a dozen American cities. The film screened at the American Film Institute/​Discovery Channel Silverdocs and numerous other film festivals, winning awards at four of them. The Oscar screening committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose it as one of the best documentaries of 2004. Beyond the festival circuit, the film screened around the world at several professional conferences of organic and agricultural organizations, as well as public screenings in countries on five continents. According to Garcia, millions of people have seen The Future of Food; the film has been translated into several languages and shown all over the world. Screenings were often arranged in support of political initiatives like ballot propositions or laws being considered. The film did enjoy some theatrical screenings, but Garcia didn’t have a major distribution marketing campaign. Mostly it has been promoted by ordinary people who see it and tell their friends, “You have got to see this film.” The Future of Food made a million dollars from website sales alone; it recovered more than its production costs by pioneering grassroots community screenings, direct sales, bulk orders, and library screenings, including a screening for the USC Cinema Graduate Documentary program. Many prominent media publications reviewed The Future of Food as well as some scientific and activist publications, including several published interviews with director Garcia. James Crawford (2005) of the Village Voice described the films as “a rarity—​a muckraking exposé that attempts to raise the level of public debate through responsible research and sober rhetoric.” The New York Times’ Stephen Holden (2005) called it a “sober, far-​reaching polemic against genetically modified foods” and a “quietly inflammatory film (that) poses many ticklish ethical and scientific questions.” On the other hand, Variety’s Robert Koehler (2005) seemed unimpressed, saying the film “opts to show only one side of the argument” and is “capped with a pitch for organic eating that’s much too weak.” From film journals, Deirdre Boyle (2005) of Cineaste regarded the film as “a frightening, depressing, and at times enervating film about the pesticide-​and disease-​resistant foods marketed and consumed by us for over a decade.” Even though she had reservations about the film’s “manipulative tactics” and “naively utopian remedies,” she closed with this: “Garcia has won the first of many battles in a war that may be as significant for our future as the war on terrorism and just as ambiguous in terms of identifying our true enemies.” Doug Cummings (2006) of FilmJourney.org called it “one of the most informative and practical

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documentaries I saw last year . . . (a) dense patchwork of science, history, and political commentary.” Thomas J.  Hoban (2005), writing for Nature Biotechnology, called the film “an excellent overview of the key questions raised by consumers as they become aware of GM food . . . Some of the most disturbing issues raised involve cracks in the regulatory and scientific foundations on which the agbiotech industry rests.” Alternet reporter Denise Caruso (2004), writing for the Organic Consumers Association, noted, “In less skillful hands, a film about genetically modified (GM) food could have been tough sledding for regular folks to sit through. Making visual sense of the science alone would be a daunting task. But The Future of Food is an engaging and lucid presentation of not only the science of genetic engineering, but of the people and the politics behind what looks to be a pitched battle to control the global food supply.” Symphony of the Soil (2012), Garcia’s “sequel” to The Future of Food, delves more deeply into the place of agriculture in the natural world. More lyrical and poetic in style, it strives to change people’s attitudes about “what can we get out of nature” and increase their sense of connection with the earth. Whereas The Future of Food was an avowedly activist film, Symphony of the Soil offers a sensitive, visually engaging combination of environmental education and spiritual uplift.

Food, Inc. Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Companies: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Based on (in part): Companion Book: Website: Available at:

2008 94 min. Robert Kenner Robert Kenner, Elise Pearlstein River Road Entertainment/​Participant Media/​Dogwoof Pictures Magnolia Pictures/​Alliance/​PBS Participatory/​Expository United States The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan Food, Inc.: A Participant Guide by Participant Media and Karl Weber (Editors) http://​www.takepart.com/​foodinc Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

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After An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc. has been the most successful US environmental documentary in terms of audience reach and theatrical box office receipts, grossing over $4.4 million in the United States alone. Not coincidentally, it was produced by Participant Media, which also produced the Al Gore film. The film opens with a very clever title sequence, displaying its title credits on food packages on supermarket shelves. Then comes an on-​camera statement from producer Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) about his motivation to “lift the veil from what’s hidden” about our food production system. There is a disconnect between how food is marketed—​what Schlosser calls “pastoral romanticism”—​and how it is actually produced: factory processing through vertically integrated production by monopolistic multinational corporations that abuse animals and workers. McDonalds fast food drive-​ins brought the factory system to restaurant kitchens—​mass production methods, division of labor, and standardization of product—​and became the largest purchaser of ground beef and potatoes in United States. The percent of the market dominated by the top few producers—​at this writing Tyson, Swift, Cargill, and National Beef—​has more than tripled since the 1970s, from 25 to 80 percent of market share. The film uses brief on-​screen clips of text to convey factual information and statistics in a clear, digestible form. The camerawork and editing are very sophisticated, with pans, focus shifts, and a “Ken Burns” style of editing. The first section of the film concerns chickens, beginning with a visit to a chicken-​farming region in Kentucky. A farmer named Vince begins to give a tour of his farm to the filmmakers, but Tyson representatives apparently persuaded him against allowing them to film chickens inside the building, where they “never see sunlight; they’re pretty much in the dark all the time.” However, one farmer named Carole agreed to let the filmmakers view the interior of her chicken house (which had open windows) despite fear of reprisals; she clearly had misgivings about the pressures coming from Tyson. Her contract with Tyson was later terminated when she refused to “upgrade” to a less humane, dark, tunnel-​ventilated house. Tyson declined to be interviewed for the film. Most farm chickens can’t walk because they’ve been overfed and are overweight. Chickens are fed antibiotics to such an extent that farmers sometimes become allergic to antibiotics and can’t take them. Companies keep farmers under their thumb through debt; the average grower carries over $500,000 in debt against an annual income of about $18,000. Corporate demands for initial construction of chicken houses and upgrades keep farmers in debt; one farmer says it’s “like being a slave to the company.”

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Figure 8.2  Food, Inc. (United States, 2008, Robert Kenner) exposes how food corporations value profit over consumer health, worker safety, and environmental pollution.

The next section, “Cornucopia of Choices,” focuses on corn. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2009), follows this prime staple food back to its source. So much grocery food is nothing more than clever rearrangements of corn; corn production per acre has grown ten-​fold over the last century. Government partnerships with corporations allow them to work below their production costs to produce corn, in part because it can be stored. High fructose corn syrup is contained in as much as 90 percent of all processed food products. Corn is also the main ingredient in animal feed, even for farmed fish; it makes animals fat quickly, but also may give rise to dangerous e-​coli mutations. Cows spread e-​coli by standing in manure all day long, and it gets into human food system in slaughterhouses. Next, the film looks at “Unintended Consequences” of the food production system. Food recalls and e-​coli outbreaks are occurring almost annually, not only in meat but also in produce as a result of water runoff from animal farms. Federal regulatory agencies such as the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) are often led by former executives of the companies that they are supposed to be regulating. FDA inspections have declined by over 80 percent since the early 1970s. In 1998 the USDA tried to institute regulations to shut down plants that failed e-​coli inspection tests. But meat and poultry trade associations took the

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USDA to court, and the courts decided that the USDA didn’t have the authority to shut down plants. In one dramatic sequence, a woman pays a visit to her Congresswoman after her son has died from an e-​coli infection (the family’s home movies add an emotional component to the woman’s story). Attempts to pass a law to establish the USDA’s regulatory authority (known as Kevin’s Law, after the woman’s son Kevin Kowalcyk who died) have repeatedly failed. When problems arise in a food system, rather than look at what might be wrong with the system, industries instead look for expensive high-​tech fixes that allow the system to survive (for example, applying bacteria-​killing ammonia to food instead of feeding cattle grass). “The Dollar Menu” follows a family shopping in the grocery, to demonstrate that food problems go way beyond fast food. Bad food from wheat, corn, and soybeans is cheaper because it’s subsidized; Pollan says that’s why the biggest predictor of obesity is income level. Poorer families are faced with decisions about whether to pay for healthy food or medicines. Humans are hardwired to go for three tastes—​salt, fat, and sugar. They are rare in nature but ubiquitous in modern society. A high diet of fructose corn syrup and refined carbohydrates leads to spikes of insulin and gradually wears down the system whereby our body metabolizes sugar. Earlier, type 2 diabetes used to affect only adults, but now it affects children in epidemic proportions, and is predicted to affect one in three Americans born after 2000, and 50 percent of minorities. “In the Grass” examines alternative methods of feeding animals grass, which they are biologically programmed to consume. For example, Polyface Farms uses feed for cattle and chickens that is grass-​based; the USDA actually tried to close this farm down, claiming that its open-​air rendering was unsanitary. Those who regard animals with disdain and a controlling mentality are likely to regard people the same way; people in corporate boardrooms do not have to live with the consequences of their decisions. The Smithfield Hog Processing Plant in North Carolina—​the world’s largest slaughterhouse—​“has the same attitudes towards its workers as they have towards the hogs,” according to one worker. (Smithfield declined to be interviewed for the film). The meat packing industry follows the same blueprint of the fast food industry, streamlining procedures and moving to union-​free states, and the quality of work in terms of pay and safety has declined accordingly. Lower prices put Mexican farmers out of work, encouraging illegal immigration that brings in workers to labor in American meat industries. Meat processor IBP actually advertised in Mexico for employees and set up a bus service to import them;

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the US government turned a blind eye. When the government occasionally does crack down, it is on the workers, not the companies; IBP actually aids the government in selective raids to avoid larger crackdowns. “Hidden Costs” points out that “cheap food” is not so cheap when one adds in the environmental and health costs. All the food corporations are moving into the organic food business; even Wal-​Mart is stocking up on organics. As a result, organic food products are growing at a rate of 20 percent annually. Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Farms wants to prove that business can be part of the solution. He says, “We’re not going to get rid of capitalism, especially not in the time it takes to arrest global warming and the toxification of our air, our food and our water . . . We need not to be David against Goliath, we need to be Goliath.” So he has taken the lessons learned during his time at the New Alchemy Institute, where he worked in the 1970s with renegade biologists and early innovators in sustainable agriculture, and put them to work in a capitalist enterprise. “From Seed to Supermarket” examines the history of genetic seed development. At the turn of the last century, the average farmer fed six to eight people; now the average American farmer can feed 126 people. Not until 1980 did the Supreme Court allow the patenting of life (i.e., seeds). Between 1996 and 2008, Monsanto’s Roundup Ready–​patented genes have gone from covering 2 percent to 90 percent of the US soybean crop. Monsanto has a team of private investigators that seek to prosecute violators for patent infringement. Although contamination from a neighbor’s seeds can put a farmer in legal jeopardy, Monsanto’s legal resources are so overwhelming that individual farmers can’t afford to defend themselves in court even if they are innocent. With Monsanto’s prohibitions and prosecutions against seed saving, most farmers have moved from contempt to acceptance. Seed cleaners are being put out of business; there are practically no public seeds anymore. Monsanto has followed the Microsoft model of monopoly, trying to own the intellectual property behind most of the food in America. It controls the food game from seed to supermarket, and the US judicial system is heavily weighted in favor of those with money (Monsanto declined to be interviewed for the film). “The Veil” investigates how the US government is dominated by the industries it is supposed to regulate, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Centralized power is being used against both farmers and consumers. Food industries fight tooth and nail against putting labeling information on the packaging of foods concerning calories, trans fats, countries of origin, and GMOs. Today 70 percent of supermarket food has GMO ingredients, but laws

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are even being passed against labeling food products. Attempts are being made to make it illegal to publish a photo of a feedlot, or to protect produce and meats from libel and slander as if they were legal persons. Companies may sue even if they know they can’t win, just to send a message, because they can literally put anyone who stands in their way out of business. However, there are some hopeful signs. Wal-​Mart decided to eliminate from its shelves milk containing synthetic bovine growth hormones (BGH), probably dooming that practice. The model for taking power away from the food industry resembles the approach taken against the tobacco industry. The final section, “Shocks to the System,” examines the vulnerability of this food system. Either in spite of the efficiencies of the food system, or perhaps because of them, this system is becoming even more precarious. It does not have the resilience to overcome severe shocks, and eventually there will be a breakdown, but where it will come from is hard to predict. It could come from oil shortages, since the system is so dependent on fossil fuels. We eat a lot of oil without knowing it (75 gallons of oil per steer). Poorer countries can’t compete with US agriculture, sometimes leading to food shortages and riots. After every food scandal, consumers turn away and look for alternatives. We vote with our dollars, but to eat well costs more; people need to start demanding wholesome food. Food, Inc. was reviewed across the mainstream media and alternative press, with a tone of urgency uncharacteristic even for environmental documentaries. After chronicling many of the facts and statistics from the film, critic Roger Ebert (2009) admitted, “This review doesn’t read one thing like a movie review . . . I figured it wasn’t important for me to go into detail about the photography and the editing. I  just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what Food, Inc. did to me.” Similarly, David Edelstein (2009) in New York Magazine confessed, “I gave up the thought of ‘reviewing’ the film and decided to exhort you: SEE IT.” John Anderson (2008) in Variety called it “a civilized horror film for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry.” In somewhat more measured tones, Maria Garcia (2009) of Film Journal International called the film “an intelligent, visually compelling argument grounded in old-​ fashioned investigative research and journalism.” Associated Press reporter Ann Levin (2009) covered Food, Inc.’s theatrical opening, noting that “(Director) Kenner and his partners want to spur legions of activists to rise up and take aim at lawmakers and government regulators they believe have been corrupted by lobbyists for agribusiness.” The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday (2009) said, “In the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair

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and the slick documentary stylings of An Inconvenient Truth . . . this absorbing film looks terrific and does a superb job of making its case that our current food ways are drastically out of whack.” Even though reviewers universally regarded the film as one-​sided, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Amy Bioncolli (2009) noted that it was “not for lack of trying. Officials at Monsanto, Smithfield, Tyson and Perdue all declined to be interviewed.” Some reviews looked at Food, Inc. from unique angles, and the film received direct blowback from stakeholders threatened by its message. Time Out London’s Tom Huddleston (2010) saw in the film “a powerful, convincingly nightmarish vision of America on the slide: a country where marketability trumps sustainability, where public health is sacrificed in favor of profit, where labor unions are crushed and animal rights are an irrelevance.” Society & Animals’ Mary Beth Woodson (2011) noted that “while the film bemoans the factory farm system, it is not advocating for change primarily to benefit the non-​human animals involved. Instead it advocates for changes that will help the environment . . . and human animals.” And Monsanto Corporation devoted a page on its website to debunking the film’s claims about the food safety of GM crops and the unfair treatment of farmers (Monsanto, n.d.). Food, Inc. is one of the relatively few environmental documentaries to receive extensive reviews and analysis from academic scholars. Flowers and Swan (2011) ground their discussion of the film as a work of cinema in a broad framework of deconstruction, encompassing the verbal, visual, and musical techniques of representation, and the structural design of its organization and argumentation. They note that “one of the dominant tropes in the film is that of things being hidden from us, the ‘veil’ of secrecy being lifted off food production.” They also observe that “the film is made up of a number of mini-​activist-​conversion narratives in which ‘ordinary’ people are shown as not knowing much about food, becoming more knowledgeable, and as a result becoming food activists. This constitutes a point of identification with the viewer.” The primary fault critics identify in the film is the reduction of its characters to caricatures, which oversimplifies the decision-​making choices about food of both its subjects and its viewers. Murray and Heumann (2012) discuss four food documentaries including Food, Inc., which they define as “an expert’s pastoral fantasy.” They particularly focus on nostalgia as a rhetorical tool. Food, Inc., they believe, displays an overreliance of the evocation of the family farm in contrast to modern agricultural practice, in a somewhat inauthentic use of memory that “problematizes the

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relations between producers and consumers.” They also assert that the film is too derivative and “offers very little that food radicals don’t already know,” presenting only anecdotal examples to represent the more in-​depth discussion of these issues in Pollan’s book. However, this criticism may possibly be put down to just a lack of understanding of the difference between the two mediums. In her two articles, Lindenfeld (2010, 2011) discusses both the narrative strategies and the production context of Food, Inc. She notes that documentary films “face significant challenges in reaching broad audiences through mainstream media channels,” and “have virtually disappeared from the big screen in all but a few major markets.” So its producer Participant Films created innovative distribution avenues by marketing through Stonyfield (an organic yogurt producer) and the Mexican food chain Chipotle. Structurally, Lindenfeld observes that “moving back and forth between personal stories and institutional practices ensures that the film can deliver important facts while creating a compelling narrative that emotionally engages its spectators” (2010). Her main criticism of the film is that it “adopts an anthropocentric perspective on food that relegates environmental issues into peripheral status.”

Flow: For Love of Water Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Web Site: Available on:

2008 84 min. Irena Salina Steven Starr The Water Project Oscilloscope Laboratories Expository United States/​France http://​www.flowthefilm.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

Water is the most essential human need, more crucial than even food or energy. If the earth is a living system, water is its lifeblood. The film Flow argues against the privatization of water in the United States and internationally. The film’s reach spans several continents, interviewing both people on the ground in struggles over water, and experts who study water needs and use from a broad

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perspective. Lyrical montages of running water accompanied by gentle music link the various chapters of the film. Water is now the third largest industry in the world, behind only oil and electricity. Worldwide, 70 percent of water is used by agriculture, 20 percent by industry, and 10 percent by consumers. The water we drink contains a lot of chemicals, drugs, and pesticides that sewage treatments plants do not remove, and millions of people get sick every year from polluted water in the United States alone. Waterborne diseases kill more people worldwide than AIDS or wars; exposure comes not only from drinking water but also from bathing and showering in it. Modern industrial agriculture, with its chemical fertilizers and pesticides, requires much more water than ever before. The herbicide Atrazine, for example, gets into the water supply, and has been shown to disrupt male hormone production in fish and amphibians, and possibly in humans; it is also linked to various forms of cancer. Atrazine has been banned in the European Union, but the EPA has declared it to be safe, and it is still used in the United States. Traditionally governments have delivered water as a public service, but in the early twenty-​first century, three companies—​Vivendi, Suez, and Thames Water—​have begun forcing poor countries in many parts of the world to hand over control of their water systems to for-​profit multinational corporations. The premise is that these companies will provide sewage treatment and potable water; a representative from the IMF says private sector know-​how is an important factor in solving the world’s water problems. In 1999, under pressure from the World Bank, the government in Bolivia privatized some of its water systems through the transnational company Bechtel. But years later, in an area that had been promised sewage treatment, there was no treatment plant, and animal blood from a slaughterhouse was being dumped directly into a river from which people sourced their drinking water. It is a pattern seen all too often: poor countries accept loans to upgrade their infrastructure, they cannot pay back the loans, then the aid agencies step and force certain “reforms,” basically displacing the local government. But in the case of Bolivia, the populace rebelled, and in 2007 the Bechtel contract was ended and control of the water returned to the people. In South Africa, many poor rural people cannot afford either water taps for their homes or tablets to purify the water from streams. The government irregularly delivers water in buckets to rural areas. In towns, there is a prepayment token system for purchasing water, but half the population cannot read the

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Figure 8.3  Flow: For Love of Water (France, 2008, Irena Salina) highlights the attempts of international corporations to exploit community resources to bottle water, and to monopolize access to water in developing nations.

directions written in English. The promises of the postliberation period for free water and electricity have yet to be delivered. What about bottled water? In 2007 the bottle water industry brought in over $100 billion, almost $11 billion in the United States alone. Yet bottled water at this time of the film was virtually unregulated. There was only one person in the FDA responsible for regulating all the bottled water in the United States, so the public has no idea what harmful substances may be in any given brand of bottled water. The majority of bottled water is simply tap water, already filtered by taxpayer-​funded treatment systems. The United Nations estimates that it would require an additional $30 billion a year to provide safe, clean drinking water to everyone on the planet—​less than one-​third of what people spend on bottled water. An important player in strategic water planning is the World Water Council, an organization composed mostly of representatives of the same multinational corporations that profit from the water privatization programs supported by the IMF. A former Vivendi accountant scoffs at the progressive language of the multinationals—​they are not philanthropic organizations. He asks if their stockholders will be willing to wait ten to fifteen years to bring water to people who can’t pay for it. This is the real dilemma: how to pay for expensive water systems when the recipients of the water can’t afford to pay for them. Most of the water systems financed by international aid agencies only benefit the politically and

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economically powerful sectors of the countries. The fear is that as water becomes more privatized, it will increasingly be provided to those who can afford it and not to those who need it. As one commentator says, it’s all about power, about which countries and corporations will control the “blue gold” of the future: “Water is essential for survival, so whoever owns your water owns you.” One of the worldwide “millennium goals” was to reduce the number of people drinking unsafe water by half by 2015. In India, for example, tens of thousands of people in every state die annually from drinking dirty water. But the economics doesn’t work; building modern water treatment plants and distribution systems that will reach the dispersed rural villages in India where the people live who need the water is simply not affordable. So scientists are looking for solutions “outside the box,” such as portable units for disinfecting water with ultraviolet light, which costs only two US dollars per person per year. Often small hydro community projects are the best way of providing water for villages, both for drinking and small-​scale agriculture. What is needed may not be million-​dollar solutions, but a thousand thousand-​dollar solutions. The building of dams on rivers has been the largest infrastructural approach to controlling water—​providing water for agriculture, preventing floods, generating electricity, and directing water into water systems for consumption. But damming rivers also alters ecosystems that have evolved over millions of years, changing patterns of life forms both within and beside the rivers. It is estimated that forty to eighty million people were displaced by dam construction in the twentieth century, often destroying their livelihoods. Also, dams cause the buildup of rotting matter that gives off methane gas, which contributes more to global warming than most coal power plants. The United States is beginning to see the impacts of climate change on its domestic water resources. Droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, and aquifers are sinking in prime agricultural regions. But in some regions, an even greater threat to the water table is corporations that move into communities and “mine” water to bottle. In one Michigan county, the bottled water giant Nestlé doesn’t pay a cent for the water it extracts, and contributes nothing to the local tax base of the community, while levels in local lakes and streams are dropping. The company even kept pumping during a drought. Says one resident: “They’ve made scads of money selling our water back to us.” A critical issue in these struggles is the legal status of water. As with air and sunlight, throughout most of history laws have considered water to be a common resource. But the US legal system has so far failed to meaningfully restrict

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the ability of bottled water companies to extract water. This is another prime example of corporate rights trumping the commons and individual property rights. A parallel struggle was going on in India, where Coca-​Cola was bottling water needed by poor residents. Wells were running dry, and formerly good water had become too poor for drinking, growing food, or bathing. When Coca-​ Cola offered free fertilizer to the villagers, the “fertilizer” turned out to be industrial sludge containing toxic levels of cadmium and lead. These companies, said one critic, “are destroying communities in their wake and they don’t care.” In the end, however, India was a success story; in 2005 Coca-​Cola was forced to close its bottling plant. The basic theme is this: multinational corporations are destroying the self-​ sufficiency of communities all over the world: “If they can control the resources of life,” says one activist, “then they can control the whole thing in our country.” Privatization and corporate control literally threaten the ability of people to survive through self-​sufficient means. Hope springs from the fact that in many countries—​notably India, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, and even the United States—​activist movements have been mounted to push back against this expansion of corporate control, and to begin to move back into balance with nature. One solution proposed by the film is to affirm the following principle in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-​being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of water due to individual economic circumstance.” The idea for Flow came to director Irena Salina (2008) on reading the article “Who Owns Water?” in The Nation magazine, and she brought on Steven Starr to produce the film. Over the next five years she shot in countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and at important events such as the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan. She gained interviews with many of the world’s leading experts and activists on water issues. The film premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and won Grand Jury Awards at the Mumbai International Film Festival and at the United Nations Film Festival. Flow was widely reviewed by major news sources and environmental publications. The New York Times’ Jeannette Catsoulis (2008) called it a “three-​alarm warning . . . less depressing than galvanizing . . . this movie ruthlessly dismantles our assumptions about water safety and government oversight.” Variety’s John Anderson (2008) was more dismissive, saying that director Salina “follows a basic formula,” but with all the topics she covers, “she can’t quite jam it all in and

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still have a film that, well, flows.” Film Forward’s Nora Lee Mandel (2008) disagreed, saying that Flow “becomes the most fresh and informative when it ties together the far-​flung issues of supply, cost, quality and extraction.” Cineaste’s Isaac Goldstein (2008) concurred:  “Salina’s compelling examples breathe life into the alarming facts and disheartening statistics . . . As a consciousness raiser for an audience that takes water for granted, this thought-​provoking work succeeds.” Goldstein felts the film’s tone sometimes becomes too negative, but is redeemed by ending on a note of empowerment that emboldens the audience to take action.

Tapped Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2009 76 min. Stephanie Soechtig, Jason Lindsey Stephanie Soechtig, Sarah Gibson, 7 others Atlas Films Gravitas Ventures Expository United States www.tappedthemovie.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

Tapped is an unflinching examination of the big business of bottled water. It poses this question: Is access to clean drinking water a basic human right, or a commodity to be bought and sold like any other article of commerce? Water is considered to be a basic human right, but the striving for control of water availability by corporations is “the next empire.” The film is structured in expository mode: interviews with experts, activists, and citizens, combined with still and motion B-​roll. Most interviews are with private citizens directly affected by the issues discussed, but representatives of various companies and environmental organizations and public officials also appear. In 2007 bottled water was an $11.25 billion business, but by the year 2030, two-​thirds of the world may be lacking access to clean drinking water. Only 1 percent of the world’s water is drinkable. The World Bank places the value of the world’s water market at $800 billion. In the United States, rivers and streams

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are considered a public trust, but groundwater falls in different legal categories depending on the state, often allowing for substantially unregulated pumping. One legal term for this status is “absolute dominion”; the permitting process is usually not even subject to public notice or environmental impact studies. This process is happening all around the United States and the world. Corporations are draining local water resources without the consent or knowledge of local residents, sometimes depriving communities of water—​communities that have spent taxpayer dollars to ensure clean water for which bottled water companies pay nothing. Corporations across the country are fighting legal battles to secure their water mining rights. They have expensive and powerful legal staffs to fend off efforts at local regulation. One regulatory approach is to tax companies for water extraction, but corporations simply refuse to pay such fees. Yet the threat of loss of control over water rights often creates serious political instability. Activists dispute the rights of corporations to sell their towns’ water. Nestlé, Coca-​Cola, and Pepsi are companies that bottle water and resell it for 1,900 times the cost of tap water. Poland Springs is one of Nestlé’s brands for bottled water; Nestlé comes into rural towns like Fryeburg, Maine and mines the water. The film uses Maine as a case study of corporate exploitation of this public resource at the expense of the people. The prospect of droughts due to climate change and water shortages makes this issue even more critical, giving rise to conflicts between public and private water interests. In 2007 thirty-​five US states experienced drought conditions, yet bottled water companies continued their operations even when private citizens were being asked to conserve. A bottled water industry spokesman states that his industry is responsible for only 0.2 percent of all the groundwater withdrawn in the United States. However, this industry has very concentrated impacts on local watersheds where pumping is taking place. Until 1989 bottled water brands like Perrier were only marketed in glass bottles as elite products. But with the development of light plastic bottles, the market exploded and companies like Nestlé, Coca-​Cola, and Pepsi joined the game. The film asserts that bottled water is the greatest advertising and marketing scam of all time. Companies promote their products as more pure, healthful, and safe; one industry representative claimed never to have heard of any bottled water recalls, despite several having occurred. Municipal water companies don’t have public relations budgets to promote the quality of their water, yet 40 percent of bottled water is simply filtered tap water (e.g., Coca-​Cola’s Dasani and Pepsi’s

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Aquafina). Industry insiders are quoted as regarding tap water as “the enemy,” yet in public company representatives deny that they are in competition with tap water. However, one must acknowledge that without a market for bottled water, companies wouldn’t be in the business of bottling it. Discouraging market demand for bottled water is a crucial element in limiting corporate abuse. Another important issue is the pollution generated by the bottled water industry, consisting primarily of plastic bottled water containers, for which the industry pays nothing for cleanup. Perisylene plastic containers are oil products, the raw substances for which are manufactured at oil refineries. The manufacture of water bottles consumes 714  million gallons of oil per year, enough to fuel 100,000 cars. Perisylene, the primary component of plastic bottled water containers, is a chemical in the benzene family, and benzene is a known carcinogen. Cancer and birth defect rates are known to be much higher than the norm among those who live near refineries (such as the Corpus Christi refinery cited by the film), raising questions of environmental justice; and the film cites research indicating that drinking from plastic containers may increase one’s chances of getting cancer. Refineries pollute not only the neighborhood air but also the groundwater. A former EPA official said he could have been fired if he had attempted to inform people of the risks of living near refineries (he called them “sacrifice zones”); officials could only respond to complaints initiated by citizens, but not engage in any behavior that might be considered agitation. Since it is difficult to link specific incidences of illness to environmental pollution, these refineries are practically never held responsible for the diseases they cause; one interviewee referred to their practices as “the perfect crime.” Tapped mentions that the FDA assigns only one person to oversee all bottled water issues in the entire United States, so there is no way it can exert meaningful oversight of the industry; the FDA relies entirely on testing done by the industries themselves. Thus tap water is highly regulated and tested, whereas bottled water is virtually unregulated; these companies are not required to make any of their testing reports available to the public. Furthermore, since 60–​70 percent of bottled water is produced and distributed within state lines, those products are completely immune to federal regulation. The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) performed several tests on bottled waters, and found evidence of arsenic, bacterial contamination, and leeching of plastic chemicals. The filmmakers also initiated their own tests, and for objectivity had them analyzed by an independent agency; its representative

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said that anyone reading the data would be “horrified.” The chemicals found included tolulene, styrene, benzene, and three kinds of phthalates, all of which have adverse effects on human health and/​or reproduction. Five-​gallon water jugs (as well as baby bottles and sports bottles) contain Bisphenol A (BPA), a highly toxic chemical active in very low doses that leeches into the water. It is harmful to male reproduction and has been linked to breast cancers, prostate cancers, diabetes, obesity, liver disease, and brain disorders. Despite 700 independent studies that have raised serious concerns about this chemical, the US government issued a report claiming it is safe, a report largely written by the plastic industry. FDA representatives refused to answer questions about it for the film, saying they wouldn’t have granted interviews to the filmmakers had they expected that topic to arise. Americans consume eighty million single-​serve bottles of water daily, and thirty million of them (37.5 percent) wind up in landfills. In the United States, the recycling rate is well below worldwide averages. Only eleven states have container deposit legislation that fund recycling programs (and only six include water bottles); the higher the return rates, the higher percentage of bottles that is recycled. Bottled water companies support curbside recycling, but 50 percent of Americans don’t have curbside recycling, and one-​third of water bottles are not consumed in homes. Nestlé, Coca-​Cola, and Pepsi all declined to offer representatives to be interviewed for the film. Some untended beaches are virtually covered with plastic refuse, mostly water and beverage containers. The world’s oceans contain several large garbage patches comprised principally of plastic container waste. Samples of ocean water from the farthest reaches contain forty-​six times more plastic than plankton. This plastic soup is poison to millions of fish and invertebrates, threatening the entire marine food web. One scientist asserts that outside of disaster relief, bottled water has no place in our society. Among the solutions that the film proposes are (1) reusable water bottles, (2) effective water regulation, (3) more participatory democracy, (4) expanded container deposit legislation, (5) more curbside recycling, and (6) banning bottled water. Tapped received scant attention from major media reviewers. Cassie Chew (2009) of Examiner.com wrote, “Tapped shows how Nestlé, Pepsico, Coca Cola and other water bottlers have pumped water from states in the midst of a water shortage, filtered it, bottled it, then put it back on store shelves to sell back to these same communities at a premium.” She also noted the way bottled water advertising conditions consumer behavior, and the pollution from disposal of

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plastic bottles. Gary Goldstein (2009) of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Soechtig’s cautionary tale is well supported by interviews with a variety of activists, environmentalists, community leaders and, especially, several small-​town residents whose health and welfare have been compromised by the encroachment of the bottled water industry.” Grist’s Claire Thompson (2009) said the film proved bottled water to be a clear waste of resources, an incredible waste of money for consumers, full of harmful toxins like BPA, and far less safe for drinking than free tap water: “Tapped does a solid job of covering every aspect of this damaging industry and inspiring more outrage than despair.” Tapped received support from scientists and academics, quoted on the film’s website at Bullfrogfilms.com (Tapped. Bullfrog Films, n.d.). Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, said, “By shining a light on threats to community water sources, risks to human health, pollution of the oceans, and mountains of plastic trash, Tapped sounds a clarion call to kick the bottle and return to the tap.” Troy Belford of Wichita State University wrote, “For classroom use this film is essential in that it conveys very important information . . . in a way that is useful, truthful and compelling. The information presented in the film itself is vital for this youth market, since they represent an overwhelming target for the marketing of bottled water. I would recommend this film highly to any ecological, environmental or economic based topic in anthropology as well as curriculums based around chemistry.”

The Russian River: All Rivers—​The Value of an American Watershed Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

2014 123 min. William Sorensen William Sorensen, Nancy Econome, Stella Kwiecinski The Russian River: All Rivers LLC Docurama Expository United States http://​russianriverallrivers.com/​index.html Netflix, YouTube, iTunes

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Humans have settled on rivers from time immemorial. In northern California the Pomo and Miwok Indians lived for centuries in harmony with nature. The Russian River:  All Rivers traces the path of this river from its source in Mendocino County, through the early history of human habitation along the river—​originally Russians after the native Indians, then the Americans—​ through the cyclic patterns of “boom-​binge-​bust” of California’s history. The California Gold Rush brought prospectors to the Russian watershed, though no gold was discovered there—​but mercury (quicksilver) was, ultimately leaving tailings from mining pollution in the river. Trade in the fur of sea otters left over one million killed, threatening their extinction. The rising population in northern California, especially San Francisco, spawned another boom, this time in the logging of Redwood timber. Today the vast majority of coastal Redwoods—​as many of 95 percent—​are gone; only John Muir’s spiritual awakening to the value of wilderness, leading to the protection of many redwood forests as parks, saved the trees from total deforestation. This film offers a clear warning: failure to preserve clean water in our rivers and streams will leave us a century from now with no water and thus no civilization. In our ecological ignorance we have moved mountains and dammed rivers, leading to disastrous consequences—​rivers that are no longer safe for humans or animals. The conclusion: “We need to change our story of how we live within our environment.”

Figure 8.4  The Russian River: All Rivers—​The Value of an American Watershed (United States, 2014, William Sorensen) uses Northern California’s Russian River as a case study in habitat exploitation, ecosystem degradation, and improper management.

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Today’s “booms” are in gravel mining and growing grapes for wine with its consequent tourism. Ninety-​five percent of the land bordering the Russian River is privately owned, most of it devoted to wine growing. In the 1890s, John Wesley Powell, director of the US Geological Survey, believing that watershed should dictate land use, proposed a strategy for holistic river basic management but it couldn’t pass Congress. As a consequence, California is stuck with a piecemeal regulation of its rivers. The Russian River serves 600,000 people over three counties, where people and crops—​mostly grapes for a wine industry with a worldwide market—​compete for a limited supply of fresh water. Over the past century, reservoirs have been built to regulate flow and hedge against drought—​Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma. Water from other regional rivers like the Eel River has been diverted to the Russian River, creating a man-​ made system of dams, reservoirs, and pumping mechanisms. Many species of fish have been endangered by deforestation and lack of regard for wetlands. Recently, wastewater has been diverted from Santa Rosa to power the Geysers geothermal plant to the north, reducing the likelihood of another sewage spill like one that occurred in 1985. Water was established as part of the Commons, or public trust, going back through English law to Roman law, to be held in trust for all generations, and cannot be owned. In spite of this long-​established legal tradition, water increasingly has been regarded and treated as private property. The expansion of modern agriculture and housing along the river’s banks has deprived the river of its traditional flood plain, reducing the oak savannah and coast prairie landscapes and drying up marshes and wetlands. The state has grown within the lifetime of elder Californians from four million to thirty-​six million, and this continued growth threatens to turn northern California into a Los Angeles–​style environment. The privatization and commodification of water without recognizing the human right to clean water is turning it into nothing more than a profit center for major corporations. Fully one-​third of the water taken from the ground not only leaves the watershed but also leaves the country in the form of agricultural exports. Corporations get the profits, and the public is left with the costs and the risks. Europe has done a better job of basic river management than the United States, establishing administrative authority over the watersheds to maintain ecological quality, as well as transparency in water economics. Subsidies for water use must be publicly disclosed. But in California the system of water rights is fragmented and incomplete. Different standards of water rights have been established during

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different periods of history that apply to different stakeholders. Ground water—​ the source representing almost half of California’s water use—​is not legally considered as part of the hydrologic cycle, even though it is replenished over the longest periods of time. Thus landowners who can afford the most powerful pumps can literally deprive their neighbors of water. With the worsening of climate change, droughts are expected to become more prolonged and severe. Some have predicted that the Oglala aquifer that provides water to the Great Plains could someday be effectively gone, and even the Great Lakes could dry up within eighty years. The fact that we are using up water that future generations will need should be a headline in our news media and a part of our daily discourse. Some towns in California’s Central Valley are slowly sinking due to land subsidence due to ground water depletion. To make things worse, regulatory powers are spread among several different governmental agencies, making a coherent and equitable water policy virtually impossible. For example, fish are regulated at the federal level by the Department of Commerce; the Forest Service serves the timber industry; and water departments serve the irrigators. One expert referred to this system as an “Alice in Wonderland” situation. Three species of salmon are native to Russian River: Chinook, Steelhead, and Coho. They all enter from the sea, lay their eggs in the river, and then either return to the sea (Steelhead) or die. All are listed as threatened or endangered by California and the federal government; one ecologist described such fish as “the canary in the coal mine.” Lake Sonoma became one of the largest and most expensive water projects in the nation’s history. But dams and roads block off the salmon pathways, so hatcheries have been established to create a substitute method of sustaining the salmon population. Although they bear little resemblance to the natural pattern of salmon spawning, in some cases they may be the only method of preserving the genetic material of some species of salmon and preserving genetic diversity in the species. The politics of conservation can be brutal. Politicians often frame issues as “fish vs. people,” ignoring the interdependence between humans and their environment. Water activist Maude Barlow believes that we have to make our human laws more compatible with the laws of nature; if we don’t understand the relationship between clean water, fish survival, and human survival, we could be “sleepwalking into extinction.” Gravel is ubiquitously used for concrete in building and road construction, and most of it comes from riverbeds. The gravel industry is the largest mining

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industry in California and the most polluting industry impacting the Russian River. Gravel mining lowers the bed of the river and distorts the distribution of sediment all along the riverbed, with negative impacts on biological processes such as salmon spawning. Taking sediment from reservoirs would be more environmentally sustainable that mining it downstream, but alternative strategies of gravel mining have hardly been explored. Gravel mining companies, like water mining companies, claim immunity from the public trust doctrine and thus from paying fees to the state for exploiting natural resources—​in part by lobbying elected officials to make sure that things don’t change. Grapes for California wines are the most profitable crop that makes use of Russian River water. Sonoma County vineyards produce 70 percent of the country’s agricultural revenue. Wine country tourism brings in over seven million visitors annually. It’s hard for local food agriculture to compete for land against those economic forces. Water for irrigation must be pumped up the hills where the grapes are grown, often resulting in deprivation of water to endangered species. Runoff from chemical fertilizers and pesticides—​often concealed from the public as “proprietary”—​leeches into the rivers and streams. Regulation and subsidization of water use has been based on the past century or two of unusually high rainfall, but that pattern may be shifting, whether due to natural cyclic climate patterns, to human-​caused climate change, or some combination of the two. So planning for both agricultural and population growth needs to be based on the dry years, not the wet ones. There are dry farming techniques that produce excellent grapes, and if climate change happens gradually enough, strategies of adaptation and mitigation may serve to sustain the wine industry well into the future. Individual human use of chemicals, from prescription drugs to consumer products, also contributes significantly to water pollution. The FDA has approved over 100,000 chemicals for human use, of which few have been tested to determine their toxicity on the environment, other species, or human health. Predicting the ultimate endgame of the ecological destabilization of a complex system like a watershed poses a huge challenge for scientists, who collect and model a vast variety of data in order to project long-​term outcomes and seek solutions that won’t have unintended negative consequences. Water conservation and pollution mitigation strategies need to be developed at the level of the household, the industry, and various levels of government. Solutions may come from anywhere—​from innovative hi-​tech systems to employing insects instead of toxic chemicals to control pests. Every river system is different, but the

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pleasures of rivers, the life-​giving water they provide, and the ecological threats they suffer are universal. The choice humanity faces is clear and stark: find a way for our society to coexist with the natural systems that support it, or face some very severe consequences in the not-​too-​distant future. For this book, I interviewed coproducers William Sorensen, Nancy Econome, and Stella Kwiecinski (Sorensen et al., 2015). Sorensen and Econome were filming another project in the Russian River—​literally—​when they noticed the river felt too warm and had a foul odor. They went on to interview some prominent local residents and discovered that a large amount of wastewater was being released into the river. Their concern and guilt kicked in and they felt like they had to do something. Sorensen feels that Hollywood rarely tells environmental stories, and when it does the stories verge toward the apocalyptic. So it falls to documentaries to portray the reality of the environmental crisis, to tell so many diverse and important stories. A crucial difference with this film is that it addresses the community in which the filmmakers live—​a community in which very few people understand the most basic things about their local environment. But even the filmmakers had no idea how very large and complex the project would become until they got into it, as complex as the environment portrayed in the film. Structurally, the river itself became the filmmaker’s guide in terms of how the film looked and felt. The river was the film’s protagonist or central character, with the antagonist’s role falling unfortunately to humans. One production challenge was finding good locations from which to shoot the river. Ninety-​five percent of the adjacent land is privately owned, so if a property owner was not willing to offer access, a great vista could be lost. So much of nature has been commercialized and commodified that developing a personal relationship with nature is difficult. But Sorensen was able to find people who had developed such a relationship, particularly on water issues. One woman said, with tears in her eyes, “I’ve lived on the river for 40 years, waiting for this film to be made.” At every screening, someone comes forward to personally thank the filmmakers for making the film. The title The Russian River: All Rivers universalizes the topic, by suggestion that whatever problems impact this particular river impacts all rivers in similar ways. The exploitation of the river by industry, the threats of extinction to fish, the health dangers to which people are exposed—​all these problems manifest in varying degrees across the globe, as demonstrated by the requests for screenings well beyond the local watershed.

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Russian River is very information-​dense, and thus potentially overwhelming to audiences. The information is often hard to get and comes from disparate places. The film tries to bring together various communities that comprise the environmental movement and start a conversation between them; sometimes this even happens at a theater after a screening during a question-​and-​answer session. But the photography captures the beauty of the river so well that viewers become inspired to ask, “What can we do?” One local board of supervisors asked that the film be screened for them. Since the filmmakers often screen the film in distant locations, they encourage viewers to get to know their own watersheds, to take action, and inform their neighbors about the issues. Links on the film’s website offer direction to organizations that promote river preservation. The production team conducted around fifty interviews and referenced around thirty books and research articles. One example is the scientists involved in the fish hatchery programs. By considering proposed scientific solutions, the film avoids the charge of being reflexively opposed to scientific or technological innovation, a charge often leveled at environmental documentaries. Indeed, Sorensen insists that science will play a crucial part is solving environmental problems, but it must be “good science,” not science whose only agenda is to preserve the industrial status quo. The film’s narrative is presented in classic expository mode, with stunning visual montages accompanied by an inspiring musical soundtrack (from solo violins and original orchestral compositions). The film is as visually beautiful as any environmental documentary, filled with time-​lapse nature photography reminiscent of Koyannisqatsi, creative split-​screen sequences, and skillfully photographed interviews with authoritative scholars and activists. However, sometimes there is a disconnect between the prosaic scientific testimony and the stunningly beautiful cinematography laid over it. The film seems overlong, unwieldy in structure, and excessive in detail, and would have benefitted from the critical eye of an independent editor. Its arguments have not been distilled into as concise or logical a structure as might be desired, meandering from topic to topic and then swinging back again. The explanations of scientists interviewed are sometimes too complex to be absorbed by the unschooled viewer, making watching the film more like reading a book. The Russian River is a complex film running over two hours in length; as with a house of cards, if you pull out one piece here, something falls apart there. Thus the filmmakers made a conscious decision to let the film play as long as it needed to cover its ground, even if it meant sacrificing opportunities for television

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or festival exposure. As of this writing, the prime method of distribution has been theatrical screenings to community audiences, bringing people together to discuss the subject and ask questions of the filmmakers and local experts. Still, there has been consideration of editing shorter segments to be put on the Internet. Sorensen admits that his purpose was more to inform that to entertain, and considers the film to be an almost religious paean to the river. The first interviews for the film were conducted in 2009, but most filming took place from 2010 to 2012. Russian River was initially a self-​funded project. The producers owned the equipment they needed, in terms of cameras, lights, sound equipment, and editing systems. The film was shot with a RED EPIC 5K digital cinema camera, one of a line of cameras designed to match the quality of motion picture film. It was edited on an Avid DS system for cutting 4K footage and creating animations, with some supplementary editing done on Final Cut Pro. The producers looked at grant funding but the application process just didn’t fit their production plan; however, they did pick up some funding help along the way from individual donors. Out-​of-​pocket expenses on the film were estimated at $150,000, much of it for travel, but with virtually no labor expenses. Had a crew been paid, the budget would have run into $250,000 to $400,000 (including lost income from other paid projects). They ran an Indigogo crowd funding campaign after they had a rough cut, primarily for finishing funds involving photo and music rights. The whole distribution environment is in such flux that, says Sorensen, “everything we thought to be the norm is changing.” Distribution was a do-​it-​yourself process, with an aura of “If we make it, they will come.” Avoiding professional distributors, the producers contacted theaters and arranged screenings, beginning at the local level and expanding outward in concentric circles. But they haven’t really made an effort to get aboard the festival circuit as of this writing. The deep California drought, which began after the production started, certainly increased public interest in the subject. There was even a political aspect to distribution, since water bonds were on the California ballot in 2014. Audience responses, although anecdotal, have been enthusiastically positive. The only print reviews, universally positive, appeared in local media outlets, often emanating from news journalists rather than film critics due to the topical nature of the film. Making Russian River has opened the door to producing future sustainability-​related films; the next one in the planning process involves

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groundbreaking technology for the future that would replace most of our fossil fuel–​based infrastructure. One of the film’s unique perspectives is the recognition that nature has rights, that humans must find a way to find their place within natural systems. Says Sorensen: “We’re learning a very difficult lesson—​we really have to climb down and join the rest of the species here.” If we conceive of man’s relationship to nature in terms of figure/​ground, we tend to see human society as the foreground and nature as the background, when in reality the reverse is closer to the truth. Human society is built upon the foundation of natural systems, and we forget that at our own peril.

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Environmental documentaries confront their audiences with damage done to nature’s creatures, at the level of both the microcosm and the macrocosm. Some films weave a comprehensive tapestry of how the unrelenting spread of human population and its consumption of natural resources is driving nonhuman creatures into what Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) calls “the sixth extinction”—​a catastrophic die-​off that could see half the world’s species vanish forever over the coming century. Other films look at a specific species that is threatened, or a particular situation where animals are abused or destroyed. Whether the topic is mass extinction or a unique incidence of animal cruelty and destruction, these films ask profound questions about the interdependent relationship between humanity and other species with which we share the natural world, and the implications of that relationship for the future of life on Earth.

Darwin’s Nightmare Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2004 107 min. Hubert Sauper Hubert Sauper, Barbara Albert Mille et Une Productions International Film Circuit Observational /​Interactive Austria-​France-​Belgium http://​www.darwinsnightmare.com Netflix, Amazon Video (DVD), YouTube (Spanish subtitles), Vimeo (Spanish subtitles)

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Darwin’s Nightmare would have to be considered a strong candidate for the most depressing film ever made, whether concerning ecological destruction, globalization of trade, or just human nature. But this statement should be regarded as praise rather than criticism, because the film presents the viewer with so many terrible realities that it is almost impossible to turn away. The story takes place in Tanzania astride Lake Victoria, a naturally idyllic location disrupted by political strife for generations. This particular chapter began with the introduction of nonnative Nile perch into the lake. A voracious predator, the perch quickly depleted the lake of the native species of fish and resorted to eating its own young. But the vast expansion of the perch population provided a valuable resource for global (especially European) fish markets. So the rural agricultural villages along the lake quickly became centers for harvesting and processing of fish. The commercialization of the region provided a few good jobs, but also led to a rapid rise in typical urban blights like prostitution, crime, drug use, and disease. The same planes—​usually manned by Russian pilots—​that took away the fish brought in arms and munitions, which fueled local violence and regional conflicts. Political bribery and corruption became rampant. Too many people migrated into the towns for work and wound up stranded in a dangerous environment without adequately paying jobs. Thus did the introduction of one invasive species of fish totally transform the society from a poor but sustainable agricultural community to one fractured by ecological, economic, and political dislocation. Much of the film’s power comes from its intimate portraits of individuals consumed by these dislocations, among them a night watchman who works for one dollar a day, who got his job after his predecessor was murdered; a woman driven to prostitution to survive, who has contracted AIDS and is probably passing it on to the transient pilots of the planes; and a small child who gets high by sniffing the fumes of burning fish containers. Viewers also witness conversations with corrupt corporate and political officials, photographed unawares by hidden cameras. Ultimately, Darwin’s Nightmare confronts its audience with a portrait of human nature at its worst, a culture totally debased and corrupted by greed. However, as author Nick Flynn (2006) observed, “One of the great strengths of the film is that we are left with a great, if unsettling, compassion for all of the characters—​the pilots, the fish factory owner, the homeless kids, the prostitutes, the fishermen—​we are left with a deeper understanding of why they do what they do, caught up as they are in the same self-​devouring system, where the few

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profit so excessively from the many.” Flynn adds, “The game of capitalism as it is practiced at ground zero Lake Victoria is deeply unjust, and ultimately life-​ threatening to millions, and that is the simple message of the film.” By avoiding voiceover narration and sparing titles, the observational and interactive style of Darwin’s Nightmare contributes powerfully to its impact. The people interviewed are ordinary people, most of them suffering severe hardships, shot with low-​tech cameras and natural lighting in their homes and streets. Said director Sauper (“Interview,” n.d.): “To shoot Darwin’s Nightmare we used a minimalist unit: my faithful travel companion Sandor, my small camera and I. We had to be very close to our ‘characters’ and follow their lives over long periods . . . So in a way it was easy to find striking images because I was filming a striking reality.” This almost clandestine technique allowed Sauper to film people in places where a larger crew would have drawn attention to itself, and would likely have made shooting impossible. The portrait painted of the fishing villages is so stark that some critics have questioned whether the film is too one-​sided in not portraying the benefits of the perch industry. But Dr. Les Kaufman (2006), Professor of Biology at Boston University and an adviser to the filmmakers, wrote that “the situation about Lake Victoria is actually worse than the film showed,” citing the mismanaged local infrastructure and a regional drought that has reduced fish catch. “Huge numbers of people are starving right near the lake that supplies so much food to the rest of the world.” Darwin’s Nightmare was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for Best Documentary Feature. The critical response to the film was overwhelmingly positive. A. O. Scott (2005) of the New York Times calls the film a “harrowing, indispensable documentary . . . There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch: rows of huge, rotting fish heads sticking out of the ground; children turning garbage into makeshift toys. At other moments, you are struck by the natural loveliness of the lake and its surrounding hills, or by the handsome, high-​cheekboned faces of many of the Tanzanians.” Variety’s David Rooney (2004) wrote that the film “focuses on the ripple effect of a globalized economy in a specific microcosm to weigh in on the casualties of the New World Order.” He sees it as “somewhat haphazardly organized yet fascinatingly detailed and enriched by the candor of its shockingly deprived interview subjects,” and “a biting allegory for a larger study of greed, opportunism and First World indifference toward the Third World.”

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The Cove Date: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2009 91 min. Louie Psihoyos Jim Clark, Fisher Stevens, Paula DuPré Pesmen Oceanic Preservation Society Participant Media/​Roadside Attractions Participatory/​Performative United States http://​www.thecovemovie.com/​ Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

There are several compelling stories in The Cove: a heist-​style thriller, one man’s personal search for redemption, and a fight against a corrupt power structure. In terms of both stylistic sophistication and edge-​of-​the-​seat suspense, The Cove feels more like a Hollywood blockbuster than a documentary, including some pretty graphic violence. The opening titles play over infrared nighttime photography of people moving around mysteriously on a rugged landscape. And then a title card: “We tried to do this story legally.” Who are these people? What are they doing? From the opening moments the audience in drawn into the mystery and intrigue. Then we meet Ric O’Barry. He had trained five dolphins for the Flipper television series in the 1960s, but became disillusioned when one of the dolphins died in his arms. He also felt guilty that the program had inspired the development of marine parks that paid top dollars for captured dolphins. Since then he has devoted his life to protecting dolphins, often suffering arrest for trying to free them from captivity. “They’re smarter than we think they are,” says O’Barry. Referring to those who promote the dolphin trade, he says, “If they could kill me, they would.” O’Barry may not have been exaggerating; some animal activists have actually been murdered for protecting Russian dolphins. The contrast between the commercial image of dolphin tourism and the grim reality of dolphin hunting borders on surrealism. The streets of Taiji, Japan, are lined with images of smiling dolphins as if ripped from a children’s book or a Disney film. But in a nearby cove, dolphins are trapped for capture and sale across the world. A prize dolphin sells for $150,000, but those that are not

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selected are brutally slaughtered and sold illegally as whale meat. Public and private security officials do their utmost to prevent anyone from photographing this grisly spectacle, and since the cove is surrounded by fences and natural boundaries like high barren hills, it proved to be a very difficult place to get into for filming. Renowned photographer Louis Psihoyos joined forces with O’Barry to try to film what was happening to the dolphins. O’Barry focused specifically on this lagoon as the central location, but they knew that filming it would be a challenge. It may come as a shock to some that dolphins have no legal protection in Japan. Neither the International Whaling Commission, the World Wildlife Fund, nor Greenpeace has made a priority of protecting dolphins; these exquisite creatures exist in a vacuum of political and governmental protection. Earlier attempts to stop dolphin killing had been met with arrests. In the film, Psihoyos and his crew begin meeting with authorities, offering to make a film that presents both sides of the issue (these meetings were filmed with a hidden camera), but those talks break down. So Psihoyos begins to envision a covert, clandestine approach modeled after a special operations military mission, which will require specialized personnel and equipment. He sets up special teams to create hidden cameras and communication systems. He obtains

Figure 9.1  The Cove (United States, 2009, Louis Psihoyos) suspensefully tracks its activist filmmakers on a covert mission to penetrate a hidden cove in Japan to reveal the secret slaughter of dolphins that happens there.

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military-​grade thermal cameras that have to be exported from the United States to Japan illegally. His team designs “nest-​cams” that can pan and tilt by remote control, and underwater cameras to shoot action from below the cove’s surface. Personnel-​wise, Psihoyos searches out world champion divers and snorkelers, highly specialized photographic and audio technicians, and men with experience in CIA-​style special operations. Meanwhile, his crew begins to survey the cove location. Plainclothes security officers supervise them from the beginning and engage in open intimidation. The crew witness a dolphin die on their very first visit. Japanese people interviewed on the street display their ignorance of the practice of killing dolphins for food. Japanese media enforce a total blackout on the consumption of dolphin meat, partly because of toxic mercury concentration in dolphins (twenty times higher than regulations allow). The film follows the team as they prepare to execute their plans. The mission’s first stage is to plant hydrophones to record audio. Stage two is to plant fake rocks containing underwater cameras. But as the suspense builds toward the night of the actual operation, the film takes a detour to fill in more backstory information. O’Barry discusses the intelligence of dolphins. The Japanese government has been telling the fisherman that dolphins are eating too many fish and their numbers had to be reduced. But it is really the human consumption of fish that is threatening to crash the fish catch within forty years. Japan basically controls the fish catch of the world, paying smaller counties to support their rights to resume whaling. But there is more at work than mere economics; a misplaced nationalistic pride is driving the politics of the situation. The film shows stock footage from an earlier “disease” outbreak in Minamata due to mercury poisoning from dolphin meat. Toxic pollution is becoming a serious problem nationwide; even local officeholders are beginning to be concerned for their children’s health. Says one: “You’re either an activist or an inactivist.” Then the crucial night arrives. The crew has to use diversionary tactics to shake security officers who are shadowing them. They sneak into the cove, using ultraviolet visors to see and walkie-​talkies to communicate. More than once they fear discovery, but everything comes off like clockwork. They plant their concealed cameras in various strategic locations around the cove, both above and below the water. Then when morning comes, using remote controls to compose the cameras, they successfully film the slaughter of dozens of dolphins. It is a painful scene to watch; the water runs red with the blood of dolphins. Psihoyos

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called it “the scariest night of my life,” but adds: “The effort wasn’t just to record the slaughter. You want to capture something that will make people change.” Louis Psihoyos is a renowned nature photographer for National Geographic, Fortune Magazine and many other publications. With the film’s executive producer Jim Clark, he founded The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) in 2005, to promote using the media to portray both the beauty and the destruction of the oceans. After O’Barry was banned from speaking at a Sea World–​sponsored event, Psihoyos sought him out and learned about what was happening in the Taiji cove. The filmmakers set out to make an immediate impact. Director Psihoyos showed the video of the slaughter to a local governmental spokesman. Ric O’Barry walked into the International Whaling Commission conference uninvited, displaying the video from a portable screen tied to his chest, until security men escorted him out of the room. He then went to stand in the middle of a city square and showed the film to the crowd of passers-​by, who looked on in shock. The truth was finally out. In a participatory/​performative mode, the film documents most of the stages in its production process. The film’s website contains an “action” link: TakePart. com/​thecove. The Cove won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, as well as similar awards from the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild. It won Best Documentary recognition from over a dozen film critic societies, and won awards at numerous festivals, including environmental media festivals. Critical reviews were lavish in their praise for the film. Jeannette Catsoulis (2009) of the New York Times called it “one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement,” and “an exceptionally well-​made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller.” The Guardian’s Catherine Shoard (2009) cited the film’s superior aesthetics, including “artful edits, zippy music, even a few jokes. Radical stuff for an eco-​documentary.” Alternatives Journal’s Mark Meisner (2010) observed that the film “serves up a great case study of how images of nature in popular culture—​in this case, Flipper—​can have a huge effect on how people treat those aspects of the natural world.” However, the responses were not all laudatory. Some reviewers found the film overly propagandistic and ethnocentric, since after all Americans and Europeans kill and eat animals too. A  Japanese official, a Japanese professor, and a Sea World representative all objected that the film had misrepresented their position

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in interviews. The film received a very limited theatrical release in Japan; some screenings were cancelled or met by protests, but a few brave Japanese publicly defended screening the film and a panel discussion was held at one screening. Overall, The Cove will likely be remembered as one of the breakthrough environmental documentaries, in terms of its superior artistic quality, its powerfully emotional message, and the sheer brilliance of its execution.

Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrated by: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2010 80 min. (60 min.—​Broadcast Version) Monte Thompson Chera Van Burg Species Alliance Video Project Peter Coyote (Introduction and Closing) Expository United States http://​www.calloflife.org/​ DVD from film’s website

Five mass extinctions have occurred in the past 500  million years, caused by catastrophic changes in climate due to natural disasters like meteor collisions or volcanic eruptions. Our planet is now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, this one caused by the actions of one species:  Homo sapiens. Deviating from historical patterns, the present-​day rate of extinction of species outpaces the evolution of new species by at least 1,000 times. Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction is, according to the film’s press kit, “the first feature documentary to investigate the growing threat to Earth’s life support systems from this unprecedented loss of biodiversity,” which the film calls a bigger threat than terrorism or even nuclear war (Call of Life—​“Press Kit,” 2010). In past fifty years or less, our planet has suffered significant declines in species of land animals (28 percent), marine birds (30 percent), songbirds (50 percent), marine animals (28  percent), big ocean fish (90  percent), and freshwater fish (50 percent). If current trends continue, half or more of all plant and animal species will be gone forever, possibly within a generation. The scientific community

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Figure 9.2  Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction (United States, 2010, Monte Thompson) focuses on the causes and impacts of a loss of biodiversity not seen since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

is nearly unanimous in this conclusion, but has not been effectively getting the word out in the media. Why should this matter to mankind? Human well-​being is intimately tied to the diverse network of life that these creatures collectively comprise; they are fundamentally important to the survival of humanity. We depend not only on the species we interact with directly, but also with all the species that support those species. Plant species have contributed to the development of 120 of the top 150 biochemical medicines. Loss of populations in certain regions can be just as destructive as total extinction, through loss of genetic variability or of transportation of primary nutrients. Nature is an intricate web or tapestry, analogous to a house of cards; if you take out one element, the entire structure may fall apart in a nonlinear extinction “cascade” or collapse. This is especially true among the lower levels of the food chain, where the loss of one species may threaten all the species in the chain above. What are the primary drivers of extinction? Pollution, overpopulation, habitat loss, invasive species, over-​exploitation, and global warming all contribute to the push toward extinction. Habitat loss may be the number one danger; perhaps 70 percent of earth’s land surface has been transformed by the spreading of cities and agricultural land. Just about 10 percent qualifies as “protected land,” enough to preserve only 5 percent of the earth’s species. Pollution is a ubiquitous threat; pesticides have adverse effects on amphibians and fish, exemplified by

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the dead zones at the mouths of rivers because of effluents of nitrogen fertilizers. Plastic that accumulates in bodies of water may be eaten by sea life. Like pollution, invasive species such as foreign grasses or fish that are introduced into an ecosystem may alter the balance of that system. Global warming resulting from higher CO2 levels could doom more than a million species by 2050. Overconsumption of food and energy resources is undermining the very foundations of societal sustainability. Brazil destroys wildlife habitats to produce soybeans to feed animals to satisfy the demands of the Chinese for meat. Indonesia mows down rainforests to grow date palms for biodiesel transportation fuel. Each year seven billion humans (as of this writing) consume 50 percent of the earth’s total production of green plants, in order to produce crops, animal feed, and wood products. Humans also annually use half of the world’s fresh water supply and consume one third of the oceans’ fish products. Human population doubled from three billion to six billion in forty years from 1960 to 2000, and is predicted to reach nine billion by 2040—​clearly an unsustainable rate of growth. Even the current population is leading to a deterioration of our resource base and lifestyles; the earth’s carrying capacity for humanity’s growing population and resource consumption is well below where we are already. Where will the food and water for all these extra people come from? If population must be reduced, who should we decide which population should be reduced and how? Even environmental organizations are reluctant to publicize the need for population control planning in their home countries. What are the hidden drivers of mass extinction? An ever-​expanding consumer culture puts ever-​greater pressure on nature with a command-​and-​control mentality. Global corporate capitalism makes it hard to have a mainstream discussion about the dangers of overconsumption. A US family with two children consumes as many resources as a Third World family with fifteen or twenty children. The globalization of the American desire for abundance and luxury pushes consumption to unsustainable levels. Current models of capitalism are ecologically illiterate, because they are based on an ever-​expanding growth model that disregards the externalization of pollution costs. Cancer clusters, rising seas, melting glaciers, and species extinction are all yields of our economic system that have no line item on any corporate budget. Every advance in technology has created a broader network of necessary support. In short, we have valued the economic system over the health of the planet—​for what? Sociological studies

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have disproven the common belief that higher consumption leads to greater happiness. Technological optimists are always waiting for the next “techno-​fix” that will allow us to overcome our environmental problems. This attitude makes a certain superficial sense; the historical advancement of technology has indeed led to fantastic achievements, and may continue to do so. But past technological successes may mislead us into believing that we will inevitably be able to control our future. Current studies indicate that humanity would need the resources of five planets like Earth to be able to sustain the US level of growth worldwide. The invisible externalities of industrial capitalism begin to increasingly resemble a gigantic pyramid scheme, passing the consequences on to future generations. When people get overwhelmingly bad news, they are inclined to either put it out of their minds or to succumb to depression, leading to a dissociation between what they know and what they feel. This is the common phenomenon of “denial.” If humanity is indeed addicted to resources like oil or behavior patterns like overconsumption, and that addiction begins to corrode away at mankind’s belief systems or ways of life, people can be expected to respond like addicts. The current threats are unprecedented in human history, and so also is the magnitude of overcoming the denial. Media advertising, entertainment programming, and even news programs promote the very behaviors that undermine the world’s ecological health; they are like “megaphones from the world’s corporate interests” that breed a kind of self-​loathing, a feeling of inadequacy. An abusive system makes its constituents dependent upon it. People are so encased in an artificially constructed environment than nature itself has become the background to human society; we all have a “nature deficit disorder.” The failure of influential environmental organizations to speak truth to power gives their followers the impression that the basic system is okay. But “keeping the economy growing” is a little like “keeping your cancer growing.” Even scientists are wary about delivering bad news in the absence of some kind of political or organizational support. There are many examples of researchers who have had their careers destroyed by corporate opposition. The expectation that a corporation will do the right thing when presented with damaging scientific information represents a complete misunderstanding of how corporations operate—​indeed, are legally mandated to operate. There may well be a basic flaw in the genetic programming of the human species. It is very hard to make people be concerned about something the impacts of which may not be known for half a century or more. Because in the past our

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environment was relatively stable, humans have not developed an affinity for long-​range thinking. However, widespread extinction is not an issue that will just affect people hundreds of years from now. If governments or cultures go into a crisis mode only to deal with the latest emergency, they may not move beyond our programmed mode to “fix things” with technology and miss the big picture, postponing actions that might address the larger challenges. Even should population growth be stabilized, if expectations for consumption continue to grow, things will continue to spiral out of control. The failure to protect biodiversity could result in the deaths of billions; humanity is literally sawing off the limb it is sitting on. Call of Life urges its audience not to think of mass extinction just as a scientific or survival issue, but also as a spiritual and moral one. In the film, environmental and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy says, “To allow yourself to touch your sorrow is a politically subversive act . . . A great dying is happening, and we are losing our connection to all that lives. We are part of an unbroken chain of the adventure of life . . . There is no birth of consciousness without pain.” A shift to a new consciousness is part of being a living organism, undoing the split between nature and human culture. Addressing the viewer directly, the film says that the time has come to answer the call. We have set the conditions for survival for the earth’s species, and now we must take the responsibility. The place to begin is at the local level where people live, where solutions will be based on local resources and social relationships. They should be aware of the environmental effects of their choices, have reverence for all life, and take responsibility for stewardship for God’s creation. Will humanity witness a great dying or a great awakening? We should consider it a privilege to be part of the generations that must discover how to save the planet. Call of Life was produced by the non-​profit Species Alliance, founded in 2005 to raise public awareness about the threat of extinction and the loss of biodiversity. The core production team was composed of media professionals from both academia and the production world. The film’s narration (except the introduction and closing by actor Peter Coyote) comes from recognized experts in each area of research—​some prominent, others less well known—​structured primarily with talking heads and B-​roll footage of nature in an expository mode. The film includes several animated visual graphics to present information, some stock footage from old films, and some rather unusual expressive dances in natural settings. It is structurally basic and simple, but very effective nonetheless. The

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film’s website contains a fact sheet as thorough as any bibliography, with links to articles that support every aspect of the information conveyed in the film. Call of Life won awards in seven film festivals, included some prominent environmental festivals like Wild and Scenic and International Wildlife. (Call of Life—​“Press Kit,” 2010) But its release was very limited, and the DVD may be available only through the film’s website. Consequently, it failed to garner many reviews, and the ones it did were exclusively from environmental organizations focusing on animal issues, such as Animal Rights and Izilwane: Voices for Biodiversity. That is a real shame, because many uninformed audiences might be more open to hearing about the plight of animal species than about more politicized topics like climate change or peak oil.

Vanishing of the Bees Year: Length: Directors Producers Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2010 88 min. George Langworthy, Maryam Henein George Langworthy, Maryam Henein, 5 others Hive Mentality Films/​Hipfuel Dogwoof Pictures, Cargo Films & Releasing Ellen Page Expository United Kingdom http://​www.vanishingbees.com Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Hulu

Bees provide pollination, one of most important tasks in nature, without which people wouldn’t have fruits and vegetables, at least not in such abundance. The human use of bees dates back as far as ancient Egypt, and bees often appear in ancient myth and ritual. Honey was one of the only sweets available to early civilizations. Today bees pollinate $15 billion worth of food annually in the United States alone, and hives are transported across the United States to pollinate orchards and farms. The decline of the honeybee population is a worldwide phenomenon, first noticed in 2006 in Florida, but rapidly documented in thirty-​five US states and across the globe. The film, shot across the United States, Europe, Asia, and

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Australia, primarily follows two Florida beekeepers named Hackenberg and Mendez as its central characters. Visually, the narrative is told through turning brown pages of old drawings, accompanied by a sorrowful musical score composed mostly of string instruments. In 2007, US scientists created a task force to study what came to be called colony collapse disorder (CCD). Bees are an important indicator of environmental quality; when bees are dying en masse, something is wrong. Beekeepers have felt helpless in diagnosing and solving the problem, and some are going out of business. Usually beekeepers can split hives to replace up to 30 percent of bees they lose annually, but recently even that tactic has come up short, so the United States has begun importing bees from Australia. Colony apiaries have been found abandoned, except sometimes by queens and young bees, but without large numbers of dead bees or consistent evidence of known bee pathogens. This absence of dead bees made scientific analysis of the problem more difficult, but the pervasiveness of disorders led scientists to suspect a major compromising of bees’ immune systems. One producer described it as a “bee holocaust.” Small-​scale biodynamic farmers question the methods of queen breeding and artificial insemination of larger-​scale corporate beekeepers, as well as the practice of removing honey from hives and replacing it with sugar syrup. Organic beekeepers believe small-​scale beekeeping is the answer; they don’t employ either artificial sugars or miticides in their beekeeping. They blame the factory farming monoculture model of beekeeping for CCD, and warn of overdependence on cheap imports as a danger to our domestic food supply. However, large-​scale beekeepers blame cheap competition from abroad (e.g., China) that contain artificial sweeteners that are more cheaply produced than honey. US producers believe they can’t compete without these artificial methods, and they also blame lack of FDA enforcement and the influence of large corporations. By 2008 beekeepers were struggling to survive, and scientists had not yet diagnosed the cause of CCD. The film echoes The Future of Food in its criticism of chemical weapons being repurposed as agricultural pesticides in Germany and the United States, and repeats the story of the fight against DDT. There is a long history of problematical interactions between bees and pesticide-​raised crops, a record of bee die-​offs when sprayed directly, and a practice of sheltering bees during spraying. Systemic pesticides, which are incorporated into seeds rather than being sprayed, were introduced around 2003, and have been demonstrated to reduce immunity in bees, impair their digestion and navigation, and harm their brains.

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Bees cannot survive away from their hives for twenty-​four hours; they may acquire nonlethal doses during pollination and not be clearly harmed, but then bring the chemicals back to the hive where they may impact reproduction. The effects of these low level doses had not been previously studied, but recent studies discovered high levels of pesticides within colonies. In 2009 the US Congress began to hold hearings about CCD. Germany had already begun to restrict the use of systemic pesticides. It was also discovered that CCD had begun in France a decade earlier, just as French farmers had begun to use the systemic fertilizer Gaucho, made by Bayer in Germany. Photographic tests on French bees showed them becoming disoriented during pollination. Unlike in the United States, French beekeepers began political protests against Bayer. They tossed empty hives over the fence at the Bayer factory that manufactured Gaucho. They also filed lawsuits, which they won based on scientific research, and as a result the French Department of Agriculture banned the pesticide on corn and sunflowers; bans also followed in England, Germany, Italy, and Slovenia. Florida beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendez attended an international conference in France to compare notes and tactics. They concluded that the snag in scientific research was the time lapse between the exposure to the pesticide in the pollen and the hive collapse, which could happen up to six months later and even be cross-​generational. Scientists suspect that the critical factor is how chemical residue builds up in the soil over time. European governments generally operate on the precautionary principle, erring on the side of caution, unlike the United States government, which uses risk assessment as the basis for decision-​making. Also, the EPA asks corporations to do their own research, which has been compared to “the fox guarding the henhouse.” When Mendez obtained the studies Bayer had done, he saw that they were all very short-​term studies (over a matter of days), and that no long-​term studies of the effects of the pesticides had been done. In fact, scientific study of the synergistic effects of chemicals in agriculture is almost nonexistent, even though over 95 percent of the food people eat from American agriculture is treated with pesticides. Affected beekeepers have come to regard the EPA as an ineffectual organization corrupted by corporate political influence. In the film, food researcher Michael Pollan says, “Cheap food is not as cheap as it looks. You pay the price in environmental damage, you pay the price in terms of future health damage, and food that looks expensive may not be in the long term if it keeps you healthier.” Pesticide-​based and genetically modified

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monocultures have not reduced the percentage of crop loss, which remains at around 33 percent; the level of infestation also remains about the same. So the arguments for these agricultural strategies become weaker as time goes by, although the agricultural and chemical corporations continue to project vast increases in yields while ignoring dangerous side effects. Bees are not the only species that appear to suffer from current practices. Frogs, hummingbirds, butterflies, and bats are all suffering population losses and higher deformities. In humans, increasing autism and cancer rates may be systemic results of these practices. In 2010, when this film was made, CCD events were continuing to rise in frequency in the United States. The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) sued the EPA to obtain data on Bayer’s insecticides; they won the first round when a federal judge banned the pesticide. In France bees bounced back within a year in regions where systemic pesticides were not applied to crops. Organic bee farmers have had to move away from regions where they were surrounded by farms using pesticides and GM crops, and the number of small-​scale organic farmers continues to expand. The film recommends cutting home use of pesticides, and its website includes a Discussion and Activity Guide for educators. The critical response to Vanishing of the Bees was sparse, generally favorable to the message but less so to the cinematic technique. Variety’s Rob Nelson (2011) wrote, “Hypnotic slo-​mo images of honeybees flapping their wings are about all that distinguishes (the film) from a well-​researched article on the subject . . . Though ‘Bees’ generates only minimal buzz, its basic point, that the insects urgently need protection if they’re to continue the crucial work of pollinating our crops, remains nigh unimpeachable.” In Eye for Film, Jennie Kermode (2009) noted, “It’s refreshing to see a documentary which doesn’t oversimplify the science or the political issues related to it . . . It’s well substantiated and is delivered with wit and occasional humor by a fantastic cast of beekeepers and related tradespeople, who feel passionately about the issues involved.” However, regarding the film’s aesthetics, Kermode wrote, “The otherwise compelling story is patchily edited and strung together with an animated book that looks like something from a twee Eighties fantasy computer game . . . some sections of the film are reused over and over again . . . it’s no more than an average piece of filmmaking.” On the academic front, a New Scientist article by Aizen and Harder (2009) questioned most of the film’s basic assumptions:  that humanity would starve without bees, that most food production depends on pollinators, and that

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pollinator decline was a worldwide phenomenon. However, other scholars responded strongly against this article, describing it as “honeybee-​determined denial” and questioning “an aversion in certain quarters to asking uncomfortable questions.” Carol Glasser (2011) of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies raised objections to the film’s primary focus on human impacts: “The documentary is a must-​see, as it brings to light an important issue that is little discussed. At the same time, the film is problematic and disappointing for its failure to fully extend the compass of concern to . . . an honest evaluation of how bees themselves are either being treated in practice or discussed in the film.”

More than Honey Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

2012 95 min. Markus Imhoof Markus Imhoof, Thomas Kufus, Helmut Grasser, Pierre-​ Alain Meier Zero One Film FilmLaden Participatory/​Expository Switzerland/​Germany http://​www.morethanhoney-​derfilm.at/​mehrinfo.html Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu

Bees are dying en masse all over the world—​50–​90  percent of all local bees, depending on the world’s region. A companion piece to Vanishing of the Bees, More Than Honey explores the “Why?” of “colony collapse disorder,” but offers a great general introduction to bee biology with less discussion of the political debates over beekeeping than the previous film. Its overall conclusion is that bees are dying as the result of an excess of civilization, a reduction due to the domestication of feral bees. Director Markus Imhoof, making his first documentary at the age of seventy, brings his extensive feature film experience to the direction of continuity sequences in the film. He creates personal portraits of several beekeepers and their stories: a Scandinavian mountain beekeeper keeping up his family’s tradition; a Florida migratory beekeeper who drives trucks of bees across the United

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States; a California almond grower who depends on bees and admits unashamedly that, “We’re capitalists seeking total global domination” (80–​90 percent of almonds come from California); farmers in China who must pollinate plants and flowers by hand; and a Southwestern US beekeeper who raises Africanized “killer bees.” The beehive is a system—​perhaps it could even be considered an organism, as each bee assumes a specialized function. The average hive contains 50,000 bees, of which 2,000 bees are born and die daily. Beekeepers have always manipulated bee reproduction. Cross-​fertilization makes it hard to keep a colony “pure,” as queens and colonies are sold around the world, spreading diseases and parasites. A bee brood may die from fungicide, and an infected brood must be destroyed. Unfortunately, beekeepers often fight back with more chemicals—​sugar, water and antibiotics. The bee industry has sacrificed the traditional relationship with hives because the business has increased tenfold. On the international scene, Africanized killer bees escaped from an experiment in Brazil and migrated up through Lain America to Mexico and the American Southwest. They are almost impossible to domesticate, tending to escape from human-​managed hives, and they refuse to interbreed with domesticated bees. But beekeepers in Brazil (and at least one in the US southwest) have embraced them. In Australia, Africanized bees are invasive but thrive. Scientists there run tests on them on an island to prevent their spread, in hopes of breeding strains that humans can live with naturally. The film concludes by following scout killer bees in search of a place to form a new hive. Director Imhoof spent five years travelling the world just doing research for the film, with assistance from the CIBER honeybee research center at the University of Western Australia. Says Imhoof: “My experience on making fiction films was beneficial when it came to structuring the broad scope of the material. I wanted the number of protagonists to be as explicit as possible so that the viewer could follow them emotionally . . . every scene told from the human perspective had to be experienced from the bees’ perspective as well. The bees became the protagonist more and more in the film” (More than Honey—​Director, n.d.). Visually, the film employs Ken Burns-​style pans and zooms with still photographs. There is little voiceover narration—​mostly people speak for themselves. The music is kept low-​key in the background, often simply an unobtrusive piano score; the opening and closing violin solos are the only strong emotional pieces. The film’s most stunning feature is its extreme close-​up photography of bees in motion with a narrow depth of field against soft focus backgrounds, and macro

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photography of hives with detailed attention to focus and shutter speed. Says Imhoof: “To film honeybees we used high-​speed cameras and endoscope lenses, like the ones used for operations in humans . . . With 70 pictures per second—​ meaning slowed down three times the normal tempo—​the bees move about as fast as we humans do, and you can see exactly what they’re doing.” Imhoof adds, “We used mini-​helicopters for the flights. All of the bees in flight were filmed with 300 pictures per second. One second of reality amounts to 12 seconds of film . . . After two years of shooting, we had 205 hours of footage, with which we spent one year in the editing room” (More than Honey—​Director, n.d.). The film expresses a distinct environmental-​cultural subtext. Imhoof states, “The relationship between human beings and bees—​thousands of years old—​ illustrates the increasing conflict between civilization and nature. But with it arises also the fundamental question: Are we human beings a part of nature? Or do we stand on the outside and subdue nature? Couldn’t there be a fruitful symbiosis between everyone involved, the bees, beekeepers, plants, farmers, traders and customers?” (More than Honey—​Director, n.d.). The screenwriters created a blog to continue the conversation online at http://​www.ciber.science. uwa.edu.au/​blog. More than Honey has played to great success in film festivals across the world, including Best Documentary or Audience awards from at least nine festivals. It was also Switzerland’s submission for the 86th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film (“More than Honey”—​Wikipedia). The critical response to the film was very positive, with special praise extended to the cinematography. Stephanie Zacharek (2013) of the Village Voice called the film “a delightful, informative, and suitably contemplative study of the bee world and the bee-​population crisis, though in the end it does offer enough dewdrops of hope to fill up a bluebell or two.” Film-​Forward’s Nora Lee Mandel said, “More Than Honey, a delectable nature documentary of the secret life of bees, is also a philosophical rumination on the past, present, and future of those who raise them, and the threat to the 80 percent of plant species that need these insects for pollination—​which means about a third of what we eat.” Jennifer Merin (2013) of About.com Documentaries called More Than Honey “a phenomenally well-​researched and thorough study of bees and their complex influence on human civilization, and an in-​depth investigation of the honeybee colony collapse disorder, a current crisis that some experts say threatens the extinction of honeybees, which would have a potentially devastating impact on human civilization.”

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Most commentators praised the exceptional macro photography of the bees. Variety’s Jay Weissberg wrote, “Most striking in Honey are closeups of bees in their hives, symbiotically working together in creating their new queen. Imhoof rightfully spends time detailing the extraordinary nature of bee social structure. Even more noteworthy are sequences of the bees in flight.” A  few critics felt that the special effects photography was so impressive that it distracted from the film’s message. Stephen Holden (2013) of the New York Times wrote, “The cinematography, by Jörg Jeshel, is spectacularly beautiful, whether the camera is contemplating the Swiss Alps or the interior of a hive . . . But the film goes overboard with cartoonish slow-​motion footage of bees in flight.” On the NPR website, Mark Jenkins (2013) wrote:  “An amiably shaggy combination of science lesson, whimsical musing and alarm bell, More Than Honey isn’t as urgent as its eco-​catastrophic subject—​the possible destruction of the world’s critically important honeybee populations—​might seem to require.”

Virunga Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2014 100 minutes Orlando von Einsiedel Orlando von Einsiedel, Joanna Natasegara Violet Films/​Grain Media Netflix Interactive/​Observational United Kingdom, Congo http://​virungamovie.com/​ Netflix

Congo’s Virunga National Park is one of the world’s oldest national parks, designated as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. It is the only region in the world where mountain gorillas still roam; only about 800 still remain. The wildlife within the park also includes elephants, antelopes, warthogs, hippos, lions, and buffalo, but most species had to be reestablished after the recent civil war ended. The money that comes from tourism helps promote the conservation of nature, but also makes things better economically for the people. Virunga is filled with magnificent photography of the vast park and its varied wildlife,

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supported by a stirring musical score that captures both the majesty and the tragedy of this nearly pristine natural world. The disturbing narrative, conveyed through interactive and observational modes, is broken from time to time by quiet montages of the natural beauty of the park and the movements of indigenous animals across the landscapes. We begin in Africa, attending a burial, surrounded by throngs of grieving people. The dead man is Ranger Kasereka, identified as having “died trying to rebuild his country” of Congo. Then—​flash back 130  years, when Africa was being “carved into colonies ruled by European nations.” Only Congo was privatized and ruled by corporations under Belgian King Leopold II, with its resources pillaged and millions left murdered or mutilated. In 1960 Patrice Lumumba led Congo to independence, only to be murdered by Western mercenaries the next year; the mining and exporting of precious metals continued, in particular for the global electronics industry. The Rwandan genocide in 1994 sparked a long civil war in Congo. A fragile peace reached in 2003 led to democratic elections in 2006. But in 2010 oil was discovered under Lake Edward in Virunga National Park, an area home to thousands of people and the last group of mountain gorillas, prompting a rise in instability—​which brings us to the present day. We move with a group of heavily armed wardens on patrol in the grasslands. They stumble upon an illegal settlement, come under attack and detain some men, while others run away. Finding evidence of poaching, Warden Rodrigue Latembo interrogates the captives and orders the huts to be burned. As a teenager, Latembo fought in the civil war until his younger brother was killed. At his mother’s urging he escaped the army and decided to dedicate his life to Virunga. Andre Bauma is a caretaker at the Rumangabo orphanage for four young gorillas—​Maisha, Koboko, Ndeze, and Ndakasi—​the only mountain gorillas in captivity in the world. Poachers want to kill the parents and sell the babies. The film shows footage of nine massacred adult gorillas, whose killings were part of a concerted effort to rid the park of gorillas, and, with them, the park rangers who defend them. Bauma has formed an emotional bond with them, as he also lost his father in the wars. He takes great joy in being both father and mother to the young gorillas, but knows that when they are old enough, they will be released back into the wild. Emmanuel de Merode is the Virunga National Park director. He is caught between the conflicting goals of protecting the park’s wildlife and managing its resources for economic benefit. The park is on the verge of becoming a battleground between the Congolese army and rebel groups uniting against it. Park

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rangers know that their work is very dangerous; 130 rangers have died protecting the park. They ride out in trucks in teams of seven rangers each. Warden Latembo has a wife and young boy, and they don’t want their son to grow up in a world as broken as theirs. The British oil company SOCO International holds the concession to explore for oil in Lake Edward and the Virunga Park. Congo has suffered foreign exploitation of its resources for centuries, and both the government and the rebel groups seek their share of the spoils. When park representatives notified SOCO that their concession was illegal, the company forced its way into the park anyway with a convoy of vehicles. Tens of thousands of families have been displaced by the current civil unrest, the roots of which go back to the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s. The film visits a camp for an estimated 60,000 displaced persons in southern Congo. Young French journalist Melanie Gouby provides a face for the investigation of the causes of the conflict. She wears a hidden camera while socializing with a young SOCO operations supervisor in order to seek out information. He sees the recolonization of Congo as the cure for its political chaos, and sees the park rangers as obstructionists to SOCO’s goals. Virunga Park thus became a test case for protecting all Congo parks from exploitation of natural resources. Many local residents support SOCO; they see oil exploration as an opportunity for work and to participate in the profits, and believe the government (including its environmental offices) supports SOCO. The filmmakers use hidden cameras to record the lobbying of local SOCO allies who try to bribe people to gather information clandestinely to benefit SOCO. Local villagers depend upon the lake for fishing. The fighting has destroyed the local economy, and fishing is about all that’s left. SOCO has made promises to provide schools and roads, but local people have not been given a seat at the table for decision-​making. The presence of soldiers and a military intelligence office have them intimidated. Warden Rodrigue wears a hidden camera when he meets with Captain Feruzi, (the army’s representative to SOCO) and a SOCO security contractor. The interaction is superficially cordial but tense. Rebel spokesman Col. Kazarama tells reporter Gouby (while being recorded by a hidden camera) how he negotiates with SOCO for a percentage of the concession. She wonders if SOCO realizes how dangerous their so-​called allies may prove to be. Viewers follow a well-​armed troop on a grasslands patrol that discovers a killed elephant. The techniques of tusk removal suggest a military operation beyond the means of typical poachers. Rebel groups, asserts Merode, are more focused on survival

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and making money that on any particular political agenda. The rebels pursue mixed agendas, sometimes negotiating for concessions with SOCO and the Kinshasa government, sometimes making war against the government to gain leverage. It is a very chaotic political scene. Ms. Gouby holds risky meetings with SOCO mercenaries, not always knowing with whom she is meeting. Sequences filmed with hidden cameras are edited in disturbing fashion, conveying the emotional tension of the conversations through visuals punctuated by jump cuts and confusing transitions. Gouby finds the dialogue reminiscent of a bad movie: “It’s just a fucking mine, this park . . . the money you could pull out.” Their motives are so crass that they cannot conceive that anyone would really care about the gorillas “unless they’re shitting fucking diamonds . . . Who gives a fuck about a fucking monkey?” Then fighting breaks out on the edge of the park and park rangers and employees are vulnerable to being caught up in it. They must figure out how to care for their gorillas, one of which has fallen ill; if their supply lines are cut off, they must also be prepared for evacuation if necessary. The distant gunfire scares animals grazing in the wild. Military vehicles line the roads, and refugees fleeing the violence begin to filter into the park. The park personnel bring out and load their weapons for self-​defense, knowing that they cannot muster a force sufficient to oppose the rebels, but they are ready to die to protect their gorillas. Congolese army tanks move in, and direct fighting breaks out in the town adjacent to the park compound. The chaotic movement of the photography is similar to any other war footage: people running from soldiers that are shooting in all directions without any sense of order. A displaced persons’ camp is established on the park’s southern border; the wounded, mostly innocent noncombatants, fill the local hospital and many of them die. Having dislodged the Congolese forces and UN peacekeepers, the rebels then move on, heading for the provincial capital And then—​quiet. Wild animals return to graze peacefully on the savannah. But one of the gorillas, Kaboko—​the only male—​has passed away from a combination of illness and stress. The rangers have now been reduced to virtual prisoners in the park, surrounded by rebel forces. They know if they leave they will be surrendering the park to the rebels, leaving no one to protect the gorillas. Park Director de Merode receives death threats from anonymous sources. Finally a team of rangers feels safe enough to venture back out into the jungle and search for more gorillas. They’re reassured to find some, including some newborns. Viewers sense the emotional closeness that the keepers feel for the

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gorillas in their care, the personal relationships they’ve developed. The preservation of the wildlife has become for them a deeply personal mission in life, protecting a web of nature so much greater than themselves. Says one: “In the end we will be judged if we just stand by as the park vanishes. But our wish is that this park lives forever.” Unfortunately, the film can offer no happy ending. When Warden Rodrigue attempted to interfere with SOCO’s building of an illegal structure within the park, he was arrested and tortured. Park Director de Merode was ambushed and shot several times but survived. SOCO denies involvement with rebel groups or any illegal actions. The struggle to protect the park from exploitation continues. Randy Astle (2014) interviewed director Orlando von Einsiedel for Filmmaker magazine. When he conceived of making the film, he expected to be portraying how “an area known for violence and conflict” was transforming into “one known for sustainable development, conservation and stability.” But on arriving in Virunga, he quickly realized that his “story about the rebirth of the region . . . became a film about the cycle of violence and foreign interference that’s beleaguered Congo for the past 150 years.” The production, said von Einsiedel, pushed everyone involved to their limits, with “the logistics of filming in a conflict zone, going up against a billion-​dollar oil company, (and) trying to make a coherent film from a narrative combining investigative journalism, verité and nature documentary filmmaking techniques.” By no means does he see the film as the end of the process: “The film is having a significant impact on stakeholders from various areas . . . shoring up financial and political support for the park itself but also amplifying pressure on SOCO International to do the right thing.” Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, philanthropist Howard G. Buffett, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu were moved by the film to coauthor an article in Huffington Post lending their support to the film’s goals: They wrote: “It is difficult to exaggerate the ecological and symbolic value of Virunga National Park. Established in 1925, it is Africa’s oldest national park, and . . . one of the most biologically diverse places on earth . . . It was declared a World Heritage site in 1970 because 190 countries agreed it deserved the world’s special protection” (Branson et al., 2014). Virunga was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was similarly honored at the Tribeca Film Festival and won “best” awards at several documentary film festivals. Netflix obtained exclusive rights to the film’s distribution. Emily Steel (2014) notes that Netflix “promotes the

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stories to its base of more than 50  million global members all at once . . . Traditional distribution models generally require that filmmakers strike deals market by market and place huge emphasis on exclusive festivals and opening weekends.” Virunga received universal acclaim for both its content and its craft among film reviewers. The New York Times’ Jeannette Catsoulis (2014) said, “Showcasing the best and the worst of human nature . . . Virunga wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheri Linden (2014) observed, “Urgent investigative reporting and unforgettable drama, Virunga is a work of heart-​wrenching tenderness and heart-​stopping suspense.” Slant’s Kenji Fujishima (2014) reported, “The most surprising thing about (Virunga) is its smashing effectiveness as a rousing piece of storytelling. This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.” Virunga has “the immediacy of an All the President’s Men–​style investigative procedural, complete with jaw-​dropping hidden-​camera footage of officials being bribed and contempt for the Congolese masses being expressed by SOCO employees.” Many critics also had high praise for the film’s character-​centered structure, its breathtaking photography and its emotionally moving musical score. Simply put, Virunga is a film that succeeds on every possible level.

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All of the documentary programs discussed so far make important activist arguments about dangers posed to the environment that impact human and animal survival. Yet often these films have been criticized for not offering solutions to the problems they confront. So let us now move on to consider some case studies of how activist groups, individuals, and filmmakers themselves have taken direct action to change the world—​either by calling attention to injustices or by finding strategies to counteract some of the threats thus far discussed. These films utilize interactive or performative modes of storytelling, presenting to audiences inside perspectives on methods and tactics utilized by activists, sometimes even offering possible strategies for change that viewers might choose to employ themselves in order to impact their communities and personal lives. These films exhibit a tremendous variety of approaches to constructive change: urban farming from Cuba to Los Angeles to Detroit; alternative technologies offering escape from reliance on fossil fuels; collaboration between American and Chinese filmmakers to help rural townspeople fight against a dam that would endanger their culture; homebuilding techniques that employ civilization’s waste products as building blocks; the liberating possibilities of living in intentional community with others; tactics of nonviolent protest by committed UK protest cells; citizen activists using the political process to protect undeveloped lands; and portraits that convey the personal struggles of individual activists who have committed their lives to their respective causes. With these inspiring stories of activism, viewers may move from focusing on the destruction wrought by human actions, to imagining possibilities for constructive change—​and ultimately, to move from despair to hope.

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The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil Year: Length: Director: Producers:

2006 53 min. Faith Morgan Faith Morgan, Eugene “Pat” Murphy, Megan Quinn, Thomas E. Blessing IV Production Company: Community Solution Distributor: Community Solution Narrator: Bruce Cromer Mode/​Genre: Participatory/​Expository Country: United States Website: http://​www.powerofcommunity.org/​cm/​ Available on: Amazon Video (DVD), YouTube, Vimeo

In 2005 the Community Solution, an Ohio-​based environmental activist organization, released a 53-​minute film called The Power of Community documenting the Cuban struggle to adapt to the dramatic loss of its oil imports after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike many environmental documentaries that are criticized for conveying doom and gloom, The Power of Community offers something that people really crave: hope. By looking at the creative approach to adaptation taken in Cuba in response to extreme oil shortages during the 1990s, the film offers a way forward in the face of peak oil—​not only strategies for providing for the survival needs of the Cuban people, but also a path to building a sense of resilience and optimism. This short film begins with a brief description of Cuba’s “Special Period,” which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and extended for a decade or more. Soviet oil and food imports virtually disappeared, as well as Cuba’s primary export market for sugarcane. During this time there was virtually no gas available and automobile transport ground to a halt. Food had to be rationed, and the average adult Cuban lost 20 pounds. Energy blackouts were common. The country’s GDP declined by about one-​third, a reduction comparable to that of the United States during the lowest point of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This introduction is followed by a capsule summary of the concept of “peak oil,” the theory that the world is approaching the maximum production of oil,

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and that in the near future oil production will begin to decline, shortages will develop, and prices will substantially increase. The film’s premise is that the artificial shortages experienced by Cuba from the loss of its Soviet trade are analogous to what the world will someday experience due to geologic reasons rather than political or economic forces. The film demonstrates many changes that were difficult but effective in adapting to fuel scarcity. The Power of Community documents the adaptations in Cuban life through interviews with environmental and urban planners, urban farmers, and lots of footage of on-​the-​ground activities and operations, linked together with a voiceover narration. In a population used to driving cars (albeit often US antiques), people transitioned to bicycle transport and mass transportation. There began a slow but steady expansion of hydro, wind, and solar energy, mostly in schools, clinics, and community centers in rural areas too difficult to connect to the grid. But perhaps even more striking than the technological and agricultural adaptations were the optimism and ingenuity displayed by the Cuban people in pulling together to face these challenges.

Figure 10.1  The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (United States, 2006, Faith Morgan) documents how Cuba responded to severe economic hardship by creating a lower-​energy society, especially through organic urban gardening.

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The central body of the film is divided into two sections. “Agriculture” details the growth of urban farming, the learning of sustainable practices of organic permaculture, and the changes in land distribution policy. Farmers made the difficult shift from tractor-​based agriculture back to the use of oxen and mules, relying on the skills of older farmers for training in raising and working with animals. A reform movement began to restructure the old Soviet-​style system of state farms to a more localized, privatized system of smaller farms and urban gardens with greater incentives. Fossil fuel–​based pesticides and fertilizers were abandoned in favor of organic permaculture, with the assistance of some Australian permaculture teachers. Within five years Cuba’s agriculture went from the greatest per capita consumer of fossil fuels in Latin America to the lowest, and the mass starvation that engulfed North Korea—​a country enduring comparable hardships—​was avoided. As of 2006, the World Wildlife Federation cited Cuba as being the most sustainable nation in the world (Lewis, 2015). “Surviving Peak Oil” covers issues of education and health, housing, transportation, and energy alternatives. Decentralizing the country’s educational system compensated for the greater expense of travel. The number of centers for higher education rose from three before the 1990s to around fifty by 2006. Despite the hardships, the Cuban government refused to compromise on its commitment to free education and health care. Thus Cuban rates for life expectancy and infant mortality remain very comparable to those in the United States, even though the average Cuban consumes only one-​eighth the amount of energy as the average American. Cuba has fifty-​seven doctors per thousand people, versus twenty-​eight per thousand in the United States. In fact, Cuban exportation of its health-​care expertise has proven a valuable commodity for trade with its developing neighbor countries around the world—​in particular with Venezuela, in return for oil. With little gas for cars, Cuba had to develop a mass transportation system overnight. Old trucks were renovated to serve as small buses; for larger groups of passengers, tractor-​trailers were used to haul older style buses called “camels.” Carpooling and hitchhiking became common, and were officially sanctioned and encouraged. Rural residents turned back to horses and mules for transport. Cuba obtained hundreds of thousands of bicycles from China. Oil shortages also posed an impediment to housing construction because of the amount of fuel required for mixing cement and other energy needs. Those living in multilevel apartment complexes often had to carry water to their residences with ropes due to power shortages, so people had to pitch in to help those who needed support.

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Alternative energy systems are too expensive to supply most of Cuba’s electrical power needs, but in rural areas small-​scale wind and hydropower systems have been implemented, and over 2,000 rural schools acquired solar panels during this period. Biogas from sugarcane waste provided a replacement fuel from the oil burned by most Cuban power plants. Despite dealing with Cuba as its central subject matter, the filmmakers did their best to keep the film nonpolitical, so it could reach the widest possible audience. The ultimate takeaway from Cuba’s “Special Period” transition is that the loss of a significant amount of oil doesn’t spell doom for a country or community that is willing to make the necessary changes to reorganize its agricultural, transportation, and energy systems, and to ensure that any sacrifice is shared. Traditional Cuban folk-​style music lends an upbeat energy to the film’s emotional tone. In the summer of 2003, Faith Morgan and Pat Murphy, members of the Ohio-​ based Community Solution organization, paid a visit to Cuba. Their group’s focus was on “local community-​based solutions that reflect the values of cooperation, conservation and curtailment.” They were aware of the hardships the Cuban people had suffered, since the collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived Cuba of 75–​90 percent of its oil imports and caused a depression-​level drop in its GDP. To Morgan and Murphy, the challenges Cubans faced resembled what the whole world might suffer if the predictions of the peaking of oil production came true in the near future (Morgan, 2012). The trip proved to be a revelation. Through a series of rapid reforms and adaptive behaviors, Cuba had managed to survive hardships that in most nations would have brought about mass starvation and revolution. To make up for the loss of oil for motorized transport, people shifted to riding bicycles; to compensate for the loss of agricultural imports, urban gardens sprang up all over Havana. The travelers were inspired by what they had seen, and returned to the United States with a burning desire to tell the story of Cuba’s transformation, so they decided to make a film. Having no filmmaking experience, they turned to Gregory Greene, the Canadian codirector of the recent peak oil film The End of Suburbia, who performed much of the cinematography. Thomas E. Blessing IV came on board as associate producer and researched most of the stock footage the film needed to portray the Special Period of the 1990s. With Greene and their colleague Megan Quinn, who served as the primary sound recordist, they returned to Cuba for two weeks in 2004 and shot the bulk of the footage relevant to their topics

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with a Canon XL-​1 camera. They interviewed several Cuban officials who were leading the strategic thinking for change: urban planner Miguel Coyula; director of Havana’s large Alamar urban farm Miguel Salcines Lopez; attorney Rita Pereira; and Carmen Cabrera and Roberto Perez of the Institute for Nature and Humanity. Back in the United States, they also interviewed prominent figures in the peak oil movement like Richard Heinberg and Matthew Simmons, to give context to the issue of peak oil. The production’s crew members donated their time and labor. Educational filmmaker Eric Johnson edited the film with Final Cut Pro upon their return to Ohio, first creating a short trailer for fundraising purposes. The filmmakers made no attempt to edit the film into any particular length, for example to fit into a PBS 56-​minute time slot; they just kept editing until the program felt right. Most of the travel and production expenses, totaling around $85,000, were covered by private donations, the assets of the non-​profit organization, and a foundation grant. The film had returned those expenses within the first year of release. The filmmakers had no sophisticated marketing plan for the film. Beyond marketing it within the rather narrow peak oil community, the main goal was to enter it in festivals, and this strategy proved incredibly successful; the reception from both critical and general audiences was overwhelmingly positive. But perhaps the most effective mode of distribution proved to be old-​fashioned word-​ of-​mouth. The Power of Community is probably the most widely seen “peak oil film” after The End of Suburbia. It has also come to be regarded as the first “positive” peak oil film, one of a handful of films that attempts to move beyond assessing the dangers of fossil fuel depletion to seeking constructive solutions for adaptation and resilience, leaving viewers with a sense of empowerment and optimism. The Power of Community was something of an under-​the-​radar environmental documentary. Over time it screened in over eighty film festivals and won nine awards, but it rarely screened on television and was not reviewed by prominent newspapers or online film sites. It reached its audience primarily through screenings in church basements, classrooms, and living rooms, sponsored by local activist organizations that wanted to spread its message of hope for adapting to a crisis similar to that forecast for a peak oil world. As its reputation grew, so did its acceptance in environmental and documentary film festivals. Many environmentally oriented journals and websites did publish reviews of the film, such as Yes! Magazine, Green Left Weekly, resilience.org, and

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transitionvoice.com. John Cooper (2006) on Axisoflogic.com said, “There are many lessons for America and the rest of inhabited Earth to learn, adapt and employ from the successful experience of Cuba.” Most individual reviews posted on the film’s website found it very informative and inspiring, although some found the production’s execution amateurish and questioned the validity of looking to Cuba as a model.

Postscript Right after the film’s release, Cuba’s government declared an “Energy Revolution” in an attempt to move away from centralized oil-​fueled electrical generation to more efficient decentralized generators and thus eliminate blackouts. The Cuban partnership with Venezuela had raised Cuban oil imports in exchange for Cuban medical training and expertise, and Cuban domestic oil production had increased twentyfold since 1991. Thus many people had abandoned their bicycles for motorized transport, via motorbikes if not cars. The huge mass transit vehicles called “camels” had disappeared from the cities and were relegated to rural transportation. But other changes were more enduring. The higher educational system has been decentralized through the creation of many mini-​universities in smaller towns and rural areas outside Havana. The momentum toward urban organic gardening and permaculture is still vibrant, and the search for more renewable sources of energy continues, whether from sugarcane, wind, or solar panels. But finding international partnerships for a variety of energy projects has been hampered by the US blockade, which continues to penalize companies and nations that do business with Cuba. Thanks to changes in US policy toward Cuba in 2015, these outdated obstacles may soon be discarded. The producers of the film, Pat Murphy and Faith Morgan, have made a couple of return trips to Cuba since production and are planning a sequel to the film. In a chapter they wrote for the anthology State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible (Murphy, 2013), they outline the objectives of the 2005 Cuban Energy Revolution (CER): increased energy efficiency and conservation; improving the availability and reliability of electrical service; development of renewable energy; development of Cuba’s own oil and natural gas resources; and increasing international cooperation. The overall goal of these policies is to sustain basic services while continuing to reduce the island country’s carbon footprint.

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Who Killed the Electric Car? Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available in:

2006 93 min. Chris Paine Jessie Deeter Electric Entertainment Sony Pictures Classics Martin Sheen Expository/​Participatory United States http://​www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/​ Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube

Who Killed the Electric Car? is an excellent film that works on all levels of information, emotion, and entertainment, executed with a crisp editing pace with quick montages backed by upbeat music. It probes the introduction and demise of General Motors’ EV-​1 and asks why the electric car failed to succeed in the marketplace. The film begins with a mock funeral of the electric car (in an actual cemetery), establishing a tone of irony and participatory engagement. Its narrative includes interviews with various scientists, public officials, industry representatives, and activist celebrities, all testifying to their experiences with electric cars and the part they played in the introduction of the EV-​1. Electric cars were introduced in California in 1996, but ten years later they were gone. Celebrity drivers included Ed Begley Jr., Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Ted Danson, and many others. Early in the twentieth century, the majority of cars were electric; they had the advantages of being quiet, requiring no cranking, and were not smelly. But by 1920 cheaper gas and mass production gave the edge to cars that ran on gasoline. What happened? Why did the gas car win out? Cars running on gas had obvious environmental disadvantages. They created smog and led to rising rates of asthma, cancer, and respiratory diseases; smog alerts became commonplace in places like Los Angeles. Each gallon of gasoline burnt adds 19 pounds of CO2 into the air, contributing to global warming. These facts are understood today, but back then the economics favored gasoline. Planning for modern-​day electric cars began in 1970s during the Carter administration. General Motors developed the experimental solar-​powered Sun

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Figure 10.2  Who Killed the Electric Car? (United States, 2006, Chris Paine) takes a humorous but critical look at how various economic and political forces came to undermine production of General Motors’ EV-​1, America’s first electric car.

Racer in 1987, then went on to develop the EV-​1 for consumers in the early 1990s under CEO Roger Smith’s management. The autos became available for lease only—​no sales were allowed (a harbinger of things to come). In 1990 the California Environmental Protection Agency Resources Board issued the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, requiring production of no-​exhaust vehicles. Pressure from auto companies led California to compromise on emission standards based on demand, while GM undermined demand by ineffectively advertising and marketing the EV-1. The advertisements they ran for the car were somber and mysterious, and didn’t even show the car driving. Yet GM’s representative claimed there was a strong, sincere attempt to sell the car, and that over 90 percent of prospective customers (who had to submit a lengthy detailed personal application) backed off in the end. According to EV-​1 drivers, the car had great driver appeal—​it was quiet with great acceleration and speed. Still, some prospective customers were skeptical. The car was expensive relative to similar gasoline automobiles, but economies of scale would have been expected to bring the price down. Others complained about the limited range of driving, the need for recharging, and its compact size. Some groups even opposed installation of charging stations, but it turned out these so-​called consumer groups were almost exclusively funded by the oil industry, which also placed editorials in newspapers questioning the benefits of

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the EV-​1. For example, some claimed that greenhouse gas emissions from coal-​ generated electricity for electric cars were worse than those from gas autos, but California studies contradicted this claim. Then unexpectedly, GM’s EV-​1 assembly line was closed in January 2000; in 2001, GM closed down the EV-​1 unit and laid off the sales force. The company also sued California’s Air Resources Board to avoid compliance with the strict standards, and was joined in this effort by the new Bush administration, which committed to research on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as an alternative to electric cars. In the end, California killed its electric car mandate in 2003, rejecting an established technology for a hypothetical future alternative, undermining all the investment that had already taken place. Immediately, the leases for EV-​1s began to be cancelled. Actor and EV-​1 driver Peter Horton said, “I’ve never seen a company be so cannibalistic about its own product before.” GM refused to even consider allowing the customers to buy their cars. Some drivers considered keeping their cars anyway—​essentially stealing them—​but decided that it wasn’t worth the legal price to be paid. Instead they followed the path of organized protest. On July 24, 2003, they staged a mock funeral ceremony for the electric car in an actual cemetery. They also found out where the returned EV-​1s were being mothballed and put up a 24-​hour picket line outside the lot. GM had to call in police to arrest protesters in order to allow the removal of the remaining EV-​1s from the lot to be shipped out for destruction. The filmmakers managed to shoot footage of the electric cars being towed away. The last known EV-​1 was returned in July 2004. The camera crew followed it for miles, their trip compressed through time-​lapse editing. Filmmakers even used a helicopter to find and shoot the Arizona site where the cars were being crushed and destroyed, contrary to what a GM spokesman had promised. After the “death” of the EV-​1, many other manufacturers of electric cars abandoned their projects as well. The story had all the trappings of a murder mystery, and that is how director Paine structured the second half of the film. So who killed the electric car? The suspects are: ll

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The public, for lack of demand due to high cost and limited range Inadequate technology, especially limited battery power General Motors, for corporate mismanagement and marketing incompetence Oil companies, for sabotaging the EV-​1 in order to keep selling oil

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The California Air Resources Board, for lack of courage to stick by its principles and stand up to powerful interests The Federal Government, for preferential tax subsidies and favoring other technologies The media, for not reporting on the story to the public.

What were the film’s conclusions? Technology?—​NOT GUILTY. It wasn’t the batteries; GM already owned a majority share in a NiMH (nickel metal hydride) battery company. Chevron purchased the company basically to keep these batteries from being used, while oil company profits just kept rising. Oil companies?—​GUILTY. The oil industry lobbied hard to defeat California’s electric car initiative, just as they had destroyed the Los Angeles electric trolley system half a century earlier. The oil and auto industries feared the loss of markets not only for their gasoline, but also for all the oil products and parts that maintained the internal combustion engine. Auto Companies?—​GUILTY. GM only reluctantly went into the EV business. The American Automobile Manufacturing Association sought to support a grassroots campaign against the California regulations. GM never effectively promoted the product, and pulled the cars as soon as the market failed to respond enthusiastically. GM was more worried about its next quarter profits than the long term, and thought Toyota was going to lose its shirt on the Prius, so GM committed instead to the more profitable Hummer. Supported by preferential tax breaks under the Bush administration (up to $100,000 for a Hummer vs. $4,000 for an EV-​1) and the ethos of the 1990s, the Hummer was the vehicle that took off instead of the EV-​1. The Federal Government?—​GUILTY. Early on, lots of tax dollars went into developing the electric car. But after George W. Bush entered the White House, the federal government sued the state of California over its emission regulations, very likely due to the influence of oil and automobile lobbying. Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff, had been head of the AAMA when it had sued California. The Bush administration focused totally on increasing production rather than encouraging efficiency. CAFÉ standards had been flat since 1985 after a decade of 100 percent improvement (during the Carter administration, until the Reagan administration terminated them). Also, Saudi Aramco dropped the price of oil to discourage development of alternatives. Between 1977 and 2005, US oil imports increased by an average of 4.7 million barrels per day.

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Ironically, early US support for electric cars did not result in American production, but it did scare Japanese automakers into production of hybrids, a market they came to dominate. The average fuel economy in 2006 for Japanese hybrids was 42 mpg; for American hybrids, it was only 25 mpg. In the past it had taken laws to get seat belts, airbags, catalytic converters, and to raise CAFÉ standards. To quote the film: “It’s not a level playing field. We’re using the military to ensure the flow of oil, and we’re not using our tax dollars to do what we really need to do to prepare for the future.” The California Air Resources Board?—​GUILTY. California’s low emissions mandate had led to the marketing of electric cars, and the ending of the mandate led to their withdrawal from the market—​a pretty clear chain of cause and effect. Chairman Alan Lloyd had a clear conflict of interest, due to his involvement in a hydrogen fuel cell development partnership. The Hydrogen Fuel Cell?—​GUILTY. The EV-​1 had the advantage of being chargeable at home. Fuel cell cars required three to four times more energy than electric cars, were far more expensive, lacked a fueling infrastructure, needed more room for its fuel, and were not yet market-​ready, while EV-​1s were and could be expected to improve. Also, oil companies were potential suppliers of hydrogen fuel. Consumers?—​GUILTY. The public at large failed to appreciate the environmental advantages of electric cars, and looked upon being environmentally responsible as an expensive inconvenience. The media?—​GUILTY. News coverage of the EV-​1 and its related issues was sparse and superficial. The news media had been eviscerated by corporate consolidation in the preceding twenty years, leaving documentary films to fill an important role on a multiplicity of issues, but especially environmental issues, as the venue for long-​form journalism. Despite the loss of this round in the fight for more environmentally friendly driving, all the big problems remained: rising gas prices, instability in the Middle East, and the growing threat of climate change. Former CIA Director James Woolsey is one establishment figure who is bullish on plug-​in hybrids, in part because of the national security implications. A potential coalition exists to revive the momentum for electric and hybrid cars, so the film manages to end on a hopeful note. Director Chris Paine was an EV-​1 electric car driver from 1997 until 2003. He was an experienced producer/​director of television commercials and industrial films, and had worked as assistant director on two Hollywood features. So instead of filing a lawsuit against GM, he decided to put $30–​50,000 into a trailer for a film and used the trailer to raise money for a longer film. Independence Day

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producer Dean Devlin’s father was an EV-​1 enthusiast, so Devlin came on board as executive producer (Paine, 2012). The optimistic ending was added after a preview screening at the Sundance Film Festival, where viewers found the film too pessimistic. Who Killed the Electric Car? benefited from support from Sundance and Sony Classics, which distributed it theatrically, hoping to have an environmental documentary to ride the publicity wave of An Inconvenient Truth. The film enjoyed a successful theatrical run, taking in a US box office gross of $1.68  million (Who Killed the Electric car?—​Internet Movie Database)—​a good total for a documentary, trailing only An Inconvenient Truth and Food, Inc. among the films covered in this book. It screened in at least twelve film festivals and won two awards; it was also nominated for Best Documentary Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America. The critical response was very positive as well. Reviewers especially appreciated the film’s balance. The Economist’s Ethan Alter (2006) noted, “Paine doesn’t position himself as a Michael Moore-​type rabble-​rouser. That actually works in his favor”; The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington (2006) said the film “strikes me as fair (because) Paine gives his opponents their say.” However, reviewers differed on the merits of about framing the story as a murder mystery. Judith Lewis (2006) of the L.A. Weekly called it a “laudably complicated, if emotional and a little comic-​book goofy.” Film Threat’s Pete Vonder Haar (2006) said the film “works best when it sticks to the facts (which is) much more effective than coverage of some goofy mock funeral”; he also cited the “particularly articulate and colorful bunch of noncelebrity talking heads.” Some reviewers also found Martin Sheen’s narration canned-​sounding or onerous. But overall, critics went into some detail about the issues and stakeholders involved, and judged Who Killed the Electric Car to be a well-​documented presentation on an important issue. Chris Paine followed up Who Killed the Electric Car? six years later with a sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car (2011). The first film was about how and why the system was broken, framed as a mystery with a touch of dark comedy; the second film was about people working within the system to change it, framed as a race against time. Thus Revenge perhaps appealed to a broader audience of auto aficionados beyond environmental activists. While the first film was a combination of expository and participatory modes, the sequel was more observational in style. Revenge was more character-​driven, with a focus on four very different entrepreneurs: General Motors’ Bob Lutz, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn, and freelancer Greg Abbott. The coming of the 2008 recession provided an unexpected twist to the film but brought some benefit. The rising, falling, and rising

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again in the companies’ fortunes provided a three-​act structure. Said Paine: “The story you end up with is the story that needs to get told, even if it isn’t necessarily your vision out of the gate.” Paine is basically a believer in the free market system, but feels that powerful vested interests work against technological innovation by creating false narratives and clandestinely manipulating the marketplace. The first film represented capitalism at its worst, while the second one presented capitalism at its best. Paine feels the two films bookend his worldview. Paine (2012) also recognizes that “peak oil is a threat to the whole system”; he doesn’t envision a future where everyone can afford to own their own car, and puts his hopes on ride-​sharing and car-​sharing programs and public transportation systems. Revenge of the Electric Car pursued an independent release strategy through WestMidwest Productions, opening at the Tribeca Film Festival on Earth Day, 2011. The multi-​platform release strategy brought the DVD, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Video on Demand releases all within two months of the theatrical closing. According to Paine, unlike the tiered release strategy of the past, in today’s world “you only get one chance, so you’d better get your stuff out there as soon as you can.” Producers need to have a marketing budget equal to their production budget, because media publicity is essential “unless you get lucky and your film goes viral.” Politicization of environmental issues by partisan media poses a big roadblock to progress—​for example, calling the Chevy Volt the “Obamavehicle.” Some battery fires and recalls have raised public concerns, but Paine predicts that by 2017 electric auto technology will be ubiquitous industry-​wide.

Garbage Warrior Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2007 86 min. Oliver Hodge Rachel Wexler Open Eye Media Mongrel Media Interactive/​Observational/​Expository United Kingdom/​United States http://​www.garbagewarrior.com Amazon (DVD), YouTube, Vimeo,

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Figure 10.3  Garbage Warrior (United Kingdom, 2007, Oliver Hodge) paints a vivid portrait of renegade New Mexico architect Michael Reynolds, whose construction of energy-​independent “Earthship” homes led to confrontations with legal authorities.

First, a disclaimer: I have had a personal connection to architect Michael Reynolds, the subject of Oliver Hodge’s Garbage Warrior. In 1973, when I was twenty-​three years old and just graduated from college, I worked for a few months on a couple of Mike Reynolds’s construction projects in Taos, New Mexico. Thus I was quite excited to see that Reynolds and his work had become the focus of Hodge’s film Garbage Warrior—​an excellent example of a biographical portrait as environmental documentary. Reynolds is a true visionary, having spent his professional life preparing for ecological and cultural collapse by devising methods of creating buildings out of the detritus of the doomed civilization. He has gained notoriety not only for his unusual construction techniques but also for his rebellious approach to his profession and his driven, sometimes combative personality. The film begins with Reynolds being interviewed while driving his pickup truck across the New Mexico desert, establishing the interactive and informal style of the film. He speaks passionately, colorfully, and often with dark humor. “I feel like I’m in a herd of buffalo stampeding towards a 1,000-​foot drop-​off,” he says with a half-​ laugh. “If humanity takes the planet down the tubes, I’m dead.” Reynolds set down roots in Taos after graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1969. On entering his chosen profession, he felt that architecture

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“had nothing to do with the planet, and barely anything to do with people.” The film effectively uses old photographs to trace his formative years and his earliest creations; some members of his crew have worked with him for decades. Reynolds developed a style of architecture that he dubbed “Earthship Biotecture”—​passive solar structural designs built with natural and recycled materials such as earth-​filled tires, wine bottles and beer cans. His structures are designed to be habitable in the face of extreme weather and sustainable in the absence of fossil fuels and public utility systems supplying water or electricity. Earthships include solar panels for electricity, water collection and recycling systems, dense walls and roofs for insulation, and interior greenhouses for food production and temperature regulation. Says Reynolds: “We’re trying to develop a method of living that allows people to take care of themselves.” Reynolds puts a lot of personal muscle power behind his designs. He exercises daily, and works on building sites with his crew under the blazing desert sun, double-​checking every detail of the construction process. In some ways he is like any other developer: making deals with clients and dealing with financing and paperwork. But his homes and developments are avowedly experimental, and sometimes those experiments go awry and wind up in lawsuits. That’s what got Reynolds in trouble with state regulators; for violations of state and county building codes, he eventually lost his state and federal architect’s licenses. But if New Mexico was not receptive to Reynolds’s experimental methods, some developing nations were enthusiastically interested, especially when faced with emergency situations. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami the infrastructure of the Andaman and Nicobar islands was devastated, with their wells filled with salt water and thousands living without shelter. Reynolds was invited to come to construct emergency housing and, with official regulations rendered irrelevant, he and his crew taught local people how to build sustainable shelters with post-​tsunami refuse. As Reynolds’s reputation spread, he has been invited to build projects in Europe, Mexico, South America, Africa, and Asia. To fight back and defend the value of his innovative work, Reynolds was forced to enter the political arena to change the laws and restore his professional status, and in this environment he was definitely a fish out of water. Prior to the beginning of filming, Reynolds had already tried once and failed to get any traction for regulatory reform from the New Mexico state legislature. The film follows his second attempt, in which he was more skillful in enlisting political allies and playing the game in a less confrontational, more collaborative manner, but this second attempt also ended in failure. These professional struggles

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and diversions from his life purpose took a definite emotional toll. However, the film ends on an upbeat note. In 2006, based on Reynolds’s international aid efforts, the US Board of Architects invited him to reapply for his federal architect’s license. Then in 2007, on his third attempt, Reynolds saw the New Mexico legislature approve his experimental development test site law, and he was able to resume his architectural career on his own terms. The strength of Garbage Warrior is its focus on creative adaptation to the threats of climate change and the decline of our energy networks. Reynolds has always taken the ecological collapse of our technological mass society as a given, and his life’s purpose has been to help people prepare for resilience through ecologically designed habitation structures and systems. No other person in his profession of architecture (that I know of) has approached this challenge as consistently or systematically, or with as much dogged determination. Garbage Warrior is an important film most of all because it inspires people to approach their future with creativity and hope. British art director Oliver Hodge (2012) was a veteran of many big budget films shot in the United Kingdom including several for director Ridley Scott. How in the world, I wondered, had he zeroed in on Mike Reynolds as the subject for his first documentary film? It turned out that Reynolds was designing a community center for a cooperative near where Hodge lived in England. As an art director, Hodge appreciated Reynolds’s skills for drawing and structural design. When Hodge researched Reynolds on the Internet and read about his famous Earthship designs, he was hooked. What attracted Hodge were not only Reynolds’s unusual construction methods but also his uniquely forceful personality. Reynolds had been building homes in New Mexico for over thirty years. Many of Reynolds’s workers and clients were descendants from Taos’s heyday as a “back to the land” hippie commune haven in the 1960s and 1970s, and originally Hodge considered making his film as a sociological study of the community as a whole. But in the end he wanted to make an activist statement with a character for the audience to identify with, so Hodge decided to put the focus squarely of Reynolds’s charismatic personality. He filled in the backstory with still photos of Reynolds’s previous work—​some obtained for free from amateurs, some from professional photographers—​and added a voiceover narration to fill in the gaps of the story. He was also able to film some of Reynolds’s current construction projects in other countries where building projects were less restricted by government regulations, such as those undertaken in India after the 2004 tsunami.

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At the time Hodge met Reynolds, the architect was in the midst of a professional crisis. His architectural license had been revoked because his projects had violated New Mexico’s state subdivision zoning and construction ordinances, and Reynolds was immersed in an extended legal battle to get a law passed through the New Mexico legislature so that he could obtain waivers from these regulations and regain his professional standing. This situation posed a problem for Hodge’s project, because he began filming in the middle of this process, without any guarantee that the legislative and legal battles would be resolved within the time frame of the production. Hodge’s filming wound up having a direct impact on the legal process. When the New Mexico legislature rejected (for the second time) a law that Reynolds had initiated to create special exemptions to current construction regulations, Hodge urged him to try again. The third time around the legislation was passed, and Hodge was able to document the process, allowing his film to end with a victorious resolution. Hodge considers his documentary to be an environmental film but also a political film. He voices tremendous admiration for the resourcefulness of Reynolds and his crews in building sustainable homes off-​grid, with water recycling and composting systems, without the help of NGO or government grants, and often in conflict with professional and governmental forces. Many environmental films advocate for government action to protect the environment, but Hodge’s film demonstrates how sometimes regulators just need to get out of the way. The film’s total production took four years, from 2003 to 2007—​one year of research and planning, two years of actual location shooting, and a year for editing and distribution planning. Hodge had worked in the film industry for fifteen years on other people’s films, but he hadn’t actually made a film on his own, so he had to learn on the job, from a friend who was a cameraman and a sister who was a sound engineer. Hodge self-​funded the project as long as he could afford a small crew, then when money ran low he became a one-​man band, doing both the camera and sound recording by himself. He engaged Phil Reynolds as editor, and composer Patrick Wilson composed a musical score with a distinct Southwestern flavor (Hodge, 2012). Hodge estimates the budget to have run somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000 (including distribution expenses), and he admits there were some dark times when the money ran low. The Sundance Channel signed on as coproducer, and the British Film Commission lent financial support as well. Other distribution rights were sold to the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in San

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Francisco, California, and the Documentary Channel in Canada. Hodge warns filmmakers to be wary of selling off DVD rights to unscrupulous agents who won’t pay up or even share their sales records. Garbage Warrior found its way into at least two dozen film festivals, including the AFI-​Discovery Channel-​sponsored Silver Docs, the DC Environmental Film Festival, the Vancouver Film Festival, and the Sheffield Doc/​Fest; it won or was nominated for awards in several of them. But that number is really only the tip of the iceberg of its international distribution. The film enjoyed screenings in theaters, museums, and other venues across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. It has also been televised on the Sundance Channel and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. The video is also available on YouTube; Hodge had it taken down at one point, but it was posted again, and he resigned himself to letting it go for free. Hodge estimated it had accumulated over a quarter of a million hits as of 2012. The critical response was extensive and very positive, especially in the United Kingdom. Among the summary comments were:  “A fascinating, stirring eco-​ documentary”; “An eye opener in all respects”; “Not to be missed”; “Highly recommended”; and “This film demands to be seen by as many humans as possible.” And then there was this: “People are tired of the doom and gloom and they are desperate to find a way out. They need inspiration” (Gill, 2008). Most reviews came from British, American, and Canadian publications. Some were from mainstream newspapers, while others were from film journals or environmental publications. One article by Australian Andrew Fildes (2008) for Screen Education ran five pages long and examined the film from the perspectives of media studies, cinematic art, and scientific content. His commentary on the film’s cinematic craft praised the quality of the photography and the effective use of editing to combine footage shot over several years into seamless sequences. A few reviewers found the sequences in the legislative committees to be overlong, or the musical cues too obvious. Most reviewers commented on how engaging a character Mike Reynolds is. Gerard O’Carroll (2008), writing for an online building design website, was ambivalent about the film’s sympathies. “Reynolds is totally charismatic and it is easy to be beguiled by his eco-​mantras,” observed O’Carroll, but he regrets that the film presents “no middle ground between the chaotic urban life we actually desire and the life that Reynolds leads.” Wheatley (2008) of Sight & Sound observed that Reynolds’s “conviction matches that of any Herzog hero,” but that “it’s a shame that Hodge’s film takes a rather conventional approach.” Even though some critics regard

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Reynolds as a Mad Max-​style renegade, they could not help being drawn in by his helpless confusion when dealing with bureaucracy, his desperate self-​doubt when all seemed lost, and the passionate heroism of his humanitarian desire to save the world. Klimek (2007) made the most interesting observation: “Reynolds embodies all of the best qualities to which the adjective ‘American’ has ever been affixed.”

The Garden Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2008 80 min. Scott Hamilton Kennedy Vivianne Nacif, Dominique Derrenger Black Valley Films Oscilloscope Observational/​Interactive United States http://​www.thegardenmovie.com/​ Netflix, Amazon Video

In 1994, two years after the devastating Los Angeles riots, the LA Harbor Department granted the Regional Food Bank a revocable permit to a 14-​acre tract of land in impoverished, industrial South Los Angeles—​originally intended for an abandoned waste incinerator project—​that became the largest urban garden in the United States. For over a decade the South Central Farm provided local residents, mostly of Mexican American heritage, with fruits, vegetables, and community. Then around a decade later, the City of Los Angeles abruptly sold the land back to its previous owner, a developer named Ralph Horowitz, who wanted to build a warehouse on the site. During the following years of negotiations, legal battles, and activist resistance, the fight over the garden became a classic David vs. Goliath story, a conflict between the public good and private property rights, with the municipal government caught in the middle. Winner of three Best of Festival awards and an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, The Garden follows the struggle of the resident farmers to keep the garden from being demolished, until 2006 when they were forcibly evicted by bulldozers and riot police. As Jeff Retzinger (2011) noted, as

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the film begins “initial glimpses of the garden are followed by a series of breathtaking views from the air, revealing more dramatically the garden as a green and verdant oasis in the midst of the otherwise grey industrial landscape of south central Los Angeles . . . The garden represents both spiritual and physical sustenance, not simply beauty, but nourishment.” When it came under threat, residents founded an advocacy group called South Central Farmers (SCF) to lead the movement to keep the garden alive. The legal and political issues were complex, and the film portrays the conflicts not only between enemies but also between potential allies. The legal status of the land was somewhat murky, as were the backroom dealings that led to the ultimate outcome. As a councilman, Anthony Villaraigosa had spoken as an advocate for the farmers prior to his election as LA mayor, but afterward many accused him of hypocrisy for overlooking opportunities to give their garden meaningful support. Resistance also came from the African American political community in the person of Councilwoman Jan Perry, who wanted to see a soccer field built on the land—​and, some accused, to profit from it. The farmers had the support of celebrities like Darryl Hannah and Danny Glover. With the help of the Annenberg Foundation, defenders of the farm actually raised the inflated sum of $16 million to buy the land back from Ralph Horowitz, but he refused to sell, because, in his own words, “Even if they raised a hundred million dollars, this group could not buy this property . . . I don’t like their cause, and I  don’t like their conduct.” (Enck-​Wanzer, 2011). In the end, despite widespread public support and publicity, government officials could not find a path through the legal protections of private property to support the needs of the disadvantaged, and the garden was destroyed. Sadly, five years later the tract was still an empty lot. The Garden’s website (thegardenmovie.com, n.d.) describes the film as having “the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country’s largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord.” A  description with which most reviewers concurred. In addition to the Academy Award nomination, the film won a SilverDocs feature prize and a strong reception at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Ethicurean reviewer Elise McDonough (2009) wrote, “As viewers, we’re quickly immersed in the action, aided by skilled, spontaneous cinematography that lends a very authentic quality to the experience. Compelling stories unfold without the use of an outside narrator.” Variety’s Robert Koehler (2008) was circumspect on some counts; he saw the film as “more of an agitprop piece than

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reportage,” and believed that “a more thorough, objective and serious journalistic approach was required once the story delves into the intricacies of the property’s murky history.” Based on its position at the intersection of various sociopolitical issues, The Garden received attention and analysis from academic journals. In Teaching Sociology, published by the American Sociological Association, Mary Thierry Texeira (2010) wrote, “It is difficult to imagine a more compelling film for inclusion in the sociologist’s video library . . . It is quite difficult to convey abstractly how the poor continuously struggle for survival and how grassroots organizations operate. But through this documentary, students will be there to understand more fully these phenomena.” In American Literature, Janet Fiskio (2012) noted the film’s portrayal of the conflict of values between individual property rights as the roots of liberty and economic development, versus the counter-​ argument of the principle of usufruct land rights as the foundation of collective identity and sustenance. In particular, the journal Environmental Communication devoted its September 2011 issue to a discussion of the film at a 2010 National Communication Association forum. Retzinger (2011) noted the influence of Hollywood fictional films on The Garden’s plot structure: “Battle lines are drawn between the pastoral and the industrial, the powerless and powerful, virtue and greed” (359). Singer (2011) wrote, “By invoking the myth of a new agrarianism, the film is able to expose the ethnic, raced, classed, and gendered basis of land-​use rhetoric, and how it perpetuates unequal access to dominant myths as empowerment resources” (344). Foust (2011) examined the varying strategies of resistance portrayed in the film, including the grinding mediational work of community organizing: “The camera follows the Farmers as they research documents, internally strategize, speak at council meetings, build and argue court cases, appear before or invite the press, (and) organize protests” (352). LeGreco and Leonard (2011) analyzed the shortcomings of the South Central Farmers to organize at the different levels of dialogue and communications; although they “gathered support from a wide range of stakeholders . . . they were plagued by tensions at the meso-​level (and) were unable to coordinate competing interests across different contexts within their community, leaving them unable to scale up and organize at that higher level” (358). Finally, Enck-​Wanzer (2011) studied the linguistic disconnections between the rhetoric of the Mexican revolutionary spirit and the neocolonial framework of Los Angeles: “The farmers speak in a language delinked from legality and employ, instead, a geo-​body politics

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of knowledge . . . that draws attention to the embodied, local, and communal significance of their struggle” (367). The Garden is, most fundamentally, a tribute to the ongoing struggle for social equity, and a noble example of the failure of a sociopolitical system to rise to the occasion when it had a chance to “do the right thing.” As LeGreco and Leonard sadly observed, “Perhaps the long-​term sustainability and viability of the South Central garden is what makes its ultimate demise so shocking and heart-​wrenching. As a cautionary tale, The Garden demonstrates that even the most community-​entrenched and seemingly sustainable food programs can remain fragile and insecure at their core” (358).

Within Reach Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrators: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

2013 98 min. Ryan Mlynarczyk (Ryan Ao) Mandy Creighton, Joanna Perry-​Folino, Raines Cohen, Betsy Morris, Derek Alan Rowe Into the Fire/​Doctrine/​Reach Within The Cinema Guild Ryan Mlynarczyk, Mandy Creighton Performative/​Participatory United States http://​www.withinreachmovie.com/​home.shtml http://​www.filmsforaction.org/​watch/​within-​reach/​

Ryan Mlynarczyk and Mandy Creighton met during a high school educational trip to South America. They returned to their respective states (California and Michigan) vowing not to forget what they had learned about the simpler life of the indigenous people they met there. Flash-​forward eight years:  they reconnect and find themselves equally dissatisfied with their working lives, alienated from nature, and dreaming of a sustainable lifestyle. So they commit to spending a year biking around America in search of a home, an intentional community where they could “live more sustainably in community on the land.” The product of their journey was this documentary film about the promise of intentional community and cooperative living, which Roth (2012) described as “a

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broadly-​appealing mixture of ‘road trip’ movie, community documentary, and exploration into practical approaches to social and ecological sustainability.” Within Reach commences with a montage that summarizes their entire journey, juxtaposing shots of them riding on their bikes, visiting communities, and cuddling together in their tent. This montage prepares the viewer not only to visit interesting places with them, but also to accompany them on their personal “hero’s journey” of hope, hardship, love, and growth. They unloaded most of their possessions and packed what they needed for the road, then they headed out on a two-​seated bicycle with a small supply box. Travelling by bicycle was an important element in the process: “Cheaper, better for the environment, and better for us.” But these intrepid travelers were tech media savvy, taking along a video camera to record their encounters, cell phones to help map out their destinations, a solar panel to charge their laptops, and Wi-​Fi to communicate with the world from remote locations. The travelers’ journey is briefly interrupted by a visually engaging rotoscoped montage of interview clips from communards speaking about what intentional community means to them. It’s one of several techniques that make the film visually creative. Ryan and Mandy used the Federation for Intentional Community website (www.ic.org) to narrow their search in finding communities to visit. They begin their journey with visits to some Southern California communities. To describe each community visited would require a book in itself; suffice it to say that, in the very few minutes of coverage that each community receives, the audience gets a sense of its physical layout, its social or philosophical focus, the personality of its residents, and a few of the unique features that distinguish it. Certain value systems are indigenous to virtually all of the communities: simple and healthy living, strong ethics of work and cooperation, and environmental stewardship, as evidenced by their small carbon footprints. Members demonstrate self-​reliance through diverse sets of skills. The couple’s travels portray the wide variety of community structures:  cohousing, spiritual communes, urban and rural groups, and so on. Each community offers attractive features, but each also seems to have gaps that make it fall short of the ideal. Ryan and Mandy constantly encounter strangers (and, surprisingly, old friends) who offer them a place to crash. The stops at each community are painfully brief, but the adept editing pace carries the viewer buoyantly along for the ride—​even if it sometimes digresses into diversionary montages. Some of the communities Ryan and Mandy visit enjoy national and international renown. Earthaven in North Carolina is home to Diana Leafe

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Figure 10.4  Within Reach (United States, 2013, Ryan Mlynarczyk) chronicles the travels by bicycle across America of a young man and woman in search of their ideal intentional community of people living in harmony with their environment.

Christian, author of several books on building intentional community. Twin Oaks in Virginia dates back to the late 1960s, and hosts an annual Intentional Communities Conference. The Farm in Tennessee is the granddaddy of all intentional communities in the United States; it hosts classes on subjects like permaculture farming, taught by celebrated experts like Albert Bates, which attract students from across the world. Founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and his followers, The Farm still retains a surprising number of its original members, and its living structures chronicle the evolution of the intentional community movement. For rural communes, access to electricity and water can be a challenge, and sometimes residents have to take things into their own hands and create systems for themselves. Like a community power generator at Earthaven. Intentional communities attempt to combine the best of modern technology—​for example, working “on the cutting edge of passive solar design or renewable energy systems”—​while also employing tried-​and-​true methods from past eras like using horses for farming. One alternative builder believes that most people have the potential for community building, but just lack the confidence. Founded by a Dartmouth professor in Hartland, Vermont, Cobb Hill Cohousing was built around three distinct parts: a cohousing community, a farm

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for food security, and a Sustainability Institute for research—​what one member called a “think-​do tank.” Growing food and eating together are central aspects of the community experience. Living in community requires difficult compromises, especially for Americans used to self-​directing their own lives. But the benefits consist in feeling more in touch with the essence of life, like growing one’s own food and enjoying more space and resources than most individuals could afford. At Ecovillage at Ithaca, residents and visitors discuss how interrelated are the social and environmental aspects of intentional communities:  “The way we’re treating out planet is really connected to how we’re treating ourselves.” Playing together in community—​“sustainable entertainment”—​is as important as working together, as demonstrated by their many music and dancing parties, as well as the communal games and education of community children. The forest adventures that urban and suburban kids go to summer camp for, Ecovillage kids enjoy the year around. The totally “off-​grid” Possibility Alliance in Missouri is noteworthy for its emphasis on community engagement. Its members reach out into their surrounding communities, providing free services and classes while spreading the word about environmentally friendly methods of problem solving. It offers internships to students to spend a few months living a rustic life and learning the requisite skills. Dancing Rabbit, also in Missouri, is one of the more well-​known intentional communities nationally, which had a strong draw for our travelers (Mandy later settled there for a while). The main rule is that “settlers” have to provide their own housing, which leads to a wide diversity of structures, from the conventional to very basic natural building techniques. But everyone pitches in with the building, as in an old-​fashioned barn raising. The personal story of the travelers is sometimes more engaging than the purpose of their trek. In one sense, watching Within Reach is a more intimate experience than watching your friends’ home movies. Exhaustion was their constant companion. The strain of bicycling on the road for so long took its toll on Ryan and Mandy. Sometimes roads turned into trails that turned into dead ends. The stress sometimes built to a breaking point and emotions boiled over, threatening both their project and their relationship. But somehow they always found a way to heal the hurt feelings and move on. Sometimes they would take a break for a few days and just crash until their energies had been restored. The Joyful Path Buddhist community near Madison, Wisconsin, put them up for a few months over a Midwestern winter, in exchange

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for sharing their learning of sustainable practices. With a break to reflect, Ryan and Mandy began the process of deciding where they might want to wind up. They drew up a list of characteristics, among them a rural location not far from a town, a place that grew food, and one with a spiritual practice. Their prime candidate was the Hummingbird Community, so with winter gone they hit the road again, heading for New Mexico. But a surprise awaited them en route. In Kansas they passed through Greensburg, a small town of 2,000 that had been devastated by a 2007 tornado that had destroyed 95 percent of its buildings; virtually the entire town had to be rebuilt. The planning process was inclusive and democratic, and despite the politically conservative culture, the citizens collectively decided to emphasize sustainability in the rebuild. Renewable energy was developed, especially wind power; recycling stations were placed everywhere. Homes were rebuilt based on geothermal design principles. Pathways were created to facilitate bicycle traffic. Fences that had been blown away stayed down. Participating in the rebuild brought the community together, and in the end its residents felt closer to each other than before. The stopover in Kansas went beyond their intentional communities framework, but showed how lessons in sustainability may be applied in more “normal” settings. Greensburg’s embrace of more sustainable building and energy strategies in the wake of the devastation was the perfect coda to their tale of intentional community—​yes, “it can happen here,” wherever here happens to be. Ryan and Mandy’s journey in the film ends with their return to Hummingbird. Further online investigation led Ryan and Mandy to discover the Transition Town movement, which encourages renewable community design in hundreds of places worldwide that are consciously pursuing similar goals. The Transition Town movement holds out the promise of bridging the gap between the utopianism of countercultural intentional communities, and regular towns of ordinary people who just want to enhance their lifestyle and become more resilient. As one community resident offered: “We need to focus on what we can agree on, and not what we don’t agree on.” The key, according to most of those interviewed, is to imagine what kind of community you want to live in, and then begin the process of creating it. The film catalogues a wide range of sustainability and community practices and technologies:  “Consensus process, solar cookers, suburban farm animals, community kitchens, skillshare workshops, gardening and permaculture, natural building, ‘unschooling,’ and homegrown entertainment.” Community can

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also represent “an ideal place to safely engage in the emotional and inner work that helps us become better community members” (Within Reach website). What Within Reach touches most deeply in its audience is the sense of alienation in contemporary society, the excess of individualism that leaves us consuming more while not even knowing our neighbors. As environmentalist Bill McKibben notes in the film, “The number of Americans who say they are very satisfied with their lives has declined steadily for the last 50 years”—​along with personal friends and activities. Some of the more interesting interviews with the communards are not about the way the communities are structured or organized, but about the values that hold them together, especially the values about communicating, sharing, and working with others. Personal reflection plays a big part in making community work. It probably comes as a surprise to most viewers that there are so many alternative communities thriving across the United States, and that so many people who live so meagerly appear to be so happy in their lives. The self-​reliance of these communities should serve them well if the larger society drifts into some form of collapse. Viewers finish watching Within Reach with a sense of inspiration, but also somewhat with a sense of incompletion. It’s fun accompanying Ryan and Mandy on their challenging journey, but one gets only the slightest tidbits of what each community is all about. One even senses our travelers’ feeling of freedom as they take to the road again, heading for another landing place. But as an educational experience for the audience, some longer visits at fewer communities might have been more enlightening. While interviewing Ryan and Mandy, I asked, “Is Within Reach an environmental film?” Ryan replied, “Community is the key ingredient to sustainability: that’s the message of the film, providing for the needs of today’s generation without compromising the needs of each generation . . . Without social sustainability, environmental sustainability is not going to happen” (Mlynarczyk, 2012). The inspiration and genesis of the film came from a combination of dissatisfaction with their lives and with the world—​a desire to make a deep change in their own lives in terms of community, and to share their search with others. An important factor was the realization that it’s becoming easier than ever to make films with digital technology. Ryan had studied photography in San Francisco but became disillusioned with academics and dropped out. A friend asked him what he would choose to do if he could do anything he wanted and money didn’t matter. He replied that he’d like to live in a sustainable community on the land. His friend suggested that he make a movie, and Ryan had his

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direction—​although he admits that if he’d known what he was getting into, he might not have said yes to the movie part. Ryan expected the film to take two years—​production plus postproduction—​ but it stretched into five. He expected to make a conventional documentary, until a friend suggested that he and Mandy turn the camera back on themselves. This approach caused some nervousness to Mandy; she hadn’t signed up as a performer, and during stressful moments, it was a source of real vulnerability and discomfort (Creighton, 2012). The idea hadn’t appealed to Ryan, except for his appreciation for the British TV series Long Way Round that documented the motorcycle journey of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. The friend also introduced Ryan to the work of Geoph Kozeny, who produced documentary DVDs about intentional communities but had recently passed away; Ryan came to see his film as a continuation of Kozeny’s work. During the trip, the solar panels on their bikes enabled them to watch documentaries on Netflix in their tent and study their cinematic style (Mlynarczyk, 2012). The couple spent eight months in preparation and fundraising. Mandy contributed $18,000, basically her life’s savings. Postproduction was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, which they advertised through various community and cohousing organizations and biking networks, raising $26,000 in only thirty-​ eight days. The total cost of the film was estimated at $75,000. They also made public presentations, resulting in a connection with film producer Joanna Folino, who became executive producer on the film and made a financial contribution. Folino told them about the “hero’s journey,” the application of Joseph Campbell’s mythological writings to cinematic story structure. She saw Ryan and Mandy enacting the hero’s journey of transformation in real life; they felt their story could inspire others in their own journeys as well. She even attended their first community visit to jumpstart the process of personal testimonials. They started out surveying communities on the Intentional Communities website, ferreting out the smallest and the start-​ups. They relied on the Fellowship for Intentional Communities organization and its board of directors, especially board members Raines Cohen and Laird Schaub, to gather information on communities. They also relied a lot on word-​of-​mouth recommendations, even after they were already on the road. The choices of communities had to be a mutual decision, and around thirty different factors were considered: community structure, economic cost, natural environment, geographical location, urban or rural, ethnic diversity, age diversity, food sources, education level, and importantly, the quality of the interviews shot.

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Since this was a personal quest, Ryan and Mandy only visited communities that they resonated with as possible landing places. This led them to skip some prominent intentional communities, for example spiritual communities whose values they did not share. One consideration was which communities would be receptive to being filmed. They compiled a spreadsheet so they could score the value of including each community in the film. As a result, some communities were covered more in depth, while others were presented through visual montages and some were dropped altogether. Deciding to cut communities from which they had good footage was a really hard decision. In practice, there was a constant tension between taking time to film vs. moving forward with their schedule and making their deadlines. In all, they shot around 1,000 hours of footage that had to be edited down to a couple of hours or so. That’s a shooting ratio that exceeds many documentaries by a factor of ten. Their thematic approach was to look at each community in terms of the hero’s journey: What was the glue that held them together, and what were the struggles they had to overcome? Many communities tried to paint a rosy picture but were reluctant to share the dark sides of their stories. So Ryan and Mandy had to work to earn people’s trust in a very few days in order to get to some of the harder truths about community living. Revealing their own struggles during their journey helped to bridge those gaps and create empathy. Ryan and Mandy went through at least six cameras overall. The first one was a mini-​HD camera from Best Buy, which broke mid-​way through the journey. The second was a Canon HS-​10, a high-​resolution prosumer camera that accounted for 90 percent of the rest of the footage. It was their only camera that recorded quality audio from a microphone input. When it went down for repairs, they bought another inexpensive Sanyo camera with decent resolution. Ryan and Mandy shot over 90 percent of the footage, but for the last month of the journey, they brought in a small professional crew with a Panasonic HD camera and wired lavaliere microphones to capture those final moments. It took them about a year to log all the footage. With their editor Derek Alan Rose, they narrowed their first B-​roll assembly to about seventy-​two hours in chronological order, then began to edit in the A-​Roll dialogue footage, community by community. They also kept a record of footage by topic, such as economy, food, and so on. In about six months, Ryan and Mandy made rough cuts of each community segment, weaving in their personal story footage, then turned over these segments—​a four-​hour timeline total—​to their editor, who cut it down to two hours.

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Originally their only distribution plan was to post the film on YouTube and get word-​of-​mouth buzzing. Novice filmmakers are usually unprepared for finding out that distribution is as demanding as the various stages of film production. Distribution is a complicated process, requiring a lot of plain busywork, and this final stage can easily lead to burnout. Ryan and Mandy attended Wild and Scenic Film Festival seminars to help them plan a distribution strategy, and during the last year of editing, they worked with a company to enter the film in from twenty to fifty festivals, plan theatrical and community screenings, and develop a more ambitious distribution plan. A preview screening at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California, helped with formative feedback for editing. There were discussion guides for screenings to help people develop community “where they are at.” The audience response was mostly positive but convinced them that the film was too long; they also learned that many festivals restrict documentaries to ninety minutes. So they spent another half year reediting the whole film to achieve that shorter length. Conflicts of vision arose during this process; first-​ time director Ryan wanted to hold to a chronological order, while editor Derek sought to rearrange the order of some sequences for dramatic effect and story flow. Finally the editor won the debate. The editor’s company also created 3-​D graphic chapter titles, which are strikingly original and enhance the production’s quality from the rawness of the video. A  soundtrack composed of homespun music was added that reinforced the grassroots perspective of the film. Ryan acknowledges that his editor’s skill in story crafting exceeded his own, and that he was too close to the story to remain objective, but nevertheless he feels that some of the emotional poignancy of the journey was lost in the translation. Mandy feels the film gave too brief a view of the communities, but hopes it will inspire people interested in community to investigate further (Mlynarczyk, 2012). The Sundance Festival rejected Within Reach, and the timeline was poor for making the deadlines of other top documentary festivals; being novice filmmakers, they may have made the mistake in shooting for top festivals right out of the gate. Although they had a mailing list of thousands of people, it quickly became evident that self-​distribution to the “choir” would severely limit the film’s exposure. So they moved on to make submissions to other regional and local film festivals, as well as to schedule theater screenings in major markets through the TUGG organization in search of broader theatrical distribution. But the latter strategy largely failed. In the end, the team reached an impasse on distribution strategies, with Ryan favoring a social media self-​distribution model (similar to

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The Power of Community) while others favored a more conventional distribution plan including independent and green film festivals and online networks. In the end, the conflicts within the team led to a burnout of the energy and time need to promote the film. As of this writing, Within Reach is only available for rent or purchase on the Films for Action website (http://​www.filmsforaction.org/​ watch/​within-​reach). The response of audience members to the final version was enthusiastically positive. But the limited distribution meant that the film received virtually no published critical response. Both filmmakers ultimately did spend time living in intentional communities, Ryan in a permaculture community in Hawaii and Mandy in Dancing Rabbit in Missouri. Ryan’s final lesson is that no matter how disillusioned and burnt out one may feel upon completion of a film, the reality is, “Once a filmmaker, always a filmmaker.” It’s hard to get filmmaking out of your system, so after a requisite amount of rest and recuperation, you’re likely to imagine a new project and, against your better judgment, move forward to start something new. Ryan plans to call his next documentary Reach Within.

Waking the Green Tiger Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode: Country: Inspired by: Website: Available on:

2011 78 min. Gary Marcuse Gary Marcuse, Betsy Carson Face to Face Media The Nature of Things (CBC)/​Face to Face Media David Hewlitt Expository/​Observational Canada/​China Mao’s War Against Nature by Judith Shapiro http://​www.cbc.ca/​natureofthings/​episodes/​ waking-​the-​green-​tiger http://​www.facetofacemedia.ca/​page. php?sectionID=2&pageID=107

Waking the Green Tiger is exceptional both as an international collaboration between filmmakers, and as a demonstration of a film having a visible, concrete

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impact on events. In 2004 a small group of environmental activists set out to save the Nu River, one of the last wild rivers in China. It would not be easy. Chairman Mao had believed that “man must conquer nature” in the name of progress; there was little room for dissent in Mao’s time or in the years that followed. Three rivers flow from the Tibetan plateau through Yunnan province—​the Nu, the Mekong, and the Yangtze—​which provide 25 percent of China’s potential hydropower. Twenty-​one dams had been planned for the Nu River alone, and news reporting on dams that had already been built was prohibited. However, more than half of China’s plant and animal species are found in the province. It is also home to a national park and twenty-​five national minorities. So a struggle over waters had become imminent. In China an Environmental Impact Assessment Law was passed in 2004, the first law in China’s history to require public participation in government decision-​making. Filmmaker Shi Lihong began to document the debate over one proposed dam. She and her colleagues were subjected to a standard criticism of environmentalists—​that they are concerned only about nature not about the people. But their activism got the attention of the State Environmental Protection Agency, and Premier Wen Jiabao urged that plans to dam the Nu River proceed with caution. The Chinese national media then reported the debate on whether to build the dam or protect nature. Qu Geping, former director of the Chinese Environmental Protection Agency, put the current debate in historical context, explaining how the breakneck development of China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution paid little heed to the environment. Economic development was pursued with the same psychology as the revolution had been. The population was mobilized to engage in deforestation, sparrow and pest elimination, and small-​scale industrial production. There were supposedly rational justifications for these programs, but they displayed a deep ignorance of ecological principles. For example, with the sparrows gone, swarms of insects attacked crops, and the result was famine; around thirty million people died. Regarding the current dam debate, local officials supported the plan, claiming that it would end poverty in the region, but social scientists and environmentalists challenged this notion. Yu Xiaogang, director of Green Watershed, is one of China’s leading environmental activists; he helps farm families to learn their rights and acquire green technology like solar hot water heaters and methane gas generators for cooking. He studied what happened to families on the Mekong River when they were moved to make way for the Manwan Dam in the 1980s.

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Figure 10.5  Waking the Green Tiger (Canada, 2011, Gary Marcuse) demonstrates the power of international media activism as filmmakers help rural villagers in China to resist the building of a dam that would devastate their culture.

Yu took a group of people from the village of Xiaoshaba on the Nu River to the village of Tianba in the Manwan region to speak directly with those who had been displaced by the dam’s construction, and invited filmmaker Shi Lihong to document the trip. When the Manwan dam was built, the villagers lost all their land and their village was moved up a mountainside. What the visitors found was the villagers of Tianba sorting through garbage searching for recyclables. They could no longer produce their own food, lacking good soil and water for irrigation, and had long since spent their government’s compensation money on food. They had been promised resettlement within three years but twenty years later they still lived in permanent poverty; their lives are now miserable. For the residents of Xiaoshaba, seeing the state of the Tianba survivors was a disturbing revelation of their own potential fate. When they returned to their village, the Xiaoshaba residents erupted in anger, realizing that they were being asked to sacrifice their lifestyle without hope for a good outcome. Some said they would rather die than see the dam built. The environmentalists promised to return to help them. Shi Lihong edited her footage from Tianba to make a short film to inform people along the Nu River of what was at stake for them. They distributed 200 copies of the film in the region. A copy must have fallen into the hands of authorities,

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because when they returned they were interrogated by police and their movements restricted. Qu Geping looks back on the Cultural Revolution as a time of chaos when dissent was forbidden and anti-​intellectualism reigned. The famine of the Great Leap Forward led Mao to send most of the population into the countryside to increase agricultural production. In Yunnan Province human labor was used to move dirt to reclaim a lake to create more land for rice growing, but the effort destroyed the ecosystem of the lake while barely increasingly the rice yield. China lost valuable wetlands to the agricultural imperatives of the Cultural Revolution, which in some cases caused massive erosion and dust bowls. Mao had no appreciation for the ecological value of forests and wetlands; he seemed to think nature could be conquered like an army, by sheer force of will. Scientists who knew better were afraid to speak out. The party line was “environmental pollution is a problem of capitalism; it won’t occur is a socialist society.” The Chinese environmental movement didn’t emerge until after that period of social convulsion, during which scientists were rarely consulted on political decisions and the ideology was “nature only exists to serve the people.” Zhou En-​Lai was the first Chinese leader to take the environment seriously and realize there was a problem. As Deng Tsou-​Ping promoted industrial growth and privatization, Qu Geping visited the West and got this advice: don’t make the mistakes we made, by polluting first and trying to clean up later. But China made those mistakes, and today is in the midst of a huge environmental crisis, focused on air and water pollution. Back in the present in Xiaoshaba, local activists made their points:  they had good agricultural land, of which China has a shortage; the farmers have good lives here and nowhere else to go. Journalists came in from Beijing and investigated the situation more closely. The focus began to fall on Tiger Leaping Gorge on the Upper Yangtze River, the damming of which would displace several villages consisting of hundreds of thousands of people, flood 265 kilometers, and destroy a famous river valley known throughout China for its beauty. Journalist Liu Jianqiang covered the debate in China’s most influential newspaper, noting the fact that the dam projects were illegal because they hadn’t filed the required environmental impact reports. This reporting, and the obvious opposition of local people, brought the issue to the attention of Premier Wen Jiabao himself. However, the reporter was pressured not to write such articles, and when he persisted in doing so, he was fired.

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When filmmaker Shi Lihong returned to the Xiaoshaba village, she found that a local activist had been making copies of her video and circulating them to the villagers. She attended one screening with an audience of around twenty villagers, and it had an obvious emotional impact on them. More local leaders began to be won over to assert their rights in opposition to the dam. Resistance to being displaced rapidly spread throughout the local population, but the dam developers had already begun marking houses that would be inundated. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the young journalist Liu Jianqiang who had spearheaded the activism died of a heart attack, probably from stress and overexertion. The movement now had a martyr. Hundreds of villagers attended his memorial service, which inevitably became a rally to carry on his unfinished work. Instead of organizing mass demonstrations that might lead to confrontations with police, the activists compiled an information packet and distributed a thousand copies—​a public education campaign familiar in the United States, but unusual in China’s recent history. These activists were following tactics proposed by Qu Geping, who had advised that using the mass media (such as China Central Television) to criticize officials was the best way to get their attention. Using the media reverses the pressure on authorities from top-​down to bottom-​up. Between 1994 and 2008, over 3,500 environmental groups formed in China. Independent filmmakers on environmental issues (e.g., preservation of endangered species) began to be viewed as national heroes. Finally in 2004, Qu Geping’s Environmental Impact Assessment Law was passed, giving the people a legal voice on environmental issues. But regarding the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam, one huge obstacle remained. The dam developers were intent on moving forward with the project, and continued to do so despite injunctions from the government, putting the villagers and the dam developers on a collision course. In 2006 developers began construction on the dam and surveyors continued to place markers on villager’s land. Finally tempers flared and a group of villagers seized several surveyors, holding them hostage in a government building. Local police refused to intervene because of family connections. For a while it seemed that a direct conflict with the army might develop. But the governor dispatched a party secretary to the village, demanding that all construction and surveying stop immediately. A few months later, the plans for a dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge were officially cancelled. A new policy was even instituted that in the future, a dam proposal would not move forward if a majority of the populace opposed it. This represented a major

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turning point both for environmental policy and for democracy in China. The residents displaced by the Manwan Dam even received an additional $10 million in compensation for the loss of their land twenty years earlier. The number of prospective dams along the Nu River was cut back from thirteen to four, and villagers who would be forced to move can expect fairer compensation. Conflicts between construction firms and environmental protection agencies echo similar conflicts in the United States. Restoration efforts are beginning to reverse some of the ecological damage done in earlier decades; the “war against nature” is ending. Expansion of wind power reduces the need for other kinds of more destructive power sources. According to Wang Yongchen, senior environmental reporter at China’s National Public Radio and one of China’s prominent green activists, the stopping of the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam shows what can happen when local people and green activists work together with the support of the media and the law. People come to feel that they have rights, and the changes in environmental laws offer the best hope for the evolution of democracy in China. Gary Marcuse has been making environmental films for some time. He worked as a journalist for the CBC for ten years making documentaries for radio, focusing on subjects that portrayed contemporary social movements in a broader historical perspective. He then moved on to make documentary films for the CBC’s flagship program The Nature of Things, which focused on nature and the environment. The kind of science documentaries Marcuse makes are different from the standard public broadcasting or educational formats; his visual style is a hybrid of journalistic and observational documentary. In particular, he seeks to follow people in the field, with less reliance on interviews and animations (Marcuse, 2012). Documentaries are risky ventures, since you never know what you’ll get until you get it. So relationships between producers and filmmakers are critical in public television. The budget for Waking the Green Tiger was about a half-​a-​million dollars, which took a year and a half to raise from the CBC, other agencies, broadcast prelicenses, and government matching funds. Marcuse’s work would not have been possible without the CBC and public broadcasting. Unfortunately, public broadcasting is in crisis all over the world, whether in Canada, Britain, Australia, or the United States. Maybe one in a thousand documentaries is actually profitable, says Marcuse. “There is no business plan for being a documentary filmmaker. The optimal plan is to break even” (Marcuse, 2012). However, there is an international network of stations and commissioning editors who get together at festivals and combine where possible to support useful projects.

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But this process is under increasing pressure not only from the political right that opposes public broadcasting, but also from the diversification of broadcast outlets that has fractured the audiences. A CBC program that would have had a million viewers a decade ago would today only attract 200,000 or 300,000. This audience erosion not only pushes public broadcasting to accept advertising, but also to target their programs to their advertisers’ demographics. On the other hand, the growth of festivals and the Internet afford a wide array of opportunities to expose the public to new programs. Marcuse sees the roots of the conservation movement in the founding of the US National Parks, such as the fight against damming the Grand Canyon. But he also credits the peace movement and antinuclear testing movement, represented in his earlier film Nuclear Dynamite (2000), which included warnings about radiation risks to the food chain as far afield as the Arctic. Viewers realized that things happening on the other side of the world could impact their lives directly, making it clear that humanity is sharing one ecosphere. In Waking the Green Tiger, all the interview subjects actually play a part in the story. Marcuse finds that the personal stories that people tell are inherently more engaging than interviews with experts, where the content is based on research. When historical background must be filled in, he finds someone to interview who is close to the action, so the transition is as smooth as possible. His film utilizes previously unseen stock footage from Mao’s Cultural Revolution; tracking down this footage required two years of research from at least six different sources. The Sound and Moving Image Division of the American National Archives in Silver Springs, Maryland, provided a lot of material in the public domain. Other Cultural Revolution footage came from an archive in Beijing and Chinese television CCTV, but much of the film shot during that period has apparently been lost. What remains was often very expensive, so sometimes it was obtained by swapping footage of Mao from US archives for Chinese footage. Some of the early color footage was shot by American journalist Edgar Snow (Marcuse, 2012). Waking the Green Tiger contains a wide variety of source footage:  black and white, color, 16mm, mini-​DV, and HD-​Cam. Marcuse believes that people will look at footage shot in any format if it supports a great story. However, the CBC contracts require an all-​Canadian core crew, so all the live interviews directed by Marcuse were shot by his Canadian cameraman. He very much wanted to get lots of observational footage, and to avoid recycling old stock footage in an expository style.

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Marcuse met with several Chinese documentary filmmakers in China, some of whom had studied cinema in the United States or Canada and had experience building the environmental movement in China. Shi Lihong, who had studied the work of documentarian Barbara Kopple, is credited as second unit director and shot a lot of footage in locations where it would have been impossible for Marcuse to go. As a conspicuous foreigner he would have attracted unwelcome police attention; he shot with an HD camera, a tripod and a cameraman, so he didn’t have the luxury of hiding his activities with tiny or hidden cameras. Footage that Shi Lihong had previously shot concerning a village’s opposition to the dam project provided the foundation for the story that Waking the Green Tiger wound up following. She and Marcuse shared both the language of environmental conservation and of observational filmmaking, and she also served as Marcuse’s translator in Mandarin Chinese. Marcuse himself worked in China for only about three months: three weeks of research, five or six weeks of filming, and two weeks for getting the film released. Shi Lihong had been following the story of the dam for five years, shooting 100 hours of raw footage that was edited into Marcuse’s film and had to be translated. Marcuse was working on a journalist’s visa, which required having government “minders” to oversee his activities, but he was fortunate to get a minder who was generally interested in and sympathetic to his goals. Marcuse was also fortunate that the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam project had already been cancelled, so he wasn’t dealing with a subject embroiled in current controversy. As for the politics, the passing of a law providing for environmental impact statements opened up public conversations and opposition that were previously suppressed. There were people within the government who really wanted to see the documentary proceed, who understood the negative impact that industrialization was having on the environment and the need to generate public support for environmental activism. There were also government agencies, including local officials, who believed in the dam project as a source of energy and income and set up roadblocks to the film’s production. The government doesn’t have as much control over industrial activities as those in the West might expect, since a lot of it has been privatized. There are good laws in China intended to limit pollution but they are very irregularly enforced. In China as elsewhere, effective pressure for environmental reform ultimately comes from the people, not from the government. Waking the Green Tiger took twice as much time to edit as Marcuse’s other films. He held about fifteen preview screenings to determine how much an

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audience needed to be told in terms of geographical and historical context, so it took around eight months to complete the final edit. That version came in at seventy-​eight minutes, which is too long for television distribution and too short for feature release, but seemed right for the content. Marcuse edited two shorter versions that fit into under-​an-​hour television slots (with and without advertising), and also a Chinese language version. As for the film’s reception, the film is innovative in breaking stereotypes of how things work in China. Young people and environmentalists in China have been greatly encouraged by the film. Promotion involved entering film festivals, finding international agents for broadcast and educational distribution, and achieving distribution through Netflix and other consumer outlets. Supporting a film’s rollout can take a year of distribution activities; if a producer doesn’t actively push a film, it will simply not get an adequate response. Waking the Green Tiger was submitted to around 100 festivals and got into twenty or more (half of them “green” film festivals) and won six awards, which Marcuse considers a good response rate. Media coverage, a good press kit, and sales agents in various arenas of distribution are all important. Even with all that, a filmmaker should seek to get paid while the film is getting made, since such films rarely make a profit. Waking the Green Tiger is one documentary that has certainly not received the recognition it deserves. It received praise from the Canadian press (as a CBC/​Nature of Things production); coverage of festivals where it has screened (Toronto and Vancouver); East-​West cultural sites (China Dialogue, Earth Rights International); and educational and environmental sites (Educational Media Reviews Online, Planet in Focus, Ecology and Animal Stories). But it never broke through into the major distribution venues in the United States. The only US festivals that had screened it by 2012 were the Washington DC Environmental Film Festival and the San Francisco Green Film Festival. Jenna Hunt (2011) at Independentfilmreviews.com called Waking the Green Tiger “a rarity in the film world—​an entertaining, optimistic, and informative movie about environmentalism.” For those in the West, the film breaks down stereotypes of how activism can succeed in a China that is awakening to a significant concern over environmentalism. The cross-​cultural aspect of this production affords the prospect that documentary film can act as a medium for bridging the gap between cultures in the search for both mutual understanding and progress in solving environmental challenges.

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Urban Roots Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2011 93 min. Mark MacInnis Leila Conners Tree Media Group Tree Media Group Interactive/​Participatory United States http://​urbanrootsamerica.com/​urbanrootsamerica.com/​ Home.html Amazon (DVD), Vimeo, Film’s website

Once the gleaming hope of industrial America, Detroit has lost half its population in the past few decades, and today is marked by vast areas of abandoned homes and factories, vacant lots, and polluted land. Many of the residents who still reside there live in “food deserts”—​few nearby grocery stores, mostly liquor stores and gas stations—​and have little money to pay for food. But a small group of dedicated citizen activists have jumpstarted an urban environmental movement to not only feed their bodies but heal their spirits as well. Director Mark MacInnis was inspired by their initiative and dedication, and committed himself to documenting their efforts so others would see them and be inspired as well. Urban Roots opens with archival footage from the heyday of the auto industry—​the only part of the film that is composed of stock footage—​then proceeds to contrast that vision of optimism with the reality of the city’s present decline. There are a few comic moments—​a chicken wandering around in an empty house—​but the overall portrait is grim. MacInnis speaks with a few academics and public officials about the city’s difficult state (although current mayor Dave Bing declined to be interviewed for the film), but for the most part he talks with ordinary people in the streets and on their front porches, spinning their stories of their past lives as workers, and how they survive in the present. Then the film turns its attention to several groups of residents who have combined forces to grow food for themselves and their friends by creating community gardens in the abandoned lots of their neighborhoods. The majority of these citizens are African American, while some are Hispanic or White; some of the leaders are women and some are men. All appear to work together seamlessly

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Figure 10.6  Urban Roots (United States, 2011, Mark MacInnis) follows the process of resilience and renewal in economically ravaged Detroit through the expansion of urban farming and the social bonds it creates.

in a unified effort to empower their communities and reestablish a sense of self-​determination. There are some interesting generational challenges. Young people seem genuinely surprised to discover that food comes from the ground instead of the fast food restaurant, and some associate agricultural work with slavery. But others welcome the opportunity for disciplined manual labor, finding that it relieves stress and gives them a renewed sense of self-​worth needed to overcome drug and alcohol addictions. Many of the urban gardeners apply the principles and practices of permaculture and organic gardening to their small plots. They form partnerships for distributing their produce to church organizations and local restaurants. Some even view urban agriculture as an opportunity to create small business opportunities, such as the founder of Brother Nature Farm. The urban gardening movement is not without friction. Many of the community gardens are technically illegal due to disputes over property ownership, zoning ordinances, prohibitions against farm animals, and questions about water usage and public safety. Some gardeners see the local government as more of a hindrance than a help; government officials recognize the value of community gardens but feel obliged to enforce existing regulations, or at least ask citizens to be patient while regulations are changed. There is mutual suspicion between some neighborhood community gardeners and the more ambitious garden

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networks that work on a business model and may be less friendly to values like organic gardening. The mode of the film is interactive and participatory, consisting mostly of original action footage and interviews, with a minimum of voiceover narration. Crew members even pitched in on occasion to work with the gardeners, pulling weeds and bailing hay, gaining direct experience that created a stronger sense of empathy with their subjects. One may regard the film as promoting activism, but it may also be viewed as an ethnographic study of a subculture of an urban environment in crisis, an approach known in academic study as “action research.” MacInnis sees Urban Roots as a model for postindustrial cities beyond Detroit. Imagine, he asks, a Hollywood where major film studios sit abandoned; Los Angeles, he says, should take note. In fact, the Post Carbon Institute has cited Detroit as a model for other cities trying to deal proactively with economic and population decline. Mark MacInnis grew up in Detroit; he saw his mother lose her job during the downsizing of the auto industry. He admired Michael Moore’s films and social advocacy as he pursued a career in the Los Angeles motion picture industry. But he always dreamt of making his own documentary, and he found his subject matter in the spontaneous emergence of urban farming in his old hometown. Urban Roots is the story of that emergence, a “Phoenix” story of optimism rising from the ashes of the American dream (MacInnis, 2012). MacInnis started out with less professional capital than even most first-​time filmmakers. He had no established video production company, only a few credits on small-​scale productions and music videos. In the beginning he even waited tables to raise extra cash, slept on friends’ couches, and borrowed cameras for guerilla-​style shoots. He didn’t turn to crowd funding, which was at that time a relatively new source of fundraising. McInnis filmed on his own for about a year, but momentum really began to build when he got his original footage to Leila Conners of Tree Media, coproducer of The 11th Hour, a high-​profile environmental documentary covered elsewhere in this text. Conners recognized the relevance and emotional power of the topic and helped take the project to another level by raising funding, attracting talent, and assuring distribution. MacInnis continued to film for another year after this new infusion of support, with a number of cinematographers covering numerous garden projects with a variety of professional and prosumer cameras (and a go-​pro camera for helicopter shots). Heidi Zimmerman, an assistant editor on The 11th Hour, served as the primary editor. The film contains many dynamic montage sequences of community members busy at work in the gardens, supplemented by classic archival footage and some aerial photography. It keeps up the pace

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with the variety of interviews—​project leaders, children, public officials, and regular folks just pitching in. The musical soundtrack, composed by Detroit native Frank Fitzpatrick, drew upon Detroit’s Motown roots to reinforce the feel of place and give emotional expression to the characters. Tree Media has been handling distribution for Urban Roots, making the rounds at environmental film festivals and holding screenings at community and film centers and grassroots activist organizations. In one innovative marketing development, the Whole Foods grocery chain carried the DVD in their stores nationwide. But as of this writing, the film has not broken through to distribution via Netflix, iTunes, or cable networks like Sundance, so its message is spreading primarily through “underground” word-​of-​mouth. Urban Roots is certainly a crowd pleaser, a highly entertaining film that energizes festival audiences, but it doesn’t appear to have garnered high-​profile reviews. Wendy Priesnitz (2011) of Natural Life Magazine called it “a hugely inspiring and powerful film about people coming together to solve problems, and discovering the fiber of community is powerful.” Katherine Montalto (2012) called it an inspiring film about “creating strong communities of people from all social, economic, and racial backgrounds working together for the benefit of everyone.” The New York Times noted the film’s inclusion in the Whole Foods Film Festival (Cieply, 2011), and PR Newswire (2011) cited the partnership of director MacInnis with artist Anthony James to create sculptures to fund a “farms in schools” program in Los Angeles. But it is disappointing that this truly inspiring film has not achieved wider recognition.

Just Do It!—​A Tale of Modern-​Day Outlaws Year: Length: Director: Producer: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available on:

2011 90 min. Emily James Lauren Simpson Left Field Films Passion River/​Dogwoof Pictures/​Journeyman Pictures James Leadbitter Observational/​Participatory United Kingdom http://​justdoitfilm.com Amazon Prime Video, Film’s website (DVD)

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Unlike most environmental documentaries that focus on some form of ecological danger, Just Do It! invites its audience into the world of committed activists in the United Kingdom, who spend their energy and sometimes risk their freedom to strike blows against the system that enables or supports environmental destruction, while trying to protect the people who are its victims. The style of the film is classic cinema verité—​a mix of hand-​held guerilla camera coverage of environmental protests and the planning for them, with the narration coming from its activist subjects with minimal intrusion of voiceover narration. Its characters are identified only by first names for their own protection. The soundtrack consists of spirited protest music in various styles: folk, rock, and grunge. After establishing several separate storylines, the film proceeds to intercut between them, following their twists and turns, with the addition of a couple of new stories to add more novelty later on. The film begins on a humorous note. Its central female activist, Marina, is a self-​described “domestic extremist” who extols the English virtues of drinking tea while facing adversity, and thus serves it to police on the front lines of protest. Her group and others in the film live in “a secretive and clandestine world of environmental direct action,” organizing theatrical and often illegal protests against the purveyors of climate change.

Figure 10.7  Just Do It!—A Tale of Modern-​Day Outlaws (United Kingdom, 2011, Emily James) takes viewers inside the secretive world of environmental direct action groups in the United Kingdom that combine street theater with serious protests to fight corporate environmental threats.

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Action one: London, 2009. The world’s leaders have arrived for the G20 meeting, and Climate Camp protesters have turned the city’s financial district into a chaotic street party. Rows of heavily armored police, referred to as “party poopers,” push back against the crowd, inadvertently killing one victim. Action two:  a closing wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight has been occupied by its 400 workers threatened with unemployment, and Climate Camp shows up to offer support by smuggling in food and supplies around police guards. In a parallel action in London, protesters challenge the bank that owns the factory—​which also finances fossil fuel companies—​by chaining themselves to the fence of one of the banker’s homes. The “camp-​in” outside the factory lasts four months, until police end the occupation and physically force the protesters (and the filmmaker) to vacate the premises. In between coverage of protest actions, the film delves into the personal lives of the protesters, investigating the sources of their commitment to activism and the sacrifices they make as a consequence. It also takes a critical look at television and newspaper coverage of Climate Camp protests, which generally characterizes the protesters as hooligans with violent and terrorist intent. Actual footage of protests, by contrast, suggests that police are usually the initiators of violence; Climate Camp trains its troops rigorously in nonviolent resistance tactics. There are many poignant moments of reflection amidst all the protest activity. When filmmaker James asks activist Marina if their action “does any good,” her question is met with a painfully long silence and an equally sorrowful expression, before the response comes: “You can’t do nothing.” Direct action seems to be the only possible response beyond depression or suicide. These are not small groups; larger actions involve scores of participants, sometimes even hundreds. They move about primarily on bicycles (sometimes by bus for longer trips) and set up makeshift tent campsites as they move from one protest site to another. The organization is non-​hierarchical and makes decisions by consensus (similar to the Occupy groups that subsequently arose in the United States). But they are well enough organized to keep everyone provided with food and water and outfitted with whatever supplies a given action calls for. On occasion these rebels even participate in old-​fashioned protest marches, such as one in London promoting carbon trading. Action three:  blockading the Royal Bank of Scotland. A  core planning group plans the overall strategy and tactics, and discusses the legal implications (including who will risk arrest and who won’t). They draft position papers filled with facts to justify their actions to their public audience, and gather the

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physical materials required for chaining themselves in a human blockade across the bank’s entrance (including ladders, bike locks, superglue, and construction worker outfits). It’s one thing to witness the planning, and something else to see those plans executed in action. A designated spokeswoman explains the rationale for their actions to police and bystanders. In this case the police are exceedingly formal, even polite. With the protesters linked together by bike locks and superglue, the process of breaking up their blockade is time-​consuming and a bit painful. But the extravagance of their gesture and its rationale is successful in drawing the attention of the media, and their point is made. Action four:  a fight to protect blocks of homes from being demolished to make way for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. This particular effort grew out of a larger campaign called “Plane Stupid” that targets the expansion of aviation in general as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Its purpose is to organize grassroots community resistance in the affected neighborhoods. Activists obtain media coverage by crashing an architects’ awards ceremony by giving their own “We Don’t Give a Shit” award to the honorees. In a more serious vein, some organizers are moving in with residents in the endangered houses to coordinate a stronger resistance. Action five: a publicly announced mass action against the Ratcliffe-​on-​Soar coal power plant near Nottingham. Publicly announcing an action has the advantage of generating a lot of media publicity, but the disadvantage of attracting a lot of police. The activists’ tactical planning resembles a military operation, including diversionary actions, “buddy” teams, and physical sabotage. Cutting through power plant security fences with wire cutters is definitely against the law. Even though security forces had advance warning and are well prepared, the protesters’ numbers threaten to overwhelm them, on occasion even springing their compatriots free from arrest. Some of the protesters actually succeed in breaking into the power station, climbing to the top of a tower, and unfurling their banners. Action six: travelling to Copenhagen to confront world leaders convening for the 2009 United Nations Conference on Climate Change to deal with the ending of the Kyoto Protocol. Danish police implemented the expanded powers they had been granted to preserve order and prevent terrorism at the prominent international gathering. At the border checkpoint, the activists’ bus is stopped and thoroughly searched, but they are allowed to proceed. In Copenhagen they rent a small abandoned factory and turn it into a workshop for building bicycles for their planned action. They even conduct rehearsals for being attacked by the police.

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After a day of peaceful protest marching by an estimated 200,000 people, police randomly detained 968 people, presumably to make a show of their powers. In the subsequent days the police take increasing control of the streets with barricades, dogs, and military-​style transport vehicles. The film’s producer is even arrested under antiterrorism charges and her videotapes confiscated, but director James continues to videotape the events with another camera. The next day she returns “home” to find the police overrunning their base camp and forbidding her to shoot video at what they called a “crime scene”; after a spirited debate, they seize her camera (but do not destroy her videotapes). On the day of their intended major action, the group sets out on bicycles toward the convention center. But midway en route police descend upon them and detain them without apparent cause. The filmmakers shoot footage of police seizing bikes en masse and even beating nonresisting protesters with clubs. Hundreds of people are put in cages without charges. The situation resembles martial law—​a police state environment, even a “war zone.” Danish police seem to have carte blanche to do whatever they want under the mantle of antiterrorism. Protesters return from Copenhagen even more radicalized and disillusioned with capitalism, feeling that the system of money and power must be changed before issues like climate change can even be meaningfully addressed. But some reasons for hope have emerged: plans for a new coal-​fired power plant were cancelled, and the arrests in Copenhagen were declared by the courts to have been illegal. Back at Heathrow, plans for that additional airport runway were also scrapped. Activists and residents begin jumpstarting a grassroots community organization called Transition Heathrow. They occupy an abandoned greenhouse complex and begin to rebuild it from scratch. The young rebels and the older residents seem to have adopted a philosophy of ignoring the laws and power structures and just moving ahead with what they feel they need to do. Local community direct action seems to be the most viable source of hope. Director Emily James calls Just Do It! “the only observational documentary about direct action.” (James, 2012) She considers herself a filmmaker who made a film about activism, not an activist who picked up a camera. She studied in film school in the United Kingdom and has a background in ethnographic documentary. Then she became involved as a videographer for a runway protest at Stansted Airport (this footage appears in the film). After witnessing the preparation for the action she felt like it was a story that needed to be told, and being somewhat on the inside, she realized that she might be the only person who

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would be able to document it. When she brought this early footage to her television producers, they were not enthusiastic, and it became clear the film would have to be made independently. So fundraising didn’t really begin until the start of editing. The filmmakers wanted to embrace an anticapitalist agenda and see what was possible outside of normal funding channels. Does Just Do It! qualify as an environmental documentary? Certainly fighting climate change provides the central motivation for both the activists and the filmmakers. James had worked on The Age of Stupid and shorter projects for television involving climate change, so she was inspired by these groups of activists who wanted to do something bold and dramatic. She narrowed the focus of the film to groups active against climate change to give it a greater sense of coherence and keep the narrative within certain boundaries. A major challenge was to shoot the film in a way to keep the activists safe from legal prosecution, since some of their actions broke laws. It was difficult to get activists to participate in the film if they feared it would jeopardize their safety. Those fears had to be respected, so part of James’s deal was to offer the activists the right to final cut on this film. A rough estimate on the total budget is £250,000. The film was released free of charge through Creative Commons. The filmmakers raised around £30,000 (around $50.000) from the general public. Most participants worked either for free or at a reduced rate. Supervising editor Kurt Engfehr’s participation was covered by a grant, although he also gave extra time for free. The grant was from the Bertha Foundation, which supports documentary production in the United Kingdom, including support for BritDoc/​Channel 4 and the National Film and Television School (from where James has graduated). The film was shot primarily with a tiny Sony A-​1 HD camera with accessory XLR inputs for audio. The field audio recording was of surprisingly high quality, recorded with a short Sennheiser shotgun microphone and lavalieres. Beginning with 425 hours of raw footage, James Leadbitter edited for over a year on Final Cut Pro. He had never edited a feature film before but came from an activist background. However, supervising editor Kurt Engfehr had edited for Michael Moore on Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/​11; he worked on Just Do It! from New Jersey while the production team was working in London. Pro Tools was used for audio postproduction. Where did the activists themselves get their funding? The film doesn’t really address this question, but some of them obviously lived in “squats” and didn’t have much overhead. They received national health care and could go on the

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dole if they needed to. Some of them got by on part-​time jobs. In the United States, organizations like Greenpeace, 350.org or the Rainforest Action Network can afford to pay their activists based on fundraising. Audience response was overwhelmingly positive; many viewers felt strongly motivated to get more actively involved themselves. According to James, some skeptics have even been won over to the cause by the film. As for festivals, the film opened in the United Kingdom in the Sheffield Documentary Festival, and generally did very well in Europe. But getting the film a wider release proved very difficult, especially in the United States. Nine months of festival entries yielded no acceptances until the San Francisco Green Film Festival screened it in 2012. According to James, American festivals set a lot of restrictions that limit opportunities for international, television, and online distribution. If one wants to enter a film in a top-​tier festival, one basically has to hold back from entering the film anywhere else—​not to mention the large expenses involved in hiring a publicist and transporting a team of people The reviews of Just Do It! came from three primary sources: the British press, film journals, and environmental organizations. In the United Kingdom the film was reviewed in most of the mainstream newspapers and journals, but the lack of festival exposure limited the chance to get critical reviews in the United States. The Telegraph’s Tim Robey (2011) was brief and a bit dismissive, saying, “It’s a sprightly and frequently funny film, even if you view the efforts of these (mostly young, oddly posh) campaigners as fundamentally ineffectual, a question James does have the gumption to raise.” Writing in the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw (2011) seemed more appreciative of the protesters’ ingenious strategies and good humor, but did not really comment of the film’s cinematic quality. Among film journals, the verdict was also split. Eyeforfilm.com’s Jennie Kermode (2011) considered Just Do It! “an impressive film that may not be quite as incisive as it needs to be but nevertheless makes important points. It seems destined to acquire historic value in providing a record of change.” Nicola Lampard (2011) of Thefilmpilgrim.com appreciated the film’s “privileged position” in giving “an exclusive view into the lives and viewpoints of these environmental activists which has never been seen before.” Lampard also noted that it was “well filmed throughout even difficult situations.” Less impressed was Sight & Sound’s Hannah McGill (2011), who noted that James’s “refusal to be critical of the protesters prevented her film being bought by a UK broadcast network.” McGill critiques the film for being little more than partisan backslapping: its “ideological approach, combined with a cutesy, informal

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narration and an emphasis on fun, partying, and eccentricity, won’t do much to counter assumptions about the student protest movement being dominated by ditzy dilettantes with a vague anti-​authority agenda in place of a thought-​ through creed.” However, McGill may have missed the point of the film’s stylistic approach; as a predominantly cinema verité-​style film with a somewhat anthropological angle, one may question whether Just Do It! should be obliged to provide ideological balance or do anything more than portray the lives and actions of its subjects on their own terms. John Parrot (2011) of TheFilmReview. com felt that the filmmakers and the protesters understood that “humor breaks down barriers and makes a message more attractive,” and that “it is not the place of this film to get into the nitty gritty of the scientific facts.” Writing for The Ecologist, Matilda Lee (2011) noted that her publication has been “an advocate for radical environmental action since our first issue back in 1970.” So her “review” consisted mostly of links to websites to provide protesters with tools for activism. Peter Wong (2012), representing the San Francisco alternative news site Beyond Chron, contradicted the view of Sight & Sound, finding the activists to be serious in their intent and reflective about their goals and methods. Wong also found the light-​hearted narration by James Leadbitter, which some reviews found annoying, to be “ironically funny” and a highlight of the film. Overall, one may conclude that there was a significant overlap between the critics’ evaluations of the film and their receptivity to the film’s subjects and message.

Elemental Year: Length: Directors: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available at:

2012 93 min. Gayatri Roshan & Emmanuel Vaughan-​Lee Gayatri Roshan & Emmanuel Vaughan-​Lee GoProject Films The Cinema Guild Observational/​Interactive United States/​India http://​www.elementalthefilm.com Amazon Video (Gaia subscription), iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo

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Elemental is a different sort of environmental film. This documentary follows three very different activists through their respective journeys and challenges. What is so strikingly original about Elemental is its personal focus on the daily lives of its subjects—​their commitment and struggles against insurmountable odds. The film’s audience can see how much they sacrifice for their devotion to their causes, and how deeply those sacrifices are rooted in their own sense of identity and spirituality. Rajendra Singh is an Indian ex-​government official who seeks to fight against the pollution of the sacred Ganges River by leading efforts to shut down factories and prevent the building of dams. Eriel Deranger is a young mother of the Canadian Dene tribal culture who campaigns against the Alberta tar sands and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to protect her people from threats to their health. Visionary Australian inventor Jay Harman employs his understanding of natural systems to the creation of innovative technologies that might limit the damage from air pollution and climate change. In the film, the forces of environmental crisis and the spirituality of nature come together within its protagonists, as they draw from their personal connections to nature to engage the crises they face. The film begins with a montage overlapping all its three stories. We see an Indian man bathing himself in polluted river water, an Alberta tar sands refinery spewing smoke into the air, and an inventor contemplating the ocean. All the classical four elements—​earth, air, fire, and especially water—​play prominent parts in the visual panorama of the film. It is humanity’s desecration of these elemental forces—​the pollution of the waters and the air, the burning of natural resources, and the wounding of the earth—​against which these “heroes” take their stands. Shot in a direct cinema observational style without narration, Elemental follows these activists through their daily journeys and travails. Singh embarks on a pilgrimage up and down the Ganges, trying to raise the consciousness of villagers to respect the sacredness of the river, even while many of them resent his interference in their local affairs. Deranger represents the Rainforest Action Network in organizing protest marches against the tar sands, until her aggressive tactics alienate even her allies. Harman searches out investors willing to risk millions of dollars in his designs for strange devices they can barely comprehend. In varying degrees, the audience is invited to see how much they sacrifice for their devotion to their respective causes. Singh suffers confusion and depression as a result of the resistance to his message and the accusations

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Figure 10.8  Elemental (United States, 2012, Gayatri Roshan and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee) follows three environmental activists—​an indigenous Canadian woman, an Indian government official, and an Australian inventor—​in their individual struggles to prevent pollution and fight against climate change.

thrown at him. Deranger has a teenage daughter and a baby on the way, so she must try to balance her maternal responsibilities with her passion to protect her people against the overwhelming power of energy corporations and their partners in government. With help from his more practical wife, Harman struggles to convey the abstract principles of biomimicry to hardheaded businessmen for whom his curious devices may seem too abstract to grasp. In the classic style of observational cinema, audience members travel by their sides. They travel with Singh up to the source of the Ganges in the Himalayas to speak to a wise religious hermit; they ride beside Deranger as she struggles to find a path forward despite the loss of her RAN support system; they sit beside Harman as he tries to explain his concepts to skeptical potential investors. Viewers cannot help but admire their tenacity, even as they fear for the futility of their efforts. Despite the overarching frustrations and futility of their endeavors, by the film’s conclusion each activist is able to claim a small victory. Rajendra Singh is granted a meeting with the prime minister, and gains a promise that no dams will be constructed in the upper region of the Ganges. One hundred and sixty-​five industries that have dumped their wastes into the Ganges have been shut down. He continues to travel all 210 tributaries of the Ganges, mobilizing

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communities to take responsibility to protect India’s rivers. Eriel Deranger’s activism has helped draw international attention to the issues of the tar sands and its projected pipelines. Over 10,000 protesters surround the White House to protest plans for the Keystone XL pipeline. Jay Harman’s atmospheric mixer is now moving toward full-​scale field trials, and his water purification technology has been proven and is being brought to market. Thus Elemental completes the story arc of each of its “heroes,” from their core inspirations and purposes, through their trials with foes, friends, and self, to arrive at an end goal that represents at least some degree of achievement and success. Each one demonstrates meaningful contributions to their society as well as significant personal growth. The word existential has a dual meaning in the context of Elemental. In the general sense, it means, “of, based on, or expressing existence.” Commentators on climate change and pollution often refer to them as “existential threats” to many of the world’s species and even to the human race. But what kinds of existential threats do these phenomena pose to us as individuals? How do these dangers affect how we view our world and how we prioritize our actions and commitments in our choices about how we live our daily lives? In its philosophical sense, existential refers to the themes associated with the writings of certain thinkers loosely affiliated with a philosophical attitude called existentialism, among them Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-​Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. Both definitions of “existential” play out clearly in the intellectual and emotional lives of Elemental’s protagonists. They all face environmental conditions that pose existential threats to their communities, their cultures, and their species; they each suffer through a “dark night of the soul” to discover what part they will play in confronting these dangers. The most important focus for the filmmakers is not whether these activists are right or wrong in their beliefs, but how they are driven by an existential commitment that overshadows everything else in their lives. Elemental engages topics that rarely show up in environmental documentaries: the confusion of regular people toward powerful forces that offer them employment but endanger their health and ecosystems; the divisions within the politics of environmental movements; and the constant tension between public activism and personal life.

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Because of the universality of these themes, audiences of the film can more easily identify with these environmental activists, because rather than being portrayed as models of perfection, they are seen as complex human beings, exhibiting the same passions, flaws, and difficult choices that all of us have to make in our own daily lives. Viewers walk away from this film feeling like they have been put through a wringer—​exhausted by the Sisyphusian task of fighting against the inevitable decline of the natural environment, yet inspired by the commitment of those who absorb the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and keep moving forward, undaunted. The depth of the ecological crisis can be clearly seen from the complexity of the challenges on both the spiritual and material planes. Reflecting on the roots of religious experience in nature reminds us how far our contemporary religious belief systems have diverged from their origins. The waste products of our industrial economy come into direct conflict with the resources provided by nature that sustain our very existence. While our economic and political systems seem enmeshed in inertia and corruption, the three crusaders persevere daily to raise awareness of the problems and build a critical mass for public protest, institutional change, and technological innovation. Producer-​director Gayatri Roshan has been active in environmental documentary production for a while, having founded the Species Alliance that produced Call of Life (2010, a film covered elsewhere in this book. As with Call of Life, a 57-​minute educational version of Elemental was prepared for the high-​ school-​to-​college classroom, accompanied by a very effective discussion guide. Published by the Center for Ecoliteracy, this guide frames the study of the film in terms of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, in three acts: the Call to Action, the Road of Trials, and Finding Hope/​Coming Home. The guide explores this progression through three themes: Connection to Place, Perseverance, and Nature as Teacher, with a set of discussion questions and reflective exercises provided. This approach seems creatively designed to combine a psychological appeal to younger viewers with a perspective on the content that they may be able to appreciate. Since its premiere in the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2012, Elemental has appeared in over two dozen film festivals (winning two awards) and was screened in around 100 cities worldwide. The film has been widely reviewed

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among major press, film journals and environmental organizations, with most reviewers praising the film’s highly distinctive take on environmental activism. Nick Guzman (2012) of LostinReviews.com noted, “It is the personal struggles that are the most compelling element of environmental documentaries,” a perspective demonstrated by other films like An Inconvenient Truth, Gasland, and Garbage Warrior. “The stories are incredible, inspiring and heartbreaking . . . we share in their defeats and their victories, often catching them at their most vulnerable,” and the directors “let the people’s stories speak for themselves.” Variety’s Dennis Harvey (2012) said the film “pays unusual attention to the exhaustion and exasperation frequently experienced by its subjects.” Michael O’Sullivan (2013) wrote in the Washington Post, “There aren’t many facts and statistics, which immediately sets this apart from most ecological documentaries.” Critics admired the film’s ability to walk the line between objectivity and advocacy. Walter Addiego (2013) of the San Francisco Chronicle credited the film for giving “a glimpse of their opponents and critics, which helps its credibility.” Michael Sauter (2013) noted in Film Journal International that even though the film “falls short of the purely objective ideal that many strive for in documentary filmmaking . . . we never feel as though it’s pushing a political agenda.” Reviewers also had high regard for the film’s aesthetic quality, including the gorgeous cinematography and the smooth editing between the three story strands. Dissenting somewhat was Village Voice’s Inkoo Kang (2013), who wondered if the film might qualify as “pollution porn,” for being so beautiful as to undermine its disturbing ecological message. What is ultimately so impressive about Elemental is the way it embraces universal spiritual, philosophical, and ecological themes, while keeping a sharp focus on individual people in the context of their families, cultures, and personal struggles. Elemental makes powerful use of the symbolic connections between religion and nature, the mythic structure of the hero’s journey, and the existential perspectives of committed individuals. These viewpoints are richly embodied in the unique personalities and daily struggles of the film’s three protagonists. Because of the universality of these themes, viewers can see them as complex human beings, exhibiting the same passions, flaws, and difficult choices that all people have to make in their own daily lives.

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Rebels with a Cause Year: Length: Director: Producers: Production Company: Distributor: Narrator: Mode/​Genre: Country: Website: Available from:

2013 72 min. (57 min. for TV) Nancy Kelly Nancy Kelly, Kenji Yamamoto New Day Films/​KRCB North Bay Public Media PBS Frances McDormand Expository United States http://​rebelsdocumentary.org/​ Film’s website (DVD or Stream)

Rebels with a Cause is the story of how a small group of ordinary people in the 1960s and 1970s saved a vast area around the San Francisco’s Golden Gate for parks and farms, so that future generations might enjoy them. In the 1950s, California’s Marin County (across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco) seemed likely to suffer the same fate of suburban overdevelopment and sprawl afflicting most growing postwar American cities—​until a determined and creative group of citizen conservationists banded together to protect the county’s open space, wildlife, and seashores for agriculture and recreation. This film is their story—​the tale of the preservation of the Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and how activists actually managed to win their campaign against powerful business interests through effective collaboration and strategizing that included the building of political alliances and support at both the local and national levels. This success story is told through personal recollections, archival video footage, and still photographs, fluidly edited to keep up the pace. The film was coproduced by local PBS affiliate KRCB in two versions: one targeted for one-​hour PBS slots, and a longer version for theatrical and festival screenings. In the early 1960s, Congressman Clem Miller introduced a bill to protect Point Reyes’ open space. At the beginning local ranchers and county supervisors opposed protecting the seashore, but an important ally was the Marin Conservation League, headed by local socialite Caroline Livermore. President Kennedy and his secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall wanted to establish

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some national seashore parks, and Point Reyes received their attention. But the cost of purchasing the land was prohibitive, over $14 million in the early 1960s. So a compromise was reached to keep the farms and ranches in private hands as long as they remained active. This plan broke local opposition and the plan was accepted by Congress. Rep. Miller died only a month later in a plane crash, and was buried at a point on a bluff overlooking the ocean. The costs of land purchasing, however, were escalating, and the Nixon administration made the decision to sell off parts of the park for development in order to finance the remaining planned acquisitions. The “Save Our Seashore” organization, supported by Rep. Miller’s widow Katie, sent a petition to the president, supported even by former opponents of the park. Not only did Nixon accede to supporting Point Reyes, but he created ten other parks across the country as well. Bolinas Lagoon, south of Point Reyes, became the next target for developers. Plans included a commercial marina with boats and hotels, linked to the interior by a coastal highway. However, the developer’s lease failed to secure a small island in the middle of the harbor. Conservationists persuaded the owner to donate the property to the country as a park, heading off the plans of the developers. Another development plan, called Marincello, targeted the Marin headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge for a vast planned housing community on the model of Levittown. This land tract was owned by Gulf Oil, which backed the development plan with corporate money and political power; the belief was that growth in the area was not only good but also inevitable. Nevertheless, the scale of the proposed development alarmed the local citizenry, and an opposition movement arose. A  ballot referendum was submitted for a countywide vote, but was invalidated by dubious political maneuvering. So the fight went to the courts, through a series of lawsuits against Marincello that dragged on for years, but without a restraining order some preparatory construction went forward. When a Gulf Oil official minimized his concern for the activists’ legal efforts, a Nature Conservancy representative replied, “There’s something you don’t understand. They’re unpaid and they’re crazy.” In the end, Gulf Oil gave up and withdrew from the project—​for a payment of $100. Further zoning restrictions prevented developmental incursions from running up to the borders of the parkland. The conflicts over zoning limited the financial prospects of landowners, sometime driving wedges between neighbors and members of families. In the end, it took a Supreme Court decision to confirm the right of Marin country to restrict development through its zoning

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practices. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT)—​the first such land trust in the nation—​was established in 1980 to help preserve agricultural land adjacent to the parkland, to ensure that the land would be preserved as agricultural land in perpetuity. On the south coast from the Golden Gate Bridge lay a piece of excess Air Force land called Fort Miley, which the Sierra Club had been eyeing as possible parkland for a couple of decades. With support from Congressman Philip Burton and President Nixon, an 85-​mile long expanse of national seashore was created on the western fringe of the Bay Area, thus preserving the natural ecology and beauty from south of San Francisco coastline all the way up to Point Reyes. Protecting so much agricultural land adjacent to population centers has had some negative consequences. Real estate prices in the settled areas of Marin County are some of the highest in the nation; even years later, conflicts arise between local business activity and the preservation of wilderness. But few of the people who helped preserve this land have any regrets; they know that these vistas could never have been preserved without the determined and passionate activism of ordinary citizens who worked tirelessly to make the engines of power bend to their will. The Rebels with a Cause website includes a Viewers Guide to assist in using the film as an educational tool for schools, universities, and community groups. The program was broadcast on many PBS stations and also screened at many festivals, and had a limited regional theatrical release. It received positive critical reviews across the mainstream West Coast press and numerous environmental publications. David Lewis (2013) of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “With the help of engaging interviews, excellent graphic maps and Lou Weinert’s cinematography—​his Bay Area landscape shots are beautiful—​filmmakers Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto are able to translate what was essentially an incremental bureaucratic fight into cinematic terms.” On the Urban Film website, eglenn (2014) observed that the film “seeks to describe the birth of the modern environmental preservation movement, giving full credit along the way to the ‘little people’—​garden clubs, small farmers, hippies and community activists who took the fight to the nation’s capital—​and won.”

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Without question, the first decades of the twenty-​first century have been a golden age for environmental documentary films and television programming, as well as a pivotal moment in ecological history. The threats of global warming, peak oil, genetic modification of food, privatization of water, pollution of the land and sea, and other ecological crises, combine to create a murky vision for the future not only for humanity, but for all of nature’s species. Furthermore, the mainstream corporate media have failed in their responsibility for educating the public about these realities. Thus documentary filmmakers have stepped in to fill the void, projecting their still small voices into the wilderness, shouting out like Paul Revere that “a crisis is coming,” in the hope of awakening people from their slumber. Their efforts have been facilitated by increasingly affordable high-​quality camera equipment, the vast creative visual potential of digital technology, and expanded distribution channels of cable and satellite television and the Internet. However, funding sources have been getting progressively more limited, making it difficult if not impossible for documentary filmmakers to make a living while plying their trade. A few of the films discussed here have garnered wide audiences, whether in theaters (An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc., and Who Killed the Electric Car?) or on television (Years of Living Dangerously, Six Degrees Could Change the World). Others have received recognition by receiving prestigious awards and nominations (Darwin’s Nightmare, The Garden, Gasland, The Cove, and Virunga). Still others received notoriety through unique distribution strategies (The Age of Stupid, Home). And some films achieved their significant impact through grassroots campaigns that lit a fire under small audiences of activists (The End of Suburbia, The Power of Community, and Chasing Ice). These environmental documentaries display a wide variety of styles and modes. Some follow the traditional expository format (The 11th Hour, Crude

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Impact, The Future of Food), while others employ the modes of observational film or cinema verité (Crude, Virunga, Darwin’s Nightmare, and Just Do It!). Some films utilize “hosts” to guide viewers through their segments (The End of Suburbia, Trashed), while sometimes the on-​camera narrators are the filmmakers themselves (The Economics of Happiness, This Changes Everything, Under the Dome). Some filmmakers play a significant performative role in their films (Josh Fox in Gasland, Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth), while other filmmakers explicitly reject the “cult of personality” and strive for an impersonality that reflects their valuation of educational objectivity (James Jandak Wood’s Crude Impact, Deborah Coons Garcia’s The Future of Food). Some films embrace comprehensive visions of ecological crisis (The 11th Hour, Crude Impact, Surviving Progress) while others focus narrowly on personal portraits of individual activists (An Inconvenient Truth, Garbage Warrior, Elemental); one film, What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, manages to do both simultaneously. Some films use fictional or imaginative constructions to frame their documentary messages (The Age of Stupid, Six Degrees Could Change the World, Who Killed the Electric Car?). In true performative mode, for some films the making of the film becomes as central and dramatic as the subject matter (The Cove, Chasing Ice). The interviews with the filmmakers reveal the challenges of financing, festival entry, and distribution. Some films were mostly or completely self-​financed (What a Way to Go, Urban Roots, Within Reach), while others received production financing and support from famous filmmakers and Hollywood studios (An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour, Surviving Progress). Some films were met with legal challenges and political or corporate opposition (An Inconvenient Truth, Crude, Gasland, Under the Dome). Some received widespread festival exposure while others received little or none. Some received widespread theatrical distribution (An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc., Who Killed the Electric Car?) while others rarely if ever saw the inside of a theater (Urban Roots, Within Reach, Call of Life). Some are available for viewing on familiar video streaming sites, while others may only be ordered on DVD from the film’s website. Most importantly, a few of them—​An Inconvenient Truth, Gasland, Food, Inc., and Under the Dome, among others—​have had a pronounced influence on the public debate around the problems and issues they highlighted. Returning to the questions we posed in our introduction, what lessons do these documentaries have for members of the public in terms of dealing with our environmental crisis? How may they be employed in an education context?

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319

What lessons do they have for documentary filmmakers, in terms of financing, production, and distribution? As indicated time and again during our discussion of these films, our ecological crisis is systemic; all the different manifestations of the crisis are interwoven in a frightening tapestry. While a case can be made that the beginnings of the geologic era now being called the Anthropocene had its genesis in the early days of human agriculture, there can be no doubt that the birth of the industrial era—​based on the widespread use of coal and oil—​rapidly accelerated the pace of growth in population and resource consumption over the past two centuries toward the planet’s ultimate limits. Peak oil tells us that we are approaching the limits of easily and profitably extractable fossil fuels, and global climate change tells us that we are reaching the limits of the ability of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb our waste products. Limits to our food and water supplies put pressure on population growth, and the dominance of powerful multinational corporations and constant political pressure for economic growth makes reform exceedingly difficult. The combined impact of climate change and deforestation pose dangers to the survival of many of the world’s species, including our own. These films have attempted to raise public awareness of these complex, interrelated ecological problems. But they have also suggested some ways forward, through strategies for technological innovation in transportation and energy production, urban farming, sustainable building, and committed activist movements. So in spite of describing daunting environmental threats, they also offer strategies for mitigation and adaptation that could help to create a path to a more sustainable and resilient future. The young people who inhabit our high schools and universities are among those who will be living into this future with all its challenges. They need to be offered opportunities for learning beyond the mainstream media and conventional models of politics, economics, and community. They need to be provided with the tools to comprehend and adapt to changes that will vastly alter the world they expect to live in as adults. These films provide engaging and thoughtful avenues of entry to comprehending and responding to those challenges. No doubt some members of the upcoming generations will feel a desire to contribute to this conversation through their own documentary productions. Hopefully the films discussed here may provide guidance, in terms of their modes of storytelling and techniques of production. Will they choose the more pedagogical expository mode, the more seemingly objective observational

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more, or the more engaged performative mode? Given the pace of change in the world of media, we can be pretty certain that their means of gaining financing, their production technologies, and their means of distribution will change radically. Raising start-​up financing will be more common through websites like Kickstarter, allowing audiences to support in advance the kinds of programming they want to see. The trend toward miniaturization of high-​quality video equipment will allow ever more sophisticated productions more dependent upon vision and talent than big budgets. Video streaming sites like YouTube, iTunes, and Vimeo (or their successors) will offer avenues of distribution and the possibility of “going viral” within a short time frame. But challenges will remain for monetizing these productions through venues like Twitter without the benefit of large marketing budgets. Of course, the cloud that hangs over the prospects for all digital technologies, from camera hardware and editing software to the Internet itself, is the possibility that economic collapse could render the advance of such technologies unsustainable. Every one of the films discussed here (and so many others we did not have time and space to include) carries an important message that deserves an audience, with the potential to help us understand more deeply the precarious balance of the ecosystem we all share. I  was moved to write this book because I knew of so many films that had very important messages to convey about our ecological crisis, which never received wide distribution and were seen only by small audiences. Yet as Buckminster Fuller once observed, by moving a small trim tab you can turn a huge ship around; perhaps these environmental documentaries (and others) may provide the spark to raise the awareness of ordinary citizens who will go on to become tomorrow’s leaders and policy makers. Let us hope that films like these keep on coming—​we really need them.

321

References Abraham, John. “Years of Living Dangerously—​a Global Warming Blockbuster.” The Guardian. April 9, 2014. https://​www.theguardian.com/​environment/​climate-​ consensus-​97-​per-​cent/​2014/​apr/​09/​years-​of-​living-​dangerously-​global-​warming-​ blockbuster. Accessed December 3, 2015. Abrams, Simon. “Naomi Klein’s Climate Change Doc ‘This Changes Everything’ Strives to Redeem Issue-​oriented Documentaries.” Village Voice. September 29, 2015. http://​www.villagevoice.com/​film/​naomi-​klein-​s-​climate-​change-​doc-​this-​changes-​ everything-​strives-​to-​redeem-​issue-​oriented-​documentaries-​7713341. Accessed June 18, 2016. Addiego, Walter. “Elemental Review: 3 Environmentalists.” San Francisco Chronicle. May 23, 2013. http://​www.sfchronicle.com/​movies/​article/​Elemental-​review-​3-​ environmentalists-​4544095.php/​. Accessed July 7, 2013. The Age of Stupid. DVD. Directed by Franny Armstrong. London: Spanner Films, 2009 The Age of Stupid. Wikipedia. http://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Age_​of_​Stupid. Accessed June 14, 2014. Aizen, Marcelo, and Lawrence Harder. “The Truth about Honeybees.” New Scientist. 204 (2731) October 24, 2009. Alter, Ethan. “Who Killed the Electric Car?” The Economist. June 26, 2006. Economist. com. Accessed August 8, 2013. Anderson, John. “Review: Flow.” Variety. January 21, 2008. https://variety.com/2008/ film/reviews/flow-3-1200548857. Accessed July 8, 2013. Anderson, John. “Review: Food, Inc.” Variety. September 11, 2008. http://variety. com/2008/film/reviews/food-inc-1200470691. Accessed July 8, 2013. Anderson, John. “Not Simply an Underdog’s Tale.” Washington Post. October 23, 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/10/22/ ST2009102204796.html?sid=ST2009102204796. Accessed July 7, 2013. Anderson, John. “Review: A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet.” Variety. February 10, 2012. http://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/a-fierce-green-firethebattle-for-a-living-planet-1117947054. Accessed July 8, 2013. Astle, Randy. “Shouting Loudly through Social Issue Documentary: Orlando von Einsiedel on Virunga.” Filmmaker Magazine. November 5, 2014. http://​ filmmakermagazine.com/​87894-​shouting-​loudly-​through-​social-​issue-​ documentary-​orlando-​von-​einsiedel-​on-​virunga/​#.V6FJ6o6ARRM. Accessed April 17, 2016. Aufderheide, Pat. “An Inconvenient Truth.” Cineaste. 32 (1) (Winter 2006): 50–​52.

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322 References Bardi, Ugo. The Limits to Growth Revisited. New York, NY: Springer, 2011. Barnett, Jon, Peter Christoff, Haripriya Tangan, and Elissa Sutherland. “An Inconvenient Truth: Review Symposium.” Geophysical Research. 47 (2) (June, 2009): 204–​211. Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-​Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Barry, Clayton. “The Environment/​Society Disconnect: An Overview of a Concept Tetrad of Environment.” The Journal of Environmental Education. 41 (2) (2010): 116–​132. Beattie, Geoffrey, Laura Sale, and Laura McGuire. “An Inconvenient Truth? Can a Film Really Affect Psychological Mood and Our Explicit Attitudes towards Climate Change?” Semiotica. 187 (2011): 105–​125. Beckerman, Andrew. “Surviving Progress.” Film-​Forward. April 6, 2012. http://​film-​ forward.com/​star-​reviews/​surviving-​progress. Accessed August 2, 2016. Bennett, Timothy S., and Sally Erickson. Interview by John A. Duvall. Personal interview via Skype. July 10, 2012. Berlinger, Joe. Interview by John A. Duvall. Personal interview via Skype. August 8, 2012. Betts, Richard. “A Climate Scientist’s View of 2055.” MET Office Hadley Centre, 2009. http://​www.spannerfilms.net/​sites/​files/​ageofstupid/​A%20climate%20scientists%20 view%20of%202055.pdf.. Accessed June 15, 2016. The Big Fix. DVD. Directed by Josh Tickell. Ojai, CA: Green Planet Productions, 2012. Bioncolli, Amy. “Review: ‘Food, Inc.’ Not for the Squeamish.” SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle). June 12, 2009. http://​www.sfgate.com/​movies/​article/​Review-​ Food-​Inc-​not-​for-​the-​squeamish-​3295336.php. Accessed June 8, 2013. Blood and Oil. DVD. Directed by Jeremy Earp. 2008. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. Bowling for Columbine. DVD. Directed by Michael Moore. Los Angeles: United Artists/​ MGM, 2002. Bowman, Ron. Interview by John A. Duvall. Personal interview via Skype. July 17, 2012. Boyle, Deirdre. “The Future of Food” Cineaste. 30 (3) (Summer 2005): 88. Bradshaw, Peter. “The Age of Stupid.” The Guardian. March 19, 2009. https://​www. theguardian.com/​film/​2009/​mar/​20/​the-​age-​of-​stupid-​review. Accessed July 6, 2013. Bradshaw, Peter. “Just Do It—​Review.” The Guardian. July 14, 2011. http://​www. theguardian.com/​film/​2011/​jul/​14/​just-​do-​it-​review. Accessed July 10, 2013. Brandt, Steven G. “The Brilliance (and Stupidity) of The Age of Stupid.” Huffington Post. November 22, 2009. http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​steven-​g-​brant/​the-​brilliance-​ and-​stupid_​b_​295518.html. Accessed June 18, 2016. Branson, Richard, Howard G. Buffett, and Desmond Tutu. “New Troubles at the Gates of Virunga.” Huffington Post. April 27, 2014. http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​ richard-​branson/​virunga-​national-​park_​b_​5222851.html. Accessed April 17, 2016. Bridge, Gavin. “Gasland.” AREA (Royal Geographical Society). 44 (3) (2012): 384390.

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Bullfrogfilms.com (no author, n.d.). Tapped. Reviews. http://​www.bullfrogfilms.com/​ print/​tap.html. Accessed June 12, 2014. Burning the Future. DVD. Directed by David Novack. Toronto: Mongrel Media, 2008. Business Wire (no author). “Energy Expert and Former Regulator Issues Statement on Oscar Nominated Documentary Gasland.” February 27, 2011. http://​www. businesswire.com/​news/​home/​20110227005069/​en/​Energy-​Expert-​Regulator-​Issues-​ Statement-​Oscar%C2%AE-​Nominated#.U5aWcC8wJoQ. Accessed June 9, 2014. Calhoun, David. “The Age of Stupid.” TimeOut London. March 17, 2009. http://​www. timeout.com/​london/​film/​the-​age-​of-​stupid-​2009. Accessed July 6, 2013. Call of Life. DVD. Directed by Monte Thompson. Annandale, NJ: Species Alliance, 2010. Call of Life. “Press Kit.” 2010. http://​www.calloflife.org/​p-​press.htm. Accessed July 6, 2013. Caruso, Denise. “New Future of Food Movie is a Hit.” Organic Consumers Association. August 23, 2004. http://​www.organicconsumers.org/​ge/​future-​of-​food.cfm. Accessed July 9, 2013. Catsoulis, Jeannette. “The War between Public Health and Private Interests.” New York Times. September 11, 2008. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2008/​09/​12/​movies/​12flow. html. Accessed July 8, 2013. Catsoulis, Jeannette. “From Flipper’s Trainer to Dolphin Defender.” New York Times. July 30, 2009. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2009/​07/​31/​movies/​31cove.html. Accessed April 30, 2014. Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Our Planet’s Destruction in Yummy Colors.” New York Times. February 3, 2011. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2012/​12/​14/​movies/​trashed-​a-​global-​ tour-​of-​rubbish.html. Accessed July 9, 2013. Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Gloom and Doom for the Planet: Trashed, a Global Tour of Rubbish.” New York Times. December 13, 2012. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2011/​02/​ 04/​movies/​04home.html?_​r=0. Accessed April 4, 2014. Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Gorillas in the Midst of a Battle over Oil: Virunga, a Searing Documentary Set in Congo.” New York Times. November 6, 2014. http://​www. nytimes.com/​2014/​11/​07/​movies/​virunga-​a-​searing-​documentary-​set-​in-​congo. html. Accessed December 6, 2015. Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Review: This Changes Everything Sweetly Confronts Climate Change.” New York Times. November 6, 2014. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2015/​10/​ 02/​movies/​review-​this-​changes-​everything-​sweetly-​confronts-​climate-​change.html. Accessed October 1, 2015. Chasing Ice. DVD. Directed by Jeff Orlowski. New York: Submarine Deluxe, 2012. “Chasing Ice: New Film Captures Melting of the Planet through the Lens of Photographer James Balog.” Democracy Now. November 15, 2012. http://​www. democracynow.org/​2012/​11/​15/​chasing_​ice_​new_​film_​captures_​melting. Accessed July 6, 2013. Chasingice.com. Production Notes. https://​chasingice.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2014/​ 03/​Chasing-​Ice-​Production-​Notes-​10-​3-​12.pdf. Accessed July 6, 2013.

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324 References Chew, Cassie. “Documentary Film Tapped Exposes Dangers of the Bottled Drinking Water Industry.” Examiner.com. October 11, 2009. http://​www.examiner.com/​ article/​documentary-​film-​tapped-​exposes-​dangers-​of-​the-​bottled-​drinking-​water-​ industry. Accessed June 12, 2014. Cieply, Michael. “Whole Foods to Sponsor Environmental Film Festival.” New York Times. March 13, 2011. http://​mediadecoderblogs.nytimes.com/​2011/​03/​13/​whole-​ foods-​to-​sponsor-​environmental-​film-​festival. Accessed July 31, 2013. Cook, Polly. “HOME by Yann Arthus-​Bertrand.” The Ecologist. June 22, 2009. http://​ www.theecologist.org/​reviews/​films/​272468/​home_​by_​yann_​arthusbertrand.html. Accessed July 9, 2013. Cooper, John N. “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” Axis of Logic. May 5, 2006. http://​www.axisoflogic.com/​artman/​publish/​printer_​21913. shtml. Accessed July 12, 2013. The Cove. DVD. Directed by Louie Psihoyos. Santa Monica, CA; Lions Gate/​Roadside Attractions, 2009. Crawford, James. “The Future of Food” Village Voice. September 6, 2005. http://​www. villagevoice.com/​2005-​09-​06/​film/​the-​future-​of-​food/​full. Accessed July 9, 2013. Creighton, Mandy. Interview by John A. Duvall. Personal interview via Skype. September 4, 2012. Crude. DVD. Directed by Joe Berlinger. Beverly Hills, CA: Entendre Films, 2009. “Crude-​Awards.” Internet Movie Database. http://​www.imdb.com/​title/​tt1326204/​ awards?ref_​=tt_​awd. Accessed August 8, 2012. Crude Impact. DVD. Directed by James Jandak Wood. New York: Docurama Films. 2006. Cummings, Doug. “The Future of Food.” Filmjourney.org. March 16, 2006. http://​ filmjourney.org/​2006/​03/​16/​the-​future-​of-​food. Accessed July 9, 2013. D’Angelo, Mike. “Damn You, Environment!” Village Voice. August 7, 2007. http://​ www.villagevoice.com/​2007-​08-​07/​film/​damn-​you-​environment/​full. Accessed July 7, 2013. Dargis, Manohla. “Helpful Hints for Saving the Planet: Review of The 11th Hour.” New York Times. August 17, 2007. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2007/​08/​17/​movies/​ 17hour.html?_​r=0. Accessed July 7, 2013. Darwin’s Nightmare. DVD. Directed by Hubert Sauper. New York: International Film Circuit, 2004. David, Laurie, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, and Lesley Chilcott. “Commentary by Producers.” An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning. DVD. Directed by Davis Guggenheim. 2006. Los Angeles: Lawrence Bender Productions. Davies, Sam. “Gasland.” Sight & Sound. February 2011. http://​old.bfi.org.uk/​ sightandsound/​review/​5874. Accessed July 9, 2013. “Dedication’s what You Need.” Spanner Films. March 14, 2009. http://​www. spannerfilms.net/​news/​dedications_​what_​you_​need. Accessed January 10, 2011

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Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. De La Baume, Marc. “For a Filmmaker, the Green Things in Life Are Free.” New York Times. January 28, 2011. http://​query.nytimes.com/​gst/​fullpage. html?res=9C0CE5D 81730F933A05752C0A9679D8B63. Accessed September 19, 2013. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1997. Ebert, Roger. “An Inconvenient Truth Review.” rogerebert.com. May 1, 2006. http:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/an-inconvenient-truth-2006. Accessed June 10, 2013. Ebert, Roger. “The 11th Hour Review.” rogerebert.com. August 23, 2007. http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/the-11th-hour-2007. Accessed July 7, 2013. Ebert, Roger. “Food, Inc.” rogerebert.com. June 17, 2009. http://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/food-inc-2009. Accessed July 8, 2013. Ebert, Roger. “Chasing Ice: The Man Who Shoots Ice.” rogerebert.suntimes.com. November 13, 2012. http://​www.rogerebert.com/​reviews/​chasing-​ice-​2012. Accessed June 18, 2016. The Economics of Happiness. DVD. Directed by Helena Norberg-​Hodge, Steven Gorelick, and John Page. East Hardwicke, VT: Local Futures, 2011 Edelstein, David. “Devastating in Its Implications.” New York Magazine. n.d. (2006). http://​nymag.com/​movies/​reviews/​17092. Accessed July 10, 2013. Edelstein, David. “Two Documentaries to Rip You up.” New York Magazine. March 6, 2008. http://​nymag.com/​daily/​movies/​2008/​03/​two_​documentaries_​to_​rip_​you_​ u.html. Accessed June 6, 2013. Edelstein, David. “Food, Inc.” New York Magazine. n.d. (2008). http://​nymag.com/​ listings/​movie/​food-​inc. Accessed June 9, 2014. Edelstein, David. “People Suck.” New York Magazine. September 6, 2009. http://​nymag. com/​movies/​reviews/​58859. Accessed July 7, 2013. Edwards, Dan. “300 Million Clicks: Under the Dome and the Chinese Documentary Context.” Sense of Cinema. Issue 76 Documentary in Asia. September, 2015. http://​sensesofcinema.com/​2015/​documentary-​in-​asia/​under-​the-​dome-​chinese-​ documentary. Accessed June 23, 2016. eglenn. “Rebels with a Cause.” Urban Film. October 8, 2014. http://​eglenn.scripts.mit. edu/​urbanfilm/​2014/​10/​rebels-​with-​a-​cause. Accessed December 6, 2014. Elbel, Fred. “What a Way to Go—​Life at the End of Empire.”. Social Contract Press. 19 (3) (Spring 2009). Elemental. DVD. Directed by Gayatri Rosham and Emmanuel Vaughan-​Lee. San Francisco: Go Project Films, 2012. The 11th Hour. DVD. Directed by Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners. Burbank, CA: Warner Independent Pictures, 2007 Ellis, Jack C., and Betsy A. McLane. A New History of Documentary Film. New York, NY: Continuum, 2005.

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326 References Enck-​Wanzer, Darrel. “Race, Coloniality, and Geo-​Body Politics: The Garden as Latin@ Vernacular Discourse.” Environmental Communication. 5 (3) (September 2011): 363–​371. The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream. DVD. Directed by Gregory Greene. Paris, Canada: Electric Wallpaper, 2004. Energy Bulletin. Web Site. (now re-​named Resilience http://​www.resilience.org). Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream. DVD. Directed by Gregory Greene. Paris, Canada: Electric Wallpaper, 2007. Fast Food Nation. Film. Directed by Richard Linklater. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. A Fierce Green Fire. DVD. Directed by Mark Kitchell. Redding, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2012. Fildes, Andrew. “‘The Charismatic Catastrophist’: An Inconvenient Truth.” Screen Education. 43 (2006): 20–​21. Fildes, Andrew. “Trash or Treasure? Garbage Warrior.” Screen Education. 51 (Spring 2008): 56–​60. Fiskio, Janet. “Apocalypse and Ecotopia: Narratives in Global Climate Change Discourse.” Race, Gender & Class. 19 (1–​2) (2012): 12–​36. Fiskio, Janet. “Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship.” American Literature. 84 (2) (June 2012): 301–​325. Flow: For Love of Water. DVD. Directed by Irena Salina. New York: Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2008. Flowers, Rick, and Elaine Swan. “‘Eating at Us’: Representations of Knowledge in the Activist Documentary film Food, Inc.” Studies in the Education of Adults. 43 (2) (2011): 234–​250. Flynn, Nick. “Darwin’s Nightmare and the World Bank.” March 17, 2006. Cited on film’s website. http://​www.darwinsnightmare.com/​reviews.htm#nickvo. Accessed July 7, 2013. Food, Inc. DVD. Directed by Robert Kenner. New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2008. Foust, Christina R. “Considering the Prospects of Immediate Resistance in Food Politics: Reflections on The Garden.” Environmental Communication. 5 (3) (September 2011): 350–​355. FrackNation. Directed by Ann McElhinney, Phelim McAleer and Magdalena Segieda. Studio City, CA: Ann and Phelim Media, 2013. Fuel. DVD. Directed by Josh Tickell. Bellingham, WA: Intention Media, 2010. Fujishima, Kenji. “Virunga.” Slant Magazine. November 3, 2014. http://​www. slantmagazine.com/​film/​review/​virunga. Accessed April 17, 2016. The Future of Food. DVD. Directed by Deborah Coons Garcia. Mill Valley, CA: Lily Films, 2004. Gamble, Patrick. “Sundance London: 2012: Chasing Ice.” CineVue. April 2012. http://​ www.cine-​vue.com/​2012/​04/​sundance-​london-​2012-​chasing-​ice.html. Accessed July 6, 2013.

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342 References What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. DVD. Directed by Timothy S. Bennett. VisionQuest Pictures, 2007. Wheatley, Catherine. “Garbage Warrior.” Sight & Sound. 18 (6) (June 2008): 59–​60. Who Killed the Electric Car? DVD. Directed by Chris Paine. Los Angeles: Sony Pictures Classic, 2006. “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Internet Movie Database. http://​www.imdb.com/​title/​ tt0489037/​?ref_​=nv_​sr_​1. Accessed June 11, 2014. Wigon, Zachary. “A Fierce Green Fire Burns Unevenly.” Village Voice. February 27, 2013. http://​www.slantmagazine.com/​film/​review/​a-​fierce-​green-​fire/​6830. Accessed July 8, 2013. Williamson, Kevin D. “The Truth about Fracking.” National Review. February 10, 2012. http://​www.nationalreview.com/​articles/​293086/​truth-​about-​fracking-​kevin-​d-​ williamson. Accessed July 9, 2013. Willis, Mikki. “Interview with Josh and Rebecca Tickell.” Origin Magazine.com. September 10, 2012. http://​www.originmagazine.com/​2012/​09/​10/​interview-​with-​ josh-​tickell-​and-​rebecca-​tickell-​interviewer-​mikki-​willis/​. Accessed May 10, 2014. Willoquet-​Maricondi, Paula. “Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism.” In Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Edited by Paula Willoquet-​Maricondi. 1–​24. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Willoquet-​Maricondi, Paula. “Shifting Paradigms: From Environmentalist Films to Ecocinema.” In Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Edited by Paula Willoquet-​Maricondi. 43–​61. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Wilmington, Michael. “Movie Review: Who Killed the Electric Car?” Chicago Tribune. 2006. http://​www.chicagotribune.com/​entertainment/​movies/​mmx-​060707-​movies-​ review-​car,0,7298984.story. Accessed June 11, 2014. Winter, Mick. “What a Way to Go—​Life at the End of Empire.” Movie Review. Dry Dipstick. 2007. http://​www.drydipstick.com/​whataway.html. Accessed July 12, 2013. Within Reach. DVD. Directed by Ryan Mlynarczyk. Orlando, FL: Doctrine Creative, 2012. Witt, Michael. “The Renaissance of Documentary Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s.” Critical Studies in Television. 7 (2) (Autumn 2012). Wong, Peter. “Film Review: Just Do It.” Beyond Chron. March 12, 2012. http://​ beyondchron.org/​film-​review-​just-​do-​it. Accessed July 10, 2013. Wood, James Jandak. Interview by John A. Duvall. Personal interview. Sonoma, CA, July 16, 2012. Woodson, Mary Beth. “Three Faces of Advocacy: The Cove, Mine and Food, Inc.” Society & Animals. (19) (2011): 195–​204. Wright, Ronald. A Short History of Progress. Canongate Books, 2006. Years of Living Dangerously. Directed by eight directors. Los Angeles, CA. The Years Project/Showtime Networks, 2014.

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345

Index Abraham, John 121–​2 Abrams, Simon 124 Achbar, Mark 74 activism 78–84, 257 first wave 17 activists, documentary on 307–12 Addtego, Walter 312 Adlesic, Trish 170, 177 aesthetics 11, 25, 30 affect, and emotion 28 Affluenza 47 Agent Orange, Vietnam 184 The Age of Stupid 107–12 agriculture 82, 196 in Cuba 260 Aizen, Marcelo 246 Alaux, Myriam 45 Alba, Jessica 119 Albert, Barbara 231 Alexa (Melnick), Tamata 78 Algar, James 39 Allen, Irwin 39 Allende, Isabel 78 Alter, Ethan 269 alternative energy 30, 131, 144–9, 168, 261 Amar, Armand 64 Ambrosino, Michael 43 America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) 175–6 American Automobile Manufacturing Association (AAMA) 267 Ancient Futures 71 Anderson, John 84, 163, 210, 216–17 Anderson, Sharon 138 The Animals Film 44–6 animals grass, alternative methods of feeding 208 animations 27, 30, 51 Annenberg Foundation 277 Anthropocene 319 antinuclear movement 81

apocalyptic narrative 99–100 Aristotle 12 Armendariz, Al 174 Armstrong, Franny 107, 111 Aronoff, Eyal 144 Aronson, Jerry 112 Arthus-​Bertrand, Yann 63, 67 Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) 132 associative model, of cognition–​emotion link 28 Astle, Randy 254 Atrazine 213 Attenborough, David 43 audiences 9, 14, 15 audiovisual documentary 12 Audubon, John James 17 Aufderheide, Pat 96 Australia 67, 82, 91, 244, 275 Africanized bees 248 fracking in 179–80 auto companies, and electric car failure 267 Bach, Joel 115, 116, 120 Baker, Carolyn 73 Baldwin, Alec 102 Balog, James 112 Bangladesh 58, 67, 76, 119, 120 Baraka 44 Barlow, Maude 224 Bateman, Jason 144 Bates, Albert 281 Battle of Algiers 10 Bauma, Andre 251 BBC Life and Planet Earth series 4 Natural History Unit (NHU) 43 Beattie, Geoffrey 102 Beavan, Colin 76–7 Beckerman, Andrew 74 beehive 248

346

346 Index bees 243–7, 247–50 killer bees 248 Beijing Besieged by Waste (Laji weicheng) 193 Belford, Troy 221 Bender, Lawrence 86 Bennett, Timothy S. 4, 54, 56, 60–3 Berlin: Symphony of a City 36 Berlinger, Joe 4, 156, 158, 160–4 Besson, Luc 63 Betts, Richard 110 Bicycle Thief 10 The Big Fix 165–9 Bill Moyers Journal 43 biofuels 147, 148 biographical films 32 biomimicry 52 Bioncolli, Amy 211 biotechnology 198, 200 birth defects 79–80, 184, 219 Bittman, Mark 119 Blessing, Thomas E., IV 258, 261 Blue Planet 43 Bolivia, privatization of water in 213 Bonfiglio, Michael 156 Boorman, Charley 285 Bortolotti, Natalia 138 bottle water industry 214, 217–21 Bowling for Columbine 9 Bowman, Ron 4, 102, 105–6 Boyle, Deirdre 204 Bradshaw, Peter 111, 306 Brandt, Steven G. 111 Branson, Richard 254 Brazil 240 oil crisis in 147 Bridge, Gavin 177 British Petroleum (BP) 165–9 Brower, David 79 Brown, John 166 Browner, Carol 167 Buffett, Howard G. 254 Burning the Future 151–5 Burns, Ken 4, 88, 248 Burns, Scott 86 Bush, George H. W. 82, 199 Bush, George W. 267 Butler, Catherine 195

cable television 46, 63 Cabrera, Carmen 262 Cadillac Desert: Water and the Contamination of Nature 47 Calhoun, Dave 111 California 223 California Air Resources Board, and electric car failure 268 California Gold Rush 222 Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction 238–43, 311 Cameron, James 115, 121, 142 Campbell, Colin 132 Campbell, Joseph 101 Camus, Albert 54 Canada 140–4 Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) 43 capitalism 109, 142, 270 carbon emissions 109 Carot, Denis 63 Carson, Betsy 288 Carson, Rachel 18, 32, 39, 79 Caruso, Denise 205 Castleberry, Chuck 50 Catsoulis, Jeannette 68, 124, 216, 237, 255 Catton, William 58 Chai Jing 124, 187–93 Chapela, Ignacio 198, 200 charts 30 Chasing Ice 112–15 Cheadle, Don 116 chemical pollution 183–7 Cheney, Dick 171 Chen Jining 188 Chevron 140, 157–61, 164, 267 Chew, Cassie 220 China 187–93, 240 China Syndrome 81 Christie, Chris 119 Christie, Julie 45 chronological mode of storytelling 14 Chronos 44 cinema 26 and documentary 8 limitations 27 civilization 66

347

Index civil unrest 131 Clark, Jim 234, 237 Clean Water Act 154 Clear Air Act 154 Climate Camp 302 climate change 21–​2, 57, 82–​3, 85, 319, see also global warming and capitalism 122–​5 and civilization destruction 107–​12 Climate Corps 119 The Climate Project 95 Clinton, Bill 82 Close, Glenn 3, 64 Cluzaud, Jacques 47 coal 151–​5 Coal Face 37 Cobb Hill Cohousing 281–​2 Coca-​Cola 216, 218 Cofan people 158 cognitive response of viewers 27–​8 Cohen, Leonard 169 Cohen, Raines 279, 285 Colborn, Theo 173–​4 colony collapse disorder (CCD) 244–​5, 246 color 30 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) 137 compilation model, of documentary 31 compressed natural gas (CNG) 148 Congo 250–​5 Conners, Leila 297, 299 conservation 18, 78–​84, 224 consumer culture 60 consumerism 109, 240 consumers, response to electric cars 268 Cook, Polly 68 Cooper, John 263 cooperative living 279–​88 Copenhagen Climate Summit 22, 142 Corbett, Tom 178 Corexit 166, 167 corn 147, 198, 199–​200, 207 corporates/​corporate dominance 216, 241, 319, see also activism control of the media 29, 59, 71 control over genetic engineering 201 globalization 51

347

Coulais, Bruno 47 counter-​cultural activism 80–​1 counterrevolution 20 Cousteau, Jacques-​Yves 42 The Cove 29, 32, 234–​8 Coyote, Peter 238 Coyula, Miguel 262 Crawford, James 204 Creighton, Amanda 4 Creighton, Mandy 279, 280–​8 Cromer, Bruce 58 Crooks, Harold 74 crowd-​funding model 110, 162, 228 Crude: The Real Price of Oil 156–​64 Crude Impact 134–​9 crude oil 134–​9 Cuba 258–​63 alternative energy systems 261 peak oil 260 transportation system 260 Cuban Energy Revolution (CER) 263 Cullen, Heidi 118 Cultural Revolution 291, 294 culture 58–​63, 61–​2, 71 Cummings, Doug 204 Damon, Matt 120 dams 37, 153, 215, 223, 224, 257, 289–​95, 308, 309 Dancing Rabbit, Missouri 282 D’Angelo, Mike 53 Dargis, Manohla 53 Darley, Julian 132 Darwin, Charles 17 Darwin’s Nightmare 231–​3 da Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula 147 David, Laurie 86, 92 Davies, Sam 176 Debats, Michel 47 Deborde, John 138 debts 75, 76 decentralization 71 Deeter, Jessie 264 Deffeyes, Kenneth 133 deforestation 66, 81, 116, 319 de Merode, Emmanuel 251, 253, 254 Deng Tsou-​Ping 291 Deranger, Eriel 308, 310

348

348 Index Derrenger, Dominique 276 de Sica, Vittorio 10 Detroit 297–​300 developing nations 20, 71 Devlin, Dean 269 DiCaprio, Leonardo 31, 49–​53 digital imagery 11 dioxin 184 Disney, Roy 39 Disney, Walt 39–​42 distribution, windows of 9 docudramas 10 documentary, see also specific documentaries definition of 7–​15 projects framing 9 purity of 8 representation modes 12–​14 dolphin industry 234–​5 Donziger, Steven 157, 160 droughts 224 dry farming techniques 225 Dust Bowl 17 Earth Day 19 Earthship 272–​3 Earthship Biotecture 272 Ebert, Roger 53, 96, 114, 210 ecocinema 26 e-​coli outbreaks 207–​8 ecology of viewership 27 Econome, Nancy 221, 226 economic activity measuring parameters 70 economics, conventional 76 The Economics of Happiness 68–​73 ecosystem 51, 66–​7 Ecovillage 282 Ecuador 156 Edelstein, David 96, 155, 163, 210 editing 30 Edwards, Dan 188, 192 eglenn 315 Ehrlich, Paul 32 Elbel, Fred 62 electric cars, failure of 264–​70 Elemental 307–​12 The 11th Hour 31, 49–​53 emotion 60 emotional response of viewers 28

Enck-​Wanzer, Darrel 278 endangered species 81 The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream 128–​34 energy alternatives 30, 131, 144–​9, 168, 261 energy companies, positive light on fracking 179 energy demand 66 Energy in Depth (EID) 176 energy production, local 71 Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) 127 Energy Revolution (Cuba) 263 Engfehr, Kurt 305 environment, definition of 15–​23 environmental activism, see activism environmental awareness 27 environmental documentaries, categorization of 30–​2 environmental film festivals 29 Environmental Impact Assessment Law, China 289, 292 environmental justice 80 environmentally focused productions 3 environmentally related productions 3 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 20, 198, 245 environmental racism and imperialism 156–​64 Erickson, Sally 4, 54, 60–​2 Escape from Suburbia 134 essentialism 9 ethanol 142–​3, 147–​8 Etheridge, Melissa 94, 95 ethnographic documentaries 13 ethnographic films 35 Ethos 12 Europe, documentary, history of 38–​9 EV-​1 cars 264–​6 existentialism 310 existential threats 310 exo-​reference 27 expository model of documentary 3, 13, 31–​2 extinctions 22, 51, 57 mass extinctions 57, 238–​43 Exxon 166

349

Index Fajardo, Pablo 156, 158, 160 Fanning, David 43 Fantasia 40 farm chickens 206 farming, see agriculture Farrabique 38 Fata Morgana 44 Federal Government, and electric car failure 266–​7 Ferrera, America 119 fiction 10, 105, 107, 111 A Fierce Green Fire (book) 83 A Fierce Green Fire (documentary) 78–​84 Fildes, Andrew 96, 275 film festivals 29, 47–​8 fire season 116–​17 Fisher, Darius144 Fisher, Linda 199 Fiskio, Janet 278 Fitzpatrick, Frank 300 Flaherty, Robert 10, 35–​6 Flahive, Gerry 74 flex fuel vehicles 147–​8 flood 119 Flow: For Love of Water 212–​17 Flowers, Rick 211 Flynn, Nick 232–​3 Folino, Joanna 285 Fonda, Peter 166 food bad food 208 cheap food 209 production system, unintended consequences of 207–​8 sovereignty 71 vulnerability of system 210 Food, Inc. 205–​12 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 198, 207 Forbes, Don 39 Ford, Harrison 115, 116, 117 Ford, Henry 147 fossil fuels/​fossil fuel industry 51, 82, 85, 103, 118, 124, 131, 168, 180, 210, 319 Foust, Christina R. 278 Fox, Josh 32, 170–​6, 177–​8, 181–​2 fracking 146, 171–​2, 177–​82 FrackNation 176

349

France 47, 63 Frentz, Thomas S. 100–​1 Fricke, Ron 44 Friedman, Thomas 115, 116, 119, 120 Frontline 43 Fuel 144 Fujishima, Kenji 255 Fuller, Buckminster 81, 320 fundamentalism 76 The Future of Food 195–​205 Gaia hypothesis 82 Gamble, Patrick 114 Gamblin, Jacques 64 Gandour, Molly 170 garbage pollution 183–​7, 220 Garbage Warrior 270–​6 Garcia, Deborah Coons 4, 195, 196, 201–​5 Garcia, Maria 210 The Garden 276–​9 Gardner, Daniel 192 Gaskin, Stephen 281 Gasland 32, 170–​7 Gasland Part II 177–​82 Gay, Verne 182 Gelber, David 115, 116, 120–​1, 122 General Morots (GM) 264–​6, 265 genetically modified (GM) products 196–​200, 209, 246 Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) 198, 209 Genzlinger, Neil 84 Geographic Research 98–​9 The Geography of Nowhere 132 GeoJournal 97 Gerber, Brian 50 Gibbs, Lois 79 Gibson, Sarah 217 Gide, Andre 60 Gilbert, Matthew 62 Gillett, Lizzie 107 Glasser, Carol 247 The Gleaners and I 47 GliderGuider 62 global activism 78–​84, see also activism global capitalism 75, 240 globalization 68–​73, 81–​2 alternative directions 70–​1

350

350 Index inconvenient truths about 69–​70 Global South, and food production 71 global trade 65–​6 global warming 39, 66, 85, 86–​102, 185, 240 and Arctic glaciers 112–​15 Glover, Danny 277 Golden Gate National Recreation Area, prevention of 313 Goldstein, Gary 111, 221 Goldstein, Isaac 217 Goodall, Jane 76 Goodell, Jeff 169 Gore, Al 21, 29, 31, 32, 53, 85–​102 Gorelick, Steven 68 Gouby, Melanie 252–​3 graphs 30 Grass 36 Grasser, Helmut 247 gravel mining 224–​5 Great Adventure 38 Great Depression 17 Great Turning 60 The Great Global Warming Swindle 97 Greene, Gregory 4, 132, 134, 261 Green Fire 32 Greenpeace 81 Greensburg, Kanas 283 Greenspan, Alan 109 greenwashing 70 Grierson, John 7, 37 Grimm, Michael 117 groundwater depletion/​pollution 151, 153, 170, 218, 219, 224 Guggenheim, Davis 86, 90, 92, 93, 94 Gulf of Mexico 165–​9 Guzman, Nick 312 Haar, Pete Vonder 269 habitat loss 239 Hackenberg, David 245 Hageman, Andrew 22, 26 Hale, Mike 107, 121 Hall, Michael C. 119 Halliburton company 171 hall of mirrors 60 handheld devices 30 Hangar, John 175

Hanger John 174, 175 Hannah, Darryl 277 Hansen, James 85, 97, 103 Harder, Lawrence 246 Harman, Jay 308 Hartmann, Thom 52, 133, 138 Harvey, Dennis 77, 133, 312 Hatton, Celia 191 Hawking, Stephen 52, 77 Hayek, Salma 64 Hayes, Chris 117, 119 Hayhoe, Katharine 116 Hayward, Tony 166 Heathrow Airport runway, and demolition of houses 303 heat waves 120 Hedges, Chris 168 Heinberg, Richard 132, 133, 138, 262 Henein, Maryam 243 hero’s journey 101, 280, 285, 286, 311, 312 Herzog, Werner 4, 44 Hessey, Ruth 111 Heumann, Joseph K. 211–​12 Hewlitt, David 288 Hibler, Winston 39 Hillgrove, Vivian 203 Hillis, Aaron 155 Hinchey, Maurice 175 Hinckley, David 182 Hirschberg, Gary 209 Hoban, Thomas J. 205 Hodge, Oliver 4, 270, 271, 273–​5 Holden, Stephen 111, 163, 204, 250 Hollander, Yossie 144 Home 63–​8 Hopkins, Rob 124, 139 Hornaday, Ann 210–​11 Horowitz, Ralph 276 Horton, Peter 266 Hoskin, Dave 96 Housing Problems 37 Howell, Rachel 111 Hubbert, M. King 127, 130, 132, 137 Huddleston, Tom 211 Hughes, Helen 23, 26, 27–​8, 29, 30, 31, 33 human biochemical reactions 29 human evolution 74–​8 human exploitation 52

351

Index human infrastructures, design of 52 humanity and nature 15–​16, 18 Hummingbird Community 283 Hunt, Drew 84 Hunt, Jenna 296 Hurricane Sandy 117 hydraulic fracturing 119, 171–​2, 181 hydrogen fuel cell, and electric cars 268 ice cores 120 identities 71 Imhoof, Markus 247–​50 incineration, of wastes 184–​5 An Inconvenient Truth 7, 27, 29, 32, 86–​102, 106, 135 India privatization of water in 216 unsafe water in 215 individualism 284 Indonesia 116, 240 Inglis, Bob 117 Ingraffea, Tony 179 Ingram, David 25, 26, 27, 28 Inslee, Jay 118 intentional community 134, 257, 279–​88 interactive mode of documentary 13 Internet 5, 45, 77, 134, 188 Irons, Jeremy 183, 185 irony 33 The Island President 32 ITVS (Independent Television Service) 203 Ivakhiv, Adrian 26, 27, 28 Ivens, Joris 36 Jackson, Lisa 181 Jacobson, Mark 180 James, Anthony 300 James, Emily 4, 300, 302, 304–​7 Japan, dolphin industry in 234–​8 Jeantheau, Mark 62, 139 Jenkins, Mark 113, 250 Jeshel, Jörg 250 JFK 10 Jindal, Bobby 167 Johnson, Brian 78 Johnson, Eric 262 Johnson, John 176 Johnson, Laura 100

Johnson, Simon 76 Jones, Van 78 Journal of Climate 97 Joyful Path Buddhist community 282–​3 Joyner, Anna Jane 117 Joyner, Rick 118 Judd, Ashley 78 Just Do It!—​A Tale of Modern-​Day Outlaws 29, 300–​7 Kang, Inkoo 312 Kantor, Mickey 199 Kaufman, Hugh 166 Kaufman, Les 233 Kelly, Nancy 313, 315 Kenigsberg, Ben 149 Kennedy, Scott Hamilton 276 Kenner, Robert 205, 210 Kermode, Jennie 246, 306 Kerry, John 106, 118 Kickstarter 162, 176, 320 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie 99 Kitchell, Mark 78 Klare, Michael 136 Klein, Ezra 122 Klein, Naomi 122, 123, 124 Klimek, Chris 276 Koch brothers 168 Koehler, Robert 176, 204, 277–​8 Koyannisqatsi 44, 50, 64 Kozeny, Geoph 285 Kubrick, Stanley 74 Kufus, Thomas 247 Kunstler, James Howard 132, 133 Kwiecinski, Stella 221, 226 Kyoto Protocol 22, 82, 85 Lake Victoria 232 Lampard, Nicola 306 land ethic 18 Langworthy, George 243 Laskow, Sarah 182 The Last Waltz 93 Latembo, Warden Rodrigue 251 laws and regulatory structures 20 Leacock, Richard 8 Leadbitter, James 300, 305, 307 Lee, Matilda 307

351

352

352 Index Legates, David R. 98 LeGreco, Marianne 278, 279 Leissle, Kristy 73 Lenz, Garth 143 Leonard, Dawn 278, 279 Leopold, Aldo 18, 79 Levin, Ann 210 Levy, Alison Rose 182 Lewis, Avi 122, 123–​4 Lewis, David 315 Lewis, Judith 269 Leydon, Joe 124 Life 43 Life after People 46 Life and Planet Earth series 4 Life on Earth 43 Life without People series 11 lignite 190 The Limits to Growth 19, 81 Linden, Sheri 255 Lindenfeld, Laura 212 Lindsey, Jason 217 Liu Jianqiang 291, 292 Livermore, Caroline 313 The Living Desert 40 Lloyd, Alan 268 localization 70 Logos 12 Lohan, Tara 73 Long, Huey 165 Lopez, Miguel Salcines 262 Lorentz, Pare 37–​8 Louis, Daniel 74 Louisiana 165–​9 Louisiana Story 10 Lovelock, James 82 Lovins, Amory 81 Lozzi, John 200 Lumière Brothers 35, 63 Lundberg, Jan 62 Lynas, Mark 103, 105, 110 Maamouri, Sara 195 MacInnis, Mark 4, 297, 299–​300 Macy, Joanna 73, 242 Ma Jun 188 Malle, Louis 42 Malthus, Thomas 16

Mandel, Nora Lee 217, 249 Mandy, Creighton 280–​8 Manwan Dam 293 Man with a Movie Camera 36 Mao 291, 294 March of the Penguins 4 Marcuse, Gary 4, 77, 288, 293–​6 Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) 315 Marin Conservation League 313 Marker, Chris 63 markets, and growth 76 Marris, Emma 155 Marsh, George Perkins 17 mass extinctions 57, 238–​43 Maysles Brothers 8 McAleer, Phelim 176 McDonough, Elise 277 McDormand, Frances 313 McGill, Hannah 305–​6 McGregor, Ewan 285 McGuire, Laura 102 McKibben, Bill 142, 284 McNeill, Janet 143 meat packing industry 208 media corporate control over 29, 59, 71 response to electiric cars 268 Meier, Pierre-​Alain 247 Meisner, Mark 237 Mendez, Dave 245 Merin, Jennifer 249 Merode, Emmanuel de 251 methanol 147 Mexico, GM products in 199–​200 Microcosmos (or Le Peuple de l’herbe) 47, 63 Miller, Clem 313 mining 151–​5 Mlynarczyk, Ryan 4, 279–​88 Monani, Salma 16, 27, 48 Monsanto 196–​7, 199, 209 Montalto, Katherine 300 moon landing, and photos of Planet Earth 18–​19 Moore, Kevin 62 Moore, Michael 9 Morano, Mark 124

353

Index More Than Honey 247–​50 Morgan, Faith 4, 258, 261, 263 Morris, Betsy 279 Morris, Errol 10 Mosaddegh, Mohammad 165 mountaintop removal 152 Mufson, Steven 192 Muir, John 17, 222 Mulcahy, Terry 114 Muller, Richard 118 Munn, Olivia 118 Munro, Donald 111 Murdoch, James 121 Murdoch, Kathryn 121 Murphy, Eugene “Pat,” 4, 258, 261, 263 Murray, Robin L. 211–​12 musical score 30 Musk, Elon 146 Myth of Sisyphus 54 Nacif, Vivianne 276 Nanook of the North 35–​6 Naqoyqatsi: Life as War 44 narrative 27, 28 Natasegara, Joanna 250 The National Parks 4 National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) 219, 246 natural capital 75 natural gas 191 nature and humanity 15–​16, 18 The Nature of Things 43 Nelson, Rob 246 Nestle 215, 218 Net Energy 127 New Alchemy Institute 81 New Deal programs 17–​18 New Urbanism 131, 134 Nichols, Bill 12 Nielsen-​Gammon, John W. 98 Night Mail 37 Norberg-​Hodge, Helena 4, 68, 69, 71–​3 North, Gerald 97 Nova 43 Novack, David 152, 155 nuclear energy industry 168 Nuridsany, Claude 47 Nu River 288–​96

353

Obama, Barack 120, 143, 179, 182 O’Barry, Ric 29, 234, 237 objectivity 60 observational mode of documentary 13 O’Carroll, Gerard 275 Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) 237 Ohio Valley Environmental Association 154 oil addiction 136 oil industry, and electric car failure 267, see also fossil fuels oil sands 142 oil spill 165–​9 Olsen, Mark 114 Olson, Kathryn M. 101 online video streaming 320 OPEC countries 137, 145 Open City 10 Open Fuel Standard law 148 Ophuls, Marcel 63 organic farming 201 organic food 203, 209 organic gardening 298 Orlowski, Jeff 112–​13, 114 O’Sullivan, Michael 312 overconsumption 240, 241 overpopulation 58, 66, see also population and global warming 90 Overton, Edward 167 packaging, and waste reduction 186 Page, Ellen 243 Page, John 68 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah 165 Paine, Chris 4, 264, 266, 268–​70 Painleve, Jean 37 Palmer, Jacqueline 99 Palumbo, Robert 115 Parrot, John 307 Participant Media 162 The Party’s Over 132 pastoral romanticism 206 patent laws 201 Pathos 12 Paulette, Francois 142 peak oil 56–​7, 127–​8, 258–​63, 319 Pearlstein, Elise 205 Pennebaker, D. A. 8

354

354 Index Pepsi 218 perch industry 231–​3 Pereira, Rita 262 Perennou, Marie 47 Perez, Roberto 262 performative mode of documentary 13, 113 Perisylene plastic containers 219 permaculture 298 Perrin, Jacques 47 Perry, Jan 277 Perry-​Folino, Joanna 279 persuasion 12 Pesmen, Paula DuPré 112, 234 pesticides 196 and immunity reduction in bees 244 systemic pesticides 244 Petersen, Leila Conners 50 PetroEcuador 158, 159 Phillips, Craig 78 Pinault, Françoise-​Henri 67 Pinchot, Gifford 17 Planet Earth 43 plastics 185–​6, 220 The Plow that Broke the Plains 37 poetic and lyrical style of documentary 13, 43–​4, 47 Point Reyes National Seashore, prevention of 313 politically and socially critical, overtly activist, and propagandistic 44–​5 politics of energy and environmental protection 21 Pollan, Michael 207–​8, 245 Pontecorvo, Gillo 10 population, see also overpopulation and consumption 76 growth 319 Population Bomb 32 Possibility Alliance, Missouri 282 Postel, Sandra 221 Postlewaite, Pete 107, 109–​10 postmodern consciousness 15 Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation 44 Powell, John Wesley 223 The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil 258–​63 Prediger, Jennifer 73

Prelinger, Rick 132 Priesnitz, Wendy 300 privatization of water 212–​17 progress traps 75–​6, 77 Psihoyos, Louie 234, 235–​7 public awareness 136 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), U.S. 43 public pressure, need for 191 Puig, Claudia 96 Pump 144–​9 Pushtai, Arpad 200 Qu Geping 289, 291, 292 Quinn, Megan 258, 261 Racing to Zero 186 Radford, Tom 141 Rain 36 Ratcliffe-​on-​Soar coal power plant, mass action against 303 Reagan, Ronald 20, 80, 267 realism 8 reality completely indexical reproduction of 8 cultural alienation from 59–​60 interpretation of 8, 15 mediated representation of reality 8 social constructions and 15 social reality 59–​60 Rebels with a Cause 313–​15 recycling 186 Redford, Robert 48, 78 reenactments 10–​11 refineries 219 reflexive mode of documentary 13, 33 Reggio, Geoffrey 44 Regional Food Bank, Los Angeles 276 Reisner, Marc 47 Reiss, Jon 110 relativism 15 relocalization 71, 73 Rendell, Ed 178 renewable energy 119, 146–​7, 180, 283 Resnais, Alain 63 Retzinger, Jeff 276–​7, 278 Revelle, Roger 93 Revenge of the Electric Car 269–​70 Revkin, Andrew 121

355

Index Reynolds, Michael 270–​6 Reynolds, Phil 274 rhetorical styles 12 Richter, Joe 175 Riefenstahl, Leni 9 Rio Earth Summit 22 The River 37 River Elegy 192 river management 221–​9 Robert, Denise 74 Roberts, Paul 133 Robey, Tim 306 Robinson, Tasha 139 Rockefeller, John D. 145 Rodrigue, Warden 252 Roma, David 170 Romm, Joseph 121 Rooney, David 233 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 17, 37 Roosevelt, Theodore 17 Rose, Derek Alan 286 Roshan, Gayatri 307, 311 Rossellini, Roberto 10 Rosteck, Thoma 100–​1 Roth, Chris 279–​80 Rouquiers, Georges 38 Rowe, Derek Alan 279 Roy, Mathieu 74 Royal Bank of Scotland, blockading 302–​3 “runaway train” metaphor 56 The Russian River: All Rivers—​The Value of an American Watershed 221–​9 Rust, Stephen 16, 27 Ruttmann, Walter 36 Safe Drinking Water Act 180 Sale, Laura 102 Salina, Irena 212, 216–​17 Samsara 44 Sanders, Bernie 168 Sanjayan, M. 117, 120 Sauper, Hubert 231, 233 Sauter, Michael 312 Schaub, Laird 285 Scheib, Ronnie 155 Schickel, Richard 96 Schindler, David 141 Schlosser, Eric 206

Schmeiser, Percy 196 Schonfeld, Victor 45 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 115–​16, 121 science 58–​9 science fiction 105 Scorsese, Martin, 75, 93 Scott, A. O. 96, 163, 233 The Sea around Us 39 Seal Island 40 Seeger, Pete 170, 176 self-​reflexivity 33 Serf, Kamil 35 Seymour, Nicole 33 Shabecoff, Philip 20, 83 shale gas initiative 180 shale wells 146 Shan, Han 163 Sheen, Martin 264, 269 Shi Lihong 289, 290, 292, 295 Shiva, Vandana 82 Shoard, Catherine 237 shot composition 30 Silent Spring 32, 79 The Silent World (Le Monde du Silence) 42–​3 Silverthorn, Barry 132 Simmens, Lance 178 Simmons, Matthew 131, 138, 167, 262 Simpson, Lauren 300 Sinclair, Upton 91 Singer, Ross 278 Singh, Rajendra 308 Six Degrees Could Change the World 102–​7 Skoll, Jeff 92, 162 Smaill, Belinda 29 Smil, Vaclav 76 Smith, Greg M. 28 Smith, Roger 265 smog 189–​90 Smol, John 143 Snow, Edgar 294 SOCO International 252 Soechtig, Stephanie 217, 221 soft energy paths 81 Somerhalder, Ian 117 Sorensen, William 221, 226–​9 sound effects 30

355

356

356 Index soundtrack 30 South Africa, water issues in 213 South Central Farmers (SCF) 277 species decline/​extinction, see extinctions speeches 12 Spencer, Roy W. 98 Spitzer, Pamela 138 Stahl, Lesley 118 Starr, Steven 212, 216 steel production, in China 190 Steig, Eric J. 98 Stevens, Fisher 234 Sting 160, 163 Stone, Oliver 10 Streep, Meryl 78 Stuever, Hank 176 Styler, Trudie 160, 163 subjective response of viewers 27 Sucksdorff, Arne 38 Summer, Gordon Matthew Thomas, see Sting Surviving Progress 74–​8 sustainability, and globalization 71 sustainable lifestyle 279–​88 Suzuki, David 43, 52, 73, 76 Swan, Elaine 211 Symphony of the Soil 205 synthetic biology 77 synthetic chemicals 185–​6, see also chemical pollution systemic fertilizer 244, 245 Tapped 217–​21 tar sands 140, 142 Taubin, Amy 96 Taylor, Michael 199 techno-​fix 59, 191, 241 technologies 59 advances in 14, 17 television 59 news, decline of 136 series 43 temperture increament, impact of 102–​7, see also global warming Tesla, Nicola 146 Texaco 156–​61 Texeira, Mary Thierry 278 The Thin Blue Line 10

Third World 20–​1 This Changes Everything 122–​5 Thomas, Clarence 199 Thompson, Claire 221 Thompson, Monte 238 Thompson, Niobe 140, 141 Thomson, Desson 96 Tickell, Josh 144, 148–​9, 165, 166, 167, 168–​9 Tickell, Rebecca Harrell 144, 148–​9, 165, 167 Tiger Leaping Gorge dam 292 tight oil 140, 146 time-​lapse photography 27 Tipping Point: The End of Oil 140–​4 tornado 119 toxic chemicals 79–​80, 181, 184–​5, see also chemical pollution Transition Heathrow 304 Transition Town movement 283 Trashed 183–​7 Triumph of the Will 9 Trudeau, Justin 143 True Life Adventures 39 Tsai, Martin 149 Turvey, Malcolm 26 Tutu, Desmond 254 Twin Oaks 281 Twist, Lynne 139 2015 COP-​21, Paris 22 Under the Dome (Qiongding zhixia) 187–​93 unedited video footage from handheld device 10 from security camera 9 United Kingdom activism in 300–​7 documentary, history of 37 An Inconvenient Truth in 97 United Nations Conference on Climate Change 303–​4 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 22 United States activist environmental documentaries 47 climate change and domestic water resources 215 Department of Agriculture (USDA) 198, 207–​8

357

Index GM products in 198 government, and industrial dominance over 209 history of documentary 37 oil consumption by 145 recyclng in 220 urban environmental movement 297 urban garden 276–​9, 298–​9 Urban Roots 297–​300 Van Burg, Chera 238 The Vanishing Prairie 41 Vanishing of the Bees 243–​7 Varda, Agnes 47, 63 Vaughan-​Lee, Emmanuel 307 vehicular emissions 190 Venter, Craig 77 Vernon, Chris 139 Vertov, Dziga 36 viewer identification 28–​9 Villaraigosa, Anthony 277 Virunga 250–​5 Vivanco, Luis 30 voiceover narration 30 von Einsiedel, Orlando 250, 254 Waking the Green Tiger 288–​96 Wallace, Deborah 177 Wal-​Mart 210 Walsh, Bryan 122 Wang Yongchen 293 water demand 120 legal status of 215 overconsumption of 66 pollution 171–​2, 181 Waters, Alice 73 Weaver, Sigourney 140 Webb, Audrey 155 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 8, 28, 30 Weintraub, Jerry 115, 121 Weiss, Marc N. 78, 83 Weissberg, Jay 250 Welling, Bart H. 29 Wen Jiabao 289, 291 West Virginia forests 152 Wexler, Rachel 270 WGBH Boston 43

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What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire 54–​5 Part One: Waking on the Train 55–​6 Part Two: The Train and the Tracks 56–​8 Part Three: The Locomotive Power 58–​63 Wheatley, Catherine 275 Who Killed the Electric Car? 264–​70 Whole Earth Catalog 81 Wigon, Zachary 83 Williamson, Kevin 175 Willoquet-​Maricondi, Paula 16, 26 Wilmington, Michael 269 Wilson, Patrick 274 Wilson, Weston 172 wine country tourism 225 Winged Migration (or Le Peuple Migrateur) 47, 63 Winter, Mick 62 Wiseman, Frederick 8 Within Reach 279–​88 WNET 43 Wong, Peter 307 Wood, James Jandak 4, 135 Woodson, Mary Beth 211 Woolsey, James 52, 268 World War II 38 World Water Council 214 Wright, Ronald 74, 76 Xiaoshaba 290, 291, 292 Xi Jinping 191 Xun, Zhou 64 Yamamoto, Kenji 313, 315 Years of Living Dangerously 115–​22 Young, Neil 187 YouTube 134 Yu Xiaogang 289 Zacharek, Stephanie 249 Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, California 265 Zero Waste Initiative, San Francisco 186 Zhou En-​Lai 291 Zimmerman, Heidi 299 Zoullas, Alexis 152 Zwicker, Barrie 130, 131

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