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Environment

Too Much Eco-Elder Worship?

A few cranky notes on watching 'Earth Days' at the otherwise cool Projecting Change Festival.

Dorothy Woodend 3 Apr 2009TheTyee.ca

Dorothy writes about film every other Friday here on The Tyee.

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Stewart Brand: old and green.

The Projecting Change Film Festival gets rolling in Vancouver on April 2nd with a screening of End of the Line, and runs through the weekend with some 22 different films, panel discussions and assorted other activities devoted to making sense of this messed up planet we call home.

Among the excellent films programmed -- Addicted to Plastic, Food Fight, Behind the Wheel, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, Blue Gold: The World Water Wars -- is director Robert Stones' Earth Days, which wraps up the festival on Sunday night.

Earth Days was also the closing film for the Sundance Film Festival this past January, and truth be told it's a bit of an odd film.

I had every expectation of liking it, since it covers the birth and toddlerhood of the American environmental movement. But the thing is, I didn't like it.

Earth Days is indicative of some of the most troubling aspects of any movement started and run by humans, namely hubris, ego, self-righteousness and bombast, etc.

This is not to say you shouldn't go and see the film.

Rather, the opposite. You should go, especially to see what happens when you make a hagiography out of something so insanely complex, and ongoing.

The magnificent eight

The film follows eight different individuals who found themselves caught up in the middle of massive sea change, although they, themselves, were often the ones instigating, lobbying and pushing like mad for change to happen. The protagonists (six men and two women) include Dennis Meadows, author of The Limits to Growth; Pete McCloskey, who co-authored the Endangered Species Act and co-chaired the very first Earth Day; Hunter Lovins, who co-founded the California Conservation Project and the Rocky Mountain Institute; Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb; Denis Hayes, the first national coordinator of Earth Day; former secretary of the interior Stewart Udall; writer/bio-regionalist Stephanie Mills; The Whole Earth Catalogue's founder Stewart Brand, and far-freaking-out astronaut Rusty Schweickart, one of the first people to see the entire planet from the overview of space.

It's an interesting and diverse group, and the film uses them and their personal experience as entry points into larger events of history.

Thus, Stewart Brand, dropping acid while sitting on a rooftop in San Francisco, consequently led, in some ineffable fashion, to the idea for the Whole Earth Catalogue. Often dubbed "the Sears Catalogue of the back to the land movement." Whole Earth helped to send an entire generation of people into the woods, seeking to get back to the land, never thinking that perhaps the land didn't want them.

So, too, former secretary of the interior Stewart Udall (pushing late-80s), who came of age in the Great Depression, and helped usher in the era of the superhighway as a young congressman, is left to look back and realize how errors in judgment led to almighty havoc. Udall is an interesting case, since as far back as the '60s and '70s he was making the case for restraint.

In a 1972 article for The Atlantic Monthly, Udall wrote: "The choice facing the American people is not between growth and stagnation, but between short-term growth and long-term disaster. We can continue to pursue the growth policies of the past and let urban decay, exorbitant prices and risks to our national security dictate stringent remedial policies a few years from now. Or we can exercise restraint and learn to live comfortably, within our means."

It didn't happen of course, but it's a nice thought.

Looking back at some futurism

Predicting the future is always a dangerous business, as Paul Ehrlich discovered when his book The Population Bomb became a massive bestseller and an easy target for criticism. Ehrlich's thesis that human population would basically outstrip the planet's capacity to sustain life may have been a few decades out, but many of his precepts will probably prove true in the long run.

Ehrlich's most recent book, The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, co-authored with his wife Anne, reexamines some of the ideas first broached in The Population Bomb. In an interview with Vision.org, Ehrlich says, "It's the top of the ninth inning and humanity is hitting nature hard, but we have to remember that nature bats last. There's no fear that the population will grow to infinity. We either stop it by adjusting the birth rates or nature will stop it by adjusting the death rates. My ethical system tells me we ought to avoid the latter. We don't want to solve the population problem by having several billion people die in misery."

You can read the rest of the interview here and it's well-worth perusing.

Right back in the groove

Earth Days makes extensive use of stock footage, combining clips of happy housewives groping major appliances with nuclear mushroom clouds, but it doesn't really get motoring until the introduction of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. The book helped midwife the burgeoning environmental movement, and lead eventually to the very first Earth Day on April 22nd, 1970. Earth Day, rather unexpectedly, galvanized the U.S. people, who took to the streets in droves, carrying hand-lettered signs and rag-tag posters, and when it was over, they went back to doing exactly what they'd done before.

One thing that emerges very clearly from the film is that, despite, the rhetoric of a passel of presidents, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes, and finally Obama (who is not included in the film's current cut, but no doubt will be folded into the mix when Earth Days screens on PBS's American Experience in 2010) is that no one has done very much to reverse the current course of action. The juggernaut of western-style capitalism, embarked upon by the post-war generations, continues to barrel along, pretty much unimpeded.

If you think people have changed their consumptive ways simply visit the mall on a Saturday afternoon, if you can squeeze in the door. We've been well-trained that more stuff equals a better, happier life, and by and large we still believe it. The film makes the point that human nature isn't nearly so easily moved away from easy pleasures, nor will it ever be. But more importantly that taking the opposite tack, moral condemnation, lectures and shaking fingers at loggers doesn't work either.

Corporations never sleep

So what does work? The film doesn't have many answers, and its relentlessly American-focus is dangerously myopic. The problem of pandering to the cult of the individual is that almost all environmentalists, no matter how rabid, eventually get tired and go home, whereas the corporate world never sleeps. How do you fight something like that in the long-term?

Aside from its content, Earth Days has some cinematic issues, namely a heavy-handedness that is almost oppressive. The film packs on the swelling strings, and helicopter pans of majestic forests and fruited plains, till you almost beg for mercy. Yes, we get it, America the beautiful. The women profiled are also given short shrift, with the lion's share of time and attention being given to the men. Hunter Lovins doesn't get much of a back story, although she does get to wear a giant cowboy hat, and Stephanie Mills's apparent claim to fame seems to be the fact that she never had any children.

The film also coats every single moment with music that demands to tell you how you ought to think or feel at any given moment. For example, the halcyon days of the '50s are graced with happy-dippy music, but when things begin to go bad, the violins pick up the pace and begin muttering amongst themselves. By the time we reach the 21st century, with its scenes of belching smokestacks and gushing outflow pipes, rivers and lakes thick with toxic gunk, the score has retreated into endless variations of Philip Glass angst. I resent any film that pre-supposes that I am a cow and must be lead with conductor's baton.

Certainly, Earth Days is meant to be an overview, a look backwards at the road not taken, but self-interest is never very far away from most human activity, and this is also true of the film's coda, when all the people profiled get to tout their degrees, their books or their consultancy firms. What at first appears to be altruism, may in fact be promotion.

Thanks! Next!

I do not mean denigrate the people and their efforts, Lord knows they've collectively done more than I could possibly hope to do, had I a couple of additional lifetimes. Rather, I question why the film chooses to present them as it does. It is really necessary to give them titles like "The Radical," or "The Politician" or "The Futurist"? These one-word descriptions may be meant to give perspective, but they just seem like toe-tags.

All these folks are keeping on keeping on, but the other thing you notice is that they're all pretty damn old. The next generation of environmental warriors, while still in short pants, will run up against problems that are considerably larger, more complex and infinitely more dire. All the swelling strings in the world won't help them one iota.

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