Fractured Land

I went to see this at the Perimeter Institute last night, and was so excited to meet the star of it, Caleb Behn, Eh-Cho Dene and Dunne-Za hunter, fisher, activist, and lawyer. Unfortunately, he cancelled. It was disappointing, but the film made it clear that he's a seriously busy guy! It was worth going to see the film anyway.

It's a perfect film for my Native Studies class. It brings in the notion of a split identity, of the relationship with the environment, the need to regain legal control over the areas being destroyed, and the challenge of putting it all together.

Behn's parents are polar opposites: his dad endured the residential school system and spoke at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and his mom is the highest ranking female executive at an oil and gas company. He's trying to cope with a system that destroyed his people, and she's trying to change the system from within. They divorced when Behn was ten, which he refers to as the first great break in his life.

The film lets us dwell on some beautiful scenery juxtaposed with concerns about checking game for contamination before eating it and the quickly dwindling number of animals to hunt. Behn lives in Northeastern B.C., land covered by Treaty 8, and the third largest hydrocarbon deposit in BC. It took 88 years to turn the pristine land into an industrial wasteland. The area is rife with cancers and birth defects.

The bulk of the film is about the treaty obligation required of any corporation or government entity to consult with Indigenous peoples on any action that could impede their rights. But they reveal that most of the consultations were for show, a quick by-the-way long after all the paperwork was completed with little in the way of real information provided to allow impacted groups to make an informed decision. Behn's grandfather commented that the government "makes the words dance on paper."

At this point one gets the sense that it's all so much about money and greed. The energy corporations rubber stamp the consultation and, in one historic day, they were able to make $476,000,000. Fracking is facilitating a new land rush. Behn relates, "They came for the trees, then the gold, the fur, the children, the oil, and now the gas." The government propaganda ads suggest that washing a car near the roadway is worse for the groundwater than pumping chemicals and fresh water down 2.5 km for the shale gas, leaving behind tailing ponds that end up back in the water system. The oil and gas company activities are regulated by their own industry. And LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) is being targeted for international markets in Asia. It's not about the jobs; it's about the fortunes they'll make. The attitude is one of getting not just what we need to survive, but as much as we possibly can - in the words of Rich Coleman, "to win this race before the rest of the world." Except the faster we extract, the faster we destroy our own land.

The film brought in many voices to add to Behn's experiences. Hydrologist Gilles Wendling explained that nobody has clearly examined exactly where the waste water goes. Dr. Robert Howarth, Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell warned that LNG emissions will soon rival the tar sands. An industry spokesperson from CAPP suggested that gas below the earth is a gift from the creator, and she explained that the industry will shut down a fracking site in a minute if there's any problems - except they never have despite all the many concerns raised. If they destroy the headwaters of the Tahltan River, they will destroy everything downstream.

Little Tahltan River

Behn had only positive things to say about the good heart of the people working on the ground in the industry. It reminded me of Julia Butterfly Hill, two years up a tree to save it from logging, explaining how fond she grew of the loggers, reminding us that we need to change the system, not demonize the players:




But many of the workers on fracking sites are itinerant who move on after 4-6 weeks to another of the 28,000 wells in B.C. The landscape is disappearing under the weight of one proposal after another, a death by 1,000 cuts.

Behn was able to speak at a moratorium on fracking and realized, "If we get this dialogue wrong, things will be very very dangerous in our territory." His speech was well-received, but then they moved on to the next item on the agenda. "There's so much more to politics than speeches and young people raising their voices." It's hard to get our heads around the slippery inner workings of the system.

The film also raised some interesting psychological issues about suffering, authenticity, and the burden of fame. Behn was born with a cleft palate, and he believes it made him more empathetic towards others. I've often commented to classes about the number of famous activists who were raised with some type of early hardship. Behn suggests it's good to have suffered: "Sometimes pain can be good." Personal pain can open our hearts to others in a way that might not be reached if we've never been a little cracked. Behn grapples with his own authenticity as he recognizes the benefits he's had from having a mom in this lucrative industry. And some of the Indigenous protesters insist that "you can't tear down the master's house with the master's tools" because he has a law degree from their universities. There's a split between the old traditions and modern day culture that's hard to bridge. And Behn is startlingly honest discussing his new fame as an activist, how girls made themselves available and he didn't always act honourably: "Relationships are the clearest expression of my failures as a man." The film did a brilliant job of getting us to really understand the complex experience of fractured people, of all of us.

I didn't leave the film feeling any better about the world, but I felt less alone in the fight, and really really lazy for the pittance I offer compared to the men and women on the front lines.

Before the Flood

First of all, I love that this Leo DiCaprio film, directed by Fisher Stevens, was free to watch everywhere on the National Geographic Channel for a while. But if you missed it, here's the gist of it.

Without ads, it's 90 minutes, jampacked with information. The pacing is good, and that's key. I can't help comparing it to Josh Fox's film, because there are marked similarities - both feature one man, a passionate novice in the field, talking a little too much about himself as he flies around the world narrating his learning experience through listening to a variety of experts - many of the same experts even - as he aims to get some kind of a hopeful conclusion. But Leo's film works so much better. It helps that he has funds and connections - where Fox had footage from drones, DiCaprio had footage from space - and that he's a much better orator and has an incredible cinematography crew (and it doesn't hurt that Trent Reznor did the music), but what Stevens and DiCaprio got from the interviews and what they did with the material, the basic trajectory of the film, is what nails it as the superior vehicle to inspire positive change. In 2000, DiCaprio interviewed President Clinton on Earth Day, and they talked about the need for citizens to use better lightbulbs. He recognizes we're getting nowhere with that kind of rhetoric, and he does a good job at getting at the big picture quickly.

DiCaprio frames the film with a discussion of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych: The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is timely as Bosch died 500 years ago this year and you can take a really interesting, brief online tour of the work. The painting hung over DiCaprio's crib as a child. My parents were wary about giving me a book of his work when I was about ten. It's pretty disturbing for a little one, depicting our deal with God, our fall from grace, and the hell that awaits us for all our sins.

He also starts and ends the film at the United Nations as he took on the role of the UN Messenger of Peace with a focus on climate change back in 2014 when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked, "If this boat is sinking, then we will all have to sink together." And then he gets moving. Here's a very brief summary of pertinent remarks made with each place or person interviewed:

ALBERTA, CANADA
Michael Brune of the Sierra Club explained how the economy is based on fossil fuels: oil for transportation and coal and gas for electricity. We're going to more extreme sources now with mountaintop removal, fracking, offshore drilling, and the tar sands - the most devastating way to produce fossil fuels that poisons miles of rives and land and requires the clear-cutting of the boreal forests. On a copter flying over the sands, DiCaprio said "It looks like Mordor," which is exactly what Maude Barlow said about it. He started shooting The Revenant in Alberta, but they had to move to Argentina because there wasn't enough snow in the winter in Canada.


BAFFIN ISLAND, CANADA
Dr. Enric Sala of the National Geographic and Jake Awa, their arctic guide, looked at the sea ice and watched the narwhals passing by. The arctic is the air conditioner for the northern hemisphere, and by 2040, we'll be able to sail over the North Pole, unencumbered by icebergs and all that snow.

GREENLAND
Professor Jason E. Box, a climatologist, thinks our projections are conservative and Greenland will be gone in a few decades if we stay on our current path. He showed DiCaprio how a climate station works and that it just looks like broken down pool equipment.

FLORIDA
Mayor Philip Levine suggested we bring all the unconverted to Miami so they can see first hand the "sunny day flooding" they get randomly. It's taken $400 million of taxpayer money for a pump project to keep the city out of water, and that will just buy them 40 years of time before they'll have to leave. Yet officials in Florida are banned from discussing climate change thanks to the work of Rick Scott and Marco Rubio.

WALL STREET
Michael Mann, an American climatologist, says we have as strong a scientific agreement on climate change as we do on gravity. There's opposition because of politics, lobbying, and industry creating a massive disinformation campaign. Scientists are vilified and attacked by congressmen. Mann has received death threats, an FBI investigation, and threats to his family. The lobbyists don't have to win a legitimate debate; they just have to divide the public enough for them to stay their course.

Front groups funded by the Koch brothers ensure all legislation supports fossil fuel interests. They're doing everything they can to protect that wealth. They own the house of representatives, with James Inhofe, the snowball dude and the largest recipient of Koch funding in the Senate, receiving $1,837,427. These people are engaged in an effort to lead us astray in the name of short term fossil fuel profits. These companies have invested all their money in one basket, and they're not going to let anything happen to it. And they control the government through cash flow. Check out this 30 minute documentary if you want more info on the Koch Brothers' War on Climate Science.

CHINA
Ma Jun, at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, explained that China has surpassed the US as number one polluter because the pollution of the world's industry is all dumped there since we've outsourced all our factory work. They want to hold power plants accountable, and have made a cool national pollution map database that makes all emissions public, transparent, and updated hourly. They won't let companies operate in the dark. But this was only possible because China's media talked about it constantly. It motivated China's policy of green growth.

NEW DELHI, INDIA
Sunita Narain, at the Centre for Science and Environment, explained that the biggest problem in India is poverty, so energy access is as big an issue as GHGs. There are 300 million people without any form of power generation; they burn cow dung to cook on. Finance Secretary Ashok Lavasa, said that they need electricity to be affordable and coal is cheap. But if they all start using it, then the entire world will be fried. One US citizen uses as much energy as 34 Indian citizens, and lifestyle consumption has to be at the centre of the discussion. Sunita explained that if the US will shift to solar and wind, if they lead the way in turning their back on the fossil fuel industry, then everyone will follow. But DiCaprio lamented that it's just not going to happen. It's a fossil addicted country. So then India won't do it either. Here's the thing: if a wealthy country can't find a way to stop using harmful energy sources, then the poor countries look at that and don't see why they should bother. The sacrifice is so much greater for the poorer countries, but the rich countries aren't going to bend on this. So we're screwed. The rich can withstand the first hits of climate change, but the poor are already impacted today. Only the poor really see that it's real and it's urgent.

PACIFIC ISLANDS
Anote Tong, President of Kiribati, regularly deals with severe flooding into fresh water ponds so there's no drinking water on the island. Soon they'll be underwater. They're trying a policy of migration with dignity: they bought land and are offering to relocate people away from the coast by choice. But the reality is that they won't be able to accommodate all their people. Tommy Remengesau, President of Palau, showed an area that was a community just a decade ago, but is completely gone. Small island nations contribute the least to climate change and feel the worst impacts.

ECOSYSTEMS
Jeremy Jackson, PhD, an American marine ecologist, says that what we've done to the rest of the world is criminal. We're reversed half a billion years of evolution by destroying ocean areas that once were dominated by abundance. They went underwater to look at areas with dead coral reef. In the last 30 years, 50% of all coral has been lost. Oceans are a stabilizing force, but they can't take in CO₂ as quickly as we're producing it. Lindsey Allen of the Rainforest Action Network says we're taking away ecosystems that normally help us stabilize climate by clearcutting and slash and burning rainforests. Farwiza Farhan, HAkA Chairperson, flew over the fires in Sumatra, Indonesia. They were intentionally set in order to make way for rows and rows of palm oil tress. It's the last place in the world with elephants, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans living together, but palm oil has taken over 90% of the forest land. Ian Singleton, PhD, runs a sanctuary to try to save them. The animals he doesn't save, die.  (Leo and Fisher almost died filming the fires.)

So, we can't seem to stop people from buying these products, and we can't seem to get the government to stop the companies from destroying the land. What else can we do?

How stupid are we that we can't see the connection between our constant consumption of these products and the destruction of the environment, or, at the very least, the destruction of animal habitat directly leading to significant extinctions?? Buy what you need, not everything you want, and stay low on the production chain.


HOW TO TURN IT AROUND??

Professor Gidon Eshel, PhD in environmental physics at Bard College, says the easiest and most important thing we can do is to change our diet. Tonight. The foremost reason for deforestation is beef, which is an inefficient form of food. 70% of agricultural land in the US is for cattle feed. And cows produce methane, CH₄, which is 20 times worse as a GHG than CO₂. It's great if you can go vegan, but it helps even to change from beef to chicken. And that's something we can all do immediately.

Elon Musk, CEO of Spacex, a Tesla Gigafactory, has made battery storage a priority. He built a Giga factory that can create power with just solar and wind. We just need 100 gigafactories to power the entire world. It's very manageable. We just need a few industrial companies to do the same thing and we'll get there very quickly.

Gregory Mankiw, Professor of Economics at Harvard, says we need a hefty carbon tax on any activity that puts carbon in the atmosphere to nudge people in the direction of doing the right thing.

BUT, my concern with this argument is that when cigarettes are taxed, people don't stop buying them. They need to get cancer to stop smoking, not a price hike. They need to see the direct consequences of their behaviour before they'll change. A gradual rise in price doesn't affect us enough. Maybe if it's a huge increase very quickly we'll actually change. We need a carbon tax that will affect industry enough to change their practices, not citizens.

Then he went on to explain the flow of power. When Obama first started he wouldn't support gay marriage because it polled terribly. But once the people got on board, he supported it. Politicians aren't elected leaders; they're elected followers. They'll say whatever the public will support. So we just need to get the public to really understand how this all works!

John Kerry, Secretary of State, says the Paris negotiations are different because Obama was able to announce his intentions to reduce with Beijing. The two largest emitters made a public declaration to reduce, which is a huge statement. The concern in the interim is that people are being displaced and there will be wars over water, and any extremist philosophy will appeal to a desperate people.

Johan Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Centre, says we're moving quickly towards 4° warming in this century, and we haven't been at those temperatures in 4 million years. We're moving faster than predicted and seeing impacts already. At 3° warming, regions will become unlivable and agriculture will collapse. We're hitting feedback loops where the melted ice leaves behind dark earth that absorbs more of the sun's rays. We have a really small window for world leaders to fix it. It can be done, though. Germany is at 30% renewable power, and Denmark is using 100% wind. Once we invest in it, then we have free energy forever.

BUT, I think this is the whole stopper for investors. It doesn't make financial sense to invest in something people will just need to buy once. If we can't get out of our current growth economic mindset, then we'll never survive.

Barack Obama says the Paris summit is a massive step forward, but there's no enforcement and we just have to take it on faith that each country will hit its own targets. It's historic because each country is locked into targets, so the architecture is in place. But we have to have increasingly ambitious targets for the next twenty years.

BUT - the next twenty years?!? That's way too gradual a change! We really don't have twenty years to get to the targets that we should be imposing today. Will Hilary have big enough balls to do what's necessary? Could anyone stand up the the money infiltrating congress through corporations? Which leaders will actually, for real, fight climate change when it means cutting their own funds?

Dr. Piers Sellers, an astronaut and director at the Earth Sciences Division, NASA, with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, says the science community hasn't done the best job of communicating the threat to the public. It's like an ant trying to understand an elephant by crawling around it. From space we can see everything and how it all works together. There are satellites looking at every aspect of earth every day. Their climate simulation tool shows the biggest impact will be the slowing of the gulf stream which will stop the transportation of heat to Europe, so it will get much colder there, and the moving of the precipitation belt, so there will be more drought in hot areas. This is going to fuel conflict in Darfur and Syria. It will make the US dustbowl much drier in the next decades.

The facts are crystal clear, but there are ways out of it. We have to stop burning fossil fuels right now. We need the people to come out of the fog of confusion with the issues, realistically appreciate the threat, and get on with it. 

Pope Francis says this is our home; it is going to ruin. Our common home has fallen into serious disrepair. Hope would have us recognize that there is always a way out, that we can always redirect our steps, that we can always do something to solve our problems. Still we can see signs that things are now reaching a breaking point. He made a call for action to stop global warming and poverty, to accept the modern science of climate change. We must speak out as loudly as we can and immediately take action. 

Leo DiCaprio's address to the United Nations: We have the means to stop the devastation, but lack the will. We must go beyond the promises of the agreement with no more excuses and studies and manipulation by fossil fuel companies. The world is watching. We'll either be laudified or vilified. It's up to all of us.

How to Let Go of the World

I was really looking forward to seeing the latest Josh Fox film on fracking. I loved Gasland (for which Mark Ruffalo was just added to the US Terror Advisory List for promoting), and then Chris Hedges gave this film a nod, which means a lot to me. And then one reviewer wrote that the film will "restore your faith that we, as a people, have the power to save ourselves." Exactly what I need. So I bought it on iTunes and settled in for some enlightenment.

Maybe my expectations were a smidge too high.

It fell into the same problems that made Rob Stewart's films less than stellar. In Sharkwater, Stewart had long dramatic interludes focusing on himself and the problems he experienced being unwittingly thrust into activism. And then in Revolution, he spoke at length about beginning to learn about the environment. At least Stewart, near the end, seemed to recognize the part he himself was playing in exacerbating climate change with all the air travel the film required. Did it really require it, is the question. Stewart starts asking himself some really hard questions, which I respect. Fox doesn't go there.

Like Stewart, Fox is just learning - or, at least, he presents the appearance of just learning about climate change. He's been in this a while, so I can't imagine he doesn't get the big picture yet, and I'm really not a fan of the technique of feigning ignorance to get people on board. It feels like he hadn't done any research before the shoot so we could watch him discover what it is to "eat from the tree of knowledge, and now there's no going back." I want a documentary to tell me something I don't know, and tell me with confidence. I want a climate change doc, especially, to tell the world everything they need to know to get with the program. There were too many shots of Fox walking through forests in awe of nature - look at that spider! and that tree! and that bird! Even worse, most of those shots weren't of the forest, but of Fox looking at the forest. We were to be enthralled by his wonder at nature, not by nature itself. If he were my son, this would be my favourite movie ever. But he's not.

That gets to the bigger problem here: that this film is way too focused on Fox to be compelling to anyone who isn't related to him or doesn't have a crush on him. It starts with a painfully awkward dance to show how happy he is that a river nearby won't be polluted with oil. It was a hard-won victory, and I get the celebratory tone, but there are other ways to show joyfulness without forcing us to watch a guy dance in his living room for the entire opening credits. He finds it helpful to cope with tragedy by playing the banjo. That's really nice for him, but it's doesn't necessarily translate to helping us cope by listening to him play.

Like Stewart, Fox does it all, and sometimes it's better to spread the jobs around a more talented pool. His narration is stilted, with long dramatic pauses mid-sentence throughout. There aren't rises and lulls in the intensity of his tone; it's all drama all the way through: "Just a few months later.  New York City.  Was about to get.  A wake-up call."  Couple that with a really quiet voice juxtaposed with sudden bursts of loud extended musical interludes meant my finger hovered on the volume the whole time. He had some great footage from a camera strapped to a drone, and he had the cash to film in twelve different countries, but he didn't spring for a steadicam, so much of the tromping through the forest had a Blair Witch effect.

He collected the usual litany of talking heads: Bill McKibben, Michael Mann, Elizabeth Kolbert...  but only for a few minutes each. If I had the chance to chat with Elizabeth Kolbert, I'd have so many more questions to ask. She's got a wealth of knowledge that was largely ignored. And the McKibben interview was in a food court, and they decided to include their argument with mall security about filming in the mall. I struggle to see the purpose of that clip - why they'd choose a food court to film in, and why they'd choose to highlight the conflict. Is it to mirror the pipeline protests? A corporation vs citizen struggle? He was just a security guard doing his job. Weird.

He threw in some stats about increasing weather events, rising sea levels, endangered animals, factory farms, ocean acidity, threatened protesters, that the window to slow the expected 2° rise by 2036 closes within a year from now (NASA thinks we may have already hit 2°), and that all our 40-year-old pipelines are going to break. He referred to the Amazon rainforest as the lungs of the world even though the oceans create significantly more oxygen. Standard stuff. But a few of his poignant pieces of information were learned by most of us in grade three: "People. And animals. Exhale carbon dioxide. Trees. Take in. Carbon dioxide."

What I learned? To make a good documentary, you really have to get over yourself and your personal learning experience and make the subject matter the star of the show. Read some Monbiot before you start shooting so you don't sound like you've never heard of any of this before, and so you can temper your amazement at what's being shared. A lot of it is old news to anyone remotely familiar with the issues, like that Republicans don't think climate change is caused by human activity. Even better, read the IPCC reports that came out in 2014.

As far as learning basic information about climate change, there are better films to watch to understand all the meetings leading up to Paris. Like this one at only 4 minutes:



And then Grist also explained what happened in Paris, but in much more positive terms than Fox:



So his big question, the big draw to the film, is the focus on what won't be destroyed by climate change. His thesis is that we'll still have courage and creativity and resilience and all sorts of other wonderful human attributes that should be celebrated. But, I think we won't have any of those if we don't have any humans left. This is where some knowledge of Naomi Klein's and Gordon Laxer's plans for change would have helped add some substance to his song and dance. He's struggling with how to cope with all the knowledge, but he hasn't gotten far enough in depth in his own journey to have us walk with him. He seems to want to escape rather than actually cope with the reality of it all - to actually feel that reality.

By comparison, a much better film on the complexity of coping with the environmental destruction in our own backyard is Fractured Land with Caleb Behn. Both Behn and Stewart were willing to question their own motives and involvement in a way that Fox skirts around, refusing to acknowledge, which leaves his film feeling superficial at best. And of the three filmmakers, Behn's film offers the most complex understanding of the situation and leaves you with the most hopeful spirit. We can't have real hope if we distract ourselves with music in the face of significant loss. We have to have a clear path to walk to help make it okay.

Genuine Artists: Strummer, Baker, and Rodriguez

A fantastic triple-bill of films about musicians filled my afternoon.  They're very different musicians, but  they all profoundly affected a ton of people because they get beyond the mundane - or immerse themselves in it.

Joe Strummer, front man for the Clash, is painted as a charming (but depressive) guy with a joyful spirit that brought people together.  Most of the interviews, of a really wide variety of people, take place outside with groups of people hanging out in front of a fire.  The film has a feel to it that made me want to live a different life just wandering around hanging out.  A brief, vicarious immersion in that bohemian lifestyle stayed with me.  It's a reminder of how unnecessary all the stuff is so long as we have the people.

The second film was also about a wandering soul:  Ginger Baker.  He was available for lengthy interviews with the filmmaker, which was very cool, and parts of the stories were animated stylistically so it wasn't just a montage of talking heads.  Nicely done.  But he came across as too quick-tempered to maintain any of the connections he made over his career.  He's bitter, and not for nothing.  Something I learned from the film is that only the songwriters get royalties for the music.  When he was in Cream, one of my all-time favourite bands, the songs were written mainly by Jack Bruce and Peter Brown.  They got all the cash, and Baker and Clapton got nothing beyond the money for touring and playing the initial recording.  I'd be bitter too.

The third film is a very different story: Searching for Sugar Man.  This is more of a detective story as a few interested fans search for Sixto Rodriguez, a musician barely known here, but with an enormous following in South Africa.  The music didn't get me for this one like it did the others, but the story is captivating.  Imagine having a talent that you think went entirely unappreciated and being completely unaware that people in another continent are nuts over you.  It's one thing to be the rare few with a talent like these guy have, it's another thing to have an audience that acknowledges that.  Without any appreciative feedback, how long will you believe you're as good as you think you are?  And maybe it doesn't really matter.  

Rob Stewart's Revolution

Margaret Wente, in her latest discourse, thinks the reason the environment's being ignored is because of all the pessimists making us too depressed about it all.  She splits all environmentalists into two camps:

"But the biggest divide is really between the purists and the pragmatists, the pessimists and the optimists - between the McKibbernists, who believe we're on the brink of global catastrophe, and those who think human beings are more resourceful and the Earth is more resilient than the doom-mongers say they are."

And I ask:  Can't it be both??

Because it is.  Every environmentalist I know wavers between the two fronts or else the pessimists would just kill themselves or stay drunk all the time, and the optimists would stop fighting to be heard - AND, if optimists really believe it'll all come out in the wash, they wouldn't worry about how to frame their arguments to avoid shutting people off by being too depressing.  Follow?

This is all a lead-in to the new Rob Stewart film:  Revolution.  He walks that line all the way.  He clearly believes we're on the brink of catastrophe, but also that human beings are resourceful - that we will actually get our shit together in this generation.



Bad news first.  As a film, it doesn't quite work.  It's telling that opening weekend, it was playing everywhere, and the following weekend, even with the promise of a tree planted for every audience member, it was down to one theatre at the outskirts of town.  And I sat in that theatre with six other people.  Like with Sharkwater (which I was privileged to see when he was there answering questions), he struggles to tell a compelling story.  He's got amazing visuals and an incredible series of events to discuss, but he's not a storyteller.  Compare Sharkwater to The Cove to see the difference a compelling story arc makes.  Connected events listed in a row with some swelling music at the end, does not a story make.  Revolution is a really short film, yet I checked my watch at the 45 minute mark, shocked that there was so much left to sit through.  And I'm in the choir!  

Now the good news.  All that aside, as a call to arms, it's genius.  My squirmy 8-year-old asked if we could leave early, not just because she was getting restless, but because she wanted to go home to make posters to tell other people.  She got the message in the first half and was inspired to act on it.  Right now!  She didn't want to be beaten over the head with more of the same.  For the inspirational aspect, I'll still give it a B+ and tell people it's a must see.

Here's the message:

1. Things are really, really, really bad.  - By 2048, we'll be fished out (which of course always makes me think of this video, harkening me back to grade 9).  But even if we stop the fishing industry on a dime, today, the whole lesson of the film is that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is destroying the pH balance of the oceans to the extent that all life on earth could be destroyed.  You heard me.  All of it.  Is that catastrophic enough for you Margaret?

The oceans have died before.  If I got my numbers right, it was 65 million years ago, but it only took 4 million years for them to rebuild.  So that's something.  The coral is dying dramatically right now and could all be gone in twenty years, and phytoplankton in the ocean has seen a 40% decline in the past 50 years.  The oceans create half the oxygen in our atmosphere, so no ocean means not enough oxygen for us mammals out here on the ground, out cutting down trees like there's no tomorrow.  Because, hahaha, there isn't!  Not at this rate.  We're hilarious!

2. Canada particularly sucks.  - Once again, preaching to the choir.  It's shocking how far we've come over the decades, how high up we once were when it came to environmental legislation, only to lose all that ground with one monstrously short-sighted business-centric Prime Minister.  Yikes.  We've won "fossil awards", for the worst country for fossil fuel use, voted on by 400 environmental organizations, for the last five years.  We've been named, officially, the colossol fossil!  The biggest problem?  The tar sands.  According to too many people to name, the mess should be shut down right now, and all that oil left in the ground, but Harper wants to make it TWENTY TIMES BIGGER!  Because, you know, bigger is always better.  Think he's maybe compensating for something?

3. "If people knew the truth, they'd do something."  - I talk about this in class all the time.  It seems like it would be true, but I know tons about horrific slavery in the Ivory Coast, yet I still sometimes get lazy and buy non-fair trade chocolate.  Even though I know the truth, and teach the truth, I sometimes forget how important it is to act on it.  And I sometimes get depressed and decide my part doesn't matter since so few people really care.  Like Marky Mark says in I (Heart) Huckabees:  "I can stop using petroleum, but there's no way I could stop its use in my lifetime."  It's a dilemma.

But what does help is constant reminders.  We need films like this to wake us up over and over.  Like racism and homophobia, we stop talking about it because we think it's getting better, then we get a backlash.  These things have to stay on the front, solar-powered burner forever.  So really, it's not just about telling the truth, it's reminding people of it in different ways all the freakin' time.  BUT the corporations own the media, and I'm not convinced they'll be on board with our little scheme, so this could be a costly affair, EXCEPT, we've got that most anarchist of media on our side (so far in our land of the free): twitter and facebook.  Go nuts!

4.  Finally, the kids will save the day.  - Once we get money and a nice home, we get complacent.  Stewart doesn't say that, but I think that's part of the problem.  Kids see the long term because they haven't settled yet.  They're still in flux sufficiently to become impassioned about their future.  We codgers think we're all safe and cosy, so what's all the fuss?  The youth of today (and many old folk thank you very much) are taking to the streets already, protesting over and over until they're in tears for the frustration of not being heard.  There are some small successes here and there, and that can keep us going.  Someone said, "We thought we had to save the polar bear, but now we know we have to save our future."  Kids want this to change so they can flourish.  They don't have a car, so they don't worry about their hummer being taken away.  They're not there yet.  They're still willing to go without so we can all live.  We have to stop using fossil fuels dramatically, and we have to protect wilderness.  Go!

George Monbiot has a new book being release soon.  One reviewer sums it up,

As a species, he argues, we’ve made enough calamitous mistakes to learn from, and gathered enough experience and evidence down the ages to draw a new and challenging conclusion: huge swathes of wild places, on land and sea, teeming with life that is largely outside our influence, are necessary not just for the diversity of life on earth, but for the spiritual nourishment, perhaps even the social stability, of mankind. And we can create such magical, life-affirming places with a radical new environmental management plan: leaving them alone.

The way I see it, we have to stop acting like a virus eating our way through everything we see.  We have to reclaim what it means to be part of humanity: to use our big brains to cooperate sustainably  instead of competing and growing exponentially.  It's suggested in the film with the story of the cycle of lynx and hares.  Every 14 years the lynx population declines because they ate too many hares, then the hares populate again, and then the lynx flourish again.  I've witnessed the same with the fox and mice populations up north.  But people don't do that in quite the same way.  We build empires that are too big, then they collapse horribly, and another one begins.  But now that our empire is global, there might not be another ever after.



I'm so thrilled that Rob Stewart made this movie and that his films are so inspirational to so many people.  I hope he continues to run this circuit.  He's an amazing cinematographer.  But maybe he should think about hiring a writer - and maybe even a better narrator.  We can't all be good at everything.  And this is too important not to be the very best it can be to get beyond the congregation and into the streets.

I mentioned to a friend recently that I've told my children not to have any children - not because children aren't a joy.  They are.  And not because of overpopulation which is a story for another day.  But because there's nothing worse than watching your children suffer.  I'm on Wente's doom-monger side when I say that I believe that if my children have kids, they will watch them suffer a fate nobody should have to endure as we cope with the heat, endless drought, and oxygen-shortage.  My friend laughed, "Of course it will all work out somehow."

 Of course it will.

The Imposter and Craigslist Joe

I watched two really intriguing documentaries this morning - but in the wrong order.  Always watch the happier one last!  Now my day will be coloured with creepy!  I'll write about the happier one last at least.  Both get a B+.

The Imposter is about a messed up guy from France who was living in Spain, and through a series of chance events and manipulations, assumed the identity of a kid from Texas who had been missing for three years.  I remember when this happened, and I just couldn't understand how the family didn't know it wasn't him.  How could you not know your own child after just three years.  Sure, at 16, he'd be taller, and maybe scruffier, but you'd know the eyes.  Even if they were now a different colour.

But Frederic Bourdin had an explanation for everything!  He said the military had put solution in his eyes to change their colour.  Even the social worker believed this.  That's some solution!

It also helped that the family was pretty sheltered.  When told the long lost Nicholas was in Spain, his sister said, "That's clear across the country."   But she was brave enough to go get him.

I ended up with some sympathy for the family - especially the mother.  The most pertinent bit that I would have like to see more of was a brief interview with a family friend who explained how much the mom loved Nicholas, and everything was good, until she let a new drug-addicted boyfriend move in.  Then everything changed for the family.  She made a bad judgment call.  Happens to the best of us.

The movie is a study in wish-fulfillment.  If we want it badly enough, we don't make it happen, we just convince ourselves it already is happening.  It's much easier on us that way.

Craigslist Joe is the kind of movie to watch when you're about to give up on the world because it's filled with so many jerks and morons who do things like try to celebrate the tar sands as an environmental breakthrough.

One guy, Joe, decided to go for one month without anything he couldn't get for free from Craigslist.  He left home with no money, just a phone and the clothes on his back to see if he could rely on the kindness of strangers for food and shelter (and to make a movie).  Of course it made me want to try it right now - I've got a week free!  But there would be too many restrictions for me to succeed as well as Joe did.  I can't drive at night, so I can't barter with that - and it seemed he did a lot of that.  I can't be around anyone smoking, much less sleep in a house full of smokers, and that would put up a huge barrier for me.  And I'm female.  I assume I'd be more likely to face greater dangers, but maybe I'm just a little paranoid.  But this makes me wonder if Joe could have done as well as anything other than a 20-something American, clean-shaven, straight white guy.

And he wasn't totally alone.  The day before leaving, he went on Craigslist and found a guy with a video camera willing to silently (completely silently) travel with him and film the entire month.  The film owes a lot of kudos to the camera guy who made himself completely disappear yet captured some pivotal scenes.

In a film like this, I'm always left wondering if any of it was staged, but I'll go with it as if it was all real and happening just like it was shown.  And of course people might be a whole lot nicer when they're being filmed.  But I can't imagine getting around that one - could you make a whole movie with hidden cameras in your lapels?  Without a camera (or camera-operator), maybe he would have been ripped off - but he didn't have much to steal anyway.

The set-up of the film is a perfect start for a significant life-altering experience - and we're cued to expect something.  Unfortunately, Joe doesn't really go there.  He's kind and open, but he's lacking any real depth or authenticity.  The movie probably doesn't deserve a B+, but it was right there when I needed to see it, to be reminded that we can help people also by allowing them to help us.  People are interesting and kinder than we expect.  That's enough.

Catfish

Catfish is a documentary, but not the talking-heads kind.  It's a romance.

I don't think I've ever felt such giddy excitement watching a movie before.  One of the filmmakers says at one point, "It's like we're just about to open our SAT scores."  Exactly.  This film could have gone horribly wrong, and the reason it didn't is because there isn't a mean-spirited person in the bunch.

Nev, a 23-year-old photographer, gets a painting of one of his published photos from 8-year-old Abby, and he e-mails her mother to thank her, and then he gradually falls in love with Abby's 19-year-old sister, Megan over eight months of online conversations.  Finally he decides to take a road trip to see the whole family.  Nev's brother, Ariel, and friend, Henry, think it all makes for a good movie, and they were right.


This movie is all about reality and duplicity and honesty and loneliness.  I don't watch reality TV shows much, but from what I've seen, they're contrived and scripted - setting people up against one another to create an interesting conflict for the viewers.  This film is a mystery, so nastiness isn't necessary to keep us watching.  In a very minor early scene, Nev is talking with his brother and casually puts his hands down the front of his pants as they chat.   That's not something people in documentaries typically do, and it nicely stages him as an open and authentic kind of guy.

The film is also about falling in love long-distance.  At one point Nev is in bed, with his retainer in, reading intimate texts between him and Megan to Ariel and Henry, and he gets embarrassed by it all and finishes reading hiding under a blanket.  Nothing is edited from a text conversation the way it would be in a retelling of an in-person dialogue.  Nev also photoshops their pictures together.  He's 23, but he's acting like a little kid because he's in love.  Love can make the most mature, reasonable, professional adult act like a total moron.  Ebert called him naive, but maybe he's been married too long to remember how overpowering that feeling can be.  We see it in the paper all the time, and we laugh or are shocked at the antics of people in the throws, yet we really shouldn't be.  That could be us!

A lesser person would be angry enough to want to cause some harm to the woman who played with his  heart so thoroughly.  Nev doesn't take so much as a footstep in that direction.  For the kindness in it, and the simple provocative nature of the story reveal, and the fact that they were brave and crazy enough to go to Megan's place in the middle of the night, I give it an A-.


***  SPOILERS *** (Go see it before you read the rest - really! - It's on Netflix)


Okay, in case you haven't guessed, Catfish is a romance between Nev and a woman who doesn't actually exist.

There's a whole other story going on here.  But it really ruins the suspense of the film to know about it in advance.  You've been warned.

Abby's mom, Angela, is in her 40s and starting to feel like she hasn't achieved any of her dreams.  She lives for other people - her husband and kids.  She paints beautifully (it's telling that she's watermarked all her photos on her site), but I imagine she felt insecure about her artwork when she decided to tell Nev it was all done by her 8-year-old daughter.  It makes it that much more impressive if it's done by a child.  Angela's got a complex fantasy life going that seems to help her cope with a demanding home life.  It appears she has an estranged older daughter somewhere named Megan whom Abby hasn't seen "in so long she doesn't know what she looks like," and she recently left her job to spend her days caring for her two disabled step-sons (one appears severely disabled) and Abby.  That's a hard road to travel.  But, unlike the fantasy lives of many frustrated and lonely moms coping with caring for kids all day, her fantasy life seeped into other people's real lives when she sent Nev her paintings and pretended to be a 19-year-old woman falling for Nev with a model's photo in "Megan's" profile box on facebook.  I think the "falling for" part was all too real.

Since a key point in the film is the problem with misappropriating information, it's ironic that the film was sued for using music without permission, and that at Sundance, they were grilled on the reality of what they actually filmed.  We never really know another person completely; we just trust that people feel and think the way they say they do and that they're not putting on an act.  Trust is generally a good thing, but technology has taken us to a place where we're even further removed from what little grasp we ever had on reality.

The film skirts the borders of being about mental illness.  Even after the big coming clean in the movie, Angela continued to try to talk to Nev as Megan.  Nev says he's empathetic, and he stays in contact with her because he used to have problems telling the truth as a kid.  I think that's a whole different ballpark!   I also think it's great that they stay in touch and that she's getting counselling.  Obsessions can be disabling.

Yet it's funny how obsessed we can be with knowing the whole truth.  I like a nice story, and I'm okay if a few things were embellished here and there.  I'm curious about some details, but this film has brought about a cult of people searching online and in public records for information about all these people.  They want to know the absolute truth, and they'll stop at nothing to find it.  Some in the comments here wonder why Nev didn't he just read Angela's blog where she wrote about giving Megan up.  Maybe because the blog started in 2010 - a little late for a film released in 2010 and obviously filmed years earlier.  Another site explains why the film likely isn't a hoax.  This obsession is curious.  The film shows us a very positive way to react to a difficult situation.  Even if it's all contrived (which I doubt), it's still a good movie.  If it is fake, then Nev, Angela, and Abby are amazing actors.

Finally, and most obviously, the movie is also a huge cautionary tale about the dangers of the internet.  There's some serious collateral damage from all this: Aimee Gozales was the woman whose face Angela used to portray Megan.  The filmmakers told the story to her on film.  She seemed to take it beautifully, but now checks online regularly to see if anyone else has stolen her identity.  Stealing credit card information is one thing.  Angela stole Aimee's face.

Be careful out there, kids!

We Could Be Heroes

"Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals. "
— Margaret Mead

When I saw The Cove I thought it would be depressing, but it was very exciting. I still don't think dolphin slaughtering compares to how we house and kill masses of cows, pigs and chickens in factory farms all over the place, but the big difference is that dolphin meat is toxic. It's full of mercury. So the slaughter for food is truly senseless. The creepiest part is that they put it in mandatory school lunches. Actually, it turned my stomach that the lunches were provided by schools and children were made to eat every last bite, and there seemed nothing parents could do to intervene on their children's behalf. I can't even imagine: my kids won't tolerate the wrong kind of mustard....

No Impact Man

I love this movie.  

Colin and Michelle are a very real couple, but also very reasonable people trying to make a difference in the world by having absolutely no impact for a year - or as little as humanly possible when you live in New York City. The film didn't just show the crazy stuff they were willing to do, it got to the heart of and tried to understand many issues to do with activism in general.  They were featured in a New York Times article, and they had to deal with a serious backlash at the same time as forgoing elevators and coffee.  It's hard to be different.  

Inside Job

I saw this movie last year, and showed it to students a few time.  It's a must see for anyone interested in how the world works!  Here's my handout if anyone's interested in how the whole sub-prime mortgage crisis happened.  There are current news links at the very very bottom.

This is ALL SPOILERS!


Inside Job (Dir: Charles Ferguson, 2010, 108 min.)

A film exposing the truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. In a nutshell, progressive deregulation of the financial sector since the 1980s gave rise to an increasingly criminal industry, whose “innovations” have produced a succession of financial crises. Each crisis is worse than the last, yet few people are being sent to prison despite fraud that caused trillions of dollars in losses.

Water on the Table

I saw this film last year with the filmmaker, Liz Marshall, there to talk afterwards. After seeing Sharkwater with Rob Stewart there, I learned never to miss a filmmaker talk about his/her film.   They always have a few good stories to add.  Plus, I think I fell in love with her a little bit.  Check out this protest letter she wrote, apparently not her first, when she was 8.

She followed around Maude Barlow for a year.  By sheer luck of the dice, it happened to be the very year that Barlow was the Advisor on Water to the UN.

The rich will drink; the poor will die.

Here's some random notes from the film and discussion.  The film was very heartfelt.  I lean towards just the facts.  See the film if you want to laugh and cry.  Read this for the bare bones of the message.

Miss Representation

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
- Alice Walker

I watched Miss Representation with several classes in a special presentation at our school last week.

Sigh.

Parts were good, and parts weren't.  And it was sooo American - except for the soundtrack with was mainly Metric songs (from Toronto) because Canada rocks!

Bully and Tomboy

I saw Bully as a PD activity for teachers last week.

 

Maybe I've lived too long and seen too much, but it wasn't nearly as shocking as I expected to be.  It was real, though.  I could easily identify with the targets - why they laugh when they're getting hit.  I could also identify with the parents and the pain we feel at every bit of suffering our children have to endure.  But I could also identify with the bullying children who are so desperate to fit in, they'll do anything to distance themselves from difference.  Difference actually makes them angry.  We'll do anything to keep from being at the bottom of that pecking order.  It gets easier as we get older, but, for many people, not by much.  It just gets more subtle.

On Intelligence

"If anyone thinks they're going to change the world by appealing to the morality of human beings, they're not going to get very far.  Human beings are not very moral." - Paul Watson

I watched Limitless and Eco-Pirate, both about reaching beyond typical human potential, then had a horrifying apocalyptical dream.  In the dream, everyone in the region had to meet in a large forested area on Tuesday.  I was curious about the purpose.  I thought it had something to do with the new food rationing system, something that made me very nervous because we were already so hungry.  But one woman, who was high up in whatever organization was running things, told me we were all going to kill ourselves at once to decrease the surplus population.  Our region had been chosen, and it was our duty to comply.  I spent the rest of the dream trying to organize my kids and their friends for an escape - and wondering how we had let everything go so wrong, how we had stopped being able to produce enough food so that mass suicide was the only option left.

I think I'm a little stressed-out about the state of the world.

Garbage! is Pretty Much Garbage

There's a film, Garbage!, that's being shown in select cities for FREE, which is almost unheard of. I got a notice to bring my students. Being a conscientious teacher that day, I bought the DVD to preview the movie.

Despite the exclamation point in the title, the film is painfully dull. It's marketed to kids of all ages, but I couldn't get any of my own kids to watch more than ten minutes with me. The camera is hand held, and, maybe because he's a such a dad, the cameraman sways a bit as he films. You know, like you see parent of little ones do whenever they see a babe in arms even if their own arms are empty.

I had problems watching Blair Witch Project for the same reasons.

The "smash hit" Garbage! is the amazing story of one family who collects their garbage for three months just to show how much crap an average family accumulates. We really could have gotten a shot of the very end result and skipped all the rest. The family didn't change their lifestyle at all - which I had expected, so it didn't show what we should do and how simple it really is to change, only what we do do. And the family wasn't funny or interesting or in any way remarkable - which I guess was the point - to find an average family. Sometimes it was a bit awkward to watch their tiffs.

And even though they use disposable diapers, which is a post all on its own, they still do twenty loads of laundry a week!! What the hell? I have a family of the same size, and I do two to four loads a week. Now, I make everyone use the same towel over and over every day for a week. Our society is so cleanliness obsessive it's ridiculous - not to mention unhealthy and time consuming.

I didn't come away with any useful lessons on how to reduce my garbage, just a guilt trip about how much we all use and, for me, a sense of superiority for not making nearly this much garbage, not using disposable diapers, not doing 20 loads of laundry, etc. I would have liked to see the garbage sorted further. This family has access to the green bin program, so they dump their diapers and meat and food waste there, and they have access to a blue box recycling program, but they still ended up with a garage full of garbage. Some of it was because of Christmas and Hallowe'en, but still. What's in all those bags??

The film does have little interesting segments about where garbage goes. It was divided under different headings so teachers could make use of the video a little at a time showing select bits of info, but then they'd have to pay for the rights - usually about $200 more. I don't think it's worth the cost and trouble for something I can just as easily explain without the visual.

It's not really that horrible a film; it's just so so disappointing when environmental films that are informative don't go all the way to being good too. And it certainly wouldn't keep the attention of a group of high school kids. The big climax of the film was that this family makes lots and lots of garbage. We suspected that all along. Big deal. The denouement: the family and their neighbours were all happy to see the garbage get taken away. Wow. Even though it's a documentary, it still needs us to care about the characters and keep cheering for them. They're probably very nice people, but I didn't root for them to keep storing their garbage.

Oh well.

Naked Apes Outta Control

We are too stupid to live.

It was just plain luck that a new movie came out, Sharkwater, AND the director/producer/cinematographer was going to be present for one night only to give a talk and answer questions. I could ask Rob Stewart questions all day long (and he’s from Ontario no less). I only got one in amidst a flurry of some really annoying questions that were clearly answered in the film. But he happily re-explained the film for everyone over and over. He's a hot environmentalist and a nice guy.

It’s a must-see movie. I recommend it over Shortbus even. But it’s not for the little ones. It’s got the kind of real-life violence I had to watch through the gaps between my fingers. Violence against sharks that is. And turtles and seals and other beautiful creatures of the ocean.

The survival of sharks means the survival of the whole food chain - and us. I can't explain it all here. Just go see the film already!

I knew that fishers (the gender-neutral term for fishermen?) tend to catch a lot of stuff they don’t want – I remember the anti-tuna years because too many dolphins were being caught in nets. But I love the analogy used in the movie after showing a 60-mile long stretch of bated hooks in the ocean. It’s like running a line of traps 60 miles long through the forest when you hope to catch, say, some deer (or perhaps a better analogy would be using these traps in the forest to catch cows and pigs). It would trap all sorts of unwanted animals – moose, rabbits, foxes, dogs, porcupines, bears, baby foxes (I love foxes), pregnant deer, etc. Thousands of animals would die a slow painful death, and be left there to rot.

Happens every day in the ocean.

Stewart told us it wasn’t the film he intended to make. He was going to make a pretty movie about the beauty of sharks. But he caught a ride to a Costa Rican island with a bunch of activists headed by Paul Watson, one of the founding members of Greenpeace. They all got charged after trying to stop a group of illegal shark-poachers, and the movie dramatically changed course.  Watson gave a perfect speech on the power of a small group of individuals to change the world.

Stewart says his next project will be creating a reality show with biologists and conservationists, and have them travel to different parts of the world with the challenge of affecting the environment in some way – and, at the same time, sleeping with each other and stabbing each other in the backs like any group of 15 people might do if kept in close quarters for long enough (he didn't say that last bit, but I could tell he was thinking it).

I can’t wait!