The following thirty-seven essays appear in alphabetical order based on the author’s last name. On pages 391–393 readers will find a bibliography, which also serves as an index, of the films discussed in the essays.
| the human side of deforestationRENATA MARSON TEIXEIRA DE ANDRADE-DOWNS | |
| “WE FEEL REMORSE in cutting one-hundred-year-old trees in three minutes, but we must do it to survive,” a charcoal worker sighs. The Charcoal People is a beautiful documentary based on a rich ethnography of charcoal production for pig-iron, and was filmed on the frontier of forests in the states of Mato Grosso, Goiás, Pará, and Amazon in Brazil. When I first saw The Charcoal People last summer, I immediately added this film to the syllabus for my graduate seminar on the environmental history, policy, and culture of Latin America. Whereas many academic studies of charcoal production have concentrated on economic, energy, and environmental issues, this film focuses on the human side of the human-nature interaction as related to forest destruction for pig-iron and steel production in Brazil. What makes this film so interesting is that it shows how consumption of steel-products, such as cars, in the United States, Europe, and Japan is deeply tied to the lives and struggles for survival of charcoal workers (carvoeiros) in the hinterlands of Brazil. The Charcoal People portrays carvoeiros’ lives through nuanced biographies, focusing on the socially produced identity of the carvoeiro as an inherent part of the destruction of forests, and on their bodies as an anachronistic technology, rooted in mid-nineteenth century charcoal production. | 1 |
| With no voices other than those of the carvoeiros and their families, the film depicts the hardships in the lives of adults, teenagers, and children, while focusing on their social identity, morals, and bodily engagement in a series of specialized activities related to the production of charcoal in brick beehive kilns. The film starts with familiar scenes and noises of trees falling as large chains attached to them are pulled by the engine of a very old truck, driven by a young subcontractor who owns the truck and works for the landowner who leased the lands for the steel mill. The next scene extracts a short conversation, during the delivery of wood for burning inside the charcoal kilns, between the young truck owner and a seventy-six year-old African-Brazilian carvoeiro who helps him to unload the wood at the site: “Not much wood! Have you tried that lot there,” points the carvoeiro. “The road access is closed and the forest is protected by law and now fenced,” responds the truck owner. From that moment on, the film focuses on short biographies of carvoeiros, both adults and children, portraying how people of different races share a common past and a contemporary struggle to survive by producing charcoal. The images of the many different bodies exposed to the elements, heat and smoke are compelling, and clearly depict health hazards and unsafe work conditions to which these people are subjected. | 2 |
| The film adds a historical perspective on the anachronism of current charcoal production by connecting the bodies of carvoeiros with those of Brazil Indian and African slaves who produced charcoal during the peak of mid-nineteenth- century smelting and forging in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. | 3 |
| This film also helps us to understand the role of family, child labor, government, and steelmakers in the production of low-cost charcoal and low-waged carvoeiros. For example, generations of carvoeiro families, many times compared to “gold miners,” have had to migrate toward eucalyptus plantations or pockets of open access forests in order to harvest them and produce charcoal. This situation has aggravated their working conditions, as one of the carvoeiros observes: “Charcoal used to be a good business, but today pays almost nothing.” | 4 |
| The film also poses a historical question about why steelmakers in Brazil have chosen charcoal instead of coal to reduce iron into steel. There is not a simple answer, but I wished that the film had also touched on macro-economic and political factors that have contributed to charcoal choices. First, the fact that domestic coal production has been so small while the cost of imported coal so high has historically forced the Brazilian government to create incentives to use regulated quotas of primary forest to produce low-cost charcoal. Second, the economic volatility of the U.S. pig-iron price has historically dampened long-term investment in reforestation for charcoal production in Brazil. Instead, the film avoids those discussions by focusing primarily on the lives of the carvoeiros. | 5 |
| With astonishing and sensitive photography of the human dimension in charcoal production, The Charcoal People complements and expands related sections on “Instruments of Devastation” and “The Development Imperative” found in Warren Dean’s classic account of the destruction of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, With Broadax and Firebrand (California, 1995). While Dean briefly describes the role of itinerant workers in charcoal production, this documentary alerts us to what could happen to the Amazon forest if sixty-thousand carvoeiros migrate to the Amazon region to produce charcoal where new iron ores have been found and steel mills have been constructed. However, this film also presents an in-depth perspective on what sort of hardships those sixty-thousand carvoeiros face in Brazil, with vulnerable and volatile work contracts, child labor, and worsening living and working conditions, as they migrate and follow multinational steelmakers toward the Amazon forest. In the bodies of the carvoeiros, forests have a purpose: to produce their livelihoods. | 6 |
| Environmental history as a discipline is incorporating the roles of race, gender, and class in environmental transformations by focusing on anachronistic and subaltern histories, borrowing from concepts in political ecology, environmental anthropology, and environmental justice. By situating the history of deforestation and charcoal production in the carvoeiros’ bodies, environmental history gains insights beyond the traditional political-economy framework of energy production and deforestation. By connecting the carvoeiros’ bodies and the hardships of their lives to the global consumption of steel for automobile production, for instance, one gains a new understanding on how the environmental history of tropical forests is deeply intertwined with global consumption and technological choices in a non-deterministic account of change. | 7 |
Renata Marson Teixeira de Andrade-Downs is a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, and research affiliate with the University of Sao Paulo, on environmental history of energy (hydro, charcoal, biofuel and oil), water and fisheries, and is currently preparing a manuscript on the saga of the SãoFrancisco River in Northeast Brazil. | |
the lion queen
WILLIAM BEINART
| BORN FREE WAS a landmark film depicting the relationship between Joy and George Adamson and the lioness Elsa. Filmed in 1964–1965 and released in 1966, it was based on their experiences in Kenya in the late 1950s. George Adamson worked as a game warden at Isiolo, north of Mt. Kenya; Joy was an Austrian botanical illustrator who married him in 1944.1 It was always a troubled relationship, but it opened up great opportunities for both of them. In 1956 Adamson shot a lioness which was believed to have attacked an African homestead and brought home its three motherless cubs. It was not unusual for Europeans in Africa to semi-domesticate wild animals and Joy “took absolute possession of the cubs.”2 Two were sent to zoos in Europe, but they kept the third, Elsa. At two years old, this lioness started hunting local livestock and they decided, after some conflict with the authorities, to put her back into the wild—a long and difficult process. | 8 |
| Joy Adamson wrote about the experience in Born Free, which appeared in 1960.3 Its extraordinary photographs showed the Adamsons, in relaxed everyday interaction with the lioness. The Adamsons maintained contact with Elsa in the wild, where she gave birth to three cubs, and Joy wrote Living Free, Forever Free, and a children’s book as sequels.4Born Free sold 1 million copies in England and 5 million copies overall; it attracted ambitious filmmakers. Columbia took it on, with Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay for High Noon and was involved in Guns of Navarone and Doctor Zhivago, as executive producer.5 The lead actors, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, already animal-lovers, were determined that they should capture the spirit of the book as closely as possible. The film was made on location and lions of different ages had to be trained to mimic the relationship with Elsa. George Adamson again lived with lions on a daily basis, in order to habituate them to people: film gave rise to, and then reflected, a reality which was as extraordinary as the earlier events it was portraying. | 9 |
| Partly because of the publicity around the books, the film had an enormous impact when it was released. Travers and McKenna, also a husband-and-wife team, found Adamson’s “attitude towards lions, and indeed all living creatures, was our chief influence during those very difficult months of filming, and will always be a guiding light to us on questions of animal treatment, and animal-human co-existence in the world.”6 Adamson repeated the process of restoring some of the film’s lions to the wild. Travers filmed this as a documentary, The Lions are Free (1967), shown three times on prime-time U.S. television to estimated audiences of 35 million.7 Sequels included Living Free (1972), A Lion Called Christian (1972), and To Walk with Lions (1998). The latter depicted the relationships among George Adamson in his old age, his lions, and his disciple, Tony Fitzjohn, who became a leading protagonist for the Mkomazi park in Tanzania.8 The drama of Elsa’s life and its aftermath played to a large Western audience. | 10 |
| Born Free, as a book and a film, was not only a minutely observed record of a lion growing up in captivity; what made it so striking was the emotional interaction between Elsa and the Adamsons. We see hugs, caresses, smacks (by the lion), playfulness, and humor. Elsa’s expressions were interpreted by the Adamsons and, in turn, she was seen to understand theirs. The words trust, love, and affection are expressed in print, and an attempt was made to show them on screen. The classic images of George show him walking with Elsa, and later the film lions Boy and Girl, his back to them while they followed. As part of training the lioness Mara, he moved his tent into her enclosure and “for the next three months she slept regularly in it, usually stretched out on the floor alongside my bed and sometimes on it.”9 Similar preparation with another lioness enabled Travers to do a bedroom scene.10 Adamson—and the actors—talked to and made sounds like the lions. Born Free showed not just appreciation for other species, but for individuals among them. Naming all these animals was an essential element in their absorption into human households, or interactive contexts, where they could become the objects of warmth and care—and were implicitly accorded rights.11 | 11 |
| Born Free projects this emotion and this is a key to its success. But there are other currents. Both the Adamsons’ project and the film aimed to be educational and conservationist. They saw themselves as representing animal behavior more accurately. In their strategies for handling lions, kindness had to be supplemented by study and experience of instinctive animal responses—especially how to avoid aggression. The film effectively transmits some of these ideas in a non-didactic way. The Adamsons were conscious of breaking boundaries and it is difficult not to marvel at the film’s capacity to capture such interaction. That we know this to have been achieved with careful training, and a minimum of special effects, makes the film more memorable. Audiences could see a vastly enlarged scope of animal behavior which few had encountered in the flesh. | 12 |
| The film seems overly sentimental at moments—the usual tendency in popular films about animals. This emerges partly from the role of McKenna, small, blond and vulnerable, who could convey only an element of Joy Adamson’s combative and unpredictable personality. Foreman and his team clearly saw how natural history and drama could be married to make lions cozy. They projected animal families as a desirable state: Born Free ends, as does Foreman’s short photo book of its making, with “the family—Elsa, her mate and the cubs relax[ing] on their rock.”12 The film offered audiences the possibility of extending toward wild animals the protective impulses they felt toward pets. | 13 |
| Sentiment was tempered by a sense of danger. David Attenborough, recalling his visit to film the Adamsons with Elsa around 1960, was struck both by Joy and George’s smouldering relationship and “the violence that lay beneath the surface wherever we looked.”13 In the Adamsons’ view, aggressiveness had been exaggerated as a trait of large mammals, but part of the attraction of the film was the immanent threat of living with lions. Our imaginations, or better senses, tell us that wild animals are dangerous and this provides a dramatic and tense undercurrent to the film. Both in the making and in the film, injuries and attacks took place; in To Walk with Lions, Fitzjohn and Adamson are both mauled bloodily. This tension also helps to convey the message that the Adamsons were not simply attempting to domesticate wild animals, but believed that the best place for wild animals was in the wild, even if human care was sometimes necessary and justified by their special role at the interface between humans and animals. The wild by this time meant reserved areas. | 14 |
© Columbia Pictures. Courtesy Columbia Pictures/Photofest. Virginia McKenna (as Joy Adamson), a lioness playing Elsa the Lioness, and Bill Travers (as George Adamson), in Born Free (1966), directed by James Hill. | |
| It is difficult to escape the implication in Born Free that the primary responsibility for protecting African wildlife lay with white people and Western society. Filmed after Kenyan independence, it makes some attempts to escape these shackles, including African actors who depicted Adamson’s assistants, Nuru and Makedde, in reasonably prominent roles. But ultimately it is a drama played out between African animals and white men and women. For Western, especially British audiences, this was also a more comfortable vision of Africa after the conflicts and violence of Mau Mau and decolonization. | 15 |
| In her more intense moments, Joy Adamson saw herself as an innovator in the progress of civilization and George Adamson believed that they had made a lasting impact on how human beings regard wild animals.14 Although Born Free, as a book and a film, has perhaps not been claimed by modern environmental movements, it is a ubiquitous reference point and did surely influence some strands of popular environmentalism, especially its animal-centric, anglophone forms. I did not like the hit song, which—along with the score—won an Oscar. | 16 |
William Beinart is professor of race relations, University of Oxford, and chair of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. He was formerly director of the African Studies Centre (2002–2006), and is author of Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, 2001), The Rise of Conservation in South Africa (Oxford, 2003), Social History and African Environments (Ohio, 2003, edited with JoAnn McGregor), and Environment and Empire (forthcoming, 2007, with Lotte Hughes). NOTES1. George Adamson, Bwana Game: the Life Story of George Adamson (London: Collins and Harvill, 1968); and My Pride and Joy: an Autobiography (London: Collins and Harvill, 1986). Adrian House, The Great Safari: the Lives of George and Joy Adamson (London: Harper Collins, 1995).2. Adamson, Bwana Game, 219.3. Joy Adamson, Born Free: a Lioness of Two Worlds (London: Collins, 1960).4. Joy Adamson, Living Free: the Story of Elsa and Her Cubs (London: Collins, 1961); and Forever Free (London: Collins, 1962).5. Carl Foreman, A Cast of Lions: the Story of the Making of the Film Born Free (London: Fontana Books, 1966).6. Virginia McKenna, Some of My Friends Have Tails (London: Collins and Harvill, 1970), 36.7. Ibid., 42.8. Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), which is highly critical of the exclusion of African people from this reserve.9. Adamson, Bwana Game, 258.10. Ibid., 261.11. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 113–15, discussing animal naming.12. Foreman, A Cast of Lions, endpage.13. David Attenborough, Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (London: BBC Books, 2002), 152.14. Adamson, Bwana Game, 219. | |
dancing along the edges of the human and the natural
MICHAEL BESS
| FAST, CHEAP, AND OUT OF CONTROL is sometimes classified as a documentary. Nothing could be more misleading. It is a visual poem, composed in the manner of a fugue. It is by moments astonishing, inspiring, fascinating, baffling, and deeply moving. With good reason, it established Errol Morris’s reputation as a truly great practitioner of the cinematic art—a reputation that has been further underscored by his equally brilliant (and equally unsettling) 2004 film, The Fog of War. | 17 |
| This masterful film presents portraits of four unusual men, interweaving and juxtaposing their thoughts and deeds. Dave Hoover is a lion tamer; George Mendonca is a topiary gardener (that is, he prunes large bushes to make them into animal shapes); Ray Mendez is a specialist on naked mole rats, the only mammals known to establish a social structure akin to that of bees and ants; and last but not least, Rodney Brooks is a robot designer at MIT. The gulf that separates these four subjects’ lives is immediately obvious, as Morris jumps from one to the other and back again; but what gradually emerges as the film goes along are the commonalities they share as well. The film viewer cannot remain passive when confronted with this stately procession of sheer diversity: The mind begins frantically searching for patterns, comparisons, thematic threads. All four of these men are tamers of nature, determined to understand and control creatures in the nonhuman world; all four are passionate about what they do, to the point of eccentricity; all four share a certain ambivalence about the power they hold over their creations and express doubts about where the final control really resides. | 18 |
| At the same time Morris plays the tease: He leaves the connections tenuous, tantalizing, uncertain. Just when the viewer thinks a pattern is becoming clear, a new one emerges to displace and slightly disrupt the former one. And then there’s the jungle movie footage: interspersed throughout the interview material and images of these four men doing what they love to do, we are confronted with dramatic scenes lifted from the 1936 Hollywood film, “Darkest Africa”—a kitschy and very obviously “dated” story about brave explorers battling in a jungle city to save a captive woman. The effect is completely perplexing at first, then gradually begins to establish subtle and unexpected connections and juxtapositions with the struggles of the lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole rat man, and robot maker. Meanwhile, a powerful musical score reminiscent of Philip Glass ties it all together, giving the film a haunting emotional tone, somewhere between melancholy, obsession, and awe. | 19 |
| As the film advances, we keep learning more about what makes these four remarkable fellows tick; the overlap effect gradually builds up, making the lives of these totally different individuals appear increasingly kindred. The lion tamer talks nostalgically about the golden age of circus acts, which he believes has now passed irrevocably away; he tells us the tricks of his trade (“never for a second forget that this creature really wants to eat you”). The 70-year-old topiary gardener reflects on the obvious fact that, when he becomes too old to pursue his daily routine of nipping and snipping, his creations will instantly go their own way once again. The mole rat expert describes his awe at the complexity of these creatures, who have built a little jungle city of their own, a glassed-in world with its own intricate rituals and hierarchies and division of labor. The robot maker speaks excitedly about the feeling he gets when he sets loose one of his mechanical creations and “it just does what’s in its nature to do.” | 20 |
Photo by Nubar Alexandian, © Sony Pictures Classics. Rodney Brooks’ robot, as portrayed in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997), directed by Errol Morris. | |
| In its nature? A robot? What kind of nature is that? This film is guaranteed to disturb anyone who would like to believe that the line between the artificial and the natural is clean and clear-cut. It’s all about the places where humans, machines, animals, and plants get deeply embroiled in each other’s affairs. What category does George Mendonca’s giant giraffe-bush fit into—human artifact, animal, or plant? Is a naked mole rat less or more insect-like than one of Rodney Brooks’s scrambling six-legged robots?—mammal, insect, machine? Morris evidently takes great delight in this kind of destabilization of boundaries. | 21 |
| This film is also about humility, the ephemeral nature of human endeavors. It leaves us with a sense of affection for the passionately quixotic efforts of these four men, each devoted to an eccentric pursuit that will clearly, in the end, fade away. Someday, they know, and we know, the lions will cease to obey; the bushes and shrubs will revert to the shape of their inscrutable inner telos; the mole rats will continue with their busy little lives, oblivious to the passing of the man who beheld them with such fascination; the robots will grow in number and populate our lives, becoming “fast, cheap, and out of control” (Rodney Brooks’s words) as we adapt to them and they adapt to us. All of these creatures, man-made or not, parade before us in Morris’s tone-poem: it leaves us with a feeling of kinship spreading across the categories we customarily use to set ourselves apart. Human, machine, plant, animal: just “doing what’s in our nature to do.” | 22 |
| This film would make a wonderful addition to any course on environmental history or green politics, because it impels the viewer to question the meanings of “nature” and “the natural,” and to reconsider the relation between humans and the myriad varieties of nonhumans that surround us. Thus, the film deftly complicates and problematizes many of the “given” concepts that arise in discussing environmental issues, and it does so in a way that powerfully engages the viewer. Too often, students tend to associate environmental issues (and environmental history) with dreary declensionist tales of woe, mayhem, and impending doom; and with preachy scholarly efforts to mobilize students for the broader cause. This film confounds those expectations: it preaches nothing at all, except the possibility of seeing ourselves, and our surroundings, in all kinds of exciting new ways. | 23 |
Michael Bess is Chancellor’s Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006). He is currently working on a study of the moral and social implications of human biological enhancement. | |
negotiating the thin red line
LISA M. BRADY
| IN MANY WAR MOVIES, there are clear winners and losers, often drawn around undisputed lines of good and evil. The focus is typically on a single, heroic individual who attains final victory through some act of daring or sacrifice. In Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line, there are no heroes. There are only individuals struggling to understand what roles they play and to find meaning in their circumstances. Malick’s film is based on James Jones’s 1962 novel of the same name. It examines the U.S. Army’s successful bid in 1942–1943 to wrest control over the small tropical island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese. The battle was a crucial turning point in the Pacific Theater and was the first step toward larger Allied victories in the region. While The Thin Red Line takes license in its presentation of the military history of the battle, it is brilliant in its portrayal of relationships—between soldiers and civilians, between officers and their men, and between humans and nature. | 24 |
| The Thin Red Line is not your typical war movie, a fact made plain in the film’s opening scene. Missing are the guns, the tanks, the marching soldiers. There are no valiant, determined men stumbling over bloody corpses (that comes later). No sense of chaos assaults the senses, no battle cries indicate that this, in fact, is a film about a war. Instead, the movie begins with a crocodile silently submerging itself in murky water, its presence quickly obscured by the algae growing on the liquid surface. From there, the camera turns its lens on the jungle. As the camera pans up into the verdant canopy, a voice asks, “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself—the land with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?” These questions are left unanswered (as indeed they must be), but they form the philosophical foundation for the film. | 25 |
| It is this uncertainty, this questioning, that makes The Thin Red Line so compelling. The film has few absolutes, and even those are presented with a cynical edge. In postulating about the reason they were fighting the war, Sergeant Welsh, played by Sean Penn, says, “Property. The whole fucking thing’s about property.” The broader issues Malick raises—the justness of war, the existence of choice and individual freedom, ambition, cowardice, life, death, the relationship between humans and nature—are timeless. Moreover, it is simply a stunningly beautiful film. Malick relies on images rather than words to illustrate his point, using voice-overs and dialogue judiciously. One of the best qualities of the film is a result of Malick’s fluid direction and meandering story line. Nearly every scene can be viewed independently, without extensive exposition on its specific context, and most of the issues raised transcend the events on Guadalcanal. For all these reasons, the film is among my favorites, personally and professionally. | 26 |
| I was transfixed the first time I watched it, fascinated by the elegant juxtaposition between nature’s calm existence and war’s frantic striving. My favorite scene, the one I always show my students, depicts the first major engagement between the Americans and the Japanese. In order to capture the enemy position, the Americans have to cross an open field and climb a steep incline that is defended by a few well-fortified Japanese machine gun nests. The battle scene resembles its counterparts in more traditional war movies until Malick zooms in to show us what’s happening on the ground—literally. There we see that the human conflict matters little to the hatchling struggling out of its shell and beginning its life in the midst of death, or to the snake winding its way through the soldiers hunkered down in the tall grass. Rather than coming across as hackneyed, the scene provides an excellent example of nature’s agency and of the importance of terrain within the context of war. | 27 |
| Other scenes are less successful in avoiding cliché, but are still useful for encouraging students to question their assumptions about nature and culture and for introducing important concepts within environmental history. Perhaps the best example is the second scene of the film, which depicts a village of Pacific Islanders living harmoniously with nature in a tropical paradise. Their lives are untouched by the war, except for the presence of two American soldiers who are absent without leave. The village is peaceful and its residents want for nothing. Later in the film, however, the soldiers return to find the community all but destroyed. I use the scene to introduce to my students the idea of constructions of nature and to discuss the implications of assuming that “traditional” ways of life have no ecological impact. | 28 |
| While the two scenes I’ve described are perhaps the most “teachable,” there are dozens of vivid images scattered throughout the film that have left deep and lasting impressions on my mind. My favorite, and perhaps the most evocative, is the quiet concentration one young soldier demonstrates in the midst of the terrible firefight on the hill; he seems oblivious to the ravages of war around him as he gently strokes a small plant, the leaves of which curl up at his touch. Another is the final scene of the film. The Americans, having taken the island from the Japanese, are shipping out to their next deployment. From the departing boats, Malick pans back to the shore of Guadalcanal, where the jungle looks as it did before the war arrived. | 29 |
| Despite some of its historical and conceptual flaws, Malick’s film provides important insights into the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. The Thin Red Line is not just another movie about the glories of war; it is a profound investigation into the meaning of conflict, not just for human societies, but for nature as well. | 30 |
Lisa M. Brady, Boise State University, is the author of “The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War” (Environmental History, July 2005). Her current research continues to examine the relationships between war and nature, both in the American Civil War and in the Korean DMZ. | |
applied science to the rescue
TOM BROOKING
| “IT SHOULD BE fertile,” muses an archetypal New Zealand farmer at the start of Pumicelands, a naively optimistic state-funded documentary (legend has it that the voice belonged to New Zealand’s doyen of grassland science and one of the most powerful men in the country when the documentary was made—Bruce Levy).1 The farmer goes on to suggest that the infertility of the Pumicelands at the volcanic center of the North Island of New Zealand is a major mystery because it’s “fine and friable.” Loosely based on Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains, the Pumicelands documentary goes on to tell in a very unproblematic manner how applied science not only solved the mystery, but opened a large area of formerly useless land (cattle and sheep both withered and died until the addition of critical trace elements such as cobalt and molybdenum) for more intensive settlement.2 Perhaps what is most fascinating about this classic New Zealand environmental film is the difference in tone from The Plow. | 31 |
| Pumicelands uses a bright and breezy commentator to explain how the soils of the central North Island defied scientific understanding for many years. The producer almost seems to be playing Tigger to Lorentz’s Eyeore because The Plow’s script is delivered with gravitas rather than the breathless levity of a Movietone Newsreel. Things become even sillier for the modern viewer when, after four minutes, white-coated scientists are shown working in a laboratory. The rather clichéd tones of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra accompany the heavily telegraphed announcement: “And then—discovery.” Twenty-first-century students find this moment so daffy that they burst out laughing. In fact it took over thirty years of experiment in field and laboratory and much trial and error to crack this problem. According to the documentary, though, this quick fix would bring benefit to both Pakeha (white New Zealanders) and Maori (native New Zealanders long dispossessed of most of their land by the state and white farmers). Seemingly oblivious to the irony involved in this claim, the documentary marches on to show bulldozers, driven down precipitous slopes by carefree latter-day cowboys, mincing scruffy secondary growth into submission. “Man’s” inevitable triumph over such obstacles as deficient soils is confirmed. The documentary concludes in an upbeat fashion by showing how a new bicultural community complete with brand new schools and houses is being built on the land rescued by applied science. Corny jokes about birds in cages and the luring of women to such a relatively remote area follow before the documentary relocates into a school room. There Maori and Pakeha children sing Little Liza Jane with no sense of either history or irony. The end comes with a flashback to the farmer muttering “it should be fertile.” | 32 |
| Visiting agrarian historians from the United States have expressed surprise that New Zealand farmers, agricultural scientists, and politicians have maintained a rather overconfident belief concerning the ability of applied science and government agencies to fix environmental problems.3Pumicelands presents science as a form of alchemy with magical transformative powers and reveals a kind of blind faith in the capacity of applied science to solve problems quickly and painlessly. Today it is still hard to find expression of the view that every solution found for old problems creates at least three new problems. In this sense there is a complete reversal here between the frequently gloomy, Bergman-like tone of New Zealand dramatic movies, compared with the hollow glamour and shallow optimism of Hollywood. | 33 |
| In contrast, The Plow presents nature as overwhelmingly powerful and incapable of domestication. Yet migrants to both the United States and New Zealand carried notions of the superiority of rural life and both peoples imagined their new land as abundant, fertile and easily transformable into a superior garden. Most of the idealism variously described as “arcadianism” or “ruralism” found its way to New Zealand as well as North America.4 So why are these movies so different? | 34 |
| The obvious reason is that New Zealand has never experienced an environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Dust Bowl, even if revisionist work suggests that the Dust Bowl may have been a natural phenomenon rather than a disaster induced by human folly.5 In contrast to the powerful and lingering mythologies associated with the Dust Bowl, the slips and floods of 1938 seem modest. Indeed most New Zealanders have forgotten all about them even though they did claim the lives of twenty-one road builders near Gisborne and convinced the First Labour Government to establish the Soil and Water Conservation Council in 1941. Nothing anywhere near as bad occurred again until Cyclone Bola in 1988 when most New Zealanders had forgotten the lessons of the big wet of 1938. Many farmers even continued to deny the link between deforestation and flooding down to Bola despite the best efforts of Lance McCaskill (coincidentally trained in the 1930s by America’s soil preservation gurus who had learned so much from the Dust Bowl), other soil conservators, and Catchment Boards.6 Soil erosion remained a problem for engineers rather than farmers. | 35 |
| More subtle differences also explain the very different approach. Whereas urban American intellectuals constructed the countryside as problematic by the 1930s, most New Zealanders still idealized rural life into the 1950s. Farmers continued to wield considerable power within the New Zealand parliament and agricultural scientists held more sway with state bureaucracy than industrialists, entrepreneurs, or accountants, so long as agriculture still earned around 80 percent of the country’s export income, that is, down to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s. Consequently, the industry remained above and beyond criticism of its environmentally damaging practices. Indeed, no major protest against environmental degradation emerged until the 1960s; even then this was largely directed at industrialization and dam building. | 36 |
| New Zealand’s identity as a kind of social laboratory from the 1890s inflated national confidence in its capacity to solve problems. By 1949, government officials and many others believed that state-assisted investigation of any problem would provide quick and easy solutions, usually in the form of some kind of bureaucratic mechanism. Just as the Department of Social Welfare and the expansion of state housing had supposedly removed poverty, so the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the agricultural colleges, and various research institutes would eradicate any negative effects of farming should such unlikely developments occur. | 37 |
| New Zealand’s relative newness, even compared with the United States, and its ongoing commitment to the Imperial project, also help to explain the difference. Pakeha New Zealanders had not been in the country long enough by 1954 to realize fully the consequences of the massive environmental transformation they had wrought. New Zealand had been changed as much in a single century of settlement as the United States had in four hundred years and Europe in two millennia. The significance of that change, which happened so fast, had literally not dawned in the consciousness of any but a few exceptional individuals. Furthermore, the guaranteed British market removed the need to think about other ways of making a living and encouraged turning to chemical inputs as the quickest and easiest method of solving soil problems. Despite the best efforts of ecologists and environmental historians, the triumphalist narrative of Pumicelands remains a dominant orthodoxy as New Zealand farmers continue to extract high levels of production by making large inputs to their indifferent soils. Films such as Pumicelands have much to teach us about New Zealand’s environmental history. | 38 |
Tom Brooking is professor of history at the University of Otago, where he teaches a course on New Zealand environmental history. He co-edited Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Oxford, 2002) with Eric Pawson and is currently leading a major project on the reconstruction of New Zealand’s grasslands with Eric Pawson. NOTES1. Tom Brooking, Vaughan Wood, and Robin Hyde, “The Grasslands Revolution Reconsidered,” in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 169–82.2. Ross Galbreath, “A Grassland Utopia? Pastoral Farming and Grassland Research in New Zealand,” in DSIR: Making Science Work for New Zealand, 1926–1992 (Wellington: Victoria University Press/Historical Branch, 1998), 58–79.3. For example, Professor Tom Isern of North Dakota State University.4. Tom Brooking, “Use It or Lose It: Unravelling the Land Debate in Late Nineteenth- Century New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 30 (October 1996): 145–47; and Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Origins of Modern New Zealand Society (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 19–73.5. Geoff Cunfer, On The Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station: Texas A&M; University Press, 2003).6. See Michael Roche, “The State as Conservationist, 1920–60: ‘Wise Use’ of Forests, Lands, and Water,” in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Pawson and Brooking, 192–97. | |
the root of your family
KATHLEEN BROSNAN
| IN A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, filmmaker Alfonso Arau juxtaposes the budding romance between two young Californians in 1945 with the story of her wine-making family’s more mature romance with the land. Victoria Aragon, the pregnant, unwed twenty-something daughter of an upper-class, Mexican-American family, returns home to the Napa Valley from graduate school. On her trip, she meets Paul Sutton, a recently discharged veteran who, disillusioned with his own marriage, has returned to his job as a traveling candy salesman. He pretends to be Victoria’s husband temporarily to placate her father. Performing this charade, Paul and Victoria fall in love, but the father remains openly hostile to the young man, who was raised in an orphanage and, in the father’s opinion, possesses no sense of family and no sense of place. After obtaining an annulment, Paul tries to explain to the vineyardist how much he loves Victoria. In anger, the father attacks the former soldier and accidentally starts a fire that seemingly ruins the vineyard. Paul climbs a hill and tears from the ground the oldest vine which the family brought to California, via Spain and Mexico, some fifty years earlier. In discovering that its rootstock has escaped the fire’s wrath, Paul stakes his place in the family and restores its landed heritage. The father tells Paul, “This is the root of your life, the root of your family. You are bound to this land.” | 39 |
| In this sentimental, visually alluring film, Arau blends fact and fantasy in what he calls “magical realism.”1 Some scenes, for example, were filmed at Napa wineries, but many landscapes were computer generated. The most memorably rapturous scene occurs when a frost threatens the next-day’s harvest. The young couple, scantily clad despite freezing temperatures, joins her family and their workers to don translucent “butterfly wings” and waft among the vines, bringing the heat of the smudge pots down to the grapes. Arau’s mixture of reality and illusion proves more fanciful than historical. | 40 |
| The Napa Valley offers a nearly ideal environment for the cultivation of grapes, and frost has been a problem, albeit not a problem for autumn harvests. “Cool conditions, and especially the cool nights, allow the grapes to ripen with an adequate natural acidity which is necessary for producing fine table wines. The only handicap is the spring frosts.”2 In March, grapevines experience budbreak, and frost is a danger as this new growth begins. In some years, before grape growers developed better protections, more than half the crop was lost in a single spring night.3 In contrast, the first autumn frost in Napa does not occur until the last days of October, after most of the valley’s grapes have been picked. There is no record of a threatening frost on the eve of harvest in 1945 or any other year.4 | 41 |
| Before the 1960s, vineyardists lit smudge pots filled with oil to warm the grapes, while smoke drifted through the vines, as the film portrays. There is no evidence, however, that Napans slipped on “butterfly wings” to aid the process. Since the 1960s, Napa vintners have employed either huge wind machines that force warmer air back to the ground or overhead sprinklers whose water freezes as it comes in contact with the vine, emitting latent heat and insulating the grapes.5 When grapegrowers contemplated these new methods, they balanced competing economic and environmental concerns. The dense, acrid air pollution generated by the smudge pots was hardly the luminous cloud suggested by Arau. It spread across Napa County, and occasionally reached the east side of San Francisco Bay. Alternatively, the scarcity of water in California made sprinklers a risky choice for vineyards that lacked private reservoirs.6 In the end, given the rise of tourism, complaints from neighbors, and the efficiencies of the new methods, vintners abandoned smudge pots and their vexatious smoke. | 42 |
| Arau fills the frost scene and others with a plethora of workers. The Aragons live in a California-missionary-style mansion. Both elements suggest a wealth that few Napa winemakers enjoyed in the 1940s. Prohibition had devastated the wine industry, and Repeal had resolved few problems. Equipment was in disrepair, expertise was lost, consumers had moved on, and vineyards contained poor quality grapes.7 Moreover, as the industry struggled to regain its footing in 1945, no Mexican-American family had achieved the viticultural success experienced by or the racial acceptance accorded the Aragons at the harvest festival. | 43 |
| In the movie, the family repeatedly claims its heritage by emphasizing the European rootstock that connects it both to the land in Napa and to its own European ancestors. In doing so, the film ignores an environmental catastrophe faced by Napa and most of the world’s viticultural regions in the nineteenth century—phylloxera—but in its error, opens the door for a classroom discussion of the global consequences of species shifting. Native to the Mississippi River Valley, phylloxera is a sap-sucking insect that attacks the roots of grapes vines, although in a parasitic adaptation, it does not kill all American vines. Phylloxera traveled to France in the 1850s and decimated its vineyards. The insect spread across Europe, and later arrived in California when local vintners recruited v. vinifera cuttings from Europe. University of California scientists mistakenly recommended a v. californica rootstock that proved nonresistant. In 1890, Napa County held some 17,000 acres of bearing vines; a decade later, only 2,000 remained, forcing local vintners finally to acknowledge successful French experiments with v. rupestris St. George, another American rootstock, and begin replanting.8 By 1945, few rootstocks that originated in Spain still would be found in the Napa Valley. | 44 |
| Rather than search for accuracy in films, I hope to discover glimmers of historical truths. Arau captures a few truths. His “magic realism” mirrors Napans’ own use of romanticism to sell wine and promote viticultural and scenic tourism. Napans have merged visitors and vintages within a veil of European historicity and California-missionary architecture. Vineyards, they tell tourists, are tended by “gentlemen farmers” and combine the lure of a pastoral idyll with cosmopolitanism. Tourists, in turn, shape self-identities by visiting places that offer social affirmation. Nowhere was this truer than in the wine world. “Tourism is fundamentally about the difference of place, while wine is one of those rare commodities which is branded on the basis of its geographical origin.”9 Napans successfully pitched to people with the greatest disposable income the sensuous imagery that dominated travel guides and food books in postwar America and suggested an achievable vision of the good life.10 | 45 |
| In presenting the Aragons as a family of “gentlemen farmers,” the movie also offers another valuable lesson for the classroom because it propagates the agrarianism that has permeated American history. A long-accepted tenet of Western thought, agrarianism suggests that humans’ natural and nobler calling is in the cultivation of the land. In working the fields, or in this case, the vineyards, farmers supposedly acquire virtues such as honor, self-reliance, and manliness.11 This film allows us and our students to contemplate how much of agrarianism is myth and how much is reality, and even in the latter case, whether it has been a reality available to all Americans or one that has been denied to some on the basis of race or ethnicity. | 46 |
| Finally, we might ask alternatively whether, in claiming his heritage through the land and despite all his flaws, the father in the film captures a different truth. Does tilling the soil inculcate what historian Dan Flores calls a “spirit of place” grounded in human interaction with local environments?12 What “spirit of place” emerges from the Napa vineyards as human values—such as familial pride and romanticism—”engage in a dialectic with the land”? In an interesting classroom exercise, we might ask students if they similarly can describe the “spirit of place” in which they live and identify the cultural values that have interacted with the local environment to create this spirit. | 47 |
| In the end, A Walk in the Clouds offers the story of a family that defines its “sense of place” through an entwined interaction with its history and its environment, and in doing so, allows us to contemplate global environmental exchanges and to probe persistent rural myths that may have found new life in the tourist world. | 48 |
Kathleen Brosnan is associate professor of history and research director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. She is the author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change along the Front Range (New Mexico, 2002). Brosnan is completing an environmental history of the Napa Valley wine industry and editing the Encyclopedia of American Environmental History. NOTES1. Joe Brown, “Big, Fluffy ‘Clouds’,” Washington Post, August 11, 1995, sec. Weekend, p. 39.2. Maynard A. Amerine, “The Napa Valley Grape and Wine Industry,” Agricultural History 49 (1975): 289.3. “Frost Protection for North Coast Vineyards,” Leaflet 2743, Division of Agricultural Sciences, University of California, September 1975, 1; Herbert B. Schultz, “Microclimates on Spring Frost Nights in Napa Valley Vineyards,” American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 12 (June 1961): 81–87; “Napa River Trial Distribution Program: 1998 Frost Season,” California Department of Water Resources, February 1999, 1, 4; and Keith W. Bowers, “Basic Facts about Napa County Grape & Wine Industry,” University of California, Cooperative Extension, Napa, CA (1975).4. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to Present (San Francisco: The Wine Appreciation Guild, 1994), 21, 44, 51, 62, 64, 72, 91, 115, 144,171, 188, 244–45.5. “Frost Protection for North Coast Vineyards,” 3; “Wind Machine Prevents Frost Damage,” Wines and Vines 28 (August 1947): 18; and “Sprinkling Does an Anti-Frost Job,” Wines and Vines 51 (May 1970): 25.6. “Napa Trial Distribution Program,” 1–5; “Two Sides of the Air Pollution Issue,” Wines and Vines 51 (April 1970): 23; and Sullivan, Napa Wine, 144.7. Sullivan, Napa Wine, chaps. 9–11 passim; and Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America: from Prohibition to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33.8.First Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners (San Francisco: Edward Bosqui & Co., 1881), 89–92; First Annual Report of the Chief Executive Viticultural Officer of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for the Year 1881 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1882), 173–74; Eugene Hilgard, University of California, Report of the Viticultural Work during the Seasons 1883–4 and 1884–5 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1886), 207–10; Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for 1889–90 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1890), 22; Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for 1891–92 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1892), 11–12; Principal Cellars: “Winehaven” on San Francisco Bay (San Francisco: California Wine Association, [1909]); and Directory of Grape Growers, Wine Makers and Distillers of California (Sacramento: State Printers, 1891), 83–99.9. Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargain: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 15; C. Michael Hall, Gary Johnson, and Richard Mitchell, “Wine Tourism and Regional Development,” in Wine Tourism Around the World: Development, Management and Markets, ed. Liz Sharples Hall, Brock Cambourne, and Niki Macionis (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), 196 (quotation); John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 1 ; and C. Michael Hall and Niki Macionis, “Wine Tourism in Australia and New Zealand,” in Tourism and Recreation in Rural Areas, ed. Richard Butler, C. Michael Hall, and John Jenkins (Chister, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1998), 199.10. Equally significant from the perspective of the valley’s wine industry participants was the demographic character of Napa’s tourists. Vintners tapped a key group: baby boomers with disposable income. A subsequent study prepared for the Napa County Board of Supervisors disclosed that 56 percent of visitors to Napa County earned more than $50,000 in 1988; the median family income at the time was $42,200. Moreover, almost two thirds of the pleasure seekers surveyed had no children, suggesting fewer demands on their wealth. “Planning for Travel and Tourism in Napa County,” February 15, 1990, prepared for Napa County Board of Supervisors by Dean Runyan Associates, 65–67. The Napa Valley Conference and Visitors Bureau (NVCVB) unapologetically attempts to identify and cater to the very wealthiest consumers. Annual Report, 2000/2001.11. Randal Beeman and James Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); and Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).12. Dan Flores, “Spirit of Place and the Value of Nature in the American West,” in A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History, ed. James E. Sherow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 37. | |
the knowledge that is in names
JANE CARRUTHERS
| SHOULD THE EQUIVALENT of an Oscar ever be awarded to cattle, there will be no worthier recipients than the colorful Nguni livestock featured in Heaven’s Herds, a South African documentary about the close bonds between the Zulu people and their cattle. Given the iconic status of species like lion or elephant, it is perhaps surprising that cows are currently the favorite mammal in South Africa. On almost every street corner informal traders sell wire-bead decorated cattle, shopping centers display similar items in tourist outlets and art galleries, cow-hide handbags and upholstered furniture are seen everywhere, while the “Cow Parade”—life-size models painted in creative designs by well-known South African artists—on tour in retail malls countrywide is much admired and raises money for charity (see http://southafrica.cowparade.com/). | 49 |
| This popular interest in livestock emanates from a doctoral thesis in Zulu linguistics by Marguerite Poland (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 1997) that linked the kaleidoscopic coloring and patterning of Nguni cattle with the naming and praising practices of their Zulu owners. In 2003 the thesis became a best-selling book, The Abundant Herds: A Celebration of the Nguni Cattle of the Zulu People (Fernwood Press, 2003), illustrated by Leigh Voigt, a renowned wildlife artist. Heaven’s Herds has followed in its wake, the film narrated by Pitika Ntuli, Zulu poet, writer, and African Renaissance academic. It begins by following Poland’s sensitive naming thread, but the movie then adopts a more human-centered storyline on the role of livestock in modern, but nonetheless traditional, Zulu society. As with other pastoral people, cattle are a Zulu man’s most prized possessions, offering wealth and status, access to women, beasts of burden, a supply of hides and dung, food in the form of milk, and playthings for racing and fighting. They are slaughtered on special occasions like weddings and funerals. Most importantly, they serve as intermediaries between the living and the dead, and the ancestors need to be approached through and appeased by the ritual slaughter of an animal (the killings shown in the film are not for the squeamish). | 50 |
| The significance of cattle in the lives and history of precolonial communities such as the herding Khoekhoen and the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers (for example, Tswana, Zulu, and Xhosa) has been covered in a rich historical and archaeological literature. Scholars also have given some attention to settler livestock and imported ideas around environmental science. However, Heaven’s Herds opens up a number of relevant new questions for environmental historians, two of which are briefly considered here. The first concerns the ecopolitical factors that account for the rallying of the South African public—both white and black—behind a breed that was for many years dismissed as economically valueless “scrub” cattle, while the second is how to tap into the environmental knowledge communicated through Nguni cattle names. | 51 |
| The enthusiastic reception of the book, film, and cattle trinkets is yet another indication of the national pride that has galvanized South Africa since 1994. Valorizing an indigenous livestock breed like the Nguni promotes African self-respect and points to precolonial stewardship. It also contests a Western agricultural philosophy that informed apartheid’s “progressive” veterinary management when Africans were encouraged to farm with imported stock, restrict the number of cattle they owned, and subscribe to strict state veterinary interventions, all of which were fiercely resisted. But current thinking advocates sustainability and ecologically appropriate land use. Nguni can survive drought, poor grazing, and parasite infestations and diseases: extensive pastoralism with a resilient creature like the Nguni would be wise agricultural husbandry. These issues are being debated in a context of declining state subsidies and difficulties with access to international markets. But what about other local cattle strains? One fundamental interdisciplinary question would be: To what extent are Nguni “indigenous”? The archaeological evidence is not conclusive, but suggests that human migrations, warfare, barter, and cross-breeding between Bos indicus (Zebu) and Bos taurus (Taurine) created Sanga cattle, a diverse grouping with a variety of physical characteristics. Sanga cattle appear to have been in southern Africa for an extremely long time, but they did not arise here. | 52 |
| Historians also need to revisit the role of colonial agriculturalists, for they were not entirely uninterested in local breeds. Nguni cattle were studied by animal scientists from the early 1930s, and this work needs to be integrated into the historical discourse. It seems that the oldest and most popular local strain is the Afrikaner, but one might also consider the Basutho, Drakensberger, Sanganer, Western (Kalahari) Nguni, Pedi, and Shangan, the last two currently in very small numbers and perhaps heading for extinction, as previously happened to the Bolowna and “Hottentot.” Moreover, Bonsmara (which has been vilified as “exotic”) is, in fact, a fascinating landrace, being an internationally as well as a locally successful beef breed, developed in South Africa in the 1950s by crossing the Afrikaner with imported Herefords and Shorthorns. What an interesting analysis the environmental history of southern Africa’s local cattle breeds would make, perhaps asking too why wild animals such as eland and buffalo were never domesticated, and linking the subject with game ranching. | 53 |
| In contrast is the cultural heritage around Nguni, so beautifully expressed in names. The different colorings and patterns are careful descriptions of the natural and domestic world and critiquing and interrogating them would indicate some of the nuances in the relationship that Africans have with nature. For example, a beast with a speckled throat is named by the Zulu Inkomo emfukumfuzi because it looks like the golden mole Amblysomus iris as it emerges from the ground with soil around its head, while a tawny animal dotted with lighter and darker spots and marks is called imaqandakahwayiba after the Kei apple, the edible fruit of Doveyalis caffra. Using the prism of cattle names to reflect indigenous environmental knowledge would lead to extremely productive historical research. | 54 |
| Thus although some scholars have highlighted aspects of the connections between southern African people and livestock, a holistic narrative that foregrounds indigenous cattle and the environment remains to be told. Heaven’s Herds suggests that the time is ripe to do so. | 55 |
Jane Carruthers is a pioneer of South African environmental history. She is best known for her book The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Natal, 1995) and for her many journal articles and book chapters dealing with issues around protected areas in southern Africa. She is professor of history at the University of South Africa. | |
oil and acadian culture
CRAIG E. COLTEN
| SINCE HURRICANES Katrina and Rita, considerable attention has been directed toward the plight of the Louisiana’s wetlands. The on-going loss of these fragile coastal marshes has made communities in the state’s southern littoral more vulnerable to storm surges. One of the most often mentioned reasons for the perilous condition of the wetland is the redirection of Mississippi River sediments into the deep Gulf of Mexico and the consequent “starvation” of the delta. An infrequently mentioned but equally, and perhaps more, significant factor in land loss has been the role of oil extraction in the coastal zone. Subsidence attributed to petroleum removal along with erosion and ecological alterations caused by the numerous channels that penetrate the vast wetlands have had devastating consequences. | 56 |
| Robert Flaherty’s 1948 Louisiana Story looks at the early entry of big oil into the Louisiana wetlands. It is the opposite end of the story that we have heard since the storms of 2005. His film presents an admiration for the splendor of the Louisiana cypress swamp and grassy marshes, the hardy independence of the reclusive Cajuns, the positive economic impact of oil revenues, and the benign environmental impacts of this transformative activity. As his wife notes in a supplementary interview on the current DVD version of the film, Flaherty thought that humans did not have a problem living in difficult environments, but managing the introduction of technology into these environments presented a real challenge. This is a central theme in this work and an important theme in environmental history since Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964). | 57 |
| Set in the late 1940s, the film opens with a young Cajun boy poling his pirogue through the lush swamp that provides sustenance to his family, but also poses an ever-present danger. Deep understanding of this simultaneously generous and hostile environment enables his family to survive. The youngster is captivated by the noisy arrival of a barge-mounted oil rig towed into the marsh near his home. When the crew fails to strike oil, the Cajun boy sneaks on board and employs folk magic to prime the dry hole. On their next effort to probe the earth for crude, the crew succeeds and the young innocent of the swamps takes credit for bringing in the well. Once the subterranean source is tapped, the crew leaves behind an unobtrusive valve known as a “Christmas Tree” that directs the oil into pipelines and its ultimate destination. With oil flowing from beneath their land, the Cajun family reaps a windfall and treats itself to basic foodstuffs, a new coffee pot, and a rifle. | 58 |
| Commissioned by Standard Oil Company, this film offers an appreciative view of the fecundity of the wetland, and at the same time portrays the oil giant as a beneficent player in the unfolding drama. Flaherty was impressed with the Acadian folk, and he portrays them as experts of the world they inhabited and able to use that acquired knowledge to wrest a living from the land. He showed similar sympathy to the oil companies who paid royalties to the land owners and thereby enabled them to escape an impoverished economic situation. Flaherty suggests that exploration and extraction of oil barely disturbed the resource-rich region and the deeply rooted local culture—their machine in the garden was only mildly disruptive. Much of what we have learned about wetland ecology in recent years suggests otherwise. | 59 |
| Half a century later, I like to show this film on long bus rides back to campus after a field trip to Cajun country. Students today know the oil companies as a once-reliable source of employment for their parents and as a prominent economic presence in the state. Yet, there are few jobs on shore today and off-shore drilling requires far fewer hands than their near-shore counterparts from thirty years ago. Those seeking to retain office jobs have followed the corporations to Texas, fracturing deeply rooted family enclaves. These students too know that oil extraction has carved up the coast and disrupted the livelihoods of relatives who once fished, trapped, or hunted the state’s wetlands. Nonetheless, Flaherty’s images of the trapper’s cabin are as foreign to Louisiana students as those in any place around the country. The sparse dwelling resembles what these students have seen in museums, but few have lived in such stark conditions. Given the circumstances of the former swamp dwellers, it is easy to see the seductive power of technology and economic promise through the eyes of Flaherty’s characters. | 60 |
| Despite its slow pace and a bombastic classical score that leaves many students thinking their professor has abysmal taste in film, I remain convinced Louisiana Story can speak to my students in a powerful way. It depicts an isolation and economic status that few of today’s students have experienced. Big oil helped many of their parents slip the bonds of poverty, yet now that lifeline to prosperity has become frayed. In overall decline, the oil industry has generated an ambivalence toward the once reliable employer while strengthening ethnic identity. I hope the film allows students to see the role oil played in the erosion of both the coast and of traditional culture. While there are still thousands of acres of swamp and marsh, few of my students’ parents rely on their wits to make a living in the wetlands anymore. And while it is still easy to find a Cajun band to dance to on Friday nights, the traditional dance hall is disappearing from the landscape. Louisiana tied its economic dreams to oil and encouraged exploration. In doing so, it unwittingly sacrificed its coast and one of its greatest resources—the Acadian culture. Flaherty saw the wetland and the Acadians who lived there as resilient in the face of the intruding industry. While oil is a nonrenewable resource and is quickly disappearing, perhaps the state’s wetlands and its Cajun culture can be sustained. | 61 |
Craig E. Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Although not a Cajun, he is a native of the state and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Louisiana State, 2005). | |
the last first contact
GREGORY T. CUSHMAN
| IN 1336, A GROUP of indigenous farmers and herders watched as an Iberian expedition disembarked on their native land, the Canary Islands. We know almost nothing about how this first contact played out, but its outcome is all too familiar. The Guanches eventually killed the leader of this early European foray into the Atlantic after he established a settler colony on the island that now bears his name. European guns, germs, horses, and steel proved incapable of eliminating anticolonial resistance on the Canaries for another 160 years, however, until a wet winter, a subsistence crisis, and a horrific epidemic joined forces with the Spaniards’ war of attrition. For the Guanches, losing meant systematic enslavement on the Atlantic World’s first sugar plantations and eventual cultural extinction.1 | 62 |
| The last first contact turned out differently. In the early 1930s, a group of Australian gold prospectors in search of El Dorado took great care to record their first meetings with New Guinea highlanders, the last major human population to make the “dangerous … passage from isolation to membership in the worldwide community.”2 In the early 1980s, two Australian filmmakers, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, tracked down dozens of surviving participants, obtained access to the massive archive of photographs, films, diaries, and letters kept by expedition leader “Mick” Leahy, and used them to produce First Contact in 1983. At first, this riveting, classroom-friendly documentary seems to confirm many of our expectations regarding how a collision between the Stone Age and the Aviation Age should play out. However, careful attention to cultural and environmental signifiers in this film—particularly those provided by native informants—reveals how much we have forgotten or ignored about the biological and cultural meaning of first contact events. This testimony provides a stark alternative to the stories Europeans and their descendants like to tell about how they came to dominate the world. | 63 |
| The first Europeans to explore the New Guinea highlands were driven by God, glory, greed for gold, and an acute sense of superiority based on eleven centuries of European overseas imperialism. This film only hints at the exploitation that mining has wreaked on the landscapes and peoples of New Guinea—and the devastation that would have ensued if geological history had located large deposits of precious metals in the Wahgi Valley. Mick Leahy gloried in his power to “elici[t] undisguised awe and terror … followed by stunned silence and tears” when demonstrating the ability of his rifle to blow out the brains of a pig or when flying brave native children to the coast in a duraluminum airplane. To some he encountered, even the tin can lids he discarded seemed to be impregnated with power. He and his brothers consciously manipulated these perceptions to advance their “friendly invasion” of this “primeval” realm.3 Many highlanders viewed these outsiders not as gods, it turns out, but as dangerous personifications of wildness. “Did [they] come from the ground? from the sky? from the water?” Others concluded that “they must be our ancestors from the place of the dead” searching riverine sediments for their discarded bones. | 64 |
| But it did not take long for highlanders to realize that these wealthy, powerful beings were human at their core. They achieved this realization in a variety of ways, befitting the spectacular cultural diversity of this region. “When we saw the laplaps [loincloths] and trousers on their bodies, we thought they must not have bodily wastes in them because they were wrapped up so neatly,” Kirupano Eza’e recalled. He “carefully hid to watch the white man excrete” in order to get a look at their unchangeable inner substance. “Their skin is different,” he concluded with a laugh, “but their shit smells just like ours.” Michael Leahy had to post a bodyguard “when nature called … to restrain natives eager to rush forward and package our bodily waste.”4 Like so many colonizers of this era, he was obsessed with hygiene; eastern highlanders, on the other hand, were disgusted by the sweet “spirit smell” given off by his soap-washed body.5 Inevitably, his careful attempts to keep foreign disease out of the highlands failed. Liklik, a highland woman who married one of his native assistants, died from malaria after she journeyed to the coast to meet her husband’s relatives. Her own people astutely diagnosed the proximate cause of her illness—she traveled too far from home.6 In other parts of the highlands, epidemics such as dysentery (sikman) sometimes preceded the appearance of outsiders by many years and, in the case of the Tsembenga, decimated their native dogs.7 But in the main, foreign disease is conspicuous by its relative absence from this film and the colonial history of highland New Guinea.8 Virgin soil epidemics and depopulation were not inexorable consequences of first contact. | 65 |
| Michael Leahy initially assumed that these “primitive people” were driven by greed for “the white man’s plainly superior possessions …; murder is of incidental importance compared with the acquisition of those goods.”9 He was therefore astonished by the preference Mt. Hagen tribes showed for large mother-of-pearl shells (kina) over steel. When Ndika Nikints first glimpsed these shells, he immediately sent someone to locate his tribe’s big-man, Ndika Powa: “Tell him the people-eating spirits wanted to eat the pig and gave this shell in return. … This strange man that came, he’s not a spirit, he’s the shellman! Hurry quickly, there’s a lot more shells!”—more than he could imagine, as a cheap by-product of pearling activity in the rich marine waters off northeastern Australia.10 In return for shells traded on native terms, the Leahy expedition obtained willing labor, more meat than they could eat, and sex. As one aged woman in the film recalls, “My people gave me to the strangers to get their wealth. We were terrified! We thought they’d eat us. In fact, they were kind to us. We had sex together. Then we knew they were men … not spirits—just men.” In return, Ndika Powa suggested a bride price that would have made his tribe a major power in ritual exchange for generations: he hoped to obtain a few cuttings of the trees that bear kina shells. | 66 |
| This naïve request actually suggests that New Guinea highlanders were not as isolated nor as technologically ignorant as the Australians believed. Europeans expected they would encounter one vast, virgin wilderness in the New Guinea interior. Indeed, the Leahys crossed large unpopulated tracts rich with wildlife, but interspersed with densely settled, grassy valleys that “looked like a huge parkland.” Paleoecological evidence shows that the upper Wahgi valley has never been primeval forest; from seven thousand years ago until after first contact, its utterly humanized landscape was dominated by gardens and fire-adapted kumai grass (Imperata cylindrica). Highland farmers were the first, worldwide, to domesticate taro (Colocasia esculenta), bananas (Musa spp.), and the Guanches’ bane, sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), and by at least 2500 years ago, they were engaged in intensive, raised-field agriculture. Ever since, enterprising highlanders like Ndika Powa have been quite open to new cultivars and agricultural practices that would improve the productivity and sustainability of their agroecosystems. Circa 1200 BP, Wahgi farmers began planting Casuarina trees en masse to provide timber and firewood, and to replenish the soil. (Meanwhile, the ubiquitous military strategy of ring-barking an enemy tribe’s trees helped ensure that the Wahgi retained its open landscape.) Sometime after the great Long Island eruption (ca. 1645), Wahgi farmers rapidly embraced an American domesticate, the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), as their dominant staple and pig fodder and learned to intercrop them with nitrogen-fixing legumes. More recently—but well before first contact—they supplemented these with maize (Zea mays), manioc (Manihot dulcis), squash (Cucurbita spp.), tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), and a host of other foreign economic plants, all the while living in intensely localized, stateless societies.11 | 67 |
| As a document of ecocultural change, First Contact is even more valuable thanks to two sequels, Joe Leahy’s Garden (1988) and Black Harvest (1992). These films show a wooded, postcolonial highland landscape transformed by the suppression of fire and warfare and the growth of plantation agriculture—lands in which sweet potato now grows as an unwanted weed. Mick Leahy’s mixed-race son, Joe, was one of the lucky few who became fantastically wealthy by postcolonial standards after the great Brazilian frost of July 1975 caused world coffee prices to skyrocket.12 The first film centers on the struggle of Tumul, a clan leader of the Ganiga tribe, to obtain suitable recompense for helping Joe make it big. The film ends with Joe Leahy, the proud owner of a Mercedes, making peace by exchanging Tumul’s pig for a smoke-spewing Daikhatsu pick-up on the verge of breakdown. (Ironically, Tumul sports a fishing hat emblazoned with the slogan “Get Rich, Stay Rich” during this ritual exchange.) The second film picks up the story five years later when a new cooperative venture is on the verge of its first harvest. Green coffee beans glisten with anticipation in a dew of orange, hand-mixed pesticide. Then, tragically, the world price of coffee collapses and the Ganiga (subsistence farmers still) refuse to pick coffee for the token wage offered by Joe. Popina Mai, the clan leader who risked his reputation and tribal lands on the success of this partnership, receives a cruel lesson in globalization from Joe: “When world prices drop, we’re affected too. Nobody cares about our little enterprise. You think we’re important. In world terms we’re fleas.” Symbolically, their partnership disintegrates when Joe refuses to let Popina use his modern toilet, while an old-style tribal war ravages their plantation and the local bank initiates foreclosure. | 68 |
| In Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, 1997), Jared Diamond begins with a question posed by Yali, a leader of the Papuan movement for independence. “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” In the spirit of Mick Leahy, Diamond did not stop to think about what Yali meant by his question, nor wait to hear Yali’s answer.13 These films do not refute the interpretations of Alfred Crosby, Tim Flannery, and Jared Diamond regarding the environmental roots of global inequalities, but they at least give the citizens of Yali’s republic—on both sides of first contact—a hard-earned chance to respond. | 69 |
Gregory T. Cushman, assistant professor of international environmental history at the University of Kansas, is researching indigenous understanding of Peru’s marine environment and coastal adaptation to the Incan and Spanish conquests. NOTES1. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).2. Ibid., 99. Circa 1930, the upper and middle Wahgi River valley, the main focus of these explorations, had an estimated population of 125,000 and the highlands of Papua New Guinea, as a whole, a population as high as one million.3. Michael J. Leahy, Exploration into Highland New Guinea, 1930–1935, ed. Douglas E. Jones (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 45, 80, 145. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotes come from the film.4. Ibid., 82.5. See Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 640–69. In Mesoamerica, the Spanish conquistadors’ relative lack of personal hygiene convinced the Aztecs they were dealing with a barbarian race.6. Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 46, 167.7. Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 8–9.8. See Warwick Anderson, “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000): 713–44; and John Dedemo Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993).9. Leahy, Exploration, 45.10. Quoted in Marilyn Strathern, “The Decomposition of an Event,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 248.11. T. P. Denham, et al., “Origins of Agriculture in Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea,” Science 11 July 2003: 189–93; Jack Golson, “The Ipomoean Revolution Revisited: Society and the Sweet Potato in the Upper Wahgi Valley,” in Inequality in New Guinean Highland Societies, ed. Andrew Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 109–136; Abraham L. Gitlow, Economics of the Mount Hagen Tribes, New Guinea, Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, 12 (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1947), 18–21, 61–65; Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors, 3, 44–46.12. See Maxine Margolis, “Green Gold and Ice: The Impact of Frosts on the Coffee Growing Region of Northern Paraná, Brazil,” Mass Emergencies 4 (1979): 135–44; these frosts also contributed markedly to the displacement of small coffee farmers from Paraná to the Amazonian frontier.13. See Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz, Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). | |
new deal jeremiads
FINIS DUNAWAY
| IMAGINE, JUST FOR a moment, that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government sponsored someone, say, a noted film critic, to make a documentary film about the catastrophe. Imagine, too, that this director, drawing on the insights of leading ecologists and other scientists, chose to blame the disaster not on the capricious behavior of nature but rather on human actions. With their lack of foresight and careless disregard for the region’s ecology, the American people, the filmmaker argued, altered the landscape and ultimately created the conditions that led to so much destruction and human misery in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Finally, as this film circulated around the United States, imagine that it was shown in thousands of movie theaters and seen by several million people, generating considerable controversy in some places but also garnering tremendous praise from a wide range of critics and audiences. | 70 |
Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University. Dorothea Lange, photograph of poster for The Plow That Broke the Plains, outside the Belasco Theater in Washington, DC, June 1936. | |
| This series of events, which probably seems un-imaginable in today’s political culture, reminds us yet again of what made the New Deal such an extraordinary mo-ment in American history: During the 1930s, a time marked not only by economic depression but also by a number of ecological disas-ters, the federal government hired Pare Lorentz, a prom-inent movie critic, to make films about the Dust Bowl and Mississippi River flooding. These documentaries—The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937)—combined ecological aes-thetics and religious rhetoric to condemn American land use practices. Like the documentary photographs sponsored by the Farm Security Administration and the post office murals commissioned by other New Deal agencies, these films grappled with the relationship between the American people and their land. But while photographers tended to portray the people as blameless victims of calamity and mural artists emphasized the glorious past of the pioneer, Lorentz presented the nation’s environmental history as a tale of decline. Refusing to see dust storms and floods as natural disasters, he instead depicted these events as human-created tragedies. Blending words and images, The Plow and The River adapted the Puritan jeremiad tradition to explain the decade’s ecological catastrophes. For environmental historians, these films provide not only a portal into the visual politics of conservation but also the opportunity to challenge traditional interpretations of the New Deal. | 71 |
Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University. Baby with plow, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains. | |
| As he worked on The Plow That Broke the Plains, Lorentz became embroiled in a cultural debate over the origins and meanings of the Dust Bowl. This debate hinged on one key question: who was responsible for the disaster? Newsreels, along with many journalists and Great Plains politicians, blamed the weather: The long drought of the 1930s, they suggested, turned large parts of the Plains into desiccated fields and swirling piles of dust. Yet Lorentz rejected this explanation and instead emphasized human culpability. His ecological history relied upon a major tenet of 1930s science—the concept of a climax community. According to the ecologist Frederic Clements, the grasslands represented a natural equilibrium, a community of plants adapted to its regional conditions. Armed with their steel plows, pioneers and farmers destroyed this delicate balance on the Great Plains. Their reckless actions, their inability to adapt to the environment, eventually led to the Dust Bowl. Lorentz visualized Clements’s concept by instructing his film crew to use a wide-angle lens to portray the vastness of the grasslands that once dominated the Plains. This panoramic perspective established the film’s ecological aesthetic. Through this visual strategy, Lorentz depicted the land as an interdependent system and portrayed people as biological agents responsible for overturning nature’s design. | 72 |
Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University. Panoramic view of soil erosion, still photograph from The River. | |
| Lorentz combined panoramic vision with the spoken words of a narrator to castigate American farmers. The Plow draws on the jeremiad sermon—a form of address that warns of God’s vengeance and admonishes Americans for their corrupt and sinful ways—to generate a sense of collective guilt. Rejecting the popular myth of frontier progress, Lorentz condemned the pioneers and their descendants for failing to adjust to the ecological realities of the Plains, for ruining the soil and creating a wasteland. Throughout the film, the narrator sounds like an angry preacher delivering a sermon: first warning a character on screen, “Settler, plow at your peril.” But the man fails to heed the narrator’s advice. Foolishly ignoring the region’s periodic drought, he breaks the soil and plants more wheat. Later, the settler, along with other farmers on the Plains, must face the fury of nature. Once again, the narrator judges and condemns, reminding the settler of his sins against nature. His words, together with the images of blowing dust and barren fields, help turn The Plow into a political sermon, one that makes the fabled errand into the wilderness appear as a downward spiral into the abyss. | 73 |
| The River follows a similar pattern. It employs panoramic shots to encompass forests and other landscapes that surround the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The film also borrows from the jeremiad sermon to blame the American people for wasting natural resources and thereby contributing to the massive floods in the Mississippi Valley. “We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns,” the narrator says, as flood imagery flickers across the screen, “but at what a cost!” As he did in The Plow, Lorentz again ignored questions of class interest. Rather than grappling with the power dynamics that shaped the American landscape, he chose to blame all Americans for their collective sins. Overlooking the racial divisions of the time, he urged viewers to feel sympathy for poor whites, toiling as sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Deep South but neglected to portray the poverty and displacement of African Americans. | 74 |
| While The Plow ends with scenes of despair, The River closes with a celebration of the technological sublime. The film features dramatic footage of the Tennessee Valley Authority building large dams to tame rivers, conserve resources, and restore the region’s ecology. The New Deal jeremiad thus moves from rebuke to rejuvenation: The River concludes with an aesthetic vision of government planning and with the promise that human society can create harmony between technology and the environment. | 75 |
| When placed within the larger visual context of the time, within the myriad appeals to “the folk” and the numerous portrayals of Dust Bowl migrants, Lorentz’s work stands out as unique. His focus on ecological history and his condemnation of traditional values departed from the era’s more typical expressions of cultural nationalism. Rather than glorifying the frontier virtues of the past and emphasizing the strength and perseverance of the American people, he found redemption in the managerial vision of the New Deal. Connecting his films to the broader cultural politics of the 1930s also points toward a different way of thinking about the New Deal, which historians have long regarded as devoid of the morality and spirituality that inspired other reform movements. While New Dealers, unlike their Progressive predecessors, rarely focused on issues of personal morality, agricultural reformers and other conservationists framed the decade’s ecological catastrophes as a moral crisis. Lorentz’s use of religious rhetoric and sublime aesthetics reveals the fervor and passion that enlivened New Deal environmental reform. | 76 |
| The Bush administration did not make a documentary about Hurricane Katrina, but Al Gore, in his recent book and film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), suggests that global warming contributed to the storm’s destructive power. Gore’s project both draws on and departs from the legacy of New Deal documentary film. Like Lorentz, Gore uses the jeremiad form to argue that human beings—particularly Americans, with their ravenous consumption of resources and profligate emission of greenhouse-gases—bear full responsibility for the climate crisis. Like Lorentz, he relies on contemporary science to explain how people have altered the environment. While Gore occasionally gestures toward a critique of corporate power, he, too, like Lorentz, tends to focus on collective guilt and charges all Americans with ecological sin. The distance between the New Deal and today can be measured by the solutions that Gore offers at the end of the film. While Lorentz imagined a collective rebirth and pictured the environment being restored by the federal government, Gore looks instead to the individual. His jeremiad closes with people using energy efficient light bulbs, carrying reusable bags to the grocery store, and, if they can afford to, buying hybrid vehicles. Without minimizing the importance of such action, we may wonder whether more will be required to save the planet. | 77 |
| For all of their flaws, Lorentz’s films still deserve our attention today. They bring us back to a time, so different from our own, when the government acknowledged and publicized the human role in ecological catastrophe. They also demonstrate that 1930s conservation cannot be reduced to a story of hardheaded realists motivated solely by economic and utilitarian concerns. The New Deal contained a spiritual dimension, expressed vividly in Lorentz’s cinematic jeremiads. Animated by emotion and infused with aesthetics, his films offered secular prayers to the possibilities of New Deal reform. | 78 |
Finis Dunaway is assistant professor of history at Trent University. His book, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago, 2005), includes an extensive analysis of New Deal documentary film, as well as discussions of landscape photography in the Progressive era and Sierra Club coffee table books in the postwar period. His current research project is tentatively entitled “This Is the Way the World Ends: A Visual History of the Environmental Crisis.” | |
environment and justice
MARCUS HALL
| IN CHESS, GAMBIT is the tactic of sacrificing a lesser piece (usually a pawn) for long-term gain and strategic advantage. In Gambit, the new Swiss film about the 1976 dioxin spill at the village of Seveso in northern Italy, a mid-level manager of the Hoffman La-Roche chemical giant reveals his own story of how his Basel-based company relaxed safety standards, delayed emergency response, withheld crucial information, resisted paying retribution, and generally feigned innocence, before blaming and sacrificing himself—and a few other, lesser employees—to save the corporate image and satisfy the public outcry. Meanwhile, Hoffman La-Roche continued with business as usual. Jürg Sambeth spent one and a half years in prison for a chemical spill that induced chloroacne in hundreds of children, forced 700 people to abandon their homes, poisoned 1,800 hectares of farmland, and killed 77,000 animals. With the difference that Seveso is not Hollywood, Gambit is an Erin Brockovich thriller exposing how the corporate bottom-line rolls over weak laws, small governments, and faceless people—whether they work south of the border or in the company’s own middle ranks. | 79 |
| My main reason for watching Gambit was to see how film might portray transnational environmental history, and in particular, how this medium might help sort out the overlapping complexities of globalization and environmental justice. I am also well aware that even if this fairly obscure documentary doesn’t earn the 256 million dollars grossed by its Hollywood counterpart, there will always be more people learning about Seveso through Gambit than through Sambeth’s own paperback, Zwischenfall in Seveso (Unionsverlag, 2004). As historians, we might finally smash our computers to replace them with camcorders if our main goal is spreading a message instead of earning tenure. Today’s crisis in publishing is countered by the boom in newer media, and if the e-book is not yet taking off, how might environmental historian filmmakers explore the field’s latest questions? Is there a special advantage of telling transboundary environmental stories on the silver screen? Is the time right for promoting an annual environmental history film festival? | 80 |
| Through a deceivingly simple storyline, director Sabine Gisiger dwells on the eyewitness account of Sambeth and his immediate colleagues and family. The extended talking head of Sambeth is supplemented by intriguing flashbacks of people, places, and documents (even home-movies) to demonstrate that Hoffman La-Roche’s ICMESA chemical plant at Seveso was an out-dated dinosaur, courting disaster. Although Sambeth requested and received from his company the minimum investment he thought necessary to maintain the plant at its barest standards, earlier proposals to refurbish this facility and provide reliable safety mechanisms had been summarily rejected. As the off-sight technical manager of ICMESA together with several other small-sized chemical plants around the world, Sambeth was given little choice but to depend on substandard technology to synthesize Tricholorphenol, a lucrative herbicide that—if heated excessively—produced dangerous quantities of dioxin. The film exhibits hard evidence that ICMESA’s reaction tank was indeed heated excessively, that the tank exploded to spew dioxin over a large inhabited area of Lombardy, that despite Sambeth’s pleas for quicker action, Hoffman La-Roche’s central office was slow to warn Italians of the details of the accident and the dangers they faced. | 81 |
| The rest of the film is an environmental whodunit, exploring the legal plea of “industrial accident” in light of the corporate aversion to installing costly safety measures, together with the corporate strategy of sacrificing pawns for the greater good of CEOs. The most revealing evidence is the corporate minutes that proclaim Italy (rather than Switzerland or other wealthy nations) to be an excellent site for manufacturing “objectionable inexpensive chemical products.” Hardly surprising, then, are the film’s main messages when we consider the power of multinational corporations, or the many noxious industries strategically sited well beyond prosperous regions and countries. Such messages are brought quickly and dramatically to light within the space of two hours’ viewing time, and do not require our attention for days or weeks, as does the monograph. This film also demonstrates the importance of reevaluating old facts alongside the new: recent evidence uncovered by a German journalist conjectures that Seveso’s chemical spill may have been caused by blunders resulting from the clandestine, weekend manufacture of dioxin for military purposes. | 82 |
| But much else is not revealed about the disaster at Seveso during our short viewing experience. A different documentary (or another chapter in a book) would address Hoffman La-Roche’s point of view, perhaps by dwelling on how governments and courts are quick to find blame in wealthy industries, and quick to find reason to make them pay—even though accidents can happen. Industry’s own story would certainly highlight the economic benefits of siting objectionable chemical plants in less-developed nations; the cheaper manufacturing costs, for example, would theoretically be passed on to local consumers eager for more affordable products. An entirely different documentary might show how Seveso and its aftermath led to a rising environmental consciousness in all European countries, ultimately serving to convince the European Parliament to enact a “Seveso Directive” (1982) that may have prevented more suffering from transboundary industrial accidents than that which occurred at the original accident. Still another film would follow the travail and suffering, not of one company employee, but of one of Seveso’s many displaced inhabitants—or else just one boy or girl who spent weeks in the hospital recovering from horrific skin rashes. One could argue that Jürg Sambeth’s story about Seveso was not the most important one to tell. | 83 |
| Gambit is an important and skillfully crafted environmental history film. It is also an important film about the powerlessness of the individual when confronted by big industry. The film reveals that environmental injustice can play itself out in unexpected ways, affecting polluters as well as polluted, living abroad as well as at home. Above all, Gambit demonstrates that ostensibly environmental issues may hardly be environmental at all. Justice—not environmental justice—is the film’s main subject; the dangers of corporate power and imperfections of legal process are the take-home message. The accidental release of dioxin on a hot summer day at Seveso, Italy, is merely an event that allows the film director to explore more universal subjects centering on power, politics, and human rights, regardless of how much poisonous chemical was ultimately absorbed by ecosystems and living bodies. Indeed, Gambit would be a terrific piece for pondering North-South relations in general, and Swiss-Italian relations in particular, including the immigrant experience: combining this film with Brusati’s Pane e Cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1973) would make a fabulous double feature. In the end, Gambit’s most important message to environmental historians is surely about reconceiving the boundaries of their field. Organizers of a future environmental history film festival may have difficulty deciding which films to exclude from their event. | 84 |
Marcus Hall is assistant professor of history at the University of Utah and associate researcher of environmental sciences at the University of Zürich. He is the author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration (Virginia, 2005), which won the Downing Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. | |
women warriors: the environment of myth
J. DONALD HUGHES
| HERE ARE TWO films that present variations on the themes of people and environment, tradition vs. modernity, myth and reality, and gender conflict. The Land Has Eyes and Whale Rider were made on Pacific islands by island people. In each, the lead is a young woman who connects with the founding myth of her own community and with the environment of land or sea, and draws strength from them for a contemporary battle on personal and social levels. | 85 |
| Rotuma, a Polynesian island now part of Fiji, is the locale of The Land Has Eyes. Director Vilsoni Hereniko and the cast with two exceptions are Rotumans. The title comes from a Rotuman proverb expressing traditional justice: The land has eyes; The land has teeth And knows the truth.That is, in a conflict over land, the land itself can be trusted to decide and execute judgment. | 86 |
| Viki, the 16-year-old protagonist, is acted by Sapeta Taito, a woman whose eyes make her worthy of the proverb. Her father, Hapati (Voi Fesaitu), keeps the old ways and tells her the story of the first person to come to the island, a woman raped and abandoned by her brothers, but who survived, gave birth, and became Warrior Woman (Rena Owen). Viki identifies with Warrior Woman. When Hapati is falsely accused by a neighbor of stealing coconuts from his land (coconuts yield copra, almost the only source of money income), he is taken before District Officer Clarke (James Davenport), representing colonial justice. Since Hapati cannot speak English and Clarke does not know Rotuman, the court translator Poto (John Fatiaki), in the neighbor’s pay, frames Hapati, who is fined ten pounds, an amount beyond his means. Viki, who listened under the courtroom window, tells her father about the deception, but he refuses to appeal because, knowing the proverb, he trusts the land. His churchgoing wife asks him if he believes in the land more than Jesus. He says only, “I am Rotuman.” | 87 |
| Hapati encourages Viki to succeed in school. The teacher, who keeps a line, “Only the hard workers deserve success,” on the blackboard, is quick to find fault, but is fair, and Viki is a hard worker, spending hours on homework. Before her father can pay his fine (he is generous to his relatives), he dies from fever. Viki runs to the sea and, diving under the waves, has a vision of Warrior Woman. Viki has nurtured a flower garden: another piece of land symbolism. She cuts it down and places the blossoms on her father’s grave. Then she makes red feather fans after Warrior Woman’s pattern, sells them, and pays Hapati’s fine. She feels no joy, because, she tells her brother, “This proves our father was a thief.” Viki places first in the school exam, which qualifies her for a high school scholarship in Fiji. | 88 |
Courtesy Photofest. Keisha Castle-Hughes (as Pai), in Whale Rider, directed by Niki Caro. | |
| Poto, translator for the scholarship committee, is determined to block Viki. The committee, chaired by Clarke, includes island elders. During the hearing, Viki quotes the proverb, “The land has eyes.” Poto mistranslates, inadvertently in a way that reveals Viki’s father’s innocence and predicts the manner of Poto’s death. The elders, who know the proverb, are not misled, and the land uses its teeth in a spectacular way that opens Clarke’s eyes to the truth. | 89 |
| The Land Has Eyes was Fiji’s official entry for the 2005 Academy Awards in the Foreign Language Film category. It was screened at film festivals, and the 2004 Festival of Pacific Arts in Palau. But it did not receive the run in U.S. art theaters that it deserved. Whale Rider was widely distributed, and received notice when its lead, Maori actress Keisha Castle-Hughes, was nominated for the 2004 Academy Award for Actress in a Leading Role. At thirteen, she was the youngest actress ever to be so nominated. In Whale Rider, the environmental connection that dominates is with the sea. The setting and location is Whangara, a Maori village on the coast of New Zealand’s North Island where the sound of the surf is ever-present. The traditions of the people, the Ngati Konohi, describe their descent from an ancestor, Paikea, who came ashore on a whale. | 90 |
| Continuity of tradition is threatened, however, as the aging chief, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), must search for a worthy successor. His artist son, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), refuses to stay in the village. Porourangi’s wife died giving birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The boy also died, and Porourangi gives the girl the sacred name, “Pai” (Paikea), over the objections of Koro, who cannot entertain the thought of a woman being chief. Porourangi leaves Pai to be raised by Koro and his wife, Nanny (Vicky Haughton). He returns after twelve years and meets Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), an attractive and energetic girl. After arguing with Koro, who still hoped his son would become chief, Porourangi leaves with Pai. But as Pai looks out the car window at the sea of her home place (and hears the whales beneath the waves), she knows she must stay, and tells her father that her grandfather needs her. | 91 |
| Koro decides to teach village boys in traditional skills and knowledge. He expects to find one who can pass difficult tests and prove worthy of becoming chief. As the boys assemble, Pai sits in the front row with them. Koro sends her away, but she secretly watches and listens to the instruction. The boys learn legends, chants, the haka challenge dance, and how to use the taiaha fighting stick. One boy, and Pai’s uncle (once a taiaha champion), help her learn. But the boys all fail the final test: to dive and bring up the chief’s whale tooth pendant, which Koro throws into the sea. Pai later retrieves it, but Nanny warns her not to tell Koro. Grieving her grandfather’s failure to appreciate who she is, Pai sits by the shore and calls to the whales. This, it proves, is a power she has. | 92 |
| Pai wins the leading role in her school pageant of Maori arts, dance, and song, and in a bid for Koro’s approval, invites him to the event. The stubborn Koro decides late to go to the pageant, but on the way sees that a pod of sperm whales (the ones Pai has called) have beached themselves by the village. He stays with the whales, and Pai, heartbroken, finishes her part without her grandfather’s presence. The village people do everything they can to pull the whales back into the sea, using a tractor, but the rope breaks and they give up. Alone, Pai climbs onto the leader whale and urges him back into the sea as the tide rises. The whale dives, and Pai comes close to drowning. When the people realize Pai is gone, Nanny gives Koro the whale’s tooth pendant. Koro asks “Who?” Nanny will not tell him, but he knows. Almost too late, he recognizes how foolishly he has hidden the truth from himself. The film is based on a book of the same title by Witi Ihimaera published in New Zealand in 1987. This is a rare case where the film is better than the book (whose author puts anthropomorphic conversations into the mouths of whales). | 93 |
| The Land Has Eyes and Whale Rider could be used together in an environmental history class, offering opportunities for comparison and discussion. Both will engage student interest, the dramatic and direct Whale Rider perhaps more so. The Land Has Eyes presents social and economic matters in a more complex way. Neither perpetuates the expected “South Pacific” stereotypes. But taken together they offer views by island people themselves of their relationship to the land and sea that comprise their environment. | 94 |
J. Donald Hughes is John Evans Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Denver. Among his recent publications are What Is Environmental History? (Polity, 2006), An Environmental History of the World: Humanity’s Changing Role in the Community of Life (Routledge, 2001), The Mediterranean: An Environmental History (ABC-CLIO, 2005), and Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). His active research includes work on a book on the environmental history of the Oceanic Pacific Islands. | |
selling california: industrial shorts in the classroom
LINDA L. IVEY
| ON SCREEN: LOUIS Pellier, a wandering Frenchmen, traversing the globe in search of adventure in the mid-nineteenth century. Lured to the American West with news of gold, Pellier arrived in the foothills of California, quickly tanked in his mining endeavors, and scrambled for another option. He had heard of some fellow countrymen who had settled in San Jose, where, the narrator explains, he “found what he had been seeking—the climate was gentle and the land was good. So like his fathers before, he turned once more to the soil.” For the crops themselves, Pellier had his brother send cuttings from France—in two old trunks—and in what is described as “the supreme moment,” Pellier carefully grafts his prune scion onto American root stock—a process used, “since the ancient days of Rome.” The narration ensures that the bigger picture is not lost: “On the skill of this man’s hands rested the future of a great industry—food for a growing nation.” | 95 |
| A Fortune in Two Old Trunks is a twenty-seven minute, two-part epic tale of Louis Pellier, father of the prune industry in the United States. If that set-up alone doesn’t grab your audience, this bio-pic, produced in 1954 by Sunsweet Growers, Inc., just might make them giggle with its hokey narration, and draw their attention with its heavy-handed marketing ploys. But what is this film selling, exactly? The answer prompts an excellent segue into pertinent conversations for an environmental history course: boosterism in the American West, the marketing of the agrarian ideal, and the chasm between myth and reality in the agriculture industry. | 96 |
| While the content of A Fortune in Two Old Trunks provides much detail about the growth of the agricultural industry in California, it is the production itself that holds the most potential for learning and discussion. This film belongs to an amorphous genre of video shorts produced by corporations, governmental agencies and other interest groups that, while boosting their own product and industry, inadvertently tap into California’s estranged relationship with the agrarian ideal. These short films—or long advertisements—while extolling the latest innovations that ensure an excellent product, invoke specific imagery of farming and family, and sentimental notions about cultivation of the land, in order to sell the fruits of California ingenuity in the twentieth century. In doing so, they give history students insight into what sold agriculture in the United States—not dancing raisins, or wise-cracking cows, but romantic notions of the family farm and man’s intimate relationship with the land he cultivates. | 97 |
| In this sense, these films do an excellent job of introducing the mythology of farming to a student body that may not be entirely familiar with “old-fashioned” ideals about agriculture. Take, for example, the case of teaching students who are quite familiar with the contemporary realities of California agribusiness. When teaching California environmental history one inevitably encounters at some point the mythology surrounding American agriculture. Exposing the reality of California agriculture via John Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams is often a dramatic moment in the discussion of California’s environmental past. But for a student body that in large part has resided in rural and suburban California for most of their lives, the “reality” is not news; they’ve seen the industrial agricultural operations and labor conditions up close. It is the mythology they have a hard time grasping. | 98 |
| Advertising shorts do an excellent job of helping students visualize the elusive agrarian ideal. In the case of A Fortune, the film provides a thorough explanation of the prune industry, and is certainly rife with homage to American ingenuity in the modern age. But it is the back-story of Louis Pellier that plays a particularly important role in the classroom. Pellier’s intensely personal relationship with the land and the crops he cultivates, and the sense of tradition his story calls upon, allow students to witness the romance employed in marketing California agricultural products. Agrarian iconography was used extensively to promote settlement in California, an advertising ploy appealing to a national ideal that was growing more elusive in the twentieth-century United States. By the turn of the century, California boosters were selling the potential of California soil, and they were doing so by revitalizing the promise of the yeoman ideal in America—a profit-making yeoman, but one that held dear to the virtue of individualism and living off the land. | 99 |
| In this sense, this film can serve as a foil in the discussion of industrial agriculture. It becomes a palpable reference while discussing the reality of industrialized environmental relationships. But the film should not merely be ridiculed or dismissed as propaganda or an over-the-top marketing scheme. It carries a cultural currency in its own right, appealing directly to potent cultural icons, and speaking to the era in which it was produced.1 | 100 |
| Industrial shorts serve the additional purpose of training history majors and other students to think critically about primary sources in terms of author and audience. Propaganda and advertisements work well to spark this kind of critical inquiry. Indeed, one of the more pertinent questions to ask a student audience is why Sunsweet sponsored the production of this film at all. Why do we get the back-story on Pellier? Why are we watching the careful graft, when the grit of the story appears to come long after the graft? What did these images mean to the film’s original audience? Again, this genre is exceptionally accessible for this kind of critique, and choices of dramatic music and narration, and particular visuals drawing on Americana from the beauty of coiffed orchards to “typical” American families enjoying the product in their kitchens, predictably together as nuclear units, provide excellent fodder for historical analysis. | 101 |
| Pellier’s prune saga is but one example of this kind of film. Other similar gems include The Romance of the Lemon (1927) produced by Castle Films, The Pick of the Pod (1939) presented by the California Packing Corporation (Del Monte) and a handful of shorts from the Oil Industry Information Committee of the American Petroleum Institute, and the USDA.2 Each example provides information about the industry it represents, and exposes students to the images these groups hoped to associate with their products and industry. The less sophisticated the pitch, the clearer the ideological strategy: these films offer fascinating examples of the mythology of American agriculture and industry in the era before television became the dominant medium of advertising. | 102 |
Linda L. Ivey teaches American history and environmental history at California State University, East Bay. She earned her doctorate from Georgetown University in 2003, specializing in environmental history and its intersection with studies on race, ethnicity, and class. She is working on a manuscript about the social and environmental impact of commercial farming on the central coast of California. NOTES1. See Daniel Pope, “Making Sense of Advertisements,” The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Ads/.2. Many of these films are available online, via www.archive.org, an excellent archive of historical primary source material for professors and students. | |
nightmare or delusion?
DARIN KINSEY
| HUBERT SAUPER’S DOCUMENTARY, Darwin’s Nightmare, according to Variety, “focuses on the ripple effect of a globalized economy in a specific microcosm to weigh the casualties of the New World Order.” Indeed, Sauper’s troubling documentary about the turbid transformations caused by Tanzania’s Nile Perch Fishery—and the peoples whose lives have revolved, evolved, and devolved around it—stirred up enormous interest when it was released earlier this year. “What gradually comes into focus,” wrote The Washington Post‘s reviewer, is a terrifying, appalling, infuriating cycle of exploitation and corruption.” Western critics generally described it in a similar vein even as they heaped it with praise. It won a fistful of awards in Europe and North America, including the grand prize at the Festival du Film d’Environnement in Paris and a nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Documentary Feature. | 103 |
| Some—including, not surprisingly, officials in the Tanzanian government— smelled something fishy, and it was not the putrefying perch carcasses being hung out to dry in the sweltering East-African sun. They accused Sauper of paying destitute women and orphaned and homeless children to say what he wanted to hear, as well as misrepresenting himself in order to gain access to officials, and then manipulating facts and scientific data to fit his agenda. There is more than a kernel of truth to these accusations. Sauper implies in his visual and audio vignettes (there is no voice-over narration in the 107-minute film) that not only is the Nile perch in Tanzania directly responsible for crushing poverty, prostitution, and the spread of AIDS, but even international arms smuggling into the Mwanza region. These are serious charges to lay on the dorsal fins of even a powerful aquatic vertebrate like the Nile perch. All of these societal scourges can be found throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and to blame them on the introduction of one exotic species is to oversimplify reality. Sauper acknowledges as much himself, writing on his web site, “I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds; in Honduras, bananas; and Libya, Nigeria or Anglola, crude oil.” | 104 |
| Sauper’s documentary belongs to a new genre of sensationalist and proactive documentary films that, in their passionate desire to send unambiguous messages of moral indignation about the consequences of globalism to the environment and to ordinary people, stretch inconvenient facts to fit their truths. Another such example is the less well known Inheritance: A Fisherman’s Story (2003) by Peter Hegedus; a documentary about the poisoning of the Tisza River with cyanide that sees the director embark on a personal crusade of subvention when his Hungarian fisherman subject proves unable to seek out social and economic justice on his own. These documentaries, while exploiting a popular antiglobalist theme, often neglect (whether purposefully or unwittingly) important cultural and environmental contexts that go beyond their specific subjects, whether they be polluted rivers or introduced species. | 105 |
| What, then, is the use of such sensationalist, agenda-driven, visual works for environmental historians? While few could doubt that their intentions are noble, they remain the equivalent of a primal scream calling for someone—anyone—to do something about the disturbing things captured by their cameras. While briefly getting our attention, such desperate and flailing imagery largely fails to give any objective accounting of the profoundly complex role of human relationships with our environment. That said, Darwin’s Nightmare, and other films of the genre, still reveal to those of us working in environmental history a number of things about the popular understanding of environmental issues. | 106 |
| First, despite its catchy and highly marketable title, Sauper’s work has nothing at all to do with Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection, but rather Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinian economics. Within that framework, the perch is first anthropomorphized and then demonized to become the biological root cause of the “nightmare.” The enormous (at a maximum of 6 feet long and 440 pounds), silver-scaled, black-eyed Lates niloticus becomes the highly invasive monster that invaded and conquered the lake, transforming first the aquatic ecosystem by feeding on the rich and diverse, pacific, algae-eating fish fauna until they were virtually extinct, then turning to cannibalize its own young. The fish, once caught by poor black fishermen, became part of a socio-economic process wherein it is filleted and packaged by Indian commercial intermediaries, and exported by Russian cargo pilots to wealthy Europeans. Finally their festering and maggot-riddled skeletized corpses, like aquatic zombies, make their way by truck supposedly to the dinner plates of the wives and children of the poor black fishermen. | 107 |
| Lost in Sauper’s Nightmare is any understanding of actual Darwinian theories of evolution that would reveal the Nile perch as simply a fish doing what natural selection prepared it so well to do—reproduce itself in abundance in warm tropical waters like those of Lake Victoria. Also quickly brushed over is what nature did not give the Nile Perch the ability to do—transport itself to populate Lake Victoria on its own. Sauper gives us the incredible voice of one unknown African fisherman who explains the origin of the seed stock of the “nightmare,” as part of a “small experiment involving a bucket of fish.” Here is where Sauper’s thesis breaks down, and it offers us pause for reflection in our own studies upon the relative nature of cultural and ecological change. | 108 |
| However shocking film critics find Sauper’s “nightmare,” it is not, in any historical sense, extraordinary. In reality, the arrival of Nile perch in Lake Victoria did not come via some thoughtless dumping of a bucketful of juvenile perch. The introduction of that fish was the outcome of systematic scientific efforts in the 1950s and 1960s by the governments surrounding the lake, done with the aid of the United Nations, with the goal of ameliorating the fishery, and by extension, their economies. The Nile perch is not a demon or a zombie. It is only one species in a long list of others that have been part of progressive state-funded and state-operated programs meant to improve and diversify freshwater fish fauna for more than 150 years. During that period literally hundreds of exotic species have been seeded around the world, with fairly high rates of success, and almost always with consequences for indigenous fish species and species diversity. Included among them are the common carp, introduced into North and South America and Africa in the nineteenth century; the rainbow trout, once native only to the drainage basins west of the Rocky Mountains but now present in every continent on Earth except for Antarctica, during the twentieth; and, the introduction of tilapia into the United States in the twenty-first century. All of these efforts have been considered as progressive and profitable activities underwritten by states. Yet, from a biocentric perspective each of these introductions has had, and continues to have, the potential to cause equally tragic and disturbing environmental consequences. Nevertheless, such episodes attract attention only when they are packaged into shocking and horrible stories of “little experiments gone awry.” In that sense, Sauper’s “nightmare” suggests that environmental historians have much more work to do in order to make our work more accessible to a lay audience. The environmental transformations that have so animated an important and influential segment of the public to watch and praise works like Sauper’s are not simply novel consequences of globalization, but the manifestations of a schema of progress and improvement through the manipulation of nature that is as old as civilization itself. Until we get our more nuanced and measured messages out to a broader audience, the public will continue to accept, and praise, the sensationalist and even delusional messages promoted by documentaries such as Sauper’s which, rather than pointing the finger of culpability at us all, blame such “nightmares” on evil corporations, corrupt governments, or the ambiguous twin-headed specters of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer whose “finned-freaks” inhabit truth-fudging films set in far-distant and forgotten places like Tanzania. | 109 |
Darin Kinsey is a doctoral candidate at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. His dissertation is entitled: “Fashioning a Freshwater Eden: Elite Anglers, Fish Culture, and State Formation of Quebec’s Sport Fishery.” | |
hott on the wilderness trail
JAMES G. LEWIS
| WHEN ASKED TO contribute an essay about an environmental history film that has had an impact on me, the first—and really only—film that came to mind was Larry Hott’s The Wilderness Idea (1989). The Wilderness Idea debuted on PBS as an episode in the “American Experience” series. The film uses the controversy over the construction of a dam in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley at the beginning of the twentieth century to explore the first national debate between preservationists, represented by Sierra Club founder John Muir, and utilitarian conservationists, represented by Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. The friendship-turned-rivalry between Muir and Pinchot provides the framework for an examination of the idea of wilderness and its intellectual construct. | 110 |
| The Wilderness Idea is the first of two films by Larry Hott on the American perception of wilderness. The second one, Wild by Law, gives an overview of the roots of the environmental movement by telling the history of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the three men responsible for its creation: Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and Howard Zahniser. Of the two films, Wild by Law is by far the better, presenting the discussions and debates about wilderness in a clearer, more accessible way, and uses biography as a storytelling device more effectively than the first film. | 111 |
| When I reviewed Wild by Law this fall, I realized that I had not seen that film when it first aired in 1991. But by then, it didn’t matter. I had decided to study Gifford Pinchot and his political evolution. Watching The Wilderness Idea in 1989 only reinforced that decision. | 112 |
| The film aired while I was taking a graduate seminar on the Progressive Era. The idea of “wilderness” as an intellectual construct was new to me, and, frankly, for a graduate student interested in political history and unaware of environmental history, the discussion did not resonate. I was watching because I was interested in Pinchot. I was fascinated by Pinchot’s rise to power within Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. My seminar paper looked at his role in the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy in 1910, in which Pinchot—a lowly bureau chief in the Department of Agriculture—took on Secretary of Interior Richard Ballinger and President William Howard Taft over conservation, the cause to which Pinchot had dedicated his life and fortune. As a “young Turk” myself—all too happy to question authority and looking for a good cause over which to storm the barricades—I was intrigued by Pinchot’s principled stand. That this film about yet another controversy he was involved in aired at this time was fate. | 113 |
| The film introduced me to John Muir and the religious fervor that can seize a man in love with nature. A hiker and camper myself, I found myself drawn to Muir’s quotations, even though they are shouted by an actor in a thick Scottish brogue (imagine Shrek reading passages from The Mountains of California). The voice acting is outlandish, and the historical interpretation of the friendship between Muir and Pinchot is outdated, but the power of Muir’s words succeeded in swaying me to his side. I began to question Pinchot’s idea of “progress.” I, too, wanted to climb to the top of a Douglas fir and ride out a violent storm as Muir once did. (Hailing from Maryland, it was only many years later that I saw for myself how tall these trees can get and concluded that Muir was mad.) | 114 |
| I became a strident “green” soon thereafter, at a time when the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest was making headlines and news magazine covers. I toyed with writing my master’s thesis on Henry Ford’s efforts to establish a rubber plantation in Brazil as an excuse to travel there and see the destruction firsthand. The reality of the situation—prohibitive travel costs and an inability to read or speak Portuguese—instead led me to write a thesis on Pinchot’s evolution from a forester to a politician. (The addendum to the adage of “write what you know,” at least for historians, should read: Write what you can afford to research. Pinchot’s papers are housed at the Library of Congress, only two hours from where I was in school.) | 115 |
| The film’s lineup of “talking heads” included Roderick Nash and William Cronon, although I did not know who they were at the time. I also did not know Char Miller, the historian chosen to “represent” Gifford Pinchot in this debate. I did notice that he was the only one interviewed outside—in the cold. The interview’s setting contributed, as I wrote in an essay discussing the liberties taken in history documentary films, to the negative impression of Pinchot the filmmakers seemed intent on conveying.1 Neither Char nor Pinchot come off in the best light—Char is in shadow for part of the interview, Pinchot is vilified for his role in Hetch Hetchy. Nonetheless, my interest in Pinchot would eventually lead me to cross paths with Char and work with him on some Pinchot-related projects. | 116 |
| By coincidence, I also crossed paths with Larry Hott not long after the films aired. The Wilderness Idea had sparked an interest in documentary films that led me to enroll in a documentary filmmaking course in 1995. Our instructor invited Larry down to review the rough cut of our ten-minute class film on Ferdinand Hayden’s 1871 survey of the Yellowstone region. The survey included landscape painter Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson, whose images helped convince Congress to establish America’s first national park. The computer with our digitized film crashed and was still down when he arrived, so Larry looked at our script and gave us feedback on what we were doing and also discussed his experiences. His kindness has not colored my thinking about his film—it does a workmanlike job of laying out the intellectual history of the idea of wilderness, and its framing device of the Pinchot-Muir debate fails and mars the film. Nevertheless, the film motivated me to focus on forest and conservation history, and it has given two classmates and me the inspiration to make our own environmental history film. The subject? How the Hayden survey helped shape the idea of wilderness in nineteenth-century America. | 117 |
James G. Lewis is the staff historian at the Forest History Society in Durham, NC. He served as a historical consultant on the documentary film, The Greatest Good, and is author of the film’s companion book, The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A Centennial History (Forest History Society, 2005). NOTES1. James G. Lewis, “History, Lies, and Videotape: Historical Documentaries in the Classroom,” OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter (April and June 1997): 1–5. | |
rethinking the film experience
SCOTT MACDONALD
| IF WE CAN AGREE that one of the biggest current threats to the environment, if not the biggest threat, is the tendency of capitalism to promote increasing levels of consumption, even what might be called hysterical levels of consumption, and that modern moving-image culture, and particularly television advertising, contribute to these hysterical levels of consumption by training viewers to consume imagery at what might be called a hysterical velocity (increasing numbers of highly complex, virtually indigestible images per minute), then one possible form of resistance might be to create films that work against this tendency, that implicitly retrain viewers’ eyes and minds. It happens that a good many such films have been made, though for the most part they exist in that underappreciated film-historical realm usually called “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema. Rose Lowder’s Impromptu (1989) and James Benning’s Thirteen Lakes (2004) provide new kinds of cinematic pleasure by rethinking the film experience itself. | 118 |
| Lowder, who lives in Avignon, France, makes short films in which she controls not just every frame that she exposes but the temporal order in which these frames are inscribed onto the filmstrip. Impromptu is made up of four short sections, each of which focuses on a landscape near Lowder’s home. During most of the first section (two minutes fifteen seconds; the entire film is eight minutes long) we see a tree in a courtyard that seems to shimmer: the shimmering effect is a result of Lowder’s painstakingly exposing every second frame on the filmstrip during one extended moment, and then after rewinding the film, exposing the remaining frames later in the day. In the finished film we are seeing the same tree simultaneously at two different times. By removing a common sight from its usual temporal context, Lowder foregrounds the fundamental life energy of the tree, and when, at the end of the section, Lowder presents the tree in a single, twenty-one-second, real-time image, the motion of the tree in a breeze seems quite new, even for a moment, strange. This section of Impromptu is followed by three other sections (a second tree in a country setting, a field of red poppies, and an orchard); each is filmed in a similar manner, and in each instance Lowder “makes strange” a common sight, in a manner that sings its significance and its fundamental energy. | 119 |
| Lowder sees her filmmaking as analogous to organic farming, both in the sense that her manner of making films uses fewer resources—”When I worked in the industry, we sometimes had a sixty-to-one shooting ratio. … My ratio is one-to-one, even in the sense that what is not shown to the public is important for me”—and in the sense that the resulting films seem to condense unusual amounts of natural energy into tiny filmic moments. The “shimmer” that results from Lowder’s method of filming in Impromptu reflects her intense focus on the trees and flowers she films, and creates an implicit metaphor for her hope that the viewer will join her in foregrounding dimensions of her/our surround that in most filmmaking provide at best the background for melodramatic action and entertaining confirmations of the conspicuously consuming status quo. | 120 |
| James Benning’s Thirteen Lakes is virtually the inverse of Lowder’s Impromptu, at least in a temporal sense. Thirteen Lakes is made up of thirteen, ten-minute shots, each made at a different American lake: specifically, Jackson Lake (Wyoming), Moosehead Lake (Maine), the Salton Sea (California), Lake Superior, Lake Winnebago (Wisconsin), Lake Okeechobee, Lower Red Lake (Minnesota), Lake Pontchartrain (Louisiana), Great Salt Lake, Lake Iliamna (Alaska), Lake Powell (Arizona/Utah), Crater Lake, and Oneida Lake (New York). Benning’s thirteen shots span a considerable geography; they evoke the four seasons and a wide range of weathers. Each shot is carefully composed, both graphically (in each shot, the horizon divides the frame in two, so that the lake is below and the sky and distant landforms above) and in time: during each shot, the viewer is able to scan the entire image carefully, again and again, and to become aware of a series of usually minimal, sometimes more obvious, events that are occurring in and on the lakes. These “events” are both visual and auditory: In the first shot, early morning light gradually hits the distant Tetons, which are increasingly reflected in the lake; in shot two, a rainstorm on Moosehead Lake gradually changes the tonality of the greys, whites, and tans of the water and sky; in shot three, several water scooters buzz in circles on the Salton Sea; in shot four, filmed in winter, a Great Lakes barge crosses the image midway through the shot, and we hear the waves lapping more dramatically a few minutes later; and in shot five, the sounds of birds and crickets continually change, and at times, the tiniest bits of mysterious light are visible miles across Lake Winnebago. | 121 |
| Even for the most environmentally conscious viewers Thirteen Lakes poses a considerable challenge. It quickly reveals how fully our media training has taught us to expect constant distraction both in front of the television and in commercial movie theaters, and it places most viewers (nearly all viewers, I would guess, who are not familiar with Benning’s earlier films) in the position of making a decision. Viewers may have come to see “a film,” but now they must choose to see this film. At any screening, some of those who begin the film are sure to leave, but my experience has been that Benning’s carefully composed, quietly beautiful images are enough to keep most viewers in their seats, and that those who do stay learn to accept and enjoy the perceptual game each successive lake image creates: We wonder what the particular developments in this image will be and how they will compare to the developments in preceding images. Thirteen Lakes is full of subtle surprises and pleasures. Inevitably, the length of the film (with the credits, about 135 minutes) forces viewers to continually choose to enjoy the film and to bring their wandering minds back to look carefully at what is on screen while listening to the on-screen and off-screen sounds. | 122 |
| Thirteen Lakes is a form of media therapy. The meditative/contemplative experience it offers can assist us in coming to grips with the media overload that seems such an intrinsic dimension of modern consumer society. In recent years especially, television commercials seem bent on offering more and more products that provide continual distraction from the experience of real time. Benning’s films, and Thirteen Lakes in particular, return us to real time and offer us the opportunity to engage forms of temporal experience that are intrinsic to natural process. Of course, in one sense, Thirteen Lakes is no less a consumer product than any other film: the same amount of 16mm film travels through the projector during this two-hour film as would travel through the projector during any other screening (and of course, filmmaking has always been a dirty industry). Nevertheless, the experience of the film allows for a rethinking of the pace of our lives and of the generally anti-ecological ways in which moving-image media usually function. | 123 |
| It is important to understand that both Impromptu and Thirteen Lakes were made to be seen in good 16mm projection, which remains the best way to experience them (neither film is available in DVD; a collection of Lowder’s films, including Impromptu, is available on VHS from Re:Voir). 16mm projection remains widely available, especially in educational institutions, though those wishing to provide these experiences to audiences may need to make special arrangements to take advantage of this option. In many institutions of higher learning the same consumer pressures that make these films so interesting have convinced many of those interested in cinema that they should restrict themselves to electronic forms of exhibition. But these films, and so many others by Lowder, Benning, and their colleagues in the independent film world, definitely repay the effort necessary for showing them. Information about Lowder and Benning and many related films is available in my The Garden in the Machine. | 124 |
Scott MacDonald has edited and written ten books on independent cinema, including A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, volumes 1–5 (California, 1988, 1992, 1998, 2005, 2006) and The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (California, 2001). He has published essays and interviews in Film Quarterly, Journal of American Studies, ISLE, October, and many other journals.” | |
“he just comes and bites”
JENNIFER ADAMS MARTIN
| SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE Steven Spielberg turned Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel about a white shark into a blockbuster, a documentary crew set off in April 1969 to record the attempts of four divers to film the real animal underwater. Few people had seen living white sharks at that time, much less knew when or where to look for them. From South Africa to Madagascar to what was then Ceylon, the film crew endured bad weather, dangerous diving conditions—and, even worse, no white sharks. In a last-ditch attempt after eight months at sea, they found their quarry off Dangerous Reef in southeastern Australia. | 125 |
| The result of that expedition was the 1971 film Blue Water, White Death, the first feature-length documentary to show real white sharks gliding out of the dark and repeatedly jostling the cages with cavernous maws as divers watched from behind aluminum bars. That image of people in cages interacting with these huge animals in the open ocean was so powerful that it would come to dominate documentaries about sharks for the next thirty-five years. Through its treatment of white sharks, Blue Water, White Death demonstrates the power of cinema to shape our ideas and behaviors toward the natural world and also to remind us that those same ideas and behaviors can change over time. | 126 |
| The idea for the film originated with Peter Gimbel, a former Wall Street banker and heir to the department store fortune. Something of a gentlemen adventurer, he was an accomplished diver and polymath. Not only did Gimbel produce, direct, shoot, and star in the film, he designed and built the shark-proof cages. Whereas the diving team he assembled on his idiosyncratic quest parlayed their experiences into long shark-related careers, Gimbel himself was no Ahab. He was not obsessed with the white shark, or even much interested in the animals beyond the challenge they posed to his organizational and mechanical skill—and to his chutzpah. In this way, Blue Water, White Death followed in an older tradition of hunting travelogue documentaries in which the filmmakers substituted cameras for guns. | 127 |
| In this instance, however, the hunter needed a cage to protect himself from the prey. The filmmakers in turn rendered the white shark into a symbol worthy of such an elaborate chase by isolating ideas about sharks that were already in circulation in the 1960s and earlier: the perfectly evolved killer, implacable, a force of nature that exists outside of time and place. The movie poster for Blue Water, White Death, with the close-up of the white shark’s open mouth and its “man-eater” tagline, demonstrates how Gimbel and his team helped to turn the shark into an icon and to exaggerate and privilege human fears and vulnerabilities at the expense of any historical or ecological context. The expedition had no scientist or other expert to explain the white sharks’ behavior near Dangerous Reef that January in 1970. The filmmakers also simplified the history between humans and sharks: One crew member recounted his near-death experience with a white shark attack nearly seven years earlier that left him with an arc of inch-long scars from his shoulder to his hip. | 128 |
| The cinema verité style of the documentary worked to reinforce the film’s way of understanding the shark as simply a gaping maw. In the final white shark sequences, neither narration nor music guided the viewer’s response; only the sound of air bubbles escaping to the surface and teeth scraping across metal accompanied the visuals. Of course, this aesthetic absence is a kind of argument representing sharks as implacable nature, a terrible expression of the sublime. | 129 |
| By translating these ideas about sharks into film, Gimbel and the other divers overwhelmed any audience’s previous oral, written, or imaginative experiences of sharks, so that the meanings of the animals turned on their established cinematic tropes. For moviegoers in the early 1970s, that final white shark sequence was new, frightening, and difficult to put into words—like something out of a nightmare. To look at a white shark with its mouth agape was to imagine one’s own violent death as prey. The encounter deeply disturbed Peter Gimbel. “There was never an animal like that,” he declared. “Never. The power and the aggressiveness of the thing is beyond belief.” Gimbel attributed the animal’s charisma not just to its dimensions—fifteen feet and over a thousand pounds—but also to the way the animal went about its business. “He doesn’t dash. He just comes and bites. He took one of the static cylinders of the cage—our cage—and just took it in his mouth, very methodically, and just raked it.” What Gimbel tried to articulate was not his surprise or new-found appreciation for white sharks, but rather a confirmation of what he, the film crew, and the rest of the audience already thought they knew about sharks. What was supposed to be a new experience in 1971 amplified the earlier stories that the audiences were carrying around in their heads. | 130 |
| In that way Blue Water, White Death helped to establish what we have come to expect from our cinematic shark stories, including fictional versions like Spielberg’s—a continuity in symbolism that has only started to change within the past fifteen years. Even if we have not seen the 1971 movie, the film influenced so many contemporary shark storytellers, including Peter Benchley—who claimed Blue Water, White Death as his favorite shark documentary and one of the inspirations for his toothy villain— that we recognize elements of the white shark’s story as cinematic tropes: the chumming of fish, horse, or even whale parts over the side of the ship; the monotonous wait for the shark; a background story about a shark attack; the relieved excitement and bustle of activity when the sharks finally swim into view; the awed encounter when such a charismatic animal collides with the cage; and the happy retreat back to port at expedition’s end. | 131 |
| A contemporary audience, however, brings a different set of ideas about what makes a shark meaningful than audiences who saw Blue Water, White Death in 1971. Metaphorically, the animal and its ecological history were almost swallowed by that potent image of the shark’s mouth against the aluminum bars, but the dominance of that symbol—a timeless, implacable killer rattling the cages of our human vulnerability—has weakened in the past fifteen years. We have started to recognize a more complicated way of seeing sharks that accounts for the changing relationships between humans and sharks over time. But to appreciate that subtler vision of the natural world we need to look beyond the icon of the shark’s jaws. Blue Water, White Death helps to remind us how and why those ideas took the form they did. | 132 |
Jennifer Adams Martin is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is working on a dissertation titled “When the Shark Bites With His Teeth: Sharks in American Cultures and Waters in the Twentieth Century.” | |
filming paradise
CYNTHIA MELENDY
| FLORIDA OFFERS the environmental historian plenty to work with. From its “River of Grass” to its unsurpassable beaches and astonishing birds, extraordinary plants, and natural resources, in addition to its extensive coastline along both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, sadly Florida’s legacy has been one of declension and excessive development more than of natural preservation. A flight over the state reveals the source of the nation’s phosphate pollution, its overdeveloped coastline, and its sprawling development. What can be done? How to alarm the public with a popular message about this sorry state? How to engage my students’ critical minds with this ongoing crisis? One answer lies with movies. Two films produced thirty years apart during two eras not characterized for their environmental consciousness relate two very different versions of Florida’s environmental history: that of the early twentieth-century Plume Wars in Winds Across the Everglades (1958) and that of greedy developers in A Flash of Green (1985). In a retrospective gaze on the evolution of Florida’s environmental exploitation and its grudging conservation consciousness, they offer both an environmental and a cultural history of Florida. | 133 |
| Often considered as the lower forty-eight’s “last frontier,” Florida is portrayed as a rough and rowdy place in Winds Across the Everglades. Merging Western conventions with ecological and philosophical concerns in Florida at the end of the 1890s, a teacher-turned-game warden played by actor Christopher Plummer takes on a gang of unruly, primitive poachers led by a charismatic boss, played by Burl Ives, who are killing off the local rare birds for their fashionable, valuable plumage. Winds’ location photography is in dazzling Technicolor by Joseph Brun (the shots of wildlife are spectacular): It presents a romantically strong argument in favor of conservation. At the same time, it develops into an oblique meditation on the relativity of good and evil. Ives may spit in the face of God to win his hard-earned money through killing and commerce, but director Nicholas Ray clearly believes Ives’s character is closer to nature than Plummer’s. | 134 |
| Bud Kirk of Goodland, Florida, (who had himself been an Everglades warden and mailman) was the technical director for this classic film about slaughter of the bird rookeries by plume hunters. It was written and produced by Budd Schulberg, who is best known for winning the Academy Award for his screenplay of On The Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando. Interestingly, Kirk himself was the inspiration for Wind Across The Everglades. When he was on a fishing trip in the Keys he met Schulberg in a bar where Kirk started talking about his earlier job as an Audubon warden. There, the idea for this classic tale was hatched. Over the years Schulberg kept track of Kirk, believing him to be an Everglades Thoreau, a self-taught archaeologist, Glades historian, and naturalist. Later, Kirk agreed to read Schulberg’s script for technical errors. So it seems that the legacy of the Audubon warden is not just that of saving plume birds—through Kirk’s inspiration and technical expertise portrayed nearly fifty years ago, Winds Across the Everglades also entrances later generations with a morality play about the beauty and fragility of life in the Everglades. | 135 |
| In the Winds’ MacKinlay Kantor, author of Andersonville and other best sellers, plays a judge. The roles of the swamp angels are taken by Emmet Kelly, the renowned clown, Tony Galeto, the former boxer, Burl Ives, once a ballad singer, and Sammy Henike, a former jockey. Gypsy Rose Lee, the strip-teaser, plays the owner of a Miami fancy house. Christopher Plummer, a famous Shakespearean actor making his film debut, is the hero—a brave Audubon society agent named Walt Murdoch who declares war on the poachers in his region and puts an end to the nefarious traffic in feathers. This brings him into direct conflict with the legendary Cottonmouth (Ives), the spiritual leader of the group of illegal bird hunters. Ives sports a red beard and black hat adorned with the plume of an egret, and wears a cottonmouth moccasin (named “Curlicue”) as a wrist adornment. An aura of artifice surrounds the film, especially when it recreates the frontier atmosphere with its cowboy saloon and jug-swilling, gun-toting poachers, but the natural outdoor settings, in the wilds of the Everglades, are real. So are the birds that fly in clouds and the dawns and sunsets. There is definitely life in this strange yet inspirational film, which is sufficiently accurate to introduce the frontier world of the Plume Wars of Florida to students. | 136 |
| The Florida portrayed sixty years later in A Flash of Green is also gritty and true to life, and although before their time, is familiar to most Florida students. Presenting the “old Florida” of the 1960s, a young Ed Harris plays Jimmy Wing, the hard-boiled yet sentimental newspaper writer out to expose the developers who aim to fill and develop the fictional Grassy Bay. Based on the novel by John D. MacDonald (Florida author and creator of the moralistic, environmentalist Travis McGhee thriller series from the 1960s) Jimmy Wing struggles with the twin seducers of corruption and scenic nature. The fictional Palm City, Florida, is an Edenic paradise subject to a dreadfully powerful local land development firm attempting to exploit the town’s unspoiled bay. The protagonists are Kat Hubble (played by Blair Brown), the attractive widowed and determined leader of the town’s conservation group; and Elmo Bliss, (Richard Jordan) a ruthless and ambitious politician who is secretly allied with the developers. Into this morality play enters Wing, whose involvement with the sinister Bliss becomes undermined by his increasing love for Kat. Accurately portraying the conflicts between the “natives” and those from “outside,” the film presents a fight between local residents content with their near-poverty and quiet scenic life versus those locals who understand that they cannot “eat the scenery.” We also meet an embittered environmental scientist and several archetypal Florida characters in the sheriff and the local bankers and townspeople. By the film’s conclusion we learn that everyone must pay the price for his or her ambition and love, whether for romance, money, or the land and an unchanging life. With its contemporary presentation, cast of familiar actors, and campy Florida scenery replete with old cars and dilapidated one-story Florida ranch houses, this film would be a popular one for college students. Although not common, it is available in VHS online and appropriate for a seminar course. | 137 |
| Interesting in their subject matter, eras of production, and representations of Florida environmental issues, Winds Across the Everglades and A Flash of Green will be part of my environmental history course curriculum. Besides focusing on issues of species protection and land conservation, the films offer object lessons in the persistence of environmental ethics in America. Additionally, both films raise issues about the acquisitive character of American culture, the antagonism between capitalism and the natural world, and the capacity of the human soul to suffer its own habitat destruction. | 138 |
Cynthia Melendy teaches environmental history and material culture at the University of South Florida, where she birds as often as possible. She is currently completing a biographical chapter on Cordelia Stanwood for the second volume of Women of Maine and is researching Florida environmentalism in fiction and film. | |
going wild
LISA MIGHETTO
| THESE FILMS, Never Cry Wolf (Carroll Ballard, 1983) and Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005), have more to say about humans than about wolves or grizzlies. Like many of the best wildlife movies, they examine the ways in which humans struggle to understand the rest of the natural world and their place in it. Both films feature lone men venturing into the wild to test themselves, and both offer compelling journeys of self-discovery. However, their visions of nature are vastly divergent, imparting different messages about the ability of humans to connect with other creatures. | 139 |
| Never Cry Wolf is based on Farley Mowat’s nonfiction book recounting his government-sponsored trip to northern Canada, where he observed wolves and analyzed whether they were responsible for declining caribou herds. The actor Charles Martin Smith is charming as Tyler, the central character, who takes on this assignment “to find that basic animal I secretly hoped was hidden somewhere in myself.” With macho overtones, Tyler explains that what made the arctic appealing for him was “all the dangerous things lurking there.” Before he boards the bush plane that will drop him in a remote location many miles north, a crusty figure at the Hotel Caribou adds a sense of foreboding. “You will be the only fresh meat,” he warns. | 140 |
| The film’s stunning scenery—sweeping views of mountain peaks, ice fields, and tundra—reinforces Tyler’s isolation as he tries to establish a camp in this wilderness. He is woefully unprepared for the challenge, and the film makes much of his inept survival skills as well as the government’s ignorance of conditions in the Far North. Scenes of him plucking a frozen sock from his sleeping bag and wondering what to do with the light bulbs and other useless supplies packed for him are presented with gentle humor, making Tyler a sympathetic character. | 141 |
| Tyler adjusts to the arctic environment at the same time he moves close to the wolves. Although mostly an observer, he does interact with the animals, at one point urinating around the camp to mark his territory. Tyler’s narration emphasizes that wolves mate for life, adopt orphans, and cooperate in teams. He further humanizes them by naming them “George” and “Angeline”—there is even an “Uncle Albert” that watches over the pups. Clearly Tyler identifies with the animals and at one point says he envies them. Surprised to discover the wolves eating mice, he does the same to prove that a large carnivore can subsist on a diet of small rodents. | 142 |
| One of the final scenes depicts Tyler running naked with a herd of caribou with the wolves in pursuit, which seemed over-the-top to this reviewer, but which serves to blur the boundary between human and wolf, solidifying Tyler’s bond with the creatures. The scene closes with his realization that the wolves were killing only sick caribou, and by thus culling the herd they were keeping it healthy. The message for Tyler, and presumably for the viewer, is that contrary to previous assump-tions, wolves aren’t “aggressive” and “bad,” and because they perform a useful function are deserving of protection and consideration. | 143 |
Image © Buena Vista Pictures. Poster for Never Cry Wolf (1983). | |
| While it romanticizes wolves, the film demonizes humans—and it ends with the destruction of the alpha wolves. Despite Tyler’s claim that there are “no heroes or villains,” most people in the film, viewed through his perspective, come across as greedy and self-indulgent exploiters. At the very least humans are intruders. Only the Inuit have wisdom and a sensible perspective, noting that “this place doesn’t belong to man.” In the end, Tyler is redeemed by his deep, if short-lived, connection with the wolves. | 144 |
| This film seems very much a product of the 1980s. Released in 1983, it was one of my favorite movies when I was a graduate student, and watching it again more than twenty years later reminded me how Barry Lopez and others during the late 1970s and 1980s had sparked an interest in wolves, revising their longstanding reputation as cruel, bloodthirsty creatures. In Never Cry Wolf, Carroll Ballard, known for films such as The Black Stallion (1979), once again had produced a beautiful story of a lone, struggling figure saved by his bonding with animals. | 145 |
| Grizzly Man, a more recent film, explores many of the same themes as Never Cry Wolf while offering a different vision of the natural world. It is a haunting documentary about Timothy Treadwell, an amateur naturalist and filmmaker who spent thirteen summers in Alaska living unarmed among grizzlies. This movie, narrated by its director, Werner Herzog, tells Treadwell’s story by interviewing friends and acquaintances and by piecing together Treadwell’s footage of bears in the wild. In a manner reminiscent of Tyler’s narration, Treadwell announces his intention to “run wild” with the bears, placing himself at the “precipice of death.” He further describes himself as a “kind warrior” and “master” of the animals, claiming ominously that he would “not die at their claws and paws.” Seeking to explore “the secret life of bears,” Treadwell, like Tyler, hoped to correct misconceptions about grizzlies. “I think they’ve been misunderstood,” he explains. This film is not gentle like Never Cry Wolf, however, as the narration reveals early on that Treadwell and his girlfriend, who accompanied him in his last few excursions, were killed by a grizzly at the end of his thirteenth season. | 146 |
Image © Lionsgate Films. A still from Timothy Treadwell’s own footage of grizzly bears, as edited and presented by director Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man (2005). | |
| The irony of the film is that for all his years living with and studying grizzlies, Treadwell misunderstood these animals—and knowing his fate makes watching him interact with them a painful experience. “I’m in love with my animal friends,” he tells the camera at one point. “I am one of them.” Like Tyler, Treadwell wanted to connect with the bears, to establish some kind of kinship. One disturbing shot shows him reaching out to a cub, which looks more dangerous than cuddly. And while he describes “Mr. Chocolate” as “my good friend,” there is no evidence that this large male bear, hovering in the background with formidable teeth and claws, feels the same way. Shots of Treadwell in his tent holding his childhood teddy bear add poignancy to his final encounter with a grizzly. | 147 |
| This film offers spectacular footage of the bears, but Treadwell occupies center stage. Like Never Cry Wolf, this is a story of self-discovery. As presented in his film clips, Treadwell is an enigmatic character, fraught with contradictions. A quixotic, self-appointed caretaker and protector of the bears, he does not clearly explain or demonstrate the threat. While he views other humans as intruders, Treadwell builds a channel for spawning salmon so that the fish could reach the bears—a manipulative, if not invasive, act. His camera becomes his confessional, as much of his narrative examines his troubled past and his motivations for moving into bear country. The grizzlies provide Treadwell with an identity, as the title of the film indicates. “I had no life and now I have a life,” he says at one revealing point. | 148 |
| One of Grizzly Man’s chief values is its attempt to find meaning in Treadwell’s experience. In interview excerpts, some people question Treadwell’s common sense, while others portray his fatal encounter with the bear in moralistic and anthropomorphic terms. The pilot who found his body, for example, calls the animal that killed him “a dirty rotten bear that he didn’t like anyway.” Even Herzog describes the bear as a “murderer,” instead of as a hungry wild animal or a creature motivated by forces that we might never understand. Like the Inuit in Never Cry Wolf, an Alutiiq from Kodiak Island explains that bears live in a “different world” from humans—one whose boundaries should be respected. He portrays Treadwell’s actions as invasive and potentially damaging to grizzlies, because he habituated the bears to humans. | 149 |
| Grizzly Man is a complex film, in part because there are two voices and two visions presented here: Treadwell’s and Herzog’s. Although Treadwell’s views as presented in this movie are the result of Herzog’s editing, it seems clear that he romanticized the bears, while Herzog sees indifference rather than kinship in the natural world. Herzog’s is the dominant view here—and Grizzly Man shows the terrible consequences of misunderstanding the natural world and assuming a benevolent bond that does not exist. While Never Cry Wolf is an uplifting film that minimizes the dangers that wild animals can pose to humans, Grizzly Man horrifies as well as fascinates us. | 150 |
| Both Never Cry Wolf and Grizzly Man offer a mesmerizing look at how humans interact with other animals and both offer awe-inspiring footage of wolves and bears in their habitats. Despite the promotional posters for both, which feature isolated men and ferocious beasts, these are not adventure stories about rugged heroes battling the predators of the Far North. These movies are about vulnerable characters forced to confront themselves in difficult circumstances and to reflect on their relation to the wondrous creatures around them—and that’s what places them in the best tradition of wildlife films. | 151 |
Lisa Mighetto is the executive director of ASEH. She has published several books and articles on fish and wildlife issues and has served as a research consultant for historical projects throughout Alaska, including the Pribilofs and Kodiak Island. | |
a clean, well-lighted place
CHAR MILLER
| ALDO LEOPOLD, THAT clear-eyed ecologist, knew how to puncture lofty rhetoric about the common man and deflate high-blown political oratory about the commonwealth. But he was not above waxing nostalgic to make a point. Such as the time the university professor warmed himself before a “particular oak now aglow on my andirons,” and warned of the “spiritual dangers” that come from “not owning a farm.” The first of these, he noted in A Sand County Almanac (Oxford, 1949), was “supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside.” By getting close to the land, if only during a weekend respite from grading (or pushing) papers, citizens would gain a much-needed immersion in the daily rigors and pleasures of a natural life. “If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator” (p. 6). | 152 |
| Tell that to Bill and Hazel Parkinson, who well knew just how much time was required to chop wood to fuel their domestic realm, how much muscle power must be exerted to wrest a decent living from their fertile fields in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Leopold’s lament notwithstanding, the Parkinsons and their five children preferred a somewhat easier life, and the manner by which they achieved it is the subject of Joris Ivens’s Power and the Land (1940), a New Deal-funded documentary of the electrification of rural America. | 153 |
| Or rather, it is framed around the need to electrify farmsteads such as the thirty acres the Parkinsons’ worked, a need predicated on the maldistribution of energy: “Our cities glow with light,” Stephen Vincent Benét intones in the film’s voice-over, “but most of our farms, even now, still rely on the kerosene lantern and the iron cook stove.” To capture this inequity of geography and capital, and to reveal its enervating impact on individual families, filmmaker Ivens tracks the Parkinsons’ daily rounds, from pre-dawn milking to the final, night-dark barn inspection. The boys haul kindling to the stove their sisters and mother tend; the women pump water from an outdoor well, do the laundry by washboard, and use a stove-heated iron to press their clothes. Meanwhile, the father and elder sons feed the animals and muck out the barn, laboring under a single, dim lantern; lacking proper refrigeration, their milk can go sour—”good for pigs but the milk receipts won’t be so good.” As they thresh alfalfa with a horse-drawn implement, fork hay onto a wagon, and make use of the single-seat outhouse, theirs seems a primitive existence, which Benét confirms is the “old way, the hard way.” | 154 |
| Still, it had its virtues. The family’s farm was “not the best land [or] the worst. But it raised five healthy Americans, and Bill and Hazel. That’s something for land to do.” The Parkinsons’ health, a signifier of their upright character, was its own reward, but why should not the Parkinsons, “good people, hard-working people,” secure “the best tools man can make”? Obtaining those technologies would not be easy nor could they gain them by themselves. Happily, help was on the way in the guise of the village people’s cooperative instincts, which, the documentary insists, was the collective force that made America. “We built our freedom and strength this way, from Mississippi to Ioway,” a binding of hearts and minds that has been inexorable: “When we get together we are hard to stop.” | 155 |
| That’s an arresting claim, and a political one, too; it was designed to fend off conservative attacks on the Rural Electrification Administration, whose work the film lauds. In its concluding segment, Power and the Land probes how utility corporations had refused to bring electricity to less-dense and poor rural areas, and how the Roosevelt administration’s commitment, through the REA, helped communities establish nonprofit cooperatives; the agency loaned funds to localities to develop power-generation capacity and distribution infrastructure. When the loans were paid off, the cooperatives gained ownership of the means of production, an outcome Ivens stressed was consistent with the American ethos: The electrical poles, their arms strung with wiring, were likened to Liberty Trees of the Revolutionary Era, a radiant legacy. | 156 |
| The film’s intellectual heritage owes more to the Great Depression; by its argumentation and ideological prescriptions, imagery and literate narration, it is of a piece with 1930s documentary iconography, most notably found in the work of Pare Lorentz.1 Indeed, as director of the U. S. Film Service (1938–1940), Lorentz had developed the idea of Power and the Land before handing it off to Ivens to complete; he would serve as one of the film’s producers. No surprise, then, Lorentz’s conviction that a beneficent federal government was the only force capable of rehabilitating a broken land and reclaiming a forgotten people, evoked in nearly every frame of his masterworks, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), is recapitulated in Ivens’s film. Nothing but good could come from such intervention, Power and the Land confirms in its final sequence. As night falls, the Parkinson family gathers for dinner around a table laden with the food they had earned through hard labor; after saying grace, they tuck into the hearty meal bathed in the rich warm glow of artificial light. | 157 |
Char Miller is director of urban studies at Trinity University, where he teaches American environmental and urban history. A senior fellow of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, Miller is associate editor of Environmental History and the Journal of Forestry. NOTES1. See Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). | |
the hope and promise of birds
GREGG MITMAN
| WHAT IS IT about birds? Long before March of the Penguins, Walt Disney had turned Pablo the penguin and other assorted animated and real feathered friends into Hollywood stars. Well before Winged Migration, the famous British filmmaker, John Grierson, whose camera illuminated the life of British working people during the Great Depression, captured the spectacular journey of birds across the Western hemisphere in his 1942 film, High Over the Borders. When the box office revenues of Happy Feet, featuring animated dancing penguins, exceeds those of Casino Royale, where beautiful bodies and action-packed adventure abound, the public appeal of birds on film merit comment. | 158 |
| Winged Migration, the acclaimed 2001 French documentary directed by Jacques Perrin, is my entrée into this essay on birds, movies, and environmental history. It took more than 450 people, 17 pilots, 14 cinematographers, and sophisticated bird-rearing techniques, planes, gliders, helicopters, and balloons to capture the migration of dozens of species of birds across seven continents. Bird watching never required a more intensive investment in labor and technology. As the film’s spectators, we take part in a breathtaking and sometimes dizzying movement of scale from the intimate close-up of a bird in flight to satellite images where migrating flocks are visible specks in a panorama of continental landforms and oceans. The human body has seemingly been transcended. | 159 |
| Technology renders an intimacy that the human eye alone could not achieve. Suspended in air high above the ocean, we look upon a gannet in wonderment. It is a wonder evoked by being an intimate witness to this poetry in flight, but also by a lurking question of what technological wonders have made such intimacy possible. | 160 |
| Winged Migration is much more than the stated story of a “promise to return”; it is a story of coadaptation between humans and wildlife. To achieve such spectacular footage, birds were imprinted on humans and their flying machines. Carroll Ballard employed such techniques in his 1996 film, Fly Away Home. But while Fly Away Home at times used the imprinting of birds on people to interrogate categories of nature and culture, Winged Migration seeks to hide the human in the life of birds, except for the negative impact of hunters and industrial pollution. The repetitiveness of overhead shots of V-flying formations, and an accompanying soundtrack of sometimes lulling Gregorian-like chants, offer a meditation on the timelessness of nature. “For eighty million years,” the narration reminds us, “birds have ruled the skies, seas, and earth,” in a never-ending cycle of seasonal migration. But the landmarks visible along their flight paths—the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, and, in times past, the World Trade Center—are also reminders that time stands still for no species on earth. The histories of birds and humans are intertwined. How the histories of land use, commerce, culture, and science and technology mediate the historical relations of birds and people is a subject opened up by Winged Migration, and one to which environmental historians have much to contribute. But such a move requires us to see the lives of birds and humans as coproductions. The irony is that birds never appear in the credits of Winged Migration, only people. Without either, however, no such film would exist. | 161 |
© Sony Pictures Classics. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Photofest. Barnacle geese in flight. From Winged Migration (2001), directed by Jacques Perrin, codirected by Jacques Cluzaud | |
| Still, the question remains, what is it about birds? Of the many bird species, the appeal of penguins is perhaps easiest to explain. Flightless, upright, donned in tuxedo-like garb, they are ideal anthropomorphic subjects. But what of bar-headed geese, Clark’s grebes, sandhill cranes, whooper swans, arctic terns, and numerous other species that appear in the film? Their sentience is less than that of chimpanzees, gorillas, and dolphins, whose likeness to humans is traded upon. It is not to the birds’ sameness, unlike penguins, but to their otherness, that we need to look to understand their appeal. It is the property of flight, a promise of freedom and escape from the human condition, I suggest, that has given birds such cultural resonance. Since the early twentieth century, birds have become cultural icons of freedom and movement. When the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs sought to promote greater cultural and economic exchange between North and South America, birds became the vehicle for doing so. Grierson’s film, High Over the Borders, commissioned by the OCIAA, instructs moviegoers in the folly of believing in exclusive ownership of birds through a visual tour of the flyways of Canada geese, hummingbirds, swallows, and other migratory birds that bound North and South America into a single biological, cultural, and economic region. The birds in Winged Migration similarly know “no barriers” in their flight to the far north. And we cheer for the parrot toward the end of Winged Migration as it tries to unlock the cage in which it is imprisoned, along with other animal compatriots on a boat traveling down the Amazon, snagged in the commercial net of the global pet trade. A sigh of relief comes when it succeeds in breaking free of its restraints; perhaps human domination is never complete. That, it seems, is the hope and promise of birds as moral fables of our time. | 162 |
Gregg Mitman is William Coleman Professor of History of Science and professor of medical history and science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An aficionado of nature films, his most recent books include (with Lorraine Daston) Thinking With Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (Columbia , 2005) and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale, 2007). | |
dad (and mom) vs. nature, 1975
KATHRYN MORSE
| OVER 120 MILLION Americans saw Jaws in the summer of 1975.1 I, at age eight, was not one of them. My parents did little damage to my environmental history career, however, in sparing me Steven Spielberg’s blockbusting tale of an island community terrorized by a Great White shark with a taste for small children. For Jaws, by scholarly consensus, is not about nature at all.2 Despite its classic disaster-movie plot (Nature Bites Back), the film is about Watergate and Vietnam. Really. But how could a film about shark attacks, made in the mid-1970s, not have something to say about nature? When viewed alongside an obscure family movie released in December of the same year—one my parents willingly allowed—the nature story in Jaws emerges. Far fewer Americans saw The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, an insignificant family flick, but without question my favorite movie of 1975.3 Viewed together, the two films reveal a shared narrative of nature’s role in the redemption of the patriarchal nuclear family. In both stories, nature provides a key refuge for the family, but only after the father takes up arms against all he cannot control, and reasserts his dominance. The American retreat to nature in the 1970s may have echoed retreats of previous decades and centuries, but this retreat, from crime, smog, stagflation, feminism, and the failures of Watergate and Vietnam, gave an old story a particularly telling spin. | 163 |
| Both films depict white American families in flight from the city. As Jaws opens, Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), his wife (Lorraine Gary), and two sons have left New York City for Amity Island, a quiet beach community economically dependent on summer tourism. Brody admits to the powerlessness he felt in the city, as a cop faced with a crime wave and as a father who could not keep his children safe. The Wilderness Family, in turn, opens in smog-choked Los Angeles, where construction worker Skip Anderson (Robert Logan) broods over his inability to protect his young daughter from painful medical treatment for allergies brought on, the doctor says, by “the air, the water, or maybe even the stress of living here.” The Anderson children are literally suffocating. Seven minutes into the film, Skip, his wife (Susan Damante Shaw), their two kids, and the dog are felling trees for a cabin worthy of Ralph Lauren on a remote lake in the Rocky Mountains, accessible only by float plane. The Wilderness Family fueled every one of my homesteading adventure fantasies, primed as I was by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jean Craighead George, and other favorite authors. I had no idea of the complex meanings of wilderness, but I knew I wanted to live there, romping through wildflowers with fawns and bear cubs alongside the kids in the film, while a soundtrack played songs about peace, heaven, harmony, and, most prominently, freedom.4 | 164 |
| In the nonfiction cities of the 1970s, families like the Brodys and Andersons faced crime and pollution, along with the economic and social dislocations brought by inflation, unemployment, rising divorce rates, the women’s movement, and the Vietnam War. The report of the 1970 White House Conference on Children warned that “America’s families are in trouble—trouble so deep and pervasive as to threaten the future of our nation.”5 Americans (mostly white) fled to the suburbs and beyond, envisioning nature as a pure and safe environment for young children.6 This connection between nature and the postwar family was not new, as middle-class Americans had already embraced family tourism and camping in the National Parks and other wild areas. Yet the crises of the seventies gave this embrace of nature new urgency. | 165 |
© Universal Pictures. Courtesy Universal Pictures/Photofest. Swimmers flee the threat of shark attack in Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg. | |
| In these two films, however, retreat to nature cannot in and of itself restore or protect the nuclear family. New threats emerge, as nature itself does bite back in the form of sharks and bears, bent on attacking the children in question. The Moms in both films question the decision to leave the city; the Dads question their own place and power, their ability to make the world safe for their kids. To settle those questions, families must take up arms. Only after Dad kills the shark (Jaws), and Mom kills the grizzly bear (Wilderness Family), can the strengthened, unified families look to a secure future in a pristine environment.7 In each film, the final victory vindicates the father’s leadership in leaving behind the environmental and social chaos of the decaying city. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argued in 1988, contemporary disaster films (including Jaws), “depict a society in crisis attempting to solve its social and cultural problems through the ritualized legitimization of strong male leadership, the renewal of traditional moral values, and the regeneration of institutions like the patriarchal family.”8 | 166 |
| Of the two films, The Wilderness Family presents the more progressive vision of redemption in nature. Everyone in the Anderson family gets a vote when the family reconsiders their move to the mountains, and, in the end, it is Mom’s vote that counts. After all, she kills the psychopathic grizzly bear. Jaws is more conservative and more powerful. Jaws, after all, is mostly about Watergate and Vietnam, about the corruption of the nation’s leaders (fathers), and their responsibility for the nation’s moral, fiscal, and social decay.9 Amity’s community fathers cover up the shark attacks in the interest of the tourist economy. When the shark takes his second victim, a young boy, the boy’s grief-stricken mother echoes the words of thousands of parents mourning sons lost in Vietnam. “You knew there was a shark out there, and you knew it was dangerous. You knew all those things, and still my boy is dead now. And there’s nothing you can do about it. My boy is dead.” Having failed, utterly, to protect his children and his community, Chief Brody must seek redemption in the wild. | 167 |
| Thus, in Jaws‘s third act, an extended homage to Moby Dick, three men take to the sea to hunt the shark, all community fathers of one type or another. Quint (Robert Shaw), the aging warrior, represents the traditional military, bent on vengeance, haunted by the sharks who fed on the crew of the Indianapolis, a Navy ship sunk by the Japanese in July 1945. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the Ivy-League scientist, stands in for the East Coast elite, the best and the brightest, Kennedy and McNamara; he applies modern theory and science to defeat the beast. But neither military might nor brain power can kill the shark, as neither could win the Vietnam War. That task is left to Chief Brody, a common sense cop, a father protecting his family despite his fear of the sea, alone with a gun on a sinking ship. Only he can end the long national nightmare, restore his own authority, and make the world safe for his children.10 | 168 |
Kathryn Morse teaches history and environmental studies at Middlebury College, and is the graphics editor of Environmental History. Her book, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush was published in 2003 by the University of Washington Press. NOTES1. Steven Spielberg, Director, Jaws, 1975. For statistics on movie attendance, see Robert P. Munafo, “All-Time Top 191 Movies By U.S. Theater Attendance,” http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/movies/topadj.html (January 2, 2007). Jaws is ranked eighth out of 191. Gone With the Wind is first. Jaws earned a total of $260 million in the United States, making it the highest grossing movie of all time in 1975. It currently ranks thirty-fourth. See Nash Information Service, “The Numbers,” http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1975/0JWS.php and Movieweb, “All Time Top 1000 Grossing Films,” http://www.movieweb.com/movies/boxoffice/alltime.php (January 2, 2007). Jaws is a historically significant film for several reasons. It marked the debut of Steven Spielberg as a nationally known filmmaker. It is considered the first summer blockbuster, a film distributed in wide release after a massive buildup of multimedia publicity, designed to be a summer “event” and to draw a massive national audience in its first weekend. It marked a watershed division between the preceding cycle of disaster movies—Airport (1970) and its sequels, The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972 )—and the record-breaking action/adventure/fantasies which followed, including Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). See Douglas Gomery, “The Hollywood Blockbuster: Industrial Analysis and Practice,” in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (London: Routledge, 2003), 72–75; and David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979, vol. 9 of History of the American Cinema, Charles Harpole, gen. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000), 40–44. Stephen Farber wrote in the New York Times that Jaws had “the largest prerelease advertising budget for any movie in the history of Universal Studios.” Stephen Farber, “Jaws and Bug: The Only Difference is the Hype,” New York Times, August 24, 1975.2. For the scholarly consensus, see Cook, Lost Illusions, 40–44, and Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 49–65.3. Stewart Raffill, director, The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, 1975. The film grossed just over $28 million in the United States, a mere tenth of the profits generated by Jaws. See Nash Information Service, “The Numbers,” http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1975/0AWFA.php (January 2, 2007).4.Wilderness Family was filmed in Utah’s Uinta Mountains.5. “The American Family: Future Uncertain,” Time, December 28, 1970, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944265-1,00.html (January 2, 2007).6. For scholarly analysis of the homesteading movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its roots, see Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).7. Admittedly, the parallels between Jaws and Wilderness Family are not perfect. The mother in The Wilderness Family commits the climactic act of violence. When the father travels down a raging river by canoe to seek medical help, the mother defends her home and children from a grizzly attack. She dispatches the bear with a double-barreled shotgun. The argument about the regeneration of the patriarchal family holds, however. The father plays the dominant and primary role throughout the film in protecting his children from bears, cougars, and wolves; it is his dream to live in the wilderness, and his leadership which makes a new life outside the city possible.8. Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 52. For further analysis of 1970s disaster movies, see also: Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower, 2001); Nick Roddick, “Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies,” in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, ed. David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 243–69; and William Graebner, “America’s Poseidon Adventure: A Nation in Existential Despair,” in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 157–80.9. As Stephen Paul Miller writes, “Jaws plays on the newly culturally embedded Watergate myth. The governmental and moneyed interests of Amity, an island off Long Island, distort reality to cover up a kind of castration machine—the shark Jaws. Eventually, this reality can be hidden no longer. The horror of the aftermath of Watergate can strike anywhere.” Stephen Paul Miller, Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 93.10. As Ryan and Kellner argue, Jaws “is also important historically as a major response to the crisis feminism and independent feminine sexuality were posing for traditional values and institutions. The power of the Father/Leader needs to be reasserted, the film seems to say, and indeed it soon would be in U.S. society.” Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 63. | |
landmarks: a personal view of the story of new zealand
ERIC PAWSON
| IN AN ERA when lavish documentary series were becoming popular with public broadcasting companies, Television New Zealand began its occasional forays into this genre with a series on the country’s environmental history. It was written and presented, much of it direct to camera, by Kenneth Cumberland, then recently retired from the Chair of Geography at Auckland University. It was entitled “a personal view,” yet there would have been few others at the time capable of providing a coherent perspective of the subject. What made the programs so convincing was the way in which Cumberland constructed a national story, and his own intersections with that story, out of a career-long study of New Zealand’s environmental transformation. | 169 |
| It is a field that Cumberland made his own, from the start of his arrival in New Zealand from Britain in 1938. Three years later, he published an overview in the Geographical Review that began with the words “What in Europe took twenty centuries, and in North America four, has been accomplished in New Zealand within a single century.”1 He was well attuned, however, to the consequences of attempted dominion. His book Soil Erosion in New Zealand (Whitcombe and Tombs, 1944) underlined the ambiguities of that achievement and itself contributed to environmental reconstruction through postwar catchment management. | 170 |
| Landmarks was therefore based on more than forty years of research and intimate awareness of New Zealand’s diverse landscapes. And a quarter of a century on, it stands up well, providing one’s spectacles are not too avowedly postcolonial. The production values were of a high order. The series looks as if it had a generous budget, and Cumberland’s scripts tied each episode together. He was engaging and debonair on camera, and provided continuity through voice-over when off it. There were no talking heads or interviews to interrupt the flow. He seemed unconstrained by accountants, coming into shot in a glider, a helicopter, on horseback, in a jetboat; here in the South Island, there in the North; on the coast, in the bush. | 171 |
| At the very least, the series showed New Zealanders their own country in a detail and range and from a vantage point that would have been new to most. It also put the national story into its necessary international context, with Cumberland often making brief appearances in overseas locations. For example, he is in the Reform Club in London to give atmospheric context to a reading of the instructions that shaped the Treaty of Waitangi, and in Monterey, California, to show the source of Pinus radiata, long since New Zealand’s predominant plantation tree. Anyone with the will to concentrate for fifty uninterrupted minutes on a Sunday night (an option long since removed for New Zealand television viewers with floods of advertising) would, however, have gained far more by way of insights into environmental history. | 172 |
| The ten programs followed a largely chronological thematic sequence. The first two were called “A Land Apart,” and “The First Foot Prints.” They were followed by the resource frontier (“Ready for the Taking”), pastoralism, and “Go North Young Man,” on dairying and North Island bush clearance. Two of the most absorbing programs were those on the environmental challenges after both world wars, “The Bitter and the Sweet,” and on environmental consequences of development, “Nature Fights Back.” The farm settlement schemes for returned soldiers are explored, Cumberland saying of those after the Great War—often uncleared, remote forest blocks—that “the new battlefield was in tougher hill country than anyone had yet tackled in New Zealand.” In contrast, the 1950s schemes were new farms handed over, to those successful in the ballots, as going concerns. Frequently they were on land brought into use with recycled wartime technology in the form of aerial topdressing. Programs on communications (“The Main Trunk Line”), towns, and the future completed the series. | 173 |
| Today different assumptions and sensibilities would frame the story. Two decades of treaty claims would put a greater emphasis on relations between Maori and European colonizers. This story is not absent in Landmarks, but it was dealt with in the then-conventional way, i.e., largely as history, rather than woven into an ongoing dialogue. Cumberland belonged to a generation when the human agent was usually “man,” and women appeared incidentally, rather than as coworkers in the enterprise. And modern environmental eyes might look askance at cutting and firing of native bush for the camera, for example, when one of the great political contests in the years since has been to call a halt to just this. | 174 |
| Would such a series be made now? Many, cynical after years of pulp television, would think not. Television New Zealand is a crown-owned company, required to meet some public service charter objectives, but overwhelmingly dependent on commercial sources of revenue. Yet sometimes it does still produce full-length documentary series: for example, in 1998, James Belich’s five parter on the New Zealand Wars between Maori and Europeans, and in 2005, a thirteen-part social history series titled Frontier of Dreams. Landmarks, however, was the first, and it remains a vivid testament to the fascinating story that is New Zealand’s environmental history. | 175 |
Eric Pawson is professor of geography, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He chaired the advisory committee of the New Zealand Historical Atlas (Bateman, 1997), and is co-editor, with Tom Brooking, of Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Oxford, 2002). NOTES1. Kenneth B. Cumberland, “A Century’s Change: Natural to Cultural Vegetation in New Zealand,” Geographical Review 31 (1941): 529–54. | |
chinese politics and environmental history
KENNETH POMERANZ
| ON MY FIRST TRIP to China in 1985, all the foreigners at our university were bused to the huge Yellow River dikes nearby, and encouraged to take lots of pictures (though taking photos of water control installations was supposedly forbidden). Clearly the dikes were a great point of pride. The point was made more dramatically a dozen years later, when the first coffer dam crossing the Yangzi was completed at Three Gorges. CCTV showed twenty-eight consecutive hours of trucks dumping rocks in the river to complete the dam: hardly scintillating drama, but a sign of how psychologically important this event was. | 176 |
| In between, however, one of the most popular, controversial, and talked-about TV programs in Chinese history took a different tack. It used a still-untamed Yellow River as a symbol of everything that was wrong with China and needed to be rejected if the country was to have any future. Looking back at those films today provides a window on how a large number of Chinese may think about environment, development, and national identity. | 177 |
| River Elegy (He shang), a six-hour, six-part documentary, aired in June and July 1988, and was reshown by popular demand in August. CCTV estimated that at least 200 million people watched the series; the full text of the narration was published in the official People’s Daily.1 This was a period of nervous openness in Chinese society, with considerable uncertainty about how far economic and political reform would be allowed to go. The series, some of whose creators had links to reformist think tanks, was quickly endorsed by allies of the technocratic reformist Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. However, conservatives immediately criticized it, with the vice president labeling it “reactionary.” (He did so in a speech given in Ningxia, one of the remote and poor Northwestern regions that the films associate with the river and “traditional” Chinese culture.) After Tiananmen, with Zhao removed from power and the position of hard-liners considerably strengthened, the film was criticized even more pointedly, CCTV was obliged to show a three-hour counterdocumentary, and some of the films’ creators went into exile; others were harassed to varying degrees. | 178 |
| The film’s voice-over narration presents a simple binary opposition. The Yellow River represents “traditional Chinese culture,” agriculture, obedience, superstition, authoritarianism and conservatism; the ocean into which it must eventually flow represents the foreign, the West, risk-taking, openness, industry, science, and democracy. The movie offers few concessions to those who—if they accept such a binary at all—would hope for some sort of compromise between its terms. While the film occasionally suggests that China’s agrarian society produced some things that were impressive for their day, its overwhelming message is that everything associated with the river must now be jettisoned. | 179 |
| One irony which many environmental historians will note immediately—that the Yellow River has been so heavily tapped for irrigation and hydropower that it no longer reaches the sea most of the year—goes unnoticed in the series. Almost all images of the river show its upstream reaches, often in full flood. (The first story told in the series is of Chinese white water rafters who died on the upper river, having attempted to run it so that an American with similar plans would not become its first conqueror.) One of the huge dams I was so eagerly shown in 1985 appears for a moment in segment 5, but otherwise the river is associated only with “traditional” technology; the opening scene of each segment (after footage of people kowtowing en masse) shows boats with sails and oars on the river, with sailors in tattered clothes; others show people desperately piling up sandbags as the floodwater rise. Agriculture is consistently associated with both poverty and environmental degradation. The badly eroded loess plateau surrounding the upper Yellow River is by far the most frequently shown landscape, and appears almost every time farming is mentioned: the highly productive paddy fields of east, central, and south China, by contrast, appear only for seconds. | 180 |
| So while most Westerners are bound to prefer the company of River Elegy‘s fans to those of its detractors, there is a great deal for an environmentalist not to like here. Industrialization is celebrated without reservation; the river is treated as a still-powerful enemy to be subdued rather than an object of solicitude; and in general, landscapes, though captured in beautiful images, are deployed as timeless symbols for social formations and political positions much more than they are treated as ecosystems (or portions thereof) with their own stories. But the enormous passion and intense discussions that River Elegy aroused make it impossible to dismiss, and the way that the environment is deployed here is worth thinking about, even if the movie is anything but environmentally sensitive. Why do a river and a landscape—particularly the landscape of a poor, disenfranchised region—make such effective stand-ins for a set of political and cultural attitudes? | 181 |
| Just as noteworthy as the portrayal of the river and other landscapes is the portrayal of modern technologies. Railroads and steamships appear rather frequently, often as symbols for modern technology more generally: These images almost always have a very tight focus, so that we see few if any people, and little of the surrounding terrain. | 182 |
| The documentary’s appeal stemmed in part from its audacity. Even in the relatively open period of 1988, many people must have been amazed and excited that something like this could be shown nationwide—and in fact, it took some rather surprising coincidences for this to be politically possible.2 And terrific photography surely helped, too. This highly political film was actually a spin-off from a different documentary on the Yellow River—more in the National Geographic mode—which was made in cooperation with the Japanese station NHK, and had, by Chinese standards, an enormous budget. Even on the small screen, many of the scenes of the upper Yellow River are stunning, worth comparing to those in movies like Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum or Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (which few Chinese have seen). At least to me, very few of the scenes of urban prosperity, or scientific achievements have anything like the same visual power. If this was true for the film’s Chinese viewers, too, perhaps watching the film might give rise to more complex reactions than reading the script would—but this is pure guesswork. | 183 |
| For the last millennium the Yangzi has actually touched far more human lives than the Yellow River—providing irrigation, transportation, and daily water for about a third of China’s people. But the Yellow River, with its far more devastating floods, is the more common symbol of how people live with the natural world. And the image that that suggests is of nature as an enemy to be subdued. These films resonated with millions of viewers because of their critique of authority, not their environmental politics, but it is unlikely that they would have been so successful if the environmental history they present had seemed as obviously “wrong” to those viewers as it does to me. (Part of what makes my own reaction ambivalent is that I can’t avoid being moved by a bold effort to “speak truth to power” at the same time that I recognize a lot of untruth in the way the films treat the river that is their central metaphor; so I presume that those who had less ambivalent reactions must have been less struck by the way the films “cheat” in their treatment of the environment per se.) Today, when environmental concerns have become more prominent in China, the films probably would be made differently, but I suspect the implicit assumption that people must either dominate or be dominated by the river would still make sense to many viewers. And that is no small challenge for those of us who think we have more complicated stories to tell, and hope that such stories can matter. | 184 |
Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor’s Professor of History at University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000). NOTES1. An English translation with a helpful introduction is available. See Stanley Rosen and Gary Zou, eds., The Chinese Documentary “River Elegy” (originally published as vol. 24 of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology (winter 1991–92); republished by M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY, 1991).2. A good introduction to the relevant politics can be found in Chen Fong-ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Culture Movement and Political Transformation 1979–1989 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1997), especially 215–26. | |
john, of the smokechasers
STEPHEN J. PYNE
| MOVIES ABOUT WILDLAND FIRE are poor, and frequently dreadful, and there is no indication that, despite better graphics, they are poised to improve. Always was a mindless remake of A Guy Named Joe; Firestorm is to firefighting what Batman is to law enforcement; only Red Skies of Montana (1953) has shown any punch or staying power. The reason seems to be that all the drama is contained in physical action: These are, in essence, chase movies or tales of personal combat, often not much above juvenile sport stories, and when they try to incorporate moral drama beyond the expression of physical virtues such as courage and stamina, they collapse like a weary fire grunt falling into an ash-filled stump hole. Documentaries are little better. They focus on those mesmerizing, telegenic flames, or slip into the default narrative, which is a war story stripped of the true horrors of war. NOVA’s Fire Wars, for example, simply follows a hotshot platoon through its seasonal campaigns. Teasers for a film version of Norman Maclean’s meditation, Young Men and Fire, promise more of the same, as a smokejumper struggles against personal demons and a dyspeptic marriage, waiting for renewal through violent action against the flames. Only the title will bear any connection to the originating text. | 185 |
| One can rail against this tradition—say it isn’t necessarily so; say it should be possible at least in principle to reconcile moral drama and physical action. Or one can accept that the genre is what it is, and if so, ask what kind of film might best convey its truest features. The logic points to a film that is pure action, that simply has its protagonist compete against the flame without encumbering quirks of personality, nagging social concerns, romantic subplots, politics, or ethics, that gives him only a Job To Do. Logic points, that is, to a training film. It leads to Forest Smokechaser. | 186 |
| Forest Smokechaser was produced by the U.S. Forest Service (Intermountain Region) and released in 1948. It features John Smokechaser, an Everyman Northern Rockies lookout-fireman, residing at a tower on Brundage Mountain along with his wife, Josephine, and their daughter, Joan. The plot simply follows John as he spots a fire, reports it, tracks it down, and puts it out, while a narrator, speaking both to John and to an audience of Johnnie-wanna-bes, explains what is happening. (“Careful, John, a sprained ankle now and your chances of getting the job done are shot.” “The hardhat came out of John’s pack. He wears it to keep from getting conked.”) If you want to know how to attack and extinguish a wildland fire with handtools, there is no better manual. More recently the film has acquired special historical interest because it demonstrates exactly what techniques the crew portrayed in Maclean’s account of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire actually possessed (a smokejumper was only a smokechaser who parachuted into fires). | 187 |
| Still, the film was, from its origins, a cliché in the making. Absurdities abound. John always has loose dirt at the tip of his shovel, his pulaski never cracks against a rock, his jeans never soil, and if he really wanted to stop the fire from crowning through that thicket of pine saplings, he ought to clobber the guy with the flamethrower hiding just outside the frame. But, hey, this is Hollywood, after a fashion. Step by step, through scouting, hotspotting, firelining, and mopping up, John singlehandedly wrestles the fire to its knees. He stops a fast-moving lead through a heavy-needled slope; he knocks down the hot flames of a pitchy stump, and digs out the smoldering burns of a rotten one; he fells a simmering snag (“Old Heartbreaker, three foot through and sound as a dollar”) with a never-dull pulaski; he separates the quick from the dead, tossing cold wood into a boneyard, while giving the still-smoking wood a dirt bath; he chops, spades, mixes, over and again. For three days he stays at it, living on water and an occasional can of beans, with a packcover for his blanket and a packframe for his pillow. When he departs, before the music swells in the background, the narrator quietly declares, “and so the fire is out”—dead out, tested like John himself, mano a mano, with his bare hands. | 188 |
| Even forty years ago the film was so corny it was campy. Crews loved it. We showed it on 16mm projectors on the fire cache walls on rainy days, while the veterans chanted the familiar lines in sync and the rookies learned the basics. This is what the job was about. John Smokechaser, portrayed by a genuine firefighter named John W. Parker, was our mythic culture hero—our Stormalong, our John Henry. We all longed to fell Old Heartbreaker with a pulaski and rip that punky stump out by its roots. John Smokechaser was the fire guild’s paragon, a man who knew what to do and just did it. | 189 |
| The wildland fire community has moved far beyond simple suppression. “Hit ’em hard and keep ’em small” seems antiquarian amid the complexities of deciding today what fires to attack and how, amid a determination to reinstate free-burning flames into a welter of landscapes well beyond John’s “empire of trees.” No one has managed to animate this new reality, or even to ponder seriously how the dilemmas of deciding might inform a moral drama commensurate with the physical action of a firefight. But if they do, the outcome will probably pull some postmodern punches (John or Joan Wildland-Fire-Use-Monitor doesn’t carry much panache), and my instincts tell me that if it happens it will likely take the form of a training film. I hope it’s campy. | 190 |
Stephen J. Pyne is a Regents professor in the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, and a former North Rim Longshot. | |
onward then, ye penguins
HARRIET RITVO
| FINDING A MOVIE to see with my parents is always a challenge—anything rated above PG must be eliminated, as must anything with rapid dialogue or a tricky plot. A documentary featuring birds going about the ordinary, if strenuous, business of their lives promised to fit this demanding bill (avian sex and violence do not pack quite the same punch as the human variety), and it fully delivered on this promise. The March of the Penguins is indeed a film for the whole family, as is proclaimed on the cover of the DVD, but that does not mean the birds’ behavior provides an ideal to which human families, traditional or otherwise, should aspire. I was therefore totally surprised when I realized that conservative viewers were celebrating The March of the Penguins as a paean to family values and intelligent design. | 191 |
| With its spectacular images of the emperor penguins and their icy homeland, the movie offers a fascinating, if depressing, evocation of the experience of the hardiest and most unfortunate of the Spheniscidae (if the environmental lot of the emperor penguins is compared to that of penguins that live in New Zealand or South Africa or the Galapagos). Their lives exemplify many of the tenets of Darwinian evolution. The severe climatic challenges they must face recall the cold comfort that Darwin offered tender-hearted readers at the conclusion of the chapter on “The Struggle for Existence” in On the Origin of Species: “we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” Evolution only figures explicitly (if obliquely) at the very beginning of the movie, in a reference to Antarctica’s slow southward drift from the tropics to the south pole. But it is hard to see the complex and arduous annual breeding cycle of the penguin as evidence of anything but a gradual adaptation to a cooling environment. | 192 |
| In the starkly forbidding environment of Antarctica survival is difficult, both for individuals and for the species. As is the case with every species, continued existence depends on the production of a sufficient number of healthy offspring. The fact that emperor penguins have to accomplish this in a frigid stormy setting, with no available food, and that, at least for each pair each year, everything depends on the fate of a single egg, makes the imperative clearer. The penguins practice serial monogamy (that is, pairs remain together for a single breeding cycle), but this fidelity does not involve much connubial bliss. As soon as the eggs are laid, the mothers trek back over many icy miles to the sea (the closest source of food), only returning when the chicks are about to hatch. The fathers have spent the intervening months incubating the eggs on their feet and starving; when the mothers show up again, they bolt immediately. Although the adults’ devotion to their chicks is intense, and exacts extreme sacrifices, it is far from absolute. In one troubling scene, which ends when a penguin chick is killed by a petrel, the predator stalks one young bird after another while adults observe without attempting to interfere. And all the adults return to the water several weeks before the chicks are able to do so, so that there is a period when the chicks live alone on the shore, without any adult protection or guidance. It is clear that their behavior illus-trates the power of the urge to reproduce. But, for emperor penguins, as for most species (even humans), the urge to reproduce does not require a lifestyle con-sistent with what are conventionally referred to as family values. | 193 |
© 2005 Bonne Pioche Productions / Alliance De Production Cinématographique. Poster for March of the Penguins (2005), directed by Luc Jacquet. | |
| It is doubtless the sentimental tone of the narrative (along with the emotional background music) that inspired conservative enthusiasm, rather than any close attention to its content. For example, the words “love” and “family” are scattered through the narration, with no indication that they might have different meanings in the human and the penguin context. And although the narration acknowledges the casualties caused by weather and hunger, so that there are repeated references to death, these references are normally illustrated by one or two pathetic corpses. There are no scenes of gruesome mass mortality, such as appear several times in the documentary about the making of The March of the Penguins that is included on the DVD. Further, the marketing of the film has consistently conflated “family values” and “family viewing.” The DVD begins with previews of cartoons and animal movies clearly intended for children—including one for Happy Feet, which features animated dancing penguin chicks—and the extras include an old Bugs Bunny cartoon about a penguin from Hoboken as well as a National Geographic documentary about penguin scientists. | 194 |
| It is interesting that neither the internal evidence provided by the movie, nor the explicit declarations of the bemused filmmakers, discouraged those who wished to admire emperor penguins as models of American domesticity. There are several conclusions that could be drawn from the impressive robustness of their conviction. One is that the creator of a work, whether a novel or a painting or a documentary film, is less and less able to control its meaning as it reaches increasingly broad audiences. Another is that the natural world often functions more like a mirror than a book, and the animals who resemble us most closely in appearance or behavior provide the most tempting targets for projection. | 195 |
Harriet Ritvo teaches history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard, 1997) and The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard, 1987). Her current project is The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere and the Victorian Environment. | |
petulia
ADAM ROME
| A FEW YEARS AGO, I decided to watch a bunch of movies from the late 1960s and early 1970s. My film festival wasn’t intended to be a work project. I had seen a few movies from that extraordinary period, and I just wanted to see more. To my surprise, though, many of the movies addressed the human relationship with the nonhuman world. That was true of works in a variety of genres—character studies (The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces, Petulia), anti-westerns (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), countercultural odysseys (Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Harold and Maude, Zabriskie Point), and science fiction (Soylent Green, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain). Only a few of those movies focused on environmental themes. More often, the ways people related to nature spoke to the issues that were the explicit subjects of the films. | 196 |
| Petulia was perhaps the most complex and provocative film on my list. Set in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, Petulia is a study of two people trying to escape from unsatisfying lives at a time of cultural upheaval. Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott) is a middle-aged father of two about to be divorced. He wants desperately “to feel something.” Petulia Danner (Julie Christie) is the young wife of a plastic pretty boy who lives off the wealth of his parents. When Petulia introduces herself to Archie at a benefit for highway safety, she tells him that she has been married for six months and still hasn’t had an affair. And so begins an improbable and difficult-to-categorize involvement. But Petulia is not just about conformity and rebellion. | 197 |
| The characterizations of Archie and Petulia suggest that the film also aims to raise questions about the problematic legacy of Western rationality. Archie is a man of science, a coldly proficient practitioner for whom a rib is “just a rib.” After leaving his wife, he lives in a hyper-modern bachelor pad. He takes Petulia to a motel that is straight out of science fiction: Everything is automated, artificially lit, aseptic. Throughout the film, Archie spends time at places where nature is stylized and totally controlled. He meets his post-separation girlfriend at an oriental garden where people are hurried along as though they were on an assembly line or a conveyor belt. He takes his kids to a Sea-World-like park where trained penguins perform tricks. Petulia, in contrast, is a “kook.” According to the dictionary, that’s a word first used in the late 1950s, perhaps derived from “cuckoo,” meaning strange or crazy. And Petulia is. She is mysterious, not logical, open to whim. Without stretching, you might say she is a force of nature. Even her name is resonant—it sounds like a flower. | 198 |
| Petulia ultimately brings Archie back to life, but the film doesn’t have a Hollywood ending. When I saw the movie the first time, I wasn’t sure what to make of Petulia’s fate. I also wasn’t sure I understood the argument about nature and culture. The film seemed to suggest that wildness is the preservation of the world. Yet Petulia is no earth mother—she lives on a meticulously landscaped estate. And Archie never goes back to nature. Or at least the nature he encounters never is “wild” in the way that Americans typically use that word. | 199 |
| In a pivotal scene near the end of the movie, for example, Archie comes home to find two men installing a greenhouse in his living room. “It gives you something alive in all this steel and glass,” the crew chief says. Archie is annoyed. The workmen must have the wrong apartment. “What kind of screwball,” he says, and then he stops in mid sentence. “Was there a gift card?” He starts to laugh, for the first time in the movie, because he realizes Petulia must be responsible. And he keeps laughing, as he gathers a few flowers from the greenhouse to give her. But the redemptive greenery is not wilderness. The crew chief shows Archie how to work the heat and humidity controls. Then the workmen underline the artificiality of the greenhouse landscape. “Now the thing to remember is to keep the sun out.” “The sun will kill it.” “These new kinds of lights work so much better, there’s no comparison.” | 200 |
| The greenhouse scene comes soon after another scene that initially struck me as puzzling. Archie takes his kids to Muir Woods, “Nature’s Cathedral,” where he talks with the man who is about to marry his ex-wife. The scene makes clear that the woods are not pristine. Two actors, a cameraman, and a director are filming a cigarette commercial! The trail is lined with signs. “This tree 68 years old the day Christ died,” says a sign next to a trashcan and a water fountain shaped like a tree stump. Another sign lists the rules: “Stay on trails. Disturb nothing. Remove nothing. Keep dogs on leash. Pedestrians only. Closed to picnicking.” Is this a desecration? Perhaps. But the kids are happy, and Archie’s conversation with their future stepfather is cordial. He is a step closer to making peace with himself. | 201 |
| Reflecting again on the movie, I now realize that my initial uncertainty about how to interpret those scenes derived from an intellectual habit that the film challenges. Though Americans with environmentalist sensibilities are predisposed to see a greenhouse and a redwood preserve as fundamentally different, Petulia equates the two. In the film, both are managed spaces, and both are liberating. Indeed, the challenge to the binary opposition of artificial and natural speaks to the film’s most basic point: We live in a fallen world, and we cannot hope to regain our innocence or transcend our history. The best we can do is to find a more satisfying balance between order and spontaneity, reason and emotion, acceptance and rejection of social norms. | 202 |
| For environmental historians, Petulia may be most interesting as a reminder of our continuing difficulty in seeing across the nature/culture divide. We slowly have recognized that many seemingly untouched places in fact bear a human imprint. But—if my reaction to the greenhouse scene in Petulia is any indication —we still are uncomfortable acknowledging the wildness of domesticated landscapes. | 203 |
Adam Rome is associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. He is working on a short history of Earth Day 1970 as well as a longer study of environmental reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. | |
environmental sustainability in the twenty-first century
CHRISTINE MEISNER ROSEN
| THE FILM Who Killed the Electric Car? concerns the life and death of the EV-1, the electric car that General Motors developed and began leasing to Californians in 1996 to meet the requirements of the state’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate— and then in 2002 brutally and quite literally destroyed, after the California Air Resources Board rolled back the measure in response to pressure from the auto, oil, and fuel-cell industries. It is one of a pair of documentaries released last summer (the other was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth) that, along with Hurricane Katrina, drowning polar bears, and the skyrocketing price of oil, seem to have finally awakened the American public’s concern about global climate change and our society’s addiction to the fossil fuels that cause it. A surprisingly instructive as well as an entertaining film, I found as I watched it that my mind was racing with questions about the boundaries of the environmental history field, how we communicate our findings, and why we do what we do. | 204 |
| The boundary issue that sprang to my mind as I watched the film had to do with where we should draw the line between the past and the present. I teach MBA courses on green corporate environmental strategy and green energy. I kid you not when I say that the last ten years have been a time of incredible change in the sustainable business field. We are on the cusp, possibly, of either catastrophic disruptions in our planet’s climate and biological ecosystems that will likely lead to chaos and conflict within human society—or major transitions in business and global markets that will lead us to environmental sustainability in our industrial system, greatly improving our chances of achieving social, economic, and political stability. Many developments have taken place over the past few years in how corporate managers view the opportunities and risks inherent in meeting society’s growing need for solutions to our mounting environmental problems as well as in how nonprofit organizations pressure and partner with businesses to help bring about these solutions.1 Together with a broad array of ambitious environmental policy initiatives with global impacts, mostly in the European Union, as well as the Bush administration’s perverse efforts to weaken environmental regulation, changing consumption patterns in China, India, and elsewhere around the globe, and emerging shifts in consumer values, these developments are promoting the transition to sustainability, as well as blocking it.2 The creation and demise of California’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate and GM’s EV-1 are just tiny manifestations of a hugely interesting, important, and confusing emerging transition of global significance and scope. But most of the changes that are giving rise to this transition are very recent—and many are ongoing. Do we have the temporal distance and perspective to study them as historians? Or can we only report on them, like newspaper reporters and documentary makers? Insight into these issues is needed now, not twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now. What special understandings can we offer as historians? | 205 |
© Sony Pictures Classics. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Photofest. The EV-1 funeral, in Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006), directed by Chris Paine. Photograph by Matt Bohling. | |
| Other questions that flashed through my brain as I watched Who Killed the Electric Car? had to do with how we communicate our research. The scenes of people trying desperately to save their beloved EV-1s from GM’s car crushing machines were so effectively infuriating, that even I, jaded as I am, found myself thinking that conventional historical research and the writing of articles and books were now passé, a distraction from what we really need to do—which at that moment seemed to be that we should all become documentary filmmakers! (A thought I have also had while watching some of Ken Burns’s documentaries.) But then I thought again. This is a nonissue. Environmental historians need to be open to working with the new media, but the written word is still a beautifully effective communication device. What is most important is the quality of our research and the intelligence and sensitivity with which we interpret and present it to an audience, whether it be in a lecture, a paper, a book, or a movie. | 206 |
| The third kind of question that flashed through my head as I was watching Who Killed the Electric Car? had to do with whether we should follow the lead of its makers and consciously embrace, as historians, a role in helping bring about the hoped for transition to environmentally sustainable industrial production and consumption. What should we be doing in our work—what can we do—to help bring about a transition to sustainable business? Is this kind of commitment a form of bias that will undermine the quality of our work by destroying our objectivity and encouraging us to oversimplify our arguments to reach the largest possible audience—or will it add energy and urgency to our work and so motivate us to improve our analysis and make it more compelling? | 207 |
| I’d like to conclude by answering these questions. Even though historians will undoubtedly have much more objectivity and historical perspective fifty or a hundred years from now, I think it would be a good thing if more of us were to investigate the history of what is taking place right now (and over the last few years) in business, in the nonprofit sector, and in government policy that is paving the way, or standing in the way, or complicating the path toward environmental sustainability. These developments raise many extremely interesting and complex issues for historians who want to explore the dynamics and limits of change in modern society. And yes, there is an urgency about the subject. I’d like to think that we environmental historians will be able to provide insightful, objective, historical analysis that will help move this transition, in all its ambiguous and controversial complexity, forward. | 208 |
Christine Meisner Rosen is associate professor at the Haas School of Business and Director of the American Studies Program at the University of California Berkeley. She is working on a book, To Quell the Raging Waste: A History of the American Response to Industrial Pollution 1840–1930. Her article, “The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Modernization of the Meat Packing Industry, 1865–1880,” will be published in Enterprise and Society in June 2007. NOTES1. For pioneering overviews and cases see: Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston, New York, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999); John Elkington, Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st-century Business (Gabriola Island, BC Canada, Stony Creek, CT: New Society Publishers, 1998); Andrew J. Hoffman, Competitive Environmental Strategy: A Guide to the Changing Business Landscape (Washington DC: Island Press, 2000); and Charles O. Holliday Jr., Stephan Schmidheiny, and Philip Watts, Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development (Sheffield, UK and San Francisco: Greenleaf Publishing Limited and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002); For further information and breaking news see: greenbiz.com and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (http://www.wbcsd.org/templates/TemplateWBCSD5/layout.asp?MenuID=1).2. Among the more innovative and potentially impactful EU environmental policies are the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) initiative, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) takeback initiative, the Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) initiative, and the policies enacted in conjunction with the European Union’s adoption of the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. For further information see the environmental, energy, and sustainable development sections of EurActiv.com, the independent media portal dedicated to EU affairs. | |
bringing history to the public
DAVID ROSNER
| ABOUT TEN YEARS ago Gerald Markowitz and I had the rare opportunity of reviewing the internal correspondence, memos, and reports of the Manufacturing Chemists Association, the trade organization for the chemical industry in the United States. Members of a law firm involved in a personal liability suit asked if we would review records they had received through the discovery process in the midst of a lawsuit they had brought against the industry on behalf of a worker suffering from angiosarcoma of the liver, a fatal, extremely rare cancer that affects workers exposed to vinyl chloride monomer, the gas that is the basic ingredient in polyvinyl chloride plastic, used in huge numbers of household and consumer products from computer keyboards and household plumbing to vinyl siding and ballpoint pens. The lawyers were interested in knowing what these records contained and what they said about the industry’s knowledge of the dangers of vinyl chloride historically to workers and consumers. At that time no one had done a systematic search of these records, and the opportunity to delve into once secret industry records regarding plastics was very tempting to us. We had written on the history of occupational disease but, like most historians, had never had access to this range of internal company documents. | 209 |
| We ventured down to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where the attorney, Billy Baggett, had his office. Immediately we were struck by the huge chemical companies that lined the highway and lake and dominated the skyline of what was apparently an economically distraught community. We found the building where the documents were housed—a split-level home packed wall-to-wall with files of documents from the Manufacturing Chemists Association, now renamed the American Chemical Council, the chemical industry trade association—and began what became a seven-year journey into the minutiae of how Goodyear, Goodrich, Monsanto, Uniroyal, Shell, Dow, and a host of other companies discovered and covered up the relationship between vinyl chloride and cancer. In short, we discovered thousands of documents that showed how the industry discovered the link between vinyl chloride exposure, and angiosarcoma of the liver in animals at levels below the established threshold level for humans. Further, these documents revealed how, in the early 1970s, the industry representatives signed secrecy agreements among themselves that barred company officials from informing the government of this link. The documents formed the basis of two chapters of our book, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, which details the social and political histories of the vinyl chloride and lead industries’ knowledge of the dangers of their products. While most of the book deals with the social history of Louisiana, particularly environmental justice as a movement, the history of lead poisoning and children, the legislative histories of both vinyl and lead, the chapters on the history of industry discovery of angiosarcoma made us the object of a tremendous effort by the plastics industry to discredit our work and to discredit us as scholars. It is an interesting tale, one that has led to a fair amount of attention in the scholarly and popular press. | 210 |
| The story really begins while we were finishing our book and received calls from Bill Moyers, and another call from Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold. Both sets of award-winning documentary filmmakers were producing documentaries on the chemical industry—Moyers for a PBS special, and Helfand and Gold for a documentary/dark comedy on the vinyl industry. They had both heard of the materials we had uncovered and asked if they could see them, a request that we gladly granted. The first half of Trade Secrets, Bill Moyers’s two-hour documentary on the chemical industry, is about the ways that the chemical industry has promoted the widespread use of vinyl chloride despite knowledge of its dangers. It included Gerald Markowitz and myself as “talking heads,” describing the documents we uncovered and showing the devastating effects of the chemical industry both on the population and environment of the Mississippi River basin and Lake Charles in particular. We also appeared briefly in Judith Helfand and Dan Gold’s Blue Vinyl, a film that has been shown to environmental groups worldwide. Further, the material we found also was used as evidence in a lawsuit by a chemical worker who suffered from angiosarcoma of the liver. | 211 |
| Both of the films attracted a great deal of attention from environmental groups and both were shown widely to different audiences of environmentalists, consumers, and workers throughout the country. The films also won acclaim from the film industry. Trade Secrets won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism and Blue Vinyl won an award at Sundance. We were proud to be part of both projects, proud that our historical research was at the core of what was obviously a growing discussion of the place of synthetic chemicals in everyday American life and proud that some workers—or at least their families—could benefit from the discovery of these documents as they brought liability suits against the plastics industry. Gerry agreed to serve as an expert witness in one case of a vinyl chloride worker who had suffered from angiosarcoma of the liver. | 212 |
| Very quickly the industry mobilized to counteract the information and point of view of these documentaries. Bill Moyers was attacked by the industry on a website that claimed he didn’t give enough time to the industry to present its “point of view” while HBO, which produced Blue Vinyl, was repeatedly challenged even before the film appeared. Since then, the industry posted a website that specifically attacked Bill Moyers’s film and Moyers has issued a number of statements pointing out that the documents used in the special are available on-line. (www.abouttradesecrets.org, the industry site used to attack the Moyers documentary, is no longer available. When you go to it, it takes you to the American Chemical Council home page. See http://www.healthy-communications.com/responsetotradesecrets.html for Moyers’s response to the attacks made by the industry.) For a number of days before Blue Vinyl aired we used our fax machine to transmit document after document to HBO, which had been challenged by lawyers for the industry, in order to reassure them that what we said on camera and what was claimed in the film was accurate. More recently, Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold, the directors and producers of Blue Vinyl, were subpoenaed for all the “out-takes”—the clips of the film that were never used—that showed Gerald Markowitz, myself, and Paul Brandt-Rauf, another scientist at Columbia. Apparently, the lawyers hoped that we had made some statement that could be used to show our bias and thereby discredit us and our documentary evidence in front of the court or the jury. | 213 |
| The documentary filmmakers were fending off attacks by industry lawyers. But we too soon discovered what it meant to bring history to the public and to enter into important social debates about the place of huge corporations in shaping our environment and polluting the earth. One day I was working in my office and I received a call from a colleague who had been one of eight reviewers of Deceit and Denial for the University of California Press/Milbank. He informed me that he had been met at his door in the middle of the night by a man who handed him a subpoena to appear for a deposition regarding his role in reviewing our manuscript for the University of California Press. He was to bring all of his documents, correspondence, communication with us or the press, all drafts of reports, etc. to a law firm where he would be deposed by lawyers for the largest chemical companies in the world regarding the review process of the manuscript. He was pretty unnerved. In the following few days Jerry and I learned that a total of five of the eight reviewers had received subpoenas from the industry lawyers ordering them to appear for depositions at a Manhattan law office. Also during that week we received calls from the University of California Press and the Milbank Fund telling us that they had received a subpoena forcing them to turn over all documents related to the publication, review, and production of the book. Finally, at the end of the week we received from a lawyer a copy of a forty-one page attack on our book and on our integrity as scholars signed by a respected historian of business and technology. The historian’s attack was to be used by the defense counsel to present to the court in an attempt to get Jerry’s testimony (and ostensibly the documents) excluded from the case. Together, this was an incredible moment in our lives and was, from our point of view, obviously intended to teach us a lesson concerning what we should and should not ask historical questions about. | 214 |
| I will not go into more detail about this whole episode for all the early history can be learned by reading the articles about it that appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and a number of other newspapers and websites. (These articles, along with links to 41,000 documents on the vinyl industry culled from our search, the attack on us by the historian, our response, the chapters from the book that were attacked by the historian along with links to all of our footnotes, and other materials can be found at www.deceitanddenial.org. We hope the scholarly community takes advantage of this site as a means of determining whether what we say in our book is an accurate representation of this history. The website was developed by Merlin Chowkwanyun, now a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania but then an undergraduate at Columbia). | 215 |
| Trade Secrets was a real thorn in the side of the industry and the industry defended itself as best it could. The last half hour of the documentary was devoted to a roundtable discussion that included Terry Yosie, vice president of the American Chemistry Council. First, he denied that the industry did anything wrong. But, more tellingly, he also claimed that what happened forty years ago was of little consequence today. Terry Yosie, the trade association’s spokesperson on the show, and himself a historian of technology, calmly argued that history was irrelevant to the situation now. “40 years ago is a very long time. 40 years ago there wasn’t an Environmental Protection Agency. 40 years ago there wasn’t a clean air act. I don’t believe the viewers of this program are interested so much in what happened 40 years ago,” he argued. Elsewhere, he argued, “I think you all know that what happened 40 years ago is no reflection of the kind of industry that we represent today,” he opined at the conclusion of Trade Secrets (http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/transcript.html). This seems disingenuous to us. Given our experience with the industry’s attempt to repress our research, defame our character and our integrity, undermine the peer review process, and corrupt other scholars by having them do their bidding, I personally feel otherwise. It appears that the industry is no more concerned about truth and scholarly integrity today than it was forty years ago when it deceived the government about what it knew about vinyl chloride and cancer. | 216 |
David Rosner, professor of history and public health and Director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at the School of Public Health, specializes in occupational and environmental history and in the history of public health. His publications include A Once Charitable Enterprise (Cambridge, 1982), Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (coauthored with Gerald Markowitz, Princeton, 1991 and 1994), and Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Virginia, 1996). His newest book is Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (California, 2002). | |
the deliverance factor
TIMOTHY SILVER
| IN THE SPRING of 1975, my college roommate and I decided to take a weeklong backpacking trip in the Great Smoky Mountains. The route took us around Fontana Lake, an old TVA impoundment, and along a sluggish tributary where the sandy soil sprouted nothing but shortleaf pines, scrubby maples, and poison oak. Discouraged, my companion took a long look across the lake and said softly, “You know what this reminds me of?” Then, calling up the mountain accent he usually kept in check, he twisted his face into a grotesque half-grin and growled, “Aintry? This river don’t go nowhere near Aiiiintry! You done took a wrong turn.” | 217 |
| The words stopped us cold. As we knew all too well, Aintry was the town in James Dickey’s novel Deliverance, a mountain hamlet slowly being swallowed by a new lake. Its image had been seared into our imaginations by John Boorman’s 1972 film adaptation of Dickey’s book and, at that moment, the Fontana landscape looked a lot like the one around that dying town. Worse, the lines my roommate recited called to mind the film’s most disturbing scene, one that neither of us cared to contemplate. Without further discussion, we double-timed it back to the trailhead and drove to a gated public campground, a peaceful place where we could calm our nerves and get a decent night’s sleep. From that day until this, I have never hiked the southern backcountry without carefully calculating “the Deliverance factor.” | 218 |
| At first glance, the film’s plot is deceptively simple. Four Atlanta businessmen—Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds), Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox), and Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty)—embark on a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in north Georgia. Their stated purpose is to see one of the South’s last wild rivers before the dam and lake destroy it. But something deeper is at work here. The men all have good jobs and families, yet still long for “a life that isn’t out of touch with everything,” something less predictable and closer to nature—a fine illustration of 1970s environmentalism and its faith in uninhabited wilderness as a purifying antidote for suburban ennui. The four friends also see the Cahulawassee as a place to test their masculinity, to experience the river as “the first explorers saw it,” and to play what Lewis calls “the game” of survival. | 219 |
| Filmed on the Chattooga and Tallulah rivers and in towns along the North Carolina-Georgia border, the movie’s depiction of the 1970s Appalachian environment is flawless. During the opening credits, Boorman juxtaposes images of heavy machinery and dam construction with peaceful scenes of hazy ridges and leafy hardwood forests, a dramatic picture of a mountain landscape ruthlessly exploited to provide resources for the urban South. Elsewhere along the Cahulawassee, though, the water is cold and fast, the snakes plentiful, and the rhododendrons thick enough to blot out the hot September sun. | 220 |
© Warner Bros. Courtesy Warner Bros./Photofest. Jon Voight (as Ed Gentry) in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). | |
| Lewis (a bow-hunter and survival-ist) and Ed (a tourn-ament archer) have some experience in the outdoors, but nothing has pre-pared the weekend warriors for this southern wilderness. Catching Ed and Bobby unawares in the woods, two shot-gun-toting locals force Ed to watch while one of them sodomizes Bobby, a brutal scene that will forever be linked with dialogue about Aintry, rivers, wrong turns, and the rap-ist’s infamous taunt: “I bet you can squeal like a pig.” In an instant, masculinity is tested, lost, and then partially recovered when Lewis dispatches Bobby’s attacker with an arrow in the back. | 221 |
| From that point, Deliverance evolves into a raw commentary on the human ability to survive—to play a real game of life and death—in an utterly alien natural world. Within twenty-four hours, Ed (arguably the most content suburbanite of the four) scales a daunting cliff in the dead of night, kills a man, helps dispose of three bodies, and then concocts an elaborate lie to conceal the whole affair. Later, while recuperating in an Aintry hospital, Ed is genuinely grateful for stainless steel, hot water, clean sheets, and other trappings of civilization. The message is unmistakable: Wilderness is neither pure nor uninhabited, but rather a place deeply tainted with human presence, where good people sink into savagery and manly skills offer the only hope of salvation. In mocking the ideals of a generation nurtured on Thoreau and John Denver, Deliverance stood (and stands) as the southern antithesis of everything seventies environmentalists held dear. | 222 |
| The film is less sophisticated in its portrayal of rural people. They appear either as degenerates or as dull-witted xenophobes, the typical “crackers” and “hillbillies” that have surfaced in everything from the antebellum stories of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Al Capp’s Li’l Abner cartoons. In addition to the two rapists, Deliverance features Lonnie, an apparently inbred, mentally-challenged, eleven-year-old banjo picker (played by local extra Billy Redden) with a serious mistrust of outsiders. His duet with Drew (on guitar) provided eerie theme music for the movie and became the hit song, Dueling Banjos. Apparently comfortable with his role, Redden later worked for a rafting company that catered to tourists who wanted to run the Chattooga with the “banjo boy.” However, other local folk resented Hollywood’s cheap caricatures and scholars denounced the film for promoting demeaning images of Appalachia that had little basis in fact. | 223 |
| Perpetuation of hillbilly stereotypes was not the movie’s only legacy. Its popularity spawned a boom in tourism that inevitably led to overdevelopment, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems within the Chattooga watershed. Since 1972, more than thirty people—many of them outsiders—have died trying to run the Chattooga. Most telling, perhaps, Deliverance is now part of everyday life in the southern Appalachians. Not long ago, at a favorite breakfast spot, I encountered several local people talking and drinking coffee at a corner table. When I spoke, they immediately identified me as an outsider—”someone from the college.” They were cordial, but hardly welcoming, and I quickly moved on. Hanging above their table, I noticed a T-shirt offered for sale by the restaurant’s proprietor. The shirt read: “PADDLE FASTER. I THINK I HEAR BANJO MUSIC.” | 224 |
Timothy Silver is professor of history at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. His latest book is Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (North Carolina, 2003). | |
mr. corporation on the couch
TED STEINBERG
| MR. CORPORATION FEELS bad and goes to see his psychiatrist. He walks into his doctor’s office presenting as follows: a lack of respect for social norms and a penchant for unlawful behavior; deceitfulness; aggressiveness; reckless disregard for the safety of others; consistently irresponsible behavior; and a lack of remorse. Mr. Corporation leaves with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. He is, in common parlance, what we call a psychopath.1 | 225 |
| The genius of The Corporation, a film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan is that it looks at what is now the world’s most powerful economic entity as a legal institution with psychopathic tendencies. The film, based on the book of the same name by Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, explores the common core legal principles that structure how the corporation is required to behave. The corporate form over the last century and half has gone from being a relatively insignificant institution, typically chartered by the state to perform a public service—like building a bridge or a road—and trenched around with restrictions on everything from the amount of capital it could raise to how long it could operate, into the dominant economic institution of twenty-first-century capitalism. Today the largest corporations have market capitalizations that are bigger than the gross domestic products of some nations. That economic power, the film makes clear, has been used to cause untold social dislocation and ecological turmoil, just as you would expect of a psychopath. | 226 |
| With the corporate revolution of the 1890s, states such as New Jersey and Delaware reformed their corporate laws and loosened the restrictions formerly placed on corporations. During this period of corporate consolidation, the law evolved toward the natural entity theory, the idea that the corporation was an independent person, even entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. The film brilliantly applies psychology to the modern corporation and asks what kind of person the corporation is, concluding that corporate law has evolved in a way that sanctions behavior most people would find unconscionable in a person. This kind of behavior is the result of legal decisions such as Dodge v. Ford (1919), which held that the corporation must act in the best financial interests of its shareholders.2 Maximizing shareholder profit is the proverbial bottom line, and since that principle is inscribed in law, corporations cannot simply engage, for example, in environmentally responsible behavior unless it benefits them financially. | 227 |
| Legal and institutional imperatives thus organize the corporation’s relationship with nature, explaining its tendency toward the aggressive use of natural resources. But the power of the corporation extends well beyond its instrumental approach to the natural world. As Susan Davis has shown in Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience, corporations also recruit nature to structure how consumers interpret environmental problems. | 228 |
Image Courtesy of the Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction. Visit the website and contribute at: http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=18. Publicity poster for the DVD release of The Corporation (2004), directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. | |
| Although the film does not explore the issue, it does at least raise the question of how it is that people are largely willing to tolerate an institution that, for example, flouts environmental regulations on groundwater contamination and air pollution whenever the financial benefits are greater than the fines. (Of course, not everyone is happy with the corporation, and the film includes a segment on how the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, revolted when the government brought in a multinational to privatize the water supply, succeeding in the end in reclaiming the utility from corporate control.) Figuring out why the corporate psychopath is countenanced is not easy, but we ought to start by looking at the problem from a historical perspective. There does seem to be a parallel, for instance, between ascendant neoliberalism—as forged since the late 1970s in the United States and Britain—with its emphasis on market logic, privatization, and a downsized role for state, and the obsessive cultural concern with personal environmental responsibility. As Davis explains, the commodification of nature so evident in a theme park like Sea World exists side by side with an injunction to recycle during your visit, the ultimate act of personal responsibility toward the environment. That is a useful ideological position for Sea World’s owner, the Anheuser-Busch corporation, which is of course a major producer of bottles and cans for its beer.3 Recycle and be a good environmental citizen, goes the logic, so that Anheuser-Busch does not have to be one. | 229 |
| At one point in the film, the businessman Robert Monks calls the corporation “an externalizing machine.” Because of its peculiar legal structure and obligations, the corporation has a perverse incentive to externalize the cost of doing business onto the public and the environment. One could make the argument that corporations are legally bound to engage in such behavior, at least to the extent that it redounds to the financial advantage of its shareholders. Let a thousand Bhopals bloom. | 230 |
| In light of this institutional context, one must wonder what it means for a corporation to act in an environmentally responsible fashion. One doesn’t have to subscribe to the view that recycling is a capitalist plot to realize that it allows consumption and the rampant use of natural resources to continue apace, and corporations to keep right on producing in the name of higher price/earnings ratios. As Noam Chomsky has put it, “Whatever one thinks of governments, they’re to some extent publicly accountable, to a limited extent. Corporations are to a zero extent.”4 | 231 |
Ted Steinberg teaches history and law at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (Norton, 2007). NOTES1. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2000), 706.2. Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919).3. Susan G. David, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 29.4. Quoted in Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004), 152. | |
two defenders of wild lands
JEFFREY K. STINE
| BOOK PUBLISHERS, AUTHORS, and teachers have long recognized the appeal of biographies, using the lives of accomplished individuals to illuminate broader topics and concerns. Documentary filmmakers are no exception to this rule and fortunately some have turned their talents toward critical figures in environmental history. Two recent and highly acclaimed films shown at the Smithsonian during Washington, D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival—Bonnie Kreps’s Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story and Kelly Duane’s Monumental: David Brower’s Fight for Wild America—emphasize the crucial role played by individuals in the fight to protect untrammeled landscapes. | 232 |
| The subjects of these documentaries—Margaret E. (“Mardy”) Murie (1902–2003) and David Ross Brower (1912–2000)—helped shape the contours of the modern environmental movement in the United States, and the cinematic examinations of their contributions include insightful surveys of both their historic accomplishments and the broader, ongoing cause. The two conservationists shared a deeply held passion for wild lands, which they fiercely defended. Their personal circumstances and approaches, however, were strikingly different, for Murie spent much of her life working humbly behind the scenes, while Brower spent much of his leading the charge. | 233 |
| Each of the filmmakers succeeds brilliantly in capturing the essence of a remarkable life but—like the protagonists they portray—each does so in her own distinctive fashion. Both films are extensively researched, both seamlessly blend historic photographs with archival and contemporary film footage, and both are accompanied by memorable soundtracks. Yet, stylistically, each woman takes a quite different cinematographic approach, as befits the differences in their own artistic sensibilities. | 234 |
| Bonnie Kreps began her film career with the Canadian Television Network in the late 1960s. After forming her own film production company in 1971, she made some of the first all-woman independent films in Canada. Since 1977, most of her films have been produced in association with the National Film Board of Canada and have been shown on television and in festivals in Canada, the United States, South America, Europe, and Australia, garnering an impressive list of awards. | 235 |
| Arctic Dance chronicles the life of an exceptional woman often dubbed “the mother of the American conservation movement,” tracing Murie’s childhood in Alaska, education and early work experiences, and thirty-nine-year marriage and collaboration with the Arctic biologist and Wilderness Society founder Olaus Murie. For decades, Mardy assisted Olaus with his conservation and wilderness preservation efforts. They had spent their honeymoon in the wilds of Alaska and she continued to be her husband’s travel companion and secretary. After his death in 1963, however, Mardy pursued this work alone and took on a visibility that might have been unthinkable for her in earlier years. She began writing books and letters, testifying at congressional hearings, and speaking publicly about her Arctic travels and in support of wilderness protection. These actions contributed significantly to the passage of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Act in 1960 and the Alaska Native Lands Conservation Act in 1980. In 1998, President Bill Clinton presented her with America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her lifetime contributions to conservation. | 236 |
| Kreps builds her film around an extended conversation between Murie and her friend Terry Tempest Williams, interspersing Murie’s recollections with evocative historical images and magnificent contemporary footage. Harrison Ford narrates from Charles Craighead’s compellingly written script, and Lyn Dalebout provides the voice of the young Murie, reading from her letters, diaries, and books. The soundtrack features Murie’s favorite music, and includes John Denver singing “A Song for All Lovers,” a waltz he dedicated to Mardy and Olaus. | 237 |
| After finishing this film, Kreps donated her treasure trove of Murie-related research material, photographs, and all the film footage (including “B-roll”) to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. | 238 |
| San Francisco-based filmmaker Kelly Duane left a similar legacy for historians when she completed her bio-documentary of David Brower, negotiating access to over two hundred unmarked 16mm film reels in the Sierra Club collection at University of California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in exchange for cataloging them. Duane spent months combing through Brower’s extensive accumulation of family photos and films, which dated back to the 1930s, together with the films Brower produced and commissioned for the Sierra Club while serving as its first executive director from 1952–1969. Duane then used the handheld footage shot by Brower and his Sierra Club friends prior to 1970 to depict the wilderness as Brower himself had seen it as a young environmentalist. She also incorporates Brower’s own voice, using Sierra Club oral histories recorded between 1970 and 1978, and complements this material with contemporary interviews with people such as Michael Cohen, Floyd Dominy, Martin Litton, Jerry Mander, Michael McCloskey, Roderick Nash, Kevin Starr, and Stewart Udall. | 239 |
| As a youthful mountaineer, Brower had been deeply influenced by photographer and mentor Ansel Adams, who encouraged him to experiment with a small movie camera. Brower intuitively understood the power of this medium and, as Monumental demonstrates so clearly, his cinematic eye continued to evolve over his lifetime, along with his conservation viewpoint and wilderness aesthetic. He became especially adept in using film as propaganda and as a tool for political persuasion. Duane documents how the films Brower made for the Sierra Club greatly assisted in the fights to establish and protect national parks and seashores and preserve wild lands more generally. Like Olaus and Mardy Murie, Brower often took people out into the wilderness fully expecting that they would fall in love with the land and be drawn to the struggle to protect it, but for those who could not experience wilderness first hand, he counted on film and photography to serve as a substitute. The classic example of Brower’s political use of imagery was Two Yosemites, produced in 1955 as the centerpiece of the club’s campaign against the proposed Echo Park dam in Dinosaur National Monument. This powerful film drew comparisons to the earlier inundation of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, concluding that such a senseless loss should never have happened and should never be allowed to happen again. | 240 |
| Monumental also follows Brower’s development as an educator, lobbyist, promoter, and organizer and it includes an incisive treatment of the Sierra Club fight during the 1960s to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon, a battle that made Brower famous. Despite successes like these, however, Brower’s increasingly confrontational and uncompromising approach to the defense of nature proved unsettling to a majority of the Sierra Club’s elected board members, and in 1969 they fired him. The film moves quickly after this, just glancing over Brower’s subsequent leadership of Friends of the Earth and, later, Earth Island Institute. | 241 |
| For environmental historians, each bio-documentary offers a combination of topics sure to provoke lively classroom discussion, such as the emergence of a framework for environmental ethics, the evolution of political tactics and strategies aimed at protecting wild lands, and the changing role of women in environmental activism. Mardy Murie and David Brower did much to make this a better world. In so doing, they demonstrated the real differences that individuals can make. As masters of their craft, Bonnie Kreps and Kelly Duane use the power of film to blend emotion and intellectual understanding of these points, producing memorable documentaries that educate, enlighten, and inspire. | 242 |
Jeffrey K. Stine is curator for environmental history and chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. | |
american pastoral
JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III
| STORIES CONNECT WITH their audiences only by transcending the essentially personal nature of experience. A River Runs Through It, based on the novella by Norman Maclean, deceptively illustrates this challenge. The reviews and hype—especially by those Montanans who blame the movie for every out-of-state angler on their streams—make it seem as if Robert Redford’s film is about fishing. When we watch Arnold Richardson’s palsied hands tie a fly to his line, hear Redford intone, “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing,” and see loving images of the Blackfoot River (doubled by the Madison and other streams because of pollution) and the casting artistry of Jason Borger (who doubled for Brad Pitt when fishing), it is hard not to fixate on fishing. But angling operates in this film like an expertly woven fly. It is a lure. Neither fishing nor the river is the real subject; they are merely the means to an examination of familial love and masculinity. | 243 |
| A River Runs Through It is in fact slightly fictionalized autobiography. Norman Maclean (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Craig Sheffer, Richardson, and Redford’s voice) recounts life with his minister father (Tom Skerritt) and younger brother Paul (Vann Gravage and Pitt). Set in Missoula, the action occurs between the boys’ youth in the 1900s and Paul’s violent death in the 1930s, and the plot is a retrospective quest for understanding. The problem, as the Reverend explains in his final sermon, is that “those we live with and should know … elude us.” The grail is not trout but wisdom in this very personal tale, but, because Norman’s experience is universal, the audience connects in a most paradoxical way. | 244 |
| A series of oppositions frame the movie. In one of the most effective juxtapositions ever filmed, for example, Redford offers a pastoral vision of the Macleans’s youth. Scenes of boys romping across rivers and prairies accompany Norman’s memory of how he and his brother were “set free untutored and untouched” to discover “the natural side of God’s order.” This reverie is followed by a jarring scene of dissipation, debauchery, and violence in Missoula’s honkytonks, brothels, and streets. Nature and culture are the yin and yang, but they work in divergent ways. If nature sometimes signifies purity, at other times it is the wildness that must be overcome. Norman and the Reverend represent the Apollonian ideal at different ages. Both are bookish, cerebral, deliberate, and restrained. Paul, by contrast, is the Dionysian, a preternaturally tough and impulsive kid drawn to the untamed life. | 245 |
| The rest of the cast serve to elaborate these themes. Women are markers for the varied forms of heterosexuality. Mother (Brenda Blethyn) signifies the successful constitution of fecund domesticity. The half refined Jessie Burns (Emily Lloyd), for whom Norman writes a telling simile (again, accompanied by images of unsullied nature) of “a field of grass where no one seems to have been,” represents the quest for romantic love. Mabel (Nicole Burdette) is a sign for how these impulses go awry. She is a sensual and defiant “Injun,” a warped match for Paul’s lusty nature. Together they dance, drink, gamble, and fight their way into self-destruction. The boy’s childhood friends illustrate the inertia of small town life and Paul’s dominating nature. Paul, ultimately, reveals the costs of failing to overcome his nature. | 246 |
| In a story hurtling toward tragedy, fly-fishing is the only sure refuge. Norman and Paul learn early in life that “only by picking up God’s rhythms” can they regain “power and beauty,” and in their family fly-fishing is the only sure path. Angling bonds the males as the only reliable mediator. The score cues these moments of grace, and its solitary absence on a fishing trip with Jessie’s brother Neal (Stephen Shellen), a poseur and, worse, a “bait fisherman,” confirms the equation. Even among worthy fishers, however, the Apollonian and Dionysian tensions persist. Following the Presbyterian ethic that “all good things … come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy,” Norman and the Reverend have a scholastic dedication to a form of casting grounded in hours of practice with a metronome. Paul, on the other hand, breaks free of the regimen “into a rhythm all his own.” His rebellion reinforces the tensions. Norman and the Reverend are well-practiced anglers, but only Paul achieves “perfection.” In the climactic scene, the Apollonians gaze in awe as Paul literally merges with the river to catch the big one. Only the Dionysian can master earthly nature, yet only he fails to tame his own nature. | 247 |
| Paul’s death creates a lingering vacuum. Because fishing was all they had in common, Norman muses that “maybe all I really know about Paul is that he was a fine fisherman.” That statement is a synecdoche for the problems of masculinity. The male figures struggle to stake their identities. The Reverend holds authority by meting approval, and the sons seek his love in distinguishing ways. Norman pleases by taking a teaching position, Paul by telling entertaining stories. Between them, though, there is no resolution. After a fight Norman observes that he and Paul “returned to being gracious to one another,” but the divide is permanent. As adults, fishing is the only way they can meet without a crisis. All else drives them apart. | 248 |
| To the very end, the producers want this film to be about fishing. The credits assure us that “no fish were killed or injured,” and that, “although the Macleans kept their catch as was common earlier in this century, enlightened fishermen today endorse a ‘catch and release’ policy,” but A River Runs Through It is about the things that separate men. Masculinity must be performed, and the most popular way for fathers and sons to do this is through sports. Change the activity and setting, and this could be about baseball in Iowa (A Field of Dreams), basketball in Indiana (Hoosiers) or climbing in the Alps (Seven Years in Tibet). Fly-fishing and nature are incidental, and that is a critical lesson when teaching nature and gender in film. Fly-fishing in Montana is a common ground for strangers, but it is hardly the only possible ground. Moreover, the grace the film celebrates is at most a brief interruption in isolation. In the end Norman sighs, “Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.” A river runs through Norman’s story; but under the river are the words, “and some of the words are theirs.” They are why he is “haunted by waters,” not by the trout. | 249 |
Joseph E. Taylor III is Canada Research Chair and associate professor of history and geography at Simon Fraser University, His first book, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Washington, 1999), won the George Perkins Marsh Prize. He is completing a manuscript on the relationship between recreation and environmentalism titled Pilgrims of the Vertical. | |
the problem of ‘progress’
DOUGLAS R. WEINER
| AFTER THE AMERICAN debut of Close to Eden, the noted film critic, Roger Ebert, wrote that it “is the kind of movie that has no reason for existence, except to keep the viewer bemused. It does that with such sly charm that when it’s over, you don’t even think to ask why it was made. You’re simply pleased that it was. The movie occupies no known category (I have never seen a film about modern-day Mongols, especially those who play accordions) and although you can possibly extract a message from it, why bother?” (Chicago Sun-Times, November 25, 1992). | 250 |
| As lushly and viscerally evocative as are the scenes of the wind-caressed steppe of Chinese Inner Mongolia, with its hypnotizing sense of endless space and nearly pristine beauty, a strong case may be made that the most profound things about this movie are its messages. Sadly, as in the case of Ebert, they were lost because viewers did not have the necessary historical knowledge and context. | 251 |
| A skeletal plot outline might mention that a local Mongol, Gombo, rescues Sergei, a Russian contract worker who has sleepily crashed his truck. Taken into the bosom of the herder’s family, who live in a yurt, the Russian comes to respect his new friends and their gentle, respectful, and honest culture, which he had formerly disparaged as “backward.” But this oasis of Edenic life is threatened by the encroachment of Western “civilization,” ironically in the form of Chinese industrial development, forcing the Mongols to yield to a more “progressive” use of the land. | 252 |
| It is the violence of this process, particularly to the human spirit as well as to cultural (and therefore, landscape) diversity, that is the concern of director Nikita Mikhalkov. In a considerable irony, the only weapon left to Mongols against this Kulturkampf was reproduction, and Gombo, against his wife Pagma’s fears of Chinese retaliation, insists on having a fourth (prohibited) child. (In fact, since the 1950s, Mongols have been responding to enormous Han Chinese inmigration with accelerating birth rates.) In a further irony, that fourth child, named Temujin (Chinggis Khan) as a symbol of Gombo’s resistance, ends up working in a gas station, which has displaced the family yurt and the solitude of the steppe with “modern living” and toxic pollution. | 253 |
| It would be easy to paint this as an éloge to a pastoral idyll of a near forgotten people. But Mikhalkov’s point is bigger than that. It is revealed in the most painful scene of the film. After a Russian pal of Sergei’s patronizingly humiliates Gombo at a bar (after all he’s “just” a “primitive”), Sergei, drunk and enraged, rushes to the bandstand, strips off his shirt, and orders the band to play the notes tattooed on his back. The song, a wrenchingly sad waltz entitled “On the Hills of Manchuria,” commemorates fallen Russian soldiers, crushed by the Japanese in the war of 1904–1905. It was as if Sergei, through his tears, was saying: “We also tried to emulate European ‘civilization,’ we thought that our white skin was a guarantee of superiority and victory, but look at what it got us. Our failure is inscribed in our very flesh.” In the name of some illusion of the good life, Mikhalkov seems to be warning, the Chinese, here the bearers of “progress” and “civilization,” are now poised to make the same self-defeating mistakes. We do not know whether Mikhalkov appreciated the already anthropogenic character of that incomparable steppe, whose tall grasses that sheltered crickets, dragonflies, marmots, and jackals had been grazed by numberless generations of nomads’ flocks and trampled by their horses. But we do know that he valued and appreciated the steppe as he found it, and the people who lived in it and from it. And this will be lost, he shows us, to the dreary, dusty sameness of roads, gas stations, and concrete. | 254 |
| The problem of “progress” is that it has to continue to expand and absorb the “primitive,” no matter what. Renouncing preservation as “romance,” it has never learned the potentially self-interested value of peaceful coexistence with difference. | 255 |
| Close to Eden charts the nomadic world’s last stand. But like Sergei and his fellow Russians, might not China and even Europe and America one day see their missteps and failures—in the name of “progress”—inscribed in their very skins? Perhaps. However, suggests Mikhalkov, if we can ever begin to respect ourselves and each other, we can begin again, as Bill Cronon once wrote, to respect the places where we live as well. | 256 |
Douglas R. Weiner is professor of history at the University of Arizona and past president of ASEH. He is the author of Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Indiana, 1988), and A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (California, 1999). | |
when life imitates art
MARSHA WEISIGER
| ON A DAY in late March 1979, when I arrived at the offices of Mountain West Research, where I worked as editor and technical writer, my boss greeted me with electrifying news. Our consulting firm had just drafted a socioeconomic history of the Three Mile Island (TMI) Nuclear Station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and now our client, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was asking for new research into the economic and social effects of an accident at the plant.1 Beginning in the wee hours of March 28, a series of equipment malfunctions and operator errors had exposed and destroyed much of the reactor core in Unit 2, leading to a small hydrogen explosion within the containment structure and, later, the venting of low-level radioactive gas into the atmosphere. What made the accident most astonishing was its timing: less than two weeks earlier, The China Syndrome had premiered, narrating the story of an eerily similar near-meltdown at the fictional Ventana Nuclear Plant. My first thought on hearing of the TMI accident was that someone had sabotaged the plant to make life imitate art, for I knew from our just-completed study that security there was notoriously lax. Three years earlier, a disgruntled employee had breached security undetected, and only six months previously, a local political official whose boat had broken down nearby had scrambled over the perimeter fence and shouted for help for some time before security guards noticed him. It seemed entirely plausible to me that a saboteur might have triggered the event to make a point. | 257 |
| That fear also crossed the mind of the film’s director, James Bridges. He worried that some would see the accident as a twisted publicity stunt. Accordingly, two of the film’s stars, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon, an outspoken critic of nuclear power, cancelled publicity appearances, unwilling to capitalize on catastrophe. Only Jane Fonda took advantage of the “shocking synchronicity” and went on a national tour with her husband, Tom Hayden, to promote energy alternatives and their Campaign for Economic Democracy.2 | 258 |
| A thriller, the China Syndrome told the story of a television news crew that—while shooting a fluff piece promoting the nuclear power industry—accidentally witnesses an alarming crisis in the control room. Unbeknownst to plant officials, cameraman Richard Adams (Douglas) films the entire scene. When he and reporter Kimberly Wells (Fonda) show the film to a physicist and a nuclear engineer, they learn that the plant probably experienced a close call, one that might have nearly exposed the reactor core, precursor to the “China Syndrome.” As the physicist explains, if exposed, the core would melt, within a matter of minutes, through the bottom of the plant and downward “theoretically to China.” But, in actuality, the scientist continues, once the molten core hit groundwater, it would explode into the air, spewing clouds of radioactivity. “The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind is blowing,” he somberly intones, “rendering an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” Such a sequence of events, in truth, has never happened, even at Chernobyl. But when I saw the film the weekend after the accident near Harrisburg, this line sent a chill down my spine. | 259 |
© Columbia Pictures Corporation. Courtesy Columbia Pictures Corporation/Photofest. Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, and Jane Fonda in a publicity photograph for The China Syndrome (1979) directed by James Bridges. | |
| The sense of déjà vu continued. As the news crew realizes they have stumbled on an important story, the plant’s conscientious control-room operator, Jack Godell (Lemmon) begins his own investigation, troubled by a tremor during the accident. Discovering that the safety inspections were falsified, he teams up with Wells and Adams to publicize his concerns before the reactor is brought back on-line and a second plant, built by the same shoddy contractor, is licensed. But as a third member of the news crew, Hector Salas (Daniel Valdez), brings the evidence of phony inspections to a licensing hearing, company goons run him off the road in a scene that purposefully evokes the suspicious death of Karen Silkwood, whose car crashed while en route to a meeting with a New York Times reporter with evidence of safety violations at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Crescent, Oklahoma. Just as Silkwood’s documentation vanished, so does Godell’s. | 260 |
| From here, the film devolves into a typical disaster flick. An armed and desperate Godell holds the plant hostage, demanding a televised forum. Company officials plot to shut the plant down and in the process nearly trigger a meltdown, and an encounter between Godell and a SWAT team ends lethally. | 261 |
| Critics of the film denounced it for its sensationalism. Supporters of the nuclear power industry argued that various technical inaccuracies regarding the design of the plant and its control room, the portrayal of corporations more concerned with image and the bottom line, and the picture of a negligent Nuclear Regulatory Commission were grossly misleading.3 In real life, the NRC launched a thorough investigation of the TMI plant, suspending the license for its other reactor for six years. Some of those sympathetic to the anti-nuclear movement also criticized the film for exalting the news media instead of grass-roots activists and for focusing on a catastrophe—one that is, in the end, narrowly averted by a redundant back-up system—rather than on the real, on-going threats of low-level radiation and long-term nuclear waste storage.4 | 262 |
| These are valid complaints, and yet they ignore an essential verisimilitude. Three nuclear engineers who resigned in protest over safety concerns from General Electric served as technical consultants, ensuring a degree of realism. Moreover, the brief shots of anti-nuclear protests (featuring actual activists), which some felt trivialized the movement, rang true to me. In one scene, activists tie gags over their mouths to protest the very real prohibition against raising certain unresolved problems, such as the long-term storage of spent fuel rods, at licensing hearings. I knew from my work for the NRC that public input at those hearings was highly constrained. Most important, the sequence of events in the fictional and real-life accidents was shockingly similar. In both, indicator lights and gauges led operators to believe that open values were closed and that low water levels in the containment vessel were high. Pumps shook violently. Operators dismissed an explosion as a normal thud. The main difference was that the real accident proved much worse than the fictional one.5 | 263 |
| The timing of the Three Mile Island accident, of course, changed the public’s response to the film. Audiences likely would have viewed it as just another disaster flick, until the accident at TMI gave it credibility. The film became a political event, energizing the anti-nuclear movement, even as the nuclear power industry rushed to denounce it as inaccurate and exaggerated. It was the accident itself, of course, that damaged the industry, but the film helped fuel the anti-nuclear debate by encouraging the public to imagine the worst-case scenario. Art foreshadowed life all too well. | 264 |
Marsha Weisiger is assistant professor of history at New Mexico State University. Her book Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is to be published by the University of Washington Press. NOTES1. Cynthia B. Flynn and James A. Chalmers, The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at Three Mile Island: Findings to Date, NUREG/CR-1215 (Washington, DC: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1980).2. Jane Fonda, My Life So Far (New York: Random House, 2005), 407–08.3. Samuel McCracken, “The Harrisburg Syndrome,” Commentary 67 (1979): 27–39.4. See, for example, Michael Gallantz, “The China Syndrome: Meltdown in Hollywood,” and Doug Zwick, “The China Syndrome, the Genre Syndrome,” both in Jump Cut 22 (1980): 3–6.5. For a thorough analysis of the accident and its aftermath, see J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); for a concise timeline of the accident, see the teachers’ guide to the American Experience documentary, “Meltdown at Three Mile Island,” at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/three/sfeature/tmiwhattxt.html. | |
opera bufo
MELISSA WIEDENFELD
| TWENTY YEARS AGO, Mark Lewis wrote and directed the film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, an unconventional, campy documentary about the introduction of Bufo marinus to Australia. The history of biological introductions seems straightforward. Humans, intentionally or unintentionally, have relocated species around the world with serious consequences for the invaded ecosystem. Many intentional introductions for biological control are well-known failures, such as the mongoose introduction to Hawaii. Cane Toads tells a similar tale, but it is much more instructive to me as an environmental historian because of what it says about culture. | 265 |
| During the early 1930s, a serious cane grub/beetle infestation threatened to destroy the economically important sugar cane crop in Queensland, Australia. Farmers pressured the Australian government to come up with a solution to the problem, and in 1935, the Australian Bureau of Sugar Experimental Stations imported about one hundred cane toads from Hawaii to release for the biological control of the grubs. Cane toads reproduced prolifically and spread throughout northeastern Australia. Engaging and informative in the telling of this tale, the film mixes elements of a documentary with artful camera angles (many from the perspective of a toad) and reenacted events. | 266 |
| Like other accounts of attempts at biological control, this story drips with irony. The film points out that toads do not fly, so they could not reach the beetles on the cane stalks. Toads did not reduce the number of grubs, but they did reduce the feral dog population, thanks to a poison the toads excrete when physically threatened. The toads have few or no predators but pose a threat to native species. | 267 |
| Analysis of the introduction and unintended ecological consequences seems to be the most critical part of the narrative, and certainly this alone is of great value to students. Fortunately, the film isn’t simply a documentary of the history and ecology, but it also includes a look at the human interaction with Bufo marinus. Australians do not uniformly oppose the cane toad invasion, as evidenced in the film’s interviews with cane toad boosters. One town even considered building a statue of the invader in the hopes of drawing tourists to the region. Children play with the toads as pets, and in some cases, as dolls. Some Aussies consider the toads “mates,” and put out cat food or turn on yard lights to attract them. Yet the toads do have detractors. Scientists fear the ecological damage, but many Australians simply view the toads as a nuisance. In one memorable scene, a Volkswagen bus swerves erratically on a road as its driver aims for the puffed up toads. Importantly, the film depicts the integration of the cane toad into Australian culture, and includes several songs devoted to the invader: “Cane Toad Blues,” “Warts ‘n’ All,” and “Queensland Toads.” The lesson for environmental historians? Cane toads invaded not just the natural environment, but the culture as well. Efforts to eradicate invasive animal species may garner protests from groups like PETA, but Cane Toads reminds us that there are others who value the toads and see them as an important part of the culture—and they are a part of the history as well. | 268 |
| Although Cane Toads entertains and informs, it leaves unanswered questions. Because Bufo marinus was introduced to Hawaii from its native Central or South America, why didn’t someone realize that the toad was an invasive problem that did not eliminate the cane grub/invasive beetle problem? And what about the paradox the film presents by depicting the toads as both poisonous threats and placid pets? | 269 |
| Students may find additional entertainment in that sex is a recurring theme, even though the toads actually reproduce by amplexus, and the efforts of the male toads to mate with gold fish or dead female toads certainly add to the campy-ness of the film. The film offers many avenues of discussion for environmental (and social/cultural) history students, and the forty-five-minute length makes it relatively easy to show to classes. | 270 |
| As an environmental historian, my inclination has been to focus on the causes of species introductions and the effects of the invaders on ecosystems, but Cane Toads reminds us that the unintended consequences of species introductions may be cultural as well as biological. | 271 |
Melissa Wiedenfeld, assistant professor at Dalton State College, has written about biological invasions and is currently working on an environmental history of the Galápagos Islands. | |
northern exposure
GRAEME WYNN
| THE NORTH IS A Canadian enigma. Most people know where it is (even as they remain uncertain about its southern boundary); far fewer know what it is. A shifting, elusive concept, a place of mystery and ambiguity, of resource potential and indigenous presence as much as a geographical location, it remains (much as the geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin described it in 1979) “an unknown quantity”—a final frontier on the fringe of familiarity—in the minds of the majority of North Americans. Seen as a “new world to conquer” by development-orientated politicians, consultants, and entrepreneurs of the 1950s and 1960s, the north was valued (as many western frontiers had been earlier) for the economic returns it might yield. Although more numerous than newcomers, the region’s widely dispersed indigenous inhabitants were generally seen as poverty-stricken, backward, even desperate peoples, whose failing and fading ways of life would necessarily yield to modernization and assimilation. But the 1970s showed that native peoples would not go quietly into that not-so-good night. In 1971 the Quebec government announced one of the most spectacular northern development initiatives, the James Bay Hydroelectric Project. To the government’s surprise, indigenous opposition to this scheme to divert rivers and flood the landscape of an enormous area along the La Grande River was strong and effective, and led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, a modern-day treaty that awarded resource and governance rights, as well as monetary compensation, to native peoples. Two years later a commission of inquiry headed by Justice Thomas Berger recommended against the development of gas pipelines in the Arctic and the Mackenzie River valley until native land claims were addressed. Growing recognition of the distinctiveness, importance, and vitality of indigenous peoples’ relations with their traditional territories lay behind these decisions, and through the next quarter century both traditional ecological knowledge and comanagement principles gained prominent places in Canadian political debates and resource-development discussions. | 272 |
| Many factors played into this shift in attitudes, but the work of journalist and filmmaker Boyce Richardson was instrumental in reshaping public awareness of the situation facing the James Bay Cree and in eliciting sympathy for their plight. A New Zealander who immigrated to Canada in 1954, Richardson was invited by the Indians of Quebec Association to make a film on their behalf after speaking out against the La Grande proposal. The result was the technically unsophisticated and now almost impossible to acquire Flooding Job’s Garden (1973), which focused on the gentle wisdom of Cree hunter Job Bearskin and his wife Mary, to illuminate their “profound understanding of the human role on this earth.” For Bearskin, as for most of the Cree, the land was home, a garden that provided resources for daily living as well as a garden in the Edenic sense, a place of cultural origin. A year later, Richardson codirected Cree Hunters of Mistassini for Canada’s National Film Board, a superbly photographed account of a winter season at Sam Blacksmith’s hunting camp north of Chibougamau, which echoed Job Bearskin’s point that people, plants, and animals grew and flourished together in the “wilderness.” Then, in 1991, as debate over the development of more dams on the Grand-Baleine River intensified, Richardson returned to document the effects of hydro development upon communities he had first visited almost twenty years before, with Flooding Job’s Garden. | 273 |
| Although Richardson has never pretended to “objectivity,” Cree Hunters and Flooding proceed in the finest tradition of Canadian documentary filmmaking, combining compelling imagery with the words and voices of those engaged with the subject matter to expose issues and persuade viewers to consider different points of view. They work quietly, but their effect is powerful. One of the most poignant, and for environmental historians perhaps most telling, moments in these films comes from the juxtaposition of scenes in Flooding. In the first a Hydro-Quebec employee proudly proclaims that if all the water in the La Grande reservoir were bottled, it would provide every inhabitant of the planet with twelve thousand one-liter containers. In the second a local man points out that his people can no longer safely eat the fish on which they have depended for generations (because of elevated levels of methyl-mercury contamination resulting from decomposition of flooded vegetation). High-modernist hubris meets indigenous stewardship. | 274 |
| Ultimately these films say more about the economic, social, and psychological changes that the Cree have had to contend with as a consequence of highway construction and the arrival of thousands of nonnatives in their traditional territories than they do about the direct effects of flooding and logging on the biophysical environment. But this is a false and trivial distinction for a people whose land, as their former Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come expressed it, is their memory. “If you destroy the land, you destroy the Cree people. Parents can no longer teach children out on the land. We’re losing our way of life.” When the Quebec judge considering a request for an injunction against the La Grande development asked Job Bearskin to state his address, Bearskin was confused. Pressed, he responded: “I have come from what I have survived on.” For Bearskin and others like him, the hydro project was not simply a matter of dams and reservoirs, but (as Coon Come noted) “a terrible and vast reduction of [their] entire world.” | 275 |
| For Richardson, there was a profound lesson in all of this, a lesson that warrants wider consideration. On page thirteen of his People of Terra Nullius—which with his Strangers Devour the Land, Hans Carlson’s “A Watershed of Words,” and a handful of other publications offers valuable print materials to place alongside the films—he wrote: “Until I met aboriginals, I had never thought of human beings as participants in a natural system that is endlessly recycled, with every element dependent on every other element. I had always behaved as if society were perfectible; had never given thought to life as a natural continuum, in which we also are called upon to act as stewards for future generations. Gradually I began to understand that all of my assumptions about social progress, personal achievement, and human control over the hostile forces of nature are not necessarily proper measures of meaningful human existence.”1 | 276 |
Graeme Wynn is professor and head of the Department of Geography in the University of British Columbia, the editor of BC Studies on the Environment (BC Studies, 2004) and the author, most recently, of Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History (ABC-Clio, 2007). | |
NOTES
1. In the opinion of anthropologist Karl Heider, “No film can stand by itself as a teaching instrument. … As a general rule, the most useful films … are those with adequate printed materials to supplement the specificity of the visual image”: Karl G.Heider and Carol Hermer, Films for Anthropological Teaching (Arlington, VA.: American Anthropological Association, 1995), introduction. For those who follow this dictum, there is a wealth of relevant printed material for consideration with these films. Boyce Richardson has written James Bay: the Plot to Drown the North Woods (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1972); Strangers Devour the Land; a Chronicle of the Assault upon the Last Coherent Hunting Culture in North America, the Cree Indians of Northern Quebec, and Their Vast Primeval Homelands (New York: Knopf, 1975); and People of Terra Nullius: Betrayal and Rebirth in Aboriginal Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1994) that bear on the issue. There is also a delightful account of the making of Job’s Garden in chapter 13, “Eeyou Astchee, Canada,” in Boyce Richardson, Memoirs of a Media Maverick (Toronto, ON: Between the Lines, 2003), 205–22.For one of many expression of Coon Come’s views on the flooding, see Matthew Coon Come, “A Reduction of Our World,” in Our People, Our Land: Perspectives on the Columbus Quincentenary, ed. Kurt Russo (Bellingham, WA: Lummi Tribe and Kluckholn Center, 1992), quote on 82. From the long shelf of academic studies and consulting reports on the James Bay project and its impacts, one might turn initially to Hans Carlson, “A Watershed of Words: Litigating and Negotiating Nature in Eastern James Bay, 1971–75,” Canadian Historical Review 85 (March 2004): 63–84; Richard F. Salisbury, A Homeland for the Cree Regional Development in James Bay, 1971–1981 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1986); James F. Hornig, ed., Social and Environmental Impacts of the James Bay Hydro-electrical Project (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Susan Williams, Hydro-Quebec and the Great Whale Project: Hydroelectric Development in Northern Quebec (Washington, DC: Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1993); and Gaetan Hayeur, Summary of Knowledge Acquired in Northern Environments from 1970 to 2000 (Montreal: Hydro-Quebec, 2001).
RECOMMENDED FILM
Unless otherwise noted, the films listed here are readily available in DVD and/or VHS format from online movie sources.
Adventures of the Wilderness Family, The. Directed by Stewart Raffill (Medford, OR: Pacific International Enterprises, 1975). 346–349.Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story. Directed by Bonnie Kreps (Fort Collins, CO: Bob Swerer Productions, 2001). Available on DVD through the Murie Center, www.muriecenter.org/film.htm. 375–377.Blue Vinyl. Directed by Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold (Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2002). 365–368.Blue Water, White Death: The Hunt for the Great White Shark. Directed by Peter Gimbel and James Lipscomb (Los Angeles: National General Pictures, 1971). Blue Water, White Death was not available on DVD until recently; there were legal disputes over ownership and broadcast rights. In wider circulation is Peter Matthiessen’s account of his experiences as member of the expedition in a book called Blue Meridian (Random House, 1971), published weeks before the film’s premiere and still in print. 331–333.Born Free. Directed by James Hill (1966; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2003). 283–286.Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. Directed by Mark Lewis (New York: First Run Features, 1987). 386–387.Close to Eden. Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov (New York: Miramax Films, 1991). 381–382.Charcoal People, The. Directed by Nigel Noble (Buena Park, CA: Vanguard Cinema, 1999). In Portuguese, with subtitles in English. 281–282.China Syndrome, The. Directed by James Bridges (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 1979). 383–385.Corporation, The. Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott (New York: Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2004). 372–374.Cree Hunters of Mistassini. Directed by Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo (Ottawa, ON: National Film Board of Canada, 1974); also available from http://www.BuyIndies.com in VHS and DVD, $245.00; and Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street Watertown, MA 02472 (617–926–0491) http://www.der.org, in DVD, $245.00. 388–390.Darwin’s Nightmare. Directed by Hubert Sauper (Paris: Mille et une productions; Vienna: Coop99 Film Produktion; Brussels, Safa Film, 2004). 322–324.Deliverance. Directed by John Boorman (San Jose, CA: Warner Brothers, 1972). 369–371.Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. Directed by Errol Morris (1997; Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar, 2002). 287–289.First Contact. Directed by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson (Canberra: Ronin Films, 1983). Available in 16mm and VHS from Ronin Films; DER; Penn State Media and Technology Support Services (rental); Filmakers Library; Indiana University (rental). 304–307.Flash of Green, A. Directed by Victor Nunez (Los Angeles: Media Home Entertainment, International Spectrafilm Distribution, Inc., 1985). 334–336.Flooding Job’s Garden. Directed by Boyce Richardson (Ottowa, ON: National Film Board of Canada, 1991). Available as part of the five-part series examining the Native struggle for self-determination in Canada, So Long as the Rivers Flow; and from First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY, 11201 (718–488–8900) [email protected] Sale/video: $390.00 Rental/ video: $75.00. 388–390.Forest Smokechaser. (Ogden, UT: U.S. Forest Service, Intermountain Region, 1948). Available in VHS through select federal agencies, including the Forest Service National Video Library. 355–356.Fortune in Two Old Trunks, A. Sunsweet Growers, Inc. (Hollywood, CA: All-Scope Pictures, 1951). 319–321.Gambit. Directed by Sabine Gisiger (Zurich: Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion AG, 2005). Available in DVD through http://www.dschointventschr.ch/dv/pdf/ Gambit_press_kit.pdf. 313–315.Grizzly Man. Directed by Werner Herzog (Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Entertainment, 2005). 337–340.Heaven’s Herds. Directed by James Hersov and Sofia de Fay (Saxonwold, South Africa: Flying Fox Productions, 2006). 299–301.Impromptu. Directed by Rose Lowder (San Francisco: Canyon Cinema, 1989). Available at www.canyoncinema.com. 328–330.Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City, CA : Universal Studios, 1975). 346–349.Land Has Eyes, The. Directed by Vilsoni Hereniko (Honolulu: Te Maka Productions, 2003). Available at http://www.thelandhaseyes.com. 316–318.Landmarks. Written by Kenneth B Cumberland; the series producer was George Andrews. It was issued at the time on video to New Zealand schools, and the accompanying book (Reader’s Digest, 1981) captures much of the spirit and visual appeal of the programs. Television New Zealand is now considering releasing Landmarks on DVD. 350–351.Louisiana Story, Directed by Robery J. Flaherty (1948; Chatsworth, CA: Home Vision Entertainment, 2003). 302–303.March of the Penguins, The. Directed by Luc Jacquet (Burbank, CA: Warner Independent Pictures). 357–359.Monumental: David Brower’s Fight for Wild America. Directed by Kelly Duane (New York: First Run Features, 2004). Available on DVD at www.firstrunfeatures.com. The DVD comes with thirty-five minutes of “bonus material,” including two short films by David Brower: Shiprock (1939) and Two Yosemites (1955). 375–377.Never Cry Wolf. Directed by Carroll Ballard (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Pictures, 1983). 337–340.Petulia, Directed by Richard Lester (1968; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006). 360–361.Plow That Broke the Plains, The. Directed by Pare Lorentz (1936; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2006). Available on a DVD entitled Our Daily Bread and Other Films of the Great Depression. 308–312.Power and the Land. Directed by Joris Ivens (1940; New York: Kino International, 1994.) This video collection also includes Pare Lorentz’s The River (1937) and The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936); and H.P. McClure’s The New Frontier (1934). 341–342.Pumicelands. Directed by John Feeney (Auckland: New Zealand National Film Unit, 1955). 292–294.River, The. Directed by Pare Lorentz (1937; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2006). Available on a DVD entitled Our Daily Bread and Other Films of the Great Depression. 308–312.River Elegy. Directed by Su Xiao-kang (Beijing: CCTV, 1988). A full text of the narration is available in the book The Chinese Documentary River Elegy (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991). 352–354.River Runs through It, A. Directed by Robert Redford (London: Allied Filmakers, 1992). 378–380.Thin Red Line, The. Directed by Terrence Malick (1998; Los Angeles: Fox, 1999). 290–291.Thirteen Lakes. Directed by James Benning (2004). Most of Benning’s early films are available from Canyon Cinema (www.canyoncinema.com), but Thirteen Lakes is currently available only from Benning himself ([email protected]). 328–330.Trade Secrets. Directed by Roy Karch (Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2004). 365–368.Walk in the Clouds, A. Directed by Alfonso Arau (1995; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2003). 295–298.Whale Rider. Directed by Niki Caro (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2002). 316–318.Who Killed the Electric Car? Directed by Chris Paine (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2006). 362–364.Wilderness Idea: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the First Great Battle for Wilderness, The. Directed by Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey (Santa Monica, CA: Florentine Films, Direct Cinema Limited, 1989). 325–327.Winds Across the Everglades. Directed by Nicholas Ray (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1958.) Videotape copies are rare; the film has not been transferred to DVD. 334–336.Winged Migration. Codirected by Jacques Cluzaud and Michel Debats (Paris: Galatée Films, 2001.) 343–345.
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