It's a dirty knob, but somebody's gotta do it.
A group calling themselves Natural Systems Solutions held a screening of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire this weekend. It was being held at an inconvenient time for me (6:00 p.m. on Saturday), but I was able to make it. It wasn't quite what I expected. With the word Empire in the title, I assumed it would be about imperialism and its modern-day mutation, globalization. Those were themes in the documentary, but its main topics were peak oil and climate change. In the tradition of The 11th Hour and An Inconvenient Truth, it was a bit disappointing. What a Way to Go features a lot of rambling narration and bad editing.
One thing I did like about it was that it was narrated by an ordinary, middle-class guy--not Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore. Celebrity attention to a cause has its benefits and downfalls: it puts a cause in the spotlight, but it also makes it seem like something that can only be taken up by people who aren't faced with the immediate needs of paying for housing, food, health care, and transportation. When you're a privileged fucker like Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore, you can worry all day about plankton dying off the coast of Australia, because you're not worried about getting evicted, getting an overdraft notice, or getting laid off from your job.
Then again, the documentary didn't do much to thwart the stereotype that the environmental movement is a movement of white, middle-class people. (Am I contradicting what I just said above?) The narrator traveled the nation by train, interviewing people (authors, students, artists, scientists, musicians, and so on) about the environment, but you start to get the sense that he never went to the proverbial "other side of the tracks," where those strange, ethnic people live. Thankfully, though, the documentary doesn't contribute to the "greening of hate" by blaming our environmental crises on Third World overpopulation; it places most of the blame on First World energy consumption (which, to me, should be elementary, but the power of denial and racism often amazes me).
Yesterday afternoon I went to the Friends of the Pima County Public Library book sale. I found three books to add to my library: Media Control by Noam Chomsky, Nobody's Son by Luis Alberto Urrea, and Ohitika Woman by Mary Brave Bird. I read Media Control a long time ago, but I figured it was worth owning (especially at the price of fifty cents). That just leaves three books by Chomsky that I've read but don't own; the other 23 I own.
One thing I did like about it was that it was narrated by an ordinary, middle-class guy--not Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore. Celebrity attention to a cause has its benefits and downfalls: it puts a cause in the spotlight, but it also makes it seem like something that can only be taken up by people who aren't faced with the immediate needs of paying for housing, food, health care, and transportation. When you're a privileged fucker like Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore, you can worry all day about plankton dying off the coast of Australia, because you're not worried about getting evicted, getting an overdraft notice, or getting laid off from your job.
Then again, the documentary didn't do much to thwart the stereotype that the environmental movement is a movement of white, middle-class people. (Am I contradicting what I just said above?) The narrator traveled the nation by train, interviewing people (authors, students, artists, scientists, musicians, and so on) about the environment, but you start to get the sense that he never went to the proverbial "other side of the tracks," where those strange, ethnic people live. Thankfully, though, the documentary doesn't contribute to the "greening of hate" by blaming our environmental crises on Third World overpopulation; it places most of the blame on First World energy consumption (which, to me, should be elementary, but the power of denial and racism often amazes me).
Yesterday afternoon I went to the Friends of the Pima County Public Library book sale. I found three books to add to my library: Media Control by Noam Chomsky, Nobody's Son by Luis Alberto Urrea, and Ohitika Woman by Mary Brave Bird. I read Media Control a long time ago, but I figured it was worth owning (especially at the price of fifty cents). That just leaves three books by Chomsky that I've read but don't own; the other 23 I own.