The Man who Planted the Trees
I borrowed the dvd of this award winning animated film of Jean Giorno's illustrated story and watched it yesterday.
It is a beautiful fable of ecological restoration and of land being made whole so liberating people into new health.
It is also a timely reminder of how the 'natural landscape' is so often a product of human engagement for good or ill.
The animation is beautifully realized and the narration (by Christopher Plummer, I believe) is superlative in its tone and pace.
Watching it coincided with my finishing 'The Lost City of Z'. The most likely explanation of the Fawcett's disappearance was being killed by hostile Amazonian Indians. A fate of which they had been warned by the last friendly group they encountered (and who remember the three Englishmen in oral tradition to this day). A fate undeserved by Fawcett, giving his championing of peaceful relations with indigenous tribes, often at great personal risk to himself, but understandable given the appalling treatment of those people from the arrival of conquest to now. Club now, ask questions later (if at all) is a wholly sensible survival strategy.
The irony of Fawcett's death is that he may have been standing upon the very thing he sought without recognizing it. His 'Lost City of Z' was not a still thriving metropolis but a compelling set of archaeological remains, mostly lost until the technological advances of the second half of this century, but whose signs Fawcett had seen - shards of pottery, patterns of village outlay. The original chroniclers in the sixteenth century had been right to describe large, organized settlements but it was wrong to imagine that they had survived the population collapse attendant on the import of new diseases. A whole network of civilizations, carved within the forbidding landscapes of the Amazon withered away as the population was weakened with people returning to simpler forms of life. That too may be a fable to ponder...
It is a beautiful fable of ecological restoration and of land being made whole so liberating people into new health.
It is also a timely reminder of how the 'natural landscape' is so often a product of human engagement for good or ill.
The animation is beautifully realized and the narration (by Christopher Plummer, I believe) is superlative in its tone and pace.
Click to viewWatching it coincided with my finishing 'The Lost City of Z'. The most likely explanation of the Fawcett's disappearance was being killed by hostile Amazonian Indians. A fate of which they had been warned by the last friendly group they encountered (and who remember the three Englishmen in oral tradition to this day). A fate undeserved by Fawcett, giving his championing of peaceful relations with indigenous tribes, often at great personal risk to himself, but understandable given the appalling treatment of those people from the arrival of conquest to now. Club now, ask questions later (if at all) is a wholly sensible survival strategy.
The irony of Fawcett's death is that he may have been standing upon the very thing he sought without recognizing it. His 'Lost City of Z' was not a still thriving metropolis but a compelling set of archaeological remains, mostly lost until the technological advances of the second half of this century, but whose signs Fawcett had seen - shards of pottery, patterns of village outlay. The original chroniclers in the sixteenth century had been right to describe large, organized settlements but it was wrong to imagine that they had survived the population collapse attendant on the import of new diseases. A whole network of civilizations, carved within the forbidding landscapes of the Amazon withered away as the population was weakened with people returning to simpler forms of life. That too may be a fable to ponder...