"Waste Land"?

PRI’s “The World’s” report on Ordos, China’s attempts to integrate composting toilets into an eco-friendly apartment complex reminded me of Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010), which highlights the work of Vik Muniz, an artist who mixes art with social projects. In his “Sugar Children” exhibition, for example, Muniz documents the children of migrant workers on Caribbean sugar plantations. Waste Land focuses on a project attempting to address classism in Brazil, the “biggest problem,” according to Muniz. The film documents his connection with “collectors” at the Jardin Gramacho Landfill near Rio de Janeiro, the so-called “Garbageland” because it’s the largest landfill in the world.

The collectors in this garbage garden sort through the equivalent of 400 thousand people’s trash every day for recylables from all socio-economic classes—rich and poor mix together in the landfill, the film explains, and collectors have formed a union, The Association of Pickers of Jardin Gramacho led by Tiao, to protect them. The 3000 pickers in the union helped build a recycling center, their demonstrators say. To highlight their work, Muniz plans to make portraits of the pickers using items from the landfill, sell them, and give the money back to them. 

The film takes the time to personalize each of the pickers chosen for these portraits. Zumbi, for example, brings books to the Association and forms a library. As Zumbi asserts in support of the union and of Muniz’s project, “we have to think about the future because I don't want my son to be a picker. Although if he is, I'd be very proud... But I'd rather he be a lawyer to represent the pickers, you know.” Valter, an old picker, thinks the photos are important because they will bring the pickers recognition. He argues vehemently for the recycling work he and the other pickers do: “People sometimes say ‘But one single can?’ One single can is of great importance. Because 99 is not 100, and that single one will make the difference.”

Once Muniz’s portraits are underway, the pickers participate, adding recyclables to build found art projects on a massive scale for Muniz to photograph. Muniz recreates classic and modern art, placing pickers in tableau and photographing them before adding garbage and other details. Ultimately, the portraits become part of a exhibition in London. “There’s so much excess, that it becomes art,” Muniz explains. The film ends, however, with postscripts about some of the pickers, “great people that weren’t very lucky.” Zumbi has created a learning center and a library, but Valter has died of lung cancer. Tiao, the leader of the pickers, is now known nationwide in Brazil and could run for president, a talk show host declares, reinforcing the worth of these pickers and their mission.

Roger Ebert compares Waste Land to Scrappers and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), “about those who seek their livings in the discards of Paris.” As Ebert argues, “When we see men going through the cans in an alley, some of us tend to distrust and vilify them. They are earning a living. They are providing a service. Incredibly, they're sometimes called lazy. Documentaries like these three help us, perhaps, to more fully appreciate our roles as full-time creators of garbage.”  Waste Land stands out as a personal portrait of the “gleaners” themselves, rather than the artist who seeks to capture them.  The PRI “The World” story also offered a glimpse of  residents’ personal reactions to their new eco-apartment living. In Ordos, unlike the Garbage Garden, the stench scared them away.

Poison Water and Natural Resources in Westerns

Westerns from the 1950s address some of the same environmental issues discussed in contemporary films like Crude.  Broken Lance (1954) , for example, highlights the negative consequences of copper mining and smelting, especially the cattle killed by a copper mine’s dumping practices. The film is an obvious example where the conflict that leads to the destruction of the Devereauxs, a ranching family in the film, involves a copper mining company and its smelter runoff. Once they discovers that thirty to forty of their cattle have been killed by a poisoned stream that smells and tastes like copper being dumped by the nearby mining company, the Devereauxs, led by Matt the patriarch, (Spencer Tracy), confront the mine and its manager. The mining company stands out against a green tree-filled mountain with its smokestacks and water-filled chutes spoiling the beauty of the land. The Devereaux patriarch exclaims, “the stuff you’re pourin’ in the stream poisoned” the cattle. And he threatens to close the mine if they do not clean up the stream.

But the mine and its workers refuse to comply. Instead, the manager calls Matt Devereaux “a loudmouth farmer with a squaw for a wife and a halfbreed son,” while his men confront the family. The Devereauxs retaliate, shooting at the miners’ feet so that the Devereaux family members can escape with their horses. Matt, Joe (Robert Wagner), Ben (Richard Widmark), Mike (Hugh O’Brian) and Danny (Earl Holliman) Devereaux and their ranch hands destroy the mine, burning it down in what looks like an act of eco-terrorism. Matt Devereaux trusts the courts to support them, but just as in q1907 case Jared Diamond cites, the Devereauxs lose, and the youngest son, Joe, who is half Native American, goes to jail to save his father. Here the poisoned stream acts as both plot device—providing a reason for Joe’s jail time and the father’s death—and as integral environmental message that condemns the mining company for its hazardous waste practices. 

Although the conflict between ranchers and miners ends with Joe’s sentencing, the presence of toxic waste from copper smelting in the film serves as a catalyst for a string of personal battles that lead to a paradigm shift in which racial boundaries become more blurred. Joe overcomes racial biases and marries the governor’s daughter. He also kills his racist brother, Ben, in self defense and pays homage to his mother, a Native American princess. These changes in worldview become possible only because Matt Devereaux confronts a copper smelting company for killing his cattle with its runoff. Toxic waste from copper smelters in nineteenth-century Arizona and the rest of the Southwest and Northwest, then, rests on a history of mining waste runoff destroying water sources both by poisoning them and clogging them with sediment.    

Mining in the West also rests on an American cultural history that legitimates a pioneer spirit meant to “tame” a wild West by not only ranching and farming, but also mining. Just as there were homestead acts that provided free land for ranchers and farmers, there was also “The General Mining Law of 1872,” which stated:

                        

"All valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States, both surveyed and unsurveyed, are hereby declared to be free and open to  exploration and purchase, and the lands in which they are found to occupation and purchase, by citizens of the United States and those who have declared their intention to become such."

This law applied to all white men but not to Native Americans or married women.

According to Robert McClure and Andrew Schneider in their “The General Mining Act of 1872 Has Left a Legacy of Riches and Ruins” published in the June 11, 2001, edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “public lands the size of Connecticut have been made private under the terms of the 1872 law.” Although the law has its roots in an 1848 push by Colonel Mason to obtain, as Mason put it, “rents for … land, and immediate steps should be made to collect them, for the longer it is delayed the more difficult it will become” (quoted in McClure and Schneider), the mining law evolved into “an incentive to those [miners] willing to push West and settle the frontier” (McClure and Schneider), an incentive that has had dire effects on the environment.

Opening lands for mining meant increased deforestation and erosion of topsoil. It also resulted in the toxic runoff discussed in Broken Lance, since copper ore (like any other ore) is leached “by misting cyanide over a barrel or large vat filled with crushed ore” (McClure and Schneider). According to McClure and Schneider, “The ore is often high in sulfides, and water passing through the rock and soil creates sulfuric acid, which in turn leaches poisonous heavy metals into runoff water, with iron in the rock turning streams an orange-red.” McClure and Schneider’s news report traces decades of environmental problems from 1872 to 2001, when the article was published. The 1872 law remains on the books and still allows private companies to open public lands for mining, and repercussions of cyanide use still have an impact on Western environments. Today the largest liquid waste pit in the United States in Butte, Montana, has become a tourist attraction.

Crude as an oil spill film

Crude follows a pattern similar to that of other oil well films highlighting the need to maintain the separation between nature and culture, while suggesting that oil production, if implemented effectively, can maintain a pristine wilderness. The film documents the battle between Ecuadorian indigenous tribes and Chevron over the oil company’s rampant toxic waste dumping and consequent destruction of both their rainforest home and their sources of water.  


With help from Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, filmmaker Joe Berlinger provides a balanced portrait of both the dangerous outcomes of toxic waste dumping and of the lawsuit between the tribes and Chevron continuing from 1993.


According to Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, however, “the most telling arguments come from watching tribes living in a toxic wasteland with children ravaged by skin diseases and cancer.” According to Travers, “The shattering sight of sludge creating a poison rainbow on a river argues eloquently about why oil and water don’t mix.” 


But in the film, the focus is not on the inherently incompatibility of oil and water but on Chevron’s negligent practices, just as Dead Ahead and Black Wave highlight the need for a safer approach to oil shipping but not the elimination of our reliance on oil or the oil industry. And recent Ecuadorian court decisions claiming Chevron owes $5 billions for damages were stopped by appeals in the U.S. courts.

Crude

The latest news of the Yellowstone River oil spill quickly connects back to Joe Berlinger's Crude (2009). Crude examines the long term effects of oil development in the rain forests of Ecuador. Decades of environmental compromises in the search, development, extraction and delivery of crude oil has significantly damaged all of nature in these areas. Soil, water, insect, animal and human lives have all been compromised in the search for huge profits. Much of the damage done could have been eliminated if the techniques for extraction were far less brutal and developers far more concerned with the long term health of the area's total eco-system.

Crude then follows the long series of court cases brought against the oil companies for the damage done and examines the citizens of the Ecuadorean rain forest damaged by such exploration confronting what the law really means when they decide to pursue justice. What this film makes clear is that when the extraction is done away from "civilization" it is as if it has never happened. Hiding the production means no questions are asked, but when simple farmers demand justice and are willing to provide both the evidence and the patience to pursue their rights, facts sometimes reach the light of day.

The Yellowstone River is the longest unobstructed river in the United States. Placing a large oil pipeline six feet under the river bed was a great idea, because it was so cheap, but now Exxon is facing the consequences of its money saving plans. I have talked to a man who has fished a lot of that river over the years and he was flabbergasted to find out that the pipe was only six feet deep. With such a large, free flowing river, whose bottom was constantly subjected to shifts, the pipeline should have been 50 feet deep at the minimum. But no one questions the line when it has disappeared and no one knows its depth until floods shift the river bed, crack the pipe and 10,000 barrels of crude pollutes the river. That's 420,000 gallons of crude oil.

The citizens of Montana now find themselves in the same situation as the citizens of the Ecuadorean rain forests that have been heavily damaged by oil spills. Land is being destroyed, fishing is being wiped out, water supplies are being threatened, citizens are claiming health issues and floods are threatening to spread the pollution quickly before it can be totally enclosed.

This problem could have been avoided if the pipeline had been properly placed, but the dice were rolled and now the oil companies responsible have to pay for the cost cutting they engaged in when the pipeline was constructed. Montana will be dealing with the spill for many years to come, just like the people of Ecuador. The big difference is that the day the spill occured it became public knowledge and no politician could claim they had no idea any problem existed. This spill is making environmentalists out of politicians that only a week ago made fun of "greens", "environmentalists", and those onerous EPA laws that inhibit the search for energy at any cost.

Water and Contemporary Cowboy Economics: *Quantum of Solace* and *Water*

Quantum of Solace (2008) takes water rights issues to the world stage in a genre that draws on the neo-noir of Polanski’s Chinatown. In Quantum, a private detective is replaced with a British Secret Service Agent. But the mystery in both films incorporates a utility company’s attempts to control water and results in multiple action sequences and deaths. Ultimately, the corporation in both films is defeated, but in Quantum, the hero becomes an eco-warrior encapsulating the activist spirit of Bolivian peasants in Cochabamba.             

           

Contemporary water rights issues come to the fore in Quantum of Solace, with control of land and water like that found in Chinatown nearly replicating the 1998-2000 Cochabamba, Bolivia water wars instigated by the World Bank, a connection noted only by Joshua Clover in the Film Quarterly review, “Cinema for a New Grand Game.”  These wars began when the World Bank “refused to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in the city of Cochabamba unless the local government sold its public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to consumers” (Barlow and Clark 154). Bolivia complied, giving control of water to Aguas del Tunari, “a newly formed subsidiary of the U.S. construction and water giant Bechtel,” but when water rates increased by almost 35%, tens of thousands of Cochabamba citizens protested for a week, with 90 percent of residents opposing Bechtel, so the Bolivian government broke its contract with Bechtel. The World Bank President Wolfensohn argued against the change, but protest coordinator Oscar Olivera disagreed, declaring, “I’d like to meet with Mr. Wolfensohn to educate him on how privatization has been a direct attack on Bolivia’s poor…. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 have seen their water bills jump to $20 per month—more than they spend on food” (155).

Dick Clement’s Water, a farce from 1985, however, also demonstrates the power of water as a commodity and its connection with environmental history and popular culture. Although Walter Goodman of  The New York Times claims the film “operated on the theory that a lot of eccentric people doing nutty things produce hilarity” and that in kidding everything, the movie leaves us uncertain about whether anything is being seriously kidded,” the film highlights bottled mineral water as a resource worth more than oil. In this spoof exploring the effects colonialism had on islands in the West Indies, mineral water is discovered by accident when an American oil company shoots a commercial beside its now useless oil derrick on the imaginary island of Cascara. Battles between the American company, the British and Cuban governments, and an ineffective but musical liberation front tie the film to a history of colonial exploitation of native people and their resources, especially to the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada.

These films build on a history of water rights debates beginning with a revision of the riparian concept in the 19^th Century American West where riparian rights were “believed to have emerged from English common law and consequently centered around individual property rights,” according to Vandana Shiva (22).  The Doctrine of Prior Appropriation and what Shiva calls “Cowboy economics” take water privatization further, defining water as a commodity that should be marketed according to the “lawlessness of the frontier,” Shiva argues. Both Quantum of Solace and Water support her assertions.