Overdevelopment, Suburban Sprawl, and Environmental Justice in *The Unforeseen*

According to The Unforseen (2007), farmers are losing everything in West Texas.  But Real Estate developer Gary Bradley believes Austin is the best place to construct homes, even though his home building will ruin trees, water, and farmers’ fields and prospective crops. The Edwards Aquifer is of most concern for both townspeople and farmers. If the Aquifer is polluted and depleted, there will be less water for residents, for recreation, and for farmers. To argue against Bradley’s claims, the film contrasts the Austin of 2007 with that of the 1970s. In the 1980s, controls were lifted from banks, the film illustrates, and developers more easily borrow money and loan it to boomers until the Savings and Loan collapse.

Bradley is painted as one of the most corrupt of those developers, seeking profits no matter the cost to the environment. For example, during the 1980s, the film reveals, Bradley invests his money into a gold mine in Papua, Indonesia, where 3 billion tons of tailings go right into the water. He also invests in phosphorus mining in Florida, which strips away square miles of land and Louisiana fertilizer plants, the number one discharge of toxic contaminants.  

In response to both the new housing developments and the vile reputation of its owner, Gary Bradley, protestors oppose unit development along Barton Creek in Austin. According to protestors, developers are destroying the creek and its natural pool and want the 4000 acres of land to be protected. The preserve will comprise of six square miles, 1500 acres of which will go for parks and 860 for a bird sanctuary. They want to protect the Edwards Aquifer.

Throughout the film, farmers, geologists, and other experts demonstrate the importance the Barton spring and its aquifer. According to the film, the city council denied the development in 1990. But because the developers still seek to build along Barton Creek, activists, including Robert Redford, advocate for their opponents, protestors and farmers in Austin and areas surrounding the city. Geologists demonstrate the negative effects of urbanization on water quality. From 1996 to 2004, the spring becomes very polluted because of Bradley’s initial home constructions sites, because housing developments block natural filtration through soil and plants by covering them in concrete. Developers had grandfathered in permits from the 1980s in the 1990s, and Senate Bill 1704 led to loss of local control in 1995.  Bradley and other developers take advantage of the opportunity to buy up failed developments from 1983-5 when George W. Bush became governor after Ann Richards. The development is compared to cancer metathesizing.

As of 2011, the area along Barton Creek has become part of Austin’s Green Belt park system, and Barton Creek Wilderness Park protects at least part of the Edwards Aquifer. Unfortunately, however, development continues along the creek, including resorts, spas, golf courses, and luxury apartments. The Unforeseen documents negative environmental consequences (externalities) of real estate development. It also illustrates the continuing conflict between residents and farmers and the developers who strive only for profit rather than environmental justice for all.  

The Plow That Broke the Plains, 2011

Recent news reports from Texas and Arizona, accompanied by video testimony that can be seen on You Tube on a daily basis, has documented the new wave of dust storms that are now tearing through the American Southwest. All it takes, as many observors have noted, is a drought, no vegetation and strong winds and these conditions are all combining to provide the dirt and dust storms that are choking people from breathing, stopping planes from flying and automobiles from moving on major highways and streets.

Though these storms appear to be new they were well documented during the 1930's, when the Dust Bowl was first given its name. An extended, multi-year drought, high winds and the refusal of American farmers to build adequate vegetative protection led to the destruction of much of the farming in states like Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas. Wheat farmers had plowed up the prairie lands, with no care for stewardship of the land, until their faulty practices ran into a major drought that lasted for close to a decade. People died, families lost their homes and farms, and whole states were choked with the debris and top soil blown off by the violence of winds.

In Pare Lorentz's 27 minute documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, produced in 1936, the opening narrative begins:

High winds and sun

A Country without rivers

And with little rain

Settler:Plow at your peril

Two hundred miles from water

Two hundred miles from town

But the land is new

Many were disappointed

The rains failed

And the sun baked the light soil.

The film goes on to document the mistakes made by the Plains farmers when they opened up the prairies to unlimited farming with no concerns about the environmental costs that would soon come due. It also proposes simple solutions to help fight erosion and makes a plea for the country as a whole to help the dispossessed who were hungry and homeless, because of this man made eco-disaster.

Today the disaster is coming again and while Federal aid may be easier to acquire, the mistakes of the the early farmers are still being made. The simple solutions that protect against the natural droughts that appear have been neglected and while droughts can occur at any time, the refusal to plant adequate vegetation that would help protect the environment has occurred once again.

Farming on open prairies is akin to settling in our vast flood plains. When it gets dry people start to suffer and get buried under dirt. When it rains too much, as it did in the Upper Middle West this year, whole communities in flood plains find themselves under water.

Lorentz warned against flooding in his The River (1937) and perhaps it is time that we watch both short films again to understand that what is happening today is the simple repetition of history.

Gunfight at the Eco-Corral

Gunfight at the eco-corral : western cinema and the environment / 

         Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

Author

Murray, Robin L

Subjects

Western films - History and criticism.; Nature in motion pictures.; Ecology in motion pictures.

Contents

• Introduction
• Don't fence me in: ecology and free-range and fenced ranching in shane and sea of grass
• Mining westerns: seeking sustainable development in McCabe and Mrs. Miller
• Is water a right?: The ballad of Cable Hogue and environmental law
• The rush for land, the rush for oil, the rush for progress: spectacle in Cimarron, Tulsa, Comes a horseman, and There will be blood
• Transcontinental technologies: telegraphs, trains, and the environment in Union Pacific, Jesse James, and The last hunt
• Smoke signals and American Indian westerns: narratives of environmental adaptation
• A west and a western that works?: contemporary traditional westerns, Riders of the whistling pines, and Silver City.

Most film critics point to classic conflicts—good versus evil, right versus wrong—as defining themes of the American Western. In this provocative examination of Westerns from Tumbleweeds (1925) to Rango (2011), Robin l. murray and Joseph K. Heumann argue for a more expansive view that moves beyond traditional conflicts to encompass environmental themes and struggles.

That’s All Folks?

Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

Although some credit the environmental movement of the 1970s, with its profound impact on children’s television programs and movies, for paving the way for later eco-films, the history of environmental expression in animated film reaches much further back in American history, as That’s All Folks? makes clear.

Countering the view that the contemporary environmental movement—and the cartoons it influenced—came to life in the 1960s, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann reveal how environmentalism was already a growing concern in animated films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. From Felix the Cat cartoons to Disney’s beloved Bambi to Pixar’s Wall-E and James Cameron’s Avatar, this volume shows how animated features with environmental themes are moneymakers on multiple levels—particularly as broad-based family entertainment and conveyors of consumer products. Only Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated Fritz the Cat and R-rated Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, with their violent, dystopic representation of urban environments, avoid this total immersion in an anti-environmental consumer market.

Showing us enviro-toons in their cultural and historical contexts, this book offers fresh insights into the changing perceptions of the relationship between humans and the environment and a new understanding of environmental and animated cinema.

Robin L. Murray is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Joseph K. Heumann is a professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University. They are the coauthors of Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge.

December 2011

For more information, check out the University of Nebraska site:

*That's All Folks?*

*The Vanishing of the Bees*, *Bee Movie* and the Precautionary Principle

The Vanishing of the Bees (2009) investigates the economic, political and ecological implications of the worldwide disappearance of the honeybee. But by comparing the current U.S. Colony Collapse Disorder with the catastrophic loss of bees in France more than a decade before, the film formulates both a cause (systemic pesticides) and a solution (the elimination of those pesticides). Systemic pesticides are chemicals that are actually absorbed by a plant when applied to seeds, soil or leaves. The chemicals then circulate through the plant’s tissues, killing the insects that feed on them. Unlike with traditional insecticides, you can’t wash or peel off systemic pesticide residues because they’re in the plant’s tissues, not on their exteriors.

The film also reveals a cultural difference in approaches to environmental protection. Responding to the Precautionary Principle, the French agreed to farmers’ demand that certain systemic pesticides be outlawed. “Better Safe than Sorry” might be the message. Drawing on the risk assessment principle, Americans and the EPA, on the other hand, are waiting to act until scientific studies provide certain evidence of a cause and effect relationship between these toxic chemicals and the collapse of bees.

The precautionary principle states that “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” Ecological risk assessments (ERAs) are conducted to evaluate the likelihood that adverse ecological effects could result from the exposure to one or more chemical and/or radiological contaminants in the environment. ERAs also provide needed information to adequately develop and evaluate remedial alternatives that best balance human health and ecological concerns while being protective of the environment and are cost-effective. Although The Vanishing of the Bees advocates for implementing the precautionary principle, Bee Movie bi-passes both principles and highlights humanity’s need for bee pollenization without destroying either the bees or humans.

Bee Movie (2007) asserts that human and nonhuman nature share an interdependent relationship based in both organismic and chaotic approaches to ecology that, once disrupted, may destroy them both. Bee Movie at first seems to illustrate a need for bifurcation between bees and humans, with any interaction between humans and nonhuman nature—in this case bees—not only advised against but outlawed. Instead, Bee Movie asserts that bees and humans must live and work together for both species to survive, either individually as represented by Barry’s relationship with Vanessa, or collectively, as illustrated by the drastic loss of plant life when bees go on strike, refusing to pollinate and thus regenerate flowers and other plants around the world.

There is no doubt that bee populations are decreasing rapidly and that their annihilation would have a devastating effect on agriculture. According to Diana Cox-Foster and Dennis vanEnglesdorp’s March 31, 2009 article in Scientific America, in 2007, due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), “a fourth of U.S. beekeepers had suffered … losses and … more than 30 percent of all colonies had died. The next winter the die-off resumed and expanded, hitting 36 percent of U.S. beekeepers. Reports of large losses also surfaced from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe and other regions.”

These losses may be catastrophic for farmers, Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp explain, “because one third of the world's agricultural production depends on the European honeybee, Apis mellifera, the kind universally adopted by beekeepers in Western countries.” Loss of bees, then, would deplete agricultural products that benefit humans. But because these bees also pollinate other plant species, their depletion could have widespread effects on a biotic community, destroying whole species of flowers and trees.

Researchers see human factors contributing to this loss of bees. Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp cite poor nutrition, pesticide exposure, stress-related viruses, and fungicides as factors influencing colony collapse. In order to slow the collapse of bee colonies and ensure agricultural pollinization, Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp assert that beekeepers need to act quickly to minimize disease and ensure good nutrition and less exposure to pesticides for their bee colonies. Farmers too should decrease their use of harmful pesticides and herbicides, so bees can survive and help maintain a food supply for both humans and bees.

    

Bee Movie illustrates the catastrophic losses such a lack of pollinization might cause, not because bee colonies have been destroyed by human farming techniques but because bees go on strike. By elucidating this connection between bees and human production, the film also reinforces the need for interdependent relationships between humans and bees, relationships that also draw on both organismic and chaotic approaches to ecology. The Vanishing of the Bees, on the other hand, validates the science Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp assert while offering an answer to the bees’ collapse—choose the precautionary principle and eliminate use of systemic pesticides.