An Introduction to Murray and Heumann’s Everyday Eco-Disasters: Cinematic Eco-disasters and Our Basic Human Needs

An Introduction to Murray and Heumann’s Everyday Eco-Disaters:

Cinematic Eco-disasters and Our Basic Human Needs

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), an epic anti-War drama confronting the fight for survival of a Devon horse named Joey in the no-man zones of World War I France, addresses our relationship with the environment in a variety of ways. It effectively illustrates the connections between human and nonhuman nature with its focus on the relationship between Joey and his owner’s son, Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). The scenes before, during, and after battles also demonstrate the horrific consequences of modern warfare to people, animals, and the natural world, a devastating human and ecological disaster leaving clear evidence that, as the film tells us, “The war has taken everything from everyone.”

But the film moves beyond more traditional disaster themes by illuminating everyday eco-disasters associated with our basic needs.  For example, Joey, a swift and strong thoroughbred, must prove he can plow a field for turnips to ensure the Narracott family maintains their shelter and the surrounding land that provides their food. When the turnip crop fails and war is declared, Albert’s father, Ted (Peter Mullan) sells the horse to the British army to pay the farm lease and, again, secure those basic needs. Joey’s horrific war journey, then, is caused by a family’s drive to simply survive.

Film and Everyday Eco-Disaster centers exclusively on films associated with our basic needs (air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and energy), and the everyday eco-disasters associated with their exploitation. Such exploitation is typically associated with a “fair use” model of ecology, which grew out of economic approaches to the environment connected to Social Darwinism. Human approaches to ecology, however, maintain the worth of our basic needs, either as separate from or part of nonhuman nature.  Whether defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow as physiological needs, by Reality therapist, William Glasser as survival needs, or self-determination theory as competence in dealing with the environment, our most basic needs all highlight our connection with our external ecology, a connection that broaches environmental externalities.

Environmental externalities resulting from everyday eco-disasters continue to have negative effects on water, air, and landscapes. For example, oil remains from the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and cleanup continues after the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, ominous foreshadowing of the possible aftermath of the 2010 BP environmental catastrophe caused by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. Negative externalities have a detrimental affect on workers in various industries, including fishing, drinking water, air quality, mountains and forests. See, for example, the December 23, 2008 coal slurry dam breach caused by mountaintop removal mining in Tennessee or the April 10, 2010 West Virginia Massey mine explosion that left twenty-nine dead.

Natural gas drilling also causes negative externalities, as documented in Gasland (2010), threatening upper water supplies in the Delaware basin, for example. Genetically engineered seed has produced resistant super weeds, and carp introduced in the Chicago River are threatening other fish in Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes. Environmental externalities have a global effect negatively impacting water, air and quality of human and nonhuman life around the world. Recent documentaries and feature films explore and argue against these everyday eco-disasters.

With explorations of films as diverse as Dead Ahead, a 1992 HBO dramatization of the Exxon Valdez disaster, Total Recall (1990), a science fiction feature film highlighting oxygen as a commodity, The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a comment on the fashion industry, and Food, Inc. (2009), a documentary interrogation of the food industry, Film and Everyday Eco-disasters explores documentaries and feature films as film art to determine how successfully they fulfill their goals. We assert that whether or not the films we explore succeed as arguments against everyday eco-disasters and the negative environmental externalities they produce depend not only on the message the filmmakers convey but also, and most importantly, on the rhetorical strategies they employ.