Happy Feet Two meets the criteria of the Enviro-Toon well. It shows us scenes of Ramon (Robin Williams) struggling to escape an oil spill and watch the spill flame up in a spectacular oil fire. It also explains The Mighty Sven’s (Hank Azaria) dilemma to introduce the film’s central conflict, the negative repercussions of global warming. Sven has lost his icy home to global warming. With warming temperatures, the ice melted, revealing open waters and green grasses that are uninhabitable to puffins.
Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment
This blog explores popular film and media and their relationship to the environment.
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Happy Feet Two as Enviro-Toon
Happy Feet Two meets the criteria of the Enviro-Toon well. It shows us scenes of Ramon (Robin Williams) struggling to escape an oil spill and watch the spill flame up in a spectacular oil fire. It also explains The Mighty Sven’s (Hank Azaria) dilemma to introduce the film’s central conflict, the negative repercussions of global warming. Sven has lost his icy home to global warming. With warming temperatures, the ice melted, revealing open waters and green grasses that are uninhabitable to puffins.
Saturday, September 17, 2022
Addressing Everyday Eco-Disasters in Happy Feet Two
For us, despite the film’s weaknesses, Happy Feet Two embraces a broader environmental message than that found in the original Happy Feet film. Happy Feet illustrates a clear eco-problem: overfishing. But the film offers a single unrealistic solution: human intervention to ensure sustainable fishing practices and protect penguins because they dance and sing like humans.
Saturday, September 10, 2022
Illustrating Everyday Eco-Disasters in Film
Recent documentaries and feature films explore and argue against 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, our projects explore documentaries and feature films as film art to determine how successfully they fulfill their goals.
Saturday, September 3, 2022
Negative Externalities and Fair Vs. Wise Use
Gasland (2010) documents multiple ways natural gas drilling causes negative externalities, threatening upper water supplies in the Delaware basin, for example. Documentaries highlight multiple types of negative environmental externalities: 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, housing, energy production, and quality of human and nonhuman life around the world.
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Negative Exteranalities in Documentaries
The term “externality” comes from economics and refers to “an economic choice or action by one actor that affects the welfare of others who are not involved in that choice or action” (Goodwin, et al). Although externalities can be positive, as when “a landowner, by choosing not to develop her land might preserve a water recharge source for an aquifer shared by the entire local community” (Goodwin, et al), environmental externalities are most often negative.
Saturday, August 20, 2022
The Rhetoric of the Eco-Documentary
Although many would argue that all texts, including documentaries, are inherently rhetorical, since they address an audience from a particular standpoint, historically, the rhetorical documentary presents an argument and lays out evidence to support it. In The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary, however, Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee assert, “The rhetorical potential of documentary film… relies not on an audience who merely provides the rhetor with resources that might be exploited in persuasion but instead on an audience who is actively engaged in judgment and action” (137).
Audiences do not merely mimic the action on the screen, according to Benson and Snee. They interpret the actions documented, and invent and engage in acts of their own that respond to the film’s rhetoric, but from the viewer’s perspective. Some of our work examines this rhetorical potential in relation to food industry documentaries. The best of these eco-documentaries fulfill Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s definition, “to play an active role in fostering environmental awareness, conservation, and political action…, that is, to be a member of the planetary ecosystem or ‘ecosphere and, most important, to understand the value of this community in a systemic and nonhierarchical way (10).”
When taking a rhetorical approach, documentation of actions also seems to adhere to the criteria Karl Heider outlines for ethnographic filmmaking, when explaining, “the most important attribute of ethnographic film is the degree to which it is informed by ethnographic understanding” (5). According to Heider, first of all, “ethnography is a way of making a detailed description and analysis of human behavior based on a long-term observational study on the spot,” (6). Secondly, Heider suggests that ethnography should “relate specific observed behavior to cultural norms” (6). The individual narratives these films provide also support Heider’s third criteria for an effective ethnography: “holism” (6). These interconnected stories are “truthfully represented” (Heider 7) according to Heider’s final criterion for an effective ethnographic film, all in service to the films’ rhetoric.
Saturday, August 13, 2022
Human Ecology and Self-Sufficiency Standard
For a working adult in Illinois, an hourly wage of at least $8.57/hour was necessary in 2002 to earn the $1508 per month (with 176 hours per month of work) or $18,097 per year salary necessary to meet housing, food, transportation, miscellaneous, and tax expenses (Pearce and Brooks 8). For a family of four, with two working adults, a pre-school child, and a school-age child, an hourly wage of at least $10.07 per adult was necessary in 2002 to earn the $3543 per month (for 176 hours per month of work) or $42,519 per year required to meet these same basic needs, as well as child care expenses (Pearce and Brooks 8).