hollywood, climate change and public attitudes to risk

Andrew Revkin asks if Hollywood can help change public attitudes to global warming. He wishes it could, but doubts it will.

There’s simply too much evidence that the fundamental characteristics of the rising human influence on climate are a very bad fit for how humans absorb and respond to risks.

There's an excellent series of comments from people with a strong interest in climate science and communications - Michael Zimmerman, David Roberts, David Ropeik, Matthew Nisbet, Anthony Leiserowitz, Gavin Schmidt, Andrew Freedman, Robert Brulle and Randy Olson - that appears below the post. more ...

how to make a theatre out of junk

Behind the scenes look at the construction of Oikos, Britain's "first recycled theatre", a 120-seat work of 'junkitecture' in south London.

See also  Most important conference you'll go to, New venue, new plays, old materials, Don't pour concrete and don't weld anything and Greenest theatre in Montreal more ...

wizardry

The best way to understand Avatar is to watch The Wizard of Oz. more ...

diversification

As Vandana Shiva suggested in her interview with us, there are strong links between cultural diversity and biodiversity. But as the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove also shows, cultural diversity can be at war with biodiversity . more ...

highest value

Well, Avatar is throwing up some interesting perspectives: anti-American, Jungian and now free-market.

Antiwar.com is a libertarian website that brings together, it says, libertarians, pacifists, leftists, greens, and independents alike. It's a welcome mix. All too often libertarians take a right-wing anti-environmental stance, when as this blog has argued (see ps below) many libertarian issues are green issues.

On Antiwar.com, the economist and academic David R. Robinson provokes the right-wing critics of the movie by arguing that Avatar is a defense of capitalism and property rights.

... the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need "Unobtainium," I turned to a libertarian friend and said, "This is the Kelo decision." Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a "grander" project.

... to the extent that it makes any statement about capitalism, Avatar is a defense of capitalism. Capitalism is based on property rights and voluntary exchange. The Na’vi had property rights in the crucial tree and various other properties surrounding it. Did they own it as individuals or as community tribal property? We can’t be sure, but probably the latter. They had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use.

h-t: Tokyo_Tom

PS. From just asking 31 March 2008: No libertarian is going to rally under a banner saying 'coerce now!' There are many millions of people in the world for whom 'liberty' is a more powerful idea than 'sustainability'. To be effective, the green movement has to win them over on their terms. As the wiki entry on green libertarianism puts it, pollution can be introduced into the classic libertarian argument: 'your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins'. Or as the philosopher John Locke said, 'Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.' more ...

one hurts, the other's mad

One notable moment in Copenhagen came when Senator James Inhofe, who describes climate change as the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, was told by a Der Speigel reporter: 'You're ridiculous.'

This puncturing remark suggested it was possible to see the conflict between climate scientists and climate 'sceptics' as a version of the familiar dramatic clash between reality and fantasy. In this case, one view was based on a vast amount of painstakingly-researched peer-reviewed evidence, and the other ... wasn't.

Dramas often show that making the transition from fantasy to reality is a painful process. Escapism is so much more attractive. Climate 'scepticism' is a kind of escapism. We'd all prefer it if we could live in a world where facts didn't intrude too harshly, one that's a little more like the movies.

In Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), these two worlds collide when a movie character steps out of the screen and enters everyday life. In Purple Rose, a waitress Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is in love with this movie character and has to choose between the on-screen character and the off-screen one. Cecilia chooses the latter, but he abandons her.

In a recent collection of interviews, Woody Allen has described this conflict in the movie in typically gloomy terms. He sees the choice between reality and fantasy as a lose-lose situation.

My perception is that you are forced to choose reality over fantasy and reality hurts you in the end, and fantasy is just madness.

pic: Mia Farrow as Cecilia, Purple Rose of Cairo more ...

top doc

Ecorazzi lists its 10 Ten Eco-Documentaries of the decade

1. Who Killed The Electric Car? (2006) - Worldwide Gross: $1,764,304
2. The 11th Hour (2007) - Worldwide Gross: $985,207
3. An Inconvenient Truth (2006) - Worldwide Gross: $49,756,507
4. Earth (2007/2009) - Worldwide Gross: $108,729,338
5. The End of Suburbia (2004) No figure.
6. FOOD, INC. (2009) - Worldwide Gross: $4,467,205
7. The Cove (2009) - Worldwide Gross: $899,552
8. Earthlings (2005) No figure.
9. Fuel (2008) - Domestic Box Office Gross: $32,465
10. The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005) - Box Office Gross: $103,714 more ...

true blue

This blog has written about the latest blockbuster Avatar as an anti-American, even anti-European, and certainly anti-colonial movie.

Alternatively, in New York, the Jungian analyst Heide Kolb sees Avatar as a 'constructive countervision to the catastrophe-mongering' of 2012.

One illustration is that the skin colour of the tribe, the Na'vi, which lives on the planet Pandora, is blue. Kolbe writes:

I have no doubt the makers of Avatar were aware of the blue god in Hindu mythology, Krishna. Krishna was the eighth reincarnation (avatar) of the Hindu God Vishnu. Significant similarities exist between Krishna and the Christ figure. Both were sent by a father god to challenge the tyranny of the ruling class. Both were considered divine and human.

Krishna is often depicted with a flute, which people found irresistible. Krishna was a rebel, a poet and a lover of many women in Hindu lore. This earthy behavior and the flute connect him to the Greek Pan and they are all aspects of the connection to the archetypal feminine that needed to be split off, denied and repressed ...

See: hit and myth more ...

hit and myth

On Friday this blog wondered if an anti-American film could also be a blockbuster hit. The answer is yes. The BBC reports that Avatar has topped the North American box office, taking $73m (£45.3m) on its opening weekend.

In this weekend's Observer Philip French highlighted the shift in James Cameron's work from pro-American to anti-American:

In Cameron's Terminator films, the central allegory derives from the story of Christ. In his brilliant Aliens, the Marines were the embattled heroes in a Vietnam-style war against vicious extraterrestrials.

Underlying Avatar is the story of the colonisation of the Americas and the destruction of the native population and their culture between the arrival of Columbus through the massacre at Wounded Knee up to the bulldozing of the Amazon rainforests. Coupled with this are more recent acts of neocolonialism like Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Marines are now the despoiling enemy and the aliens the good guys, and thrown into the mix are references to King Kong, Planet of the Apes and Bambi and echoes of H G Wells's The Time Machine.

(Though you could say that the people who colonised America and destroyed the native populations were Europeans, so the movie is also anti-European.) more ...

not bothered by parallels

The big new Christmas movie, James Cameron's Avatar, which opened yesterday, has some striking green themes.

There's deforestation: a truly massive tree gets destroyed. There's a threatened indigenous people: the home of the Na'vi tribe gets obliterated. And there's a new-agey idea that that there's a mutual thing going on between the people living in forest and the forest itself and there may even be scientific evidence (Sigourney Weaver tells us) of electro-magnetic impulses that allows the forest to act like a brain, communicating between its many constituent elements.

The baddies of the piece, of course, don't have such a sophisticated brain. What the US military has is muscle - a massive arsenal of weaponry which it aims to use ( 'shock and awe') to get the 'savages' moving out of an area where there they have discovered a very precious mineral called - yes! - 'unobtanium'.

This raises an interesting question. I assume you can't have a successful blockbuster movie that's anti-American. So there must be plenty of people watching this movie who aren't remotely bothered by the parallels suggested by the storyline.

Update: in this interview Cameron refers to the themes of imperialism and biodiversity and attacks the way America has 'had eight years of the oil lobbyists running the country'. But he points out that anti-imperialism is American too. 'You can take it back to the origins of America in a fight of rebels against an imperial dominating force.' Except the rebels in question were hardly fighting on behalf of indigenous people. more ...

harder we work, more we believe

One of this blog's favourite bloggers, Samantha Ellis, has just been to Fantastic Mr Fox and loved it.

Samantha wrote a journal for us about her time researching wolves and rewilding when writing her play The Last Wolf in Scotland.

Fantastic Mr Fox turns out to be a paean to the crunchy side of nature with Mr Fox giving an impassioned defence of wildness. But Samantha was also struck by the stop-motion filming, which made her realise how much she hated CGI:

The more you can see the joins, the more you're aware that these are handmade puppets being photographed, moved a tiny bit, then photographed again, the more real it seems. I think we believe more when we have to work a bit harder to suspend disbelief. more ...

pressure point

There's a Japanese word, gaiatsu, that means "external pressure". That's what the campaign is all about. Ric O'Barry, the man who trained the dolphins that played Flipper, says The Cove is gaiatsu-plus. 'It's really going to piss them off.' more ...

open road

The movie version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road has just been screened at the Venice Film Festival. The movie stars Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, with Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy.

The Independent says:

It plays like a dystopian version of Huck Finn ...

In creating this barren taciturn world, it was obviously more fun to be one of the production designers than the dialogue writer.

If sometimes the film's earnestness bordered on the 'inadvertently comic' (says the reviewer) overall it was 'absorbing and affecting'. more ...

more than laws and patrol boats

Two almost incidental remarks stayed with me after seeing The End of the Line last night. The documentary charts the crazy path we've taken since the 1950s with the large-scale industrialisation of fishing. Plenty of gloomy graphs back up the science. Many fish are on the verge of extinction.

At one moment in the film Charles Clover, author of the book on which the movie is based, discusses the oceans and finite resources and says what is needed is 'a new philosophy'. Our idea of oceans needs to be rethought.

In the Q&A afterwards, the movie's producer Claire Lewis described the importance of bluefin tuna to the Japanse in cultural terms. She said it was easy for us to underestimate the part that bluefin tuna plays in Japanese culture.

Yes, overfishing is often illegal, and we need tough laws and more patrol boats. But it's also cultural and philosophical, and that's the area, traditionally, where writers and artists have had influence. more ...

home sweet home

Le Monde considers the electoral impact of televising Home, Yann Arthus-Bertrand's movie about the planet, two days before the European vote.

It was broadcast on France 2 and attracted an audience of eight million.The debate that followed was watched by three million.

The result in the elections? Le Monde's front page headline says, 'les ecologistes triomphent'. more ...

no hiding from this story

This blog has suggested before that Greek drama, with its focus on hubris, offers rich source material for plays on climate change. (Faust has been another suggestion; and the genre of farce another still.)

But as the issue of climate-change refugees becomes increasingly urgent there's another Greek narrative that offers a ready template: The Odyssey.

In Le Monde today there's an op-ed article on the remarkable success of Welcome (blogged here), a new movie about a swimming instructor who helps train a young Kurd to swim the channel (pic).

Jacques Mandelbaum and Thomas Sotinel place the movie in a tradition that includes Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears and Costa-Gavras. They argue that this type of story will only increase as the rich countries: 'multipliaient les mesures répressives et dissuasives à l'encontre des migrants'.

The range of extreme risks undertaken by illegal migrants gives these stories the appeal of 'un modern Ulysse'. (Except, of course, that Odysseus was heading in the other direction: he was on his way home.)

The authors also suggest that another character is vital to the success of Welcome (as it is, they say, to Tom McCarthy's The Visitor). This is the citizen who is suddenly confronted by the situation of the illegal immigrant. It's through these characters ('les intercesseurs') that the audience enters these hidden worlds. more ...

what green first nights look like

You can watch a 51-minute preview of The Age of Stupid, which premieres today.

No dramatist ought to need to repeat the movie's content, but theatres generally would do well to emulate the range of inventive greenery that surrounds this evening's premiere. The list runs:

'full eco audit of emissions from the event; solar powered projector; pedal-powered popcorn making machine; used coffee bean sacks recycled as trendy fence covers; re-used and reusable Green Carpet; bicycles and electric vehicles for celebs, charged from renewable energy sources; biodiesel for vehicles, made from recycled cooking oil collected by volunteers from friendly local chip shops; organic chocolate, beer and soft drinks; no bottled water, disposable cups or other crap like that; no flying! and no offsetting. Offsetting is palpable nonsense.' more ...

stake out

John Vidal's Guardian piece on Franny Armstrong, producer of The Age of Stupid has Armstrong making a point (familiar to readers of this blog) that 'narrative, not just facts, is needed to make people understand what is at stake'. more ...

give it up for (the other) michelle

At the start of No Impact Man's blog (which I first wrote about in summer 2007), there was a winning sense that Colin Beavan's guilty Liberal idealism was on a collision course with his wife Michelle's 'Prada-wearing, Four Seasons-loving' lifestyle.

In the early months of NIM, Beavan was foisting his eco-fundamentalism onto his Manhattan wife and their young child, and hastily blogging his anxieties about doing so on his solar-powered computer - before the light went.

Nowadays the NIM blog is more like a support network for well-intentioned green people. But it's encouraging to learn that the movie-of-the-blog (what a new genre that is) keeps those early competing voices in the foreground. The LA Times says the movie could have been preachy and self-righteous, but turns out to be funny and informative.

'In large part, that's thanks to Michelle, who becomes our voice in the production -- from her admitted addiction to everything from shopping to coffee (no beans are grown within the roughly 250 mile radius they set for any of the food products they bought), to her discomfort with the composting bin in the house, complete with earthworms and, in the summer, flies.' more ...

seven up

At least seven movies at this year's Sundance festival, which opened this week, have strong environmental themes. more ...