In the spirit of this past Pride Weekend in San Francisco (and New York, and San Diego, and Chicago, etc.) I watched a movie that was a huge hit at this year's Frameline LGBT Film Festival in SF (thank you, Netflix, for getting the quick release to me). And all I have to say is: wow. Very heartfelt, sweet, sad, political, activist, personal, educational, enlightening, frightening, moving. This documentary exposes the deeply entrenched role of the Mormon Church in the recently passed and still legally embattled Proposition 8 that defined marriage in the state constitution of California as only a man and a woman. The news of the Mormon involvement in the political campaign made headlines ($22 million spent on anything would), but one of the most terrifying revelations in this movie was how the Mormons were involved in the similar political debate in Hawaii back in1996, and had plotted this proposition in California for years ever since that one.
Really made me think, made me weepy, made me angry, made me hopeful (for the individuals, politicians, reporters, intellectuals, families, and organizations shown fighting back on this issue), and made me want to watch it again (with a fresh box of tissues, just in case). Another important movie to watch and learn from...please.
More on "8: The Mormon Proposition" at IMDB:
Monday, June 28, 2010
Fuel...Hope For The Future
In response to my own posts and musings and the many many lingering worries about the wars in the Middle East and the Gulf Oil Disaster, Netflix delivered a movie that I wanted to see in the independent theater circuit last year and never got to: "Fuel."
I was very pleased with this movie: it started out as a familiar diatribe against "Big Oil," and even that was educational and full of new facts that I didn't know. But what made this activist film a bit more enriching was its balanced and realistic approach to answering the question, "What can I do to save this planet?" That question haunts as much as it stupefies, precisely because of the magnitude of scale it is asking each of us to address. So in addition to learning about BioDiesel fuel, "Big Oil," the "military oil industrial complex," and frightening backstories to 9/11 and the resulting "War On Terror," this documentary also touched on very important themes of fear, individual choice, cultural stories and the power of narratives, cutting edge technology, and political action. It was very empowering to watch one talking head after another speaking genuinely and passionately about the need to fix the mess we are all in and have all inherited and all contribute to.
Josh Tickell's environmental documentary is not just his story. It needs to be each one of our stories. Very well done, one of the best 112 minutes I have had in a while, and I certainly it hope it gets wide distribution in DVD audiences. Please watch it.
Fuel (2008) - link to IMDB information
I was very pleased with this movie: it started out as a familiar diatribe against "Big Oil," and even that was educational and full of new facts that I didn't know. But what made this activist film a bit more enriching was its balanced and realistic approach to answering the question, "What can I do to save this planet?" That question haunts as much as it stupefies, precisely because of the magnitude of scale it is asking each of us to address. So in addition to learning about BioDiesel fuel, "Big Oil," the "military oil industrial complex," and frightening backstories to 9/11 and the resulting "War On Terror," this documentary also touched on very important themes of fear, individual choice, cultural stories and the power of narratives, cutting edge technology, and political action. It was very empowering to watch one talking head after another speaking genuinely and passionately about the need to fix the mess we are all in and have all inherited and all contribute to.
Josh Tickell's environmental documentary is not just his story. It needs to be each one of our stories. Very well done, one of the best 112 minutes I have had in a while, and I certainly it hope it gets wide distribution in DVD audiences. Please watch it.
Fuel (2008) - link to IMDB information
Monday, June 7, 2010
Blame vs. Responsibility
Last week (May 31-June 6) both "Newsweek" and "The New York Times" reported in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill eco-disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the first rig to experience a blowout while drilling in such deep water (about 5,000 feet down). Both publications reported that (as many people are now asking), the BP company did in fact have a plan to respond to such an incident. The document was titled, "BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan - Gulf of Mexico" and it was approved by the federal government. But if you think this disaster was unfathomable, get this: the report includes discussions about protecting walruses, seals, and sea lions - animals that do not even exist in the Gulf of Mexico! The report also lists a Web address for a disaster-response contractor that is instead a Japanese shopping site! Lovely. That's what I find unbelievable. The response plan was not only a second-rate copy-and-paste job (presumably from an Alaska/West Coast response plan), but it wasn't even corrected and fact-checked. Isn't the only thing worse than a lie, a bad lie?
BP oil (and other big oil companies) = score 1 point for cheap self-protection.
Government oversight = score 1 point for loopholes and future disavowed involvement.
Earth, the global ecosystem, and all of the planet's inhabitants = score 0 points.
So if the blame will be shifted (at best), who is left responsible? Tough question. But I know those oil-covered dead dolphins, the oil-covered shellfish, and the oil-covered birds had nothing to do with a metal pipe stuck in the sea floor one mile down. I think we're all responsible...and we will continue to be. The question is: how and for what will be responsible?
BP oil (and other big oil companies) = score 1 point for cheap self-protection.
Government oversight = score 1 point for loopholes and future disavowed involvement.
Earth, the global ecosystem, and all of the planet's inhabitants = score 0 points.
So if the blame will be shifted (at best), who is left responsible? Tough question. But I know those oil-covered dead dolphins, the oil-covered shellfish, and the oil-covered birds had nothing to do with a metal pipe stuck in the sea floor one mile down. I think we're all responsible...and we will continue to be. The question is: how and for what will be responsible?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Top Kill = Fail / Failure to Learn/Act
I must admit that I have surprised even myself with some recent posts and some recent offline conversations (wow: remember those?) about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico. Even before I was a vegetarian I never self-identified as an "environmentalist." Sure, I knew that humans had a responsibility to care for the planet, I probably will always be an animal lover and be passionate about zoology (especially paleobiology, primate evolution, and marine biology), but I guess I still had "Child of the 70s" presuppositions that environmentalists were all hippies worshipping Gaia (even though I considered myself a supporter of the "Save The Whales" movement).
Over the weekend I discovered another happy privilege of the iPad: watching movies and causing serious catch-up damage on my ever-increasing Netflix queue. So I watched several documentaries on that DVD/TV-like portable device. And I found myself several times this weekend thinking back to another documentary I have mentioned before: "The Corporation." Seriously: everyone must watch that one.
But the two most recent ones for me were "Crude" and "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." "Crude" documents the ongoing class action lawsuit trying to get some reparations from Chevron/Texaco for the massive damage alleged by indigenous people in Ecuador for what some have called "The Amazon Chernobyl." A glimpse of the future that massive oil spills and environmental pollution disasters hold for all of us? Yes. Also a scathing indictment of corporate greed and a failure for individual leaders to accept any sort of shared responsibility not only for actions but also for human protection of a shared planet. The concept of greed is the focus of the second movie, "Wal-Mart" that is full of frightening facts and includes eyewitness testimony from former/current employees that document how greed becomes injustice in every sense of the word. Truly eye-opening and made me swear off ever shopping at Wal-Mart (or Sam's Club) ever (not that I ever did). Now I understand why communities have protested Wal-Mart coming into their communities, large and small. Reading facts like Wal-Mart employees contributing $5M one year to help their peer employees experiencing financial hardship when the executive family contributed only $6K of their vast fortunes for the same emergency fund just sickened me. (The Wal-Mart family routinely contributes something like 1% of their profits to charitable causes; Bill Gates gives away 56% of his. Bravo to him; Boo on Wal-Mart.)
So this brought me back to the current oil spill that is nowhere close to being solved. I decided it;s not enough to just throw up my hands and say, well, what can we do? Corporations are in for the money, I still drive a gasoline-powered car, engineers can't possibly solve every mechanical problem in the world especially one that is one mile below the surface of the ocean, etc. I decided instead that this is all about individual responsibility: the individual responsibility we each have to conserve the planet's resources, to honor the privileges of our lifestyles by giving back what we can when we can, to use political and social action to promote justice for all people (and all living things), to steward the health of our societies for future generations, and to never just sit back and accept the "fate" of "accidents." We're each capable of much more than that. At the very least we can all continue to examine multiple sides to each story and stay as educated as possible.
I hope you'll do that too, iPad/documentary movies or not.
For more (eye-opening and mind-expanding) information:
"Crude"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326204/
"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473107/
Over the weekend I discovered another happy privilege of the iPad: watching movies and causing serious catch-up damage on my ever-increasing Netflix queue. So I watched several documentaries on that DVD/TV-like portable device. And I found myself several times this weekend thinking back to another documentary I have mentioned before: "The Corporation." Seriously: everyone must watch that one.
But the two most recent ones for me were "Crude" and "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." "Crude" documents the ongoing class action lawsuit trying to get some reparations from Chevron/Texaco for the massive damage alleged by indigenous people in Ecuador for what some have called "The Amazon Chernobyl." A glimpse of the future that massive oil spills and environmental pollution disasters hold for all of us? Yes. Also a scathing indictment of corporate greed and a failure for individual leaders to accept any sort of shared responsibility not only for actions but also for human protection of a shared planet. The concept of greed is the focus of the second movie, "Wal-Mart" that is full of frightening facts and includes eyewitness testimony from former/current employees that document how greed becomes injustice in every sense of the word. Truly eye-opening and made me swear off ever shopping at Wal-Mart (or Sam's Club) ever (not that I ever did). Now I understand why communities have protested Wal-Mart coming into their communities, large and small. Reading facts like Wal-Mart employees contributing $5M one year to help their peer employees experiencing financial hardship when the executive family contributed only $6K of their vast fortunes for the same emergency fund just sickened me. (The Wal-Mart family routinely contributes something like 1% of their profits to charitable causes; Bill Gates gives away 56% of his. Bravo to him; Boo on Wal-Mart.)
So this brought me back to the current oil spill that is nowhere close to being solved. I decided it;s not enough to just throw up my hands and say, well, what can we do? Corporations are in for the money, I still drive a gasoline-powered car, engineers can't possibly solve every mechanical problem in the world especially one that is one mile below the surface of the ocean, etc. I decided instead that this is all about individual responsibility: the individual responsibility we each have to conserve the planet's resources, to honor the privileges of our lifestyles by giving back what we can when we can, to use political and social action to promote justice for all people (and all living things), to steward the health of our societies for future generations, and to never just sit back and accept the "fate" of "accidents." We're each capable of much more than that. At the very least we can all continue to examine multiple sides to each story and stay as educated as possible.
I hope you'll do that too, iPad/documentary movies or not.
For more (eye-opening and mind-expanding) information:
"Crude"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326204/
"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473107/
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