Ecology Documentaries

Their Function and Value Seen Through the Lens of Doughnut Economics

Susan Hayward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000478792
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics

This companion piece to Susan Hayward's Film Ecology focuses on ecology documentaries produced in the first 20 years of the new millennium (2000–19).

Using Kate Raworth's regenerative economic theoretical model as set out in Doughnut Economics, this book examines 57 films emanating from Europe and the 4 areas of concern they raise about energy production, pollution and waste

management, agribusiness, disrupted ecosystems and the migratory f low. These ecology documentaries make explicit the damage done to our planet thanks to growth capitalism and neoliberal globalisation. But they also provide the evidence that solutions to this planetary abuse exist. The book demonstrates how these documentaries reveal the process of humankind's planetary plundering and explores the structuring of the eco-doc as a new generic type in the domain of documentary practice. Using Raworth's model allows us to measure the tentacular extent of the planetary harm growth economics induces and, too, by way of contrast, perceive how regenerative economics can work to redress this harm, heal the Earth and make it a safe place for humanity.

This book is ideal for film studies scholars and students, including those teaching or studying film practice, documentary film, European cinema and environmental studies, as well as economists interested in regenerative economic models. It also has general appeal to all who are concerned about some of the major causes of planetary degradation and its impact on humanity and Earth.

1 ENERGY – crude awakenings Extractive energy sources versus regenerative energy practices

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130246-1

It seems logical to start this study with ENERGY since the four planetary elements – earth, water, air, fire – which constitute the forces that drive Earth’s existence are, paradoxically, in terms of the Anthropocene’s exploitation of the Earth’s resources, the very forces that are at the heart of global warming. In a mere 200 years we have managed, by tapping into the energy of the earth, to strip it of many of its inner resources which took millions of years to create. Take oil – 150 million years ago, extreme global warming caused the creation of oil. By contrast, in less than two centuries of oil exploitation we are nearing the end of its availability. By the early 1900s, the major producers and exporters were the USA, Venezuela and Russia; and as we know, the USA built its nation on oil. Yet, 80 years ago, half the world did not use oil. However, since the 1950s, we have come to use oil for virtually everything (from fertilising agriculture to greater mechanisation, from the many household objects we own, to the clothes we wear). Consider coal – first used commercially in China in 1000 bce, it was not used massively until the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution engendered an insatiable demand. In terms of its reserves, estimates suggest there is only a further 200 years’ worth left. Both oil and coal cause air, soil and water pollution (as indeed do natural gas exploitation and fracking, new energy procedures of the late twentieth century). But not content with this and the pollution these industrial processes cause (responsible for 8.7 million deaths globally per year,¹ to say nothing of the impact on wildlife), we deforest our planet at a tremendous rate, thus endangering further the quality of the air we breathe. Indeed, with regard to the four planetary elements, because global warming has so seriously affected the ozone layer, these same forces have caused flooding in certain parts of the world, bush and wild-fires in some areas and desertification in others – this is the effect of our planetary plundering.

This apparent insatiability of human wants is the focus of all 13 eco-docs in this ENERGY category. All films pose the same question: continue as we are, or change? Should we remain addicted to fossil fuels and expand further our sourcing of fossil fuels and minerals, pursue uniformity in food production, build huge dams that will bring economic prosperity to a country at the expense of the natural environment, manufacture cheap energy whose disposal is unsafe? Or can we awaken from these dependencies which limit us in their destructiveness and open ourselves, instead, to the potential of more regenerative modes of economic existence in which caring for planet Earth is at the centre of our ethical nature?

In response to the above questions, 10 of the 13 eco-docs raise the thorny problem of economic need entrapped into limited expediency (see columns I and II in Table 1.1). And three (in column III) offer some working solutions constructed around regenerative principles.

TABLE 1.1 Table of energy eco-docs

I. Nuclear	II. Oil/minerals/hydropower	III. Alternatives
1. The Day the Sun Fell Switzerland (2015) 2. How to Change the World UK/Can (2015) 3. Into Eternity Den (2010) 4. Journey to the Safest Place on Earth Switzerland (2013)	5. A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash Switzerland (2006) 6. Dreamland Iceland (2009) 7. Home Fr (2009) 8. Stealing Africa Den (2012) 9. Undamaged Slovenia (2019) 10. Virunga UK/Congo (2014)	11. The 4th Revolution Ger (2010) 12. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I Fr (2000) 13. Solar Mamas Den/UK/US (2012)

The first four films (in column I) address the issue of nuclear energy: the bomb in The Day the Sun Stood Still; resistance to further atomic bomb testing as Greenpeace’s opening gambit in How to Change the World; the storage of nuclear waste in Into Eternity and Journey into the Safest Place on Earth. The six listed in column II examine the impact of oil, hydropower and mineral prospecting for energetic ends, beginning with Home, which offers a broad sweep of the march of human progress over the planet. The other five investigate, respectively, oil dependency in A Crude Awakening; hydro-electric dams for aluminium processing in Dreamland, and hydropower dams for electricity in Undamaged; and abusive resource exploitation in Africa in Virunga and Stealing Africa. Finally, the three eco-docs in column III set out purposefully to demonstrate that change is a viable option: recycling waste, pursuing a non-throwaway ethos where food and plastic are concerned as with The Gleaners and I; exploring renewable energies in The 4th Revolution; training women in solar engineering as with Solar Mamas.

This chapter falls into three sections. The first focuses on a single eco-doc, Home. I do so because it provides the broadest sweep of the ecological issues at stake. Section 1.2 concentrates on eco-docs that investigate individual instances of the Anthropocene’s relentless pursuit of non-renewable energy sources. The third section turns to the eco-docs that explore humankind’s creative responses to the question of renewable energies and, with it, the concept of a bio-generative economy. Throughout, we bear in mind the nefarious effect of global capitalism and how it has fed into a seemingly endless insatiability of human wants addicted to the idea of growth and progress.² At the end of the second section I will provide a mapping on Raworth’s Doughnut model so we can easily visualise what this means in terms of planetary degradation. Section 1.3, which offers solutions – both simple and complex – to our energy needs will also conclude with a Doughnut-mapping; this time however the picture that emerges is far more encouraging.

1.1 So let us begin – cards on the table: the four elements in chains and the performative exchange-value of Home

The eco-doc that most extensively documents the magnitude of this planet-asset stripping and despoliation is Home (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009). It points in all directions to the effects of our commitment to energy growth over sustainability, as if the planet were a bottomless pit. Based around a consideration of the four planetary elements, and shot over 54 countries, this eco-doc focuses on the impact of the first two major revolutions brought about by the human species: Agriculture and Fossil Fuels – two revolutions that have become inexorably entwined. We learn how water and light brought plant life into being and, from there, how plant life altered the atmosphere and life forces began. Water, light, air, soil and trees created life. We then learn how humans first acquired the knowledge to harness those life forces, but then, over the millennia, subsequently abused that knowledge. This knowledge acquisition began once the human started to settle (10,000 years ago). Slowly but surely, the planetary balance (the Holocene) started to shift to the point of going out of kilter as it is now. First came the invention of agriculture, the use of beasts of burden for the heavy toil and our children as assets to work the land, a process which led to food surpluses and the concept of exchange-value. The major outcomes of this First Revolution were bigger settlements in the form of cities and civilisations and monetised exchange. The Second Revolution, much closer in time, and far speedier in its effect, was the exploitation of coal (beginning with the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution) and then oil (in the early twentieth century) leading to massive industrial growth and a huge population increase – doubling under coal and growing by six times under oil. The effect: more people to feed, more cities to expand, rural exoduses and urban growth (often driven by a desire to survive rather than any expectation of new possibilities). To meet the needs of this population growth, Home informs us, a massive spur to the development of agriculture was required, which coal, then oil made possible. And since then Agribusiness has been on the march (as we will discuss in Chapter 3). We have stolen from the biodiversity of the Earth to grow crops to feed the livestock that feeds us. Thus, half the world’s wetlands have been reclaimed to pastureland (or real-estate development, or flooding for hydropower – both of which we will see in Dreamland); similarly, around 43% of the world’s rainforests have been forfeited to produce soya and palm oil. Trees, our oxygen suppliers, have been turned into meat and other food products.³ Wetlands, the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems (purifiers of water and carbon capturers amongst other properties) are sacrificed to human wants.⁴

Home is constructed like an opera. Wagnerian in its dimensions, the magnitude of the planetary destruction appears matched, in production-value terms, by the film’s own excesses. With its fusion of music, voice-over narration and painterly images, it could be argued it out-performs itself. A massive operation of visuals and sound, exposing the delusional beauty of our planetary plundering, Home is a hymn of the sublime addressed to the non-sublime. Our senses are bombarded. Home is a Blakean visual-sublime of awe and terror; a monumental partition devised from musical influences from all corners of the Earth; a censorious voice-over endlessly intoning our disregard of the evidence in front of us. First, there are the extravagant gyro-technics of the film’s shooting – the director, Yann Arthus-Bertrand shot this film mostly using aerial shots taken from a small helicopter and using high-definition Cineflex cameras suspended from a gyro-stabilised sphere attached to rails on the base of the helicopter (Duvall, 2017: 63).⁵ Second, Armand Amar’s powerful, sometimes throbbing, sometimes sweepingly lyrical score – made up of 24 tracks, drawing on all varieties of music, and thematically linked to all the elements present in the film – is a relentless reminder of the universality of our desecration.⁶ Third and finally, in the English version, Glenn Close’s beautiful voice unrelentingly remonstrates with us as we go ‘faster and faster’ to our self-induced perdition (much as the mellifluous Mephistopheles did with Faust in Gounod’s opera). The whole effect of this painterly aestheticised apocalyptic text (with a ten-minute coda of hope at the end) is overwhelming. Given this film was produced by Luc Besson and his company EuropaCorp, this extraordinary global extravaganza should not surprise,⁷ and indeed it delighted spectators – reaching well over 50 million since its one-week free release in June 2009.⁸

The controversy over the film’s $12 million budget, sponsored by the Qatar Foundation and primarily Kering (an international group based in Paris specialising, in 2009, in retail and luxury goods) has already been mentioned in the Introduction. And it seems easy to point out that, much as with the film’s production context, there is also an uncomfortable tension within the film itself, this time between the aestheticisation (the sublime), through sound and image, of what we are shown and the content and meaning of what we see (the non-sublime). By this I mean that just as there is a problematic funding context so, too, there is a sense of glut within the film itself (perhaps an effect of the 488 hours of footage the editors had to deal with to bring it in at 90 minutes). Putting everything in, packing it high with so much verbal information and sonorous flow, leaves very little space to reflect, let alone respond (it leaves one truly breathless). Almost as if the technological feat of bringing all three documentary parts (image, music and narration) together and in on time (for 5 June 2009, World Environmental Day) was as significant as the film itself – so, the PRODUCT, the spectacle itself becomes that which MATTERS. Furthermore, the visualisation of the damage done to the planet is powerful, but it is also intentionally shaming.⁹ These are paintings of the Rape of Gaia (in a Blakean sense) and they are meant to shock, doubtless, but there is no human scale to attach to, apart (perhaps) from the brief mention, at the end, of examples of good practice and slogans such as ‘make harmony with nature the rule’ or ‘agriculture on a human scale’ and calls to be a responsible consumer, all of which are intended to reassure us that it is not too late. Thus, the risk this block-blustering film runs is that we remain, on the one hand, simultaneously shamed and overwhelmed by the enormity of our misdemeanours and, on the other, perplexed rather than empowered as to how to act for change, to save our Home. That being said, there appears a tangible argument, however, for the film’s reformative exchange-value in that Kering, since 2012, has committed itself to an environmental plan targeting a 40% reduction of its global environmental impact by 2025.¹⁰

Indeed, if we slow down our own response to this film and consider it alongside Raworth’s Doughnut diagram, a somewhat different or nuanced way of evaluating this eco-doc occurs. In terms of performative exchange, Home has great value in its visualising our transgressions of the two planetary boundaries (ecological and social). Insofar as the painterly images, in their own excessive sublime, directly reflect our own addiction to the ugly beauty of fossil fuels, we are exposed to what it means to take. These images now become images of the degree of our insatiable greed, and the consequential damage to the environment of those from whom we take (indigenous peoples being a primary example, biodiversity the other). Home exposes how all nine of the planetary boundaries are transgressed by our Anthropocenic plundering. And, because of the way in which powerful nations and multinationals negotiate this plundering – whereby, just to cite one example, half of the world’s population, despite living in resource-rich countries, nonetheless live in poverty (a point we shall return to) – most of the 12 dimensions of the social foundation are frequently in shortfall.

Home also exposes the underlying problem of our refusal to slow down. Because capitalism is so committed to the economic-growth model and is thereby slavishly attached to the principle of GDP growth, we precipitate ourselves faster and faster and pursue farther and farther afield in order to obtain more and more. As Raworth (2017: 261) explains, ‘the last two centuries of extraordinary growth in high-income countries is largely due to the availability of cheap fossil fuels’.

It is the ‘cheap’ of this energy which is the primary reason behind big energy corporations’ refusal to consider turning their attention to renewable energy. Because the fossil fuels still remain (in relative terms) an inexpensive commodity, energy companies can continue to make huge profits and sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 ENERGY – crude awakenings: Extractive energy sources versus regenerative energy practices
• 2 Waste … means … money … and suffocating the earth – the human practice of pollution
• 3 Bad-husbandry versus Earth-as-provender, a tale of two cultures: Agribusiness’ monocultural-monopolies and Agroecology’s pluriculturalism
• 4 The effects of disrupted ecosystems, the migratory flow and the unsafe, inhumane space of the unheard
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix A: List of 57 European ecology-documentaries 2000–19
• Index