It's hard to explain what a watershed this moment is to have someone speak so publicly, authoritatively and openly about something that over a billion people have a hunch about but pretend isn't happening so as not to be singled out for negative treatment in the world's most populous complex but nonetheless authoritarian regime. Take a look:
While China is pretty low per capita compared to the US and a few other automobile dependent and cold weather dominated nations like the US, Australia, and Canada, as a nation, China produced 24.65% of world carbon output in 2010, and likely has grown in relation in the last 5 years. You heard me right.. 1/4 of world fossil fuel carbon output.. it's staggering... The United States produced 16% of the total the same year, and we had been discussing it openly for years at that point, even originated the observations that Global Climate Change was happening in our scientific communities, but we didn't really start to get our carbon habit under control and reverse growth until literally the last year or two, maybe starting in 2013 or '14.
However, warts and all, we are a functional democracy with many enshrined freedoms and limited central economic control (despite perhaps legitimate arguments to the contrary) and while I would rather live in the land of the somewhat free, there is something stunning about how quickly China can solve a problem when they decide to from the Top. Many years ago some of the greatest minds of the Chinese Technocracy were already working to solve a problem that many Chinese people didn't even realize was happening or admit to themselves was happening publicly, and they cranked up Chinese windmill and solar construction to world leading rates in what might be seen as record time, but this post is not about carbon saving inventions but climate and ecology saving messages, and I think this is the most powerful the world might have ever seen. It literally ripped the scales off of China's eyes in the way that Edward Snowden might have changed american security discourse, and some of the solutions discussed were so simple that withing just a few years we might see a major dive in world carbon and pollution by solutions as simple as coal cleaning and enforcement of some basic local codes.
Before documentaries it was books, like John Muir and Silent Spring and Cadillac Desert. Many say that modern environmentalism began with the conservation movement at the turn of the last century under Muir and Teddy Roosevelt and the first foresters like Gifford Pinchot, others with Aldo Leopold and the Sand County almanac and the beginning of Scientific Game management and ecology after WWII. Back then people were connected to their environment perhaps a bit more and could see for themselves the impacts of man's efforts before we learned to put polluting and destructive industries deep in the woods or behind locked gates, and before we realized we could be so hurt by genetics we could engineer or chemicals we could manufacture . Back in the day people from London to LA could see the smog before the Clean Air act passed or England created pollution controls.. it didn't need to be explained, but it took Earth Day and a crying Indian to galvanize people to bite the hand that fed us all in part, American Industry. But we fought our fights and the American standard of living improved, We reduced pollution from cars, factories, pesticides and litter, and a a lot of other things, somewhat behind more 'progressive' Western Europe but speedily despite our greater respect for economic freedom compared to many European nations. we did make our country cleaner, preserve biological diversity both publicly with our great parks and national forests and lands and marine reserves, and privately with land trusts and great estates, but it all came after we identified a problem and agreed to fix it, collectively and often by outcry. As we moved through the more obvious issues, the less obvious issues have begun to jump up in ages that are characterized by a shorter national attention span. Everyone has a camera now running around making content. luckily, they are digital, and as much as we loved celluloid, it was pretty bad for the environment to produce, so now the majority of film is made in bits and bytes which is many ways continued the democratization of the process begun by the mini 8. Among the things people began to film were stories of Environmental Woe and people began to notice. Nothing in the modern world seems to take the ball as far down field in an environmental fight as quickly and effectively as a documentary. Film has in essence become the new literature.
It began with 'Nature Documentaries', and many can remember in the last half of the 20th century, the age dominated by television, that Nature documentaries were a staple of off peak hours and eventually PBS, films from David Attenboro and Jacques Cousteau and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. It was all very dignified, more of an examination than a battle cry, with perhaps of the three only Cousteau likely to break the academic atmosphere with condemnations of human behavior. Back then, despite what the US had done to the west in it's lust for natural resources, the world was wilder than it was tamed. The transition seemed to happen in the 1970's or 80s as world population crossed from 3 to 4 billion, and there seemed to be more world that was affected than unaffected, and we could see that a pipe in spot A could affect people in spot B thousands of miles away.
Then came the Baby Boomers, the activist generation, and they started to use the camera more like a weapon of discourse than a microscope. They had strong opinions and film showed what they wanted to talk about more vividly and immediately than writing. They were preoccupied with social justice and military policy but they took time to film and turn the documentary into a mouthpiece, but nature wasn't high on their agenda until perhaps the 90's, so television did it for them. Events like Three Mile Island and the pollution of the Love Canal became national stories and brought attention to their causes, but nature documentary still took a second seat to Nuclear Disarmament, Racial Issues, and the many other social causes they tried to champion. One voice in the wilderness, literally, was Edward Abbey, but his medium was still the pen or typewriter, and his disgust was deeply emblematic of his generation, more likely to condemn than try to understand because what needed condemning seemed so obvious.
Then along came Generation X. This generation grew up with home accessible moving media like the Boomers did, but grew up with easy access to it's strings and not just a fascination with it's puppetry as technology improved. It took less infrastructure and these kids knew how to use computers. this generation felt more comfortable in solitude, wanted to avoid the often shrill entrenchment of their parents generation and took things one step further, from a return to the farm to a return to the wilderness. They were characterized by Chris McCandless and Teton Gravity Research. They wanted to go where no man had gone before to get away from what man had done. Turning and fighting had just led to a lot of stupidity in their mind, but they still wanted to come up with solutions, to see the essence of the issue. They put understanding before blaming, so that when they blamed they could do it with a calmer conviction, which carried on to the even more level headed Generation Y.
It seems nature documentary as activism was about to hit it's golden age with the new Millennium. Alt media became the new thing with entities like Vice Magazine transitioning from a hipster humor magazine to a legitimate source of insightful world info:
Vice was preceded by Journeyman Pictures (a youtube constant ) who is only overshadowed by Vice because it perhaps never had that snarky Gen Y base to begin with, more a Gen X kind of critical examination, but nonetheless went places only CNN would go without the bumbling crowd pleasing narratives. While National Geographic awkwardly tried to transition from the David Attenboro era to the modern, Jacques who was actually in some ways modern but yet destined to run out his days and Mutual of Omaha went the way of the dodo bird, kids with cameras became a vanguard of truth seeking around the world, going to places explored in books like lonely planet but bringing the latest mega pixel technological masterpiece with them. Even Jacques Grandson came back with a camera and seemed to catch what was happening:
The age of Discovery Channel and the Travel and Nature Channel started to mix mediums of human and natural stories, first Steve Irwin style, a bit goofily, but then more sophisticatedly, as cable channels proliferated and some figured out that they didn't just need more media for a media savvy world, they needed better media, more insightful stories, stories that acknowledged how complex these issues were. PBS's nature still holds down the Attenboro/Marlin Perkins Legacy, along with some of National Geographic's more dignified stuff, but people now want to know what is wrong and not just what is right, and the edgy documentarians are giving it to them. As we transition from the era of Cable, which started in the 80's and 90's and is now starting to be pinched by the on demand
Films like Food Inc. and Super Size Me started to feed the curiosity of the unseen, as regulation and awareness made environmental travesties more subtle and more embedded in our economy, working off of a decade earlier notion where films like A Civil Action and Erin Brokovich popularized environmental activism and the pursuit of it's mysteries, to a new generation, delineating wrong from right while making the impact and not the mentality the crime.
Even Couteaux's grandson has gotten into the act, mixing leggy models with real observation and calls to action:
http://earthecho.org/
Nature Documentaries have so arrived that they were even honored in parody, by Wes Anderson with his hilarious work The Life Aquatic. If you hit the Cousteau link towards the top you won't have to watch long to know exactly what he was making fun of, but within the movie even he is overshadowed by an edgier documentarian played by Jeff Goldblum who is willing to point fingers more directly, demonstrative of some of hte gyrations this medium has gone through since he first documentary was made in 1922, Nanook of the North, a film I legitimately watched for a Winter Field Ecology Class in college. It brings to mind that anthropology documentaries, also so popular for so many decades from perhaps the 20's on, were also nature documentaries of sorts.
It appears I am not the first to notice that since the millennium the Environmental Documentary has taken off:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/book-reviews/evaluating-ecocinema-green-documentary-environmental-documentary-in-the-twenty-first-century-by-helen-hughes/
I feel as if the documentary that most captures this modern era of advocacy and depiction was a film that in some ways scooped this blog. For months I had been working in my head setting a narrative for the growing movement of dam removal both in the east and in the west. I had been inspired by finally reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, a book very popular among many of my classmates in college but one I had never had to read in class. I picked it up years later on a trip through the Canyon Country one winter a few years back and immediately got the power of why my friends were so compelled by it. It was the history of the modern west, and was it's self made into a documentary some time after publishing. I had about 10 threads going in my mind and was getting ready to sit down and write. One lazy night I opened Netflix and a recommendation for a Movie called Damnation popped up. They had literally shown every dam dropping I planned to write about, except that I was going to trade on in New Jersey for one they depicted in Maine. I was flabbergasted, and would have been frustrated had I not been so amazed at the cinematography and the boldness of the filmmakers. They had deep pockets behind them, Yvon Chiounard of Patagonia and Black Diamond fame, the blacksmith who literally created the modern era of climbing gear from his days at Camp 4, but since I knew so much of the story already (the Elwah river, check.. the Klamath and the Rogue and the little dam off the Colombia, check.. etc etc.) I was able to focus on the craft of how they spread the message instead of the message they were spreading and I was just stunned. I felt like I had just watched the perfect Environmental Documentary. It was part informative, part subversive, and as beautiful as Baraka to boot. Anyone who has been in the far north in winter knows it can make you a bit emotional, and I think I might have dropped a few appreciative tears around thanksgiving time when I was done watching Dam Nation:
I knew the dam issues well, but had never questioned the fish hatchery boondoggle.. it was a whole new story to me and now I fins myself talking to people about it and reading books on salmon. it's amazing how much can be conveyed in a documentary even if there are things that still belong in a book perhaps by virtue of complexity ( I am quite comfortable with that assertion being questioned!). It was a fascinating trip down a road I thought I knew and I couldn't imagine what it would be like to watch it with fresh eyes.
Maybe someday China will produce work like this as they come to grips with their problems large and small, but we take solace in knowing that that walk of one thousand miles begins with the first step and China has taken it's first step.. for all the work we are doing worldwide from technology innovators like Tesla to protesting mountain top removal to climate accords and town recycling boards, when they nominate a person for the polar bears to raise a statue of, it might just be Chai Jing, and when they ask me the story I was most happy to see told the way it was told, it might be those guys who made Dam Nation, furthering my dream of a restored environmental west, but what perhaps gives me the most hope in addition to the restoration and healing that might come from all this, is what might come next. What crew of kids is holding a camera or editing with a mac in a basement apartment somewhere about to show me the next problem or even the next solution in a concise and beautiful one to two hour format to leave me aching with hope for a long time to come... this is perhaps the more glamorous side of Environmentalism, but it does trade in river flows of hope..
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