Surviving Progress to be screened on ABC

A couple of months ago I posted a few thoughts about the excellent and intriguing documentary Surviving Progress. I've just realised it was shown in Australia by the ABC a few hours ago. If you missed it, there is a repeat at 11:05pm this Wednesday (19th September). It is also available (for Australian viewers) on iView.
H/T Dave Lankshear and Mick Pope.

Waking the Green Tiger

Here's a documentary I'd really like to see. A home-grown Chinese environmental movement is one of those important developments the world needs right now. Even better would be for it to make good connexions with the Christian church in China, which has all kinds of excellent reasons for being concerned about how we treat God's good creation

Surviving Progress: Are we walking into our own trap?

"Things that start out to seem like improvements or progress, these things are very seductive; it seems like there's no downside to these. But when they reach a certain scale they turn out to be dead ends or traps. I came up with the term 'progress trap' to define human behaviours that seem to be good things, seem to provide benefits in the short term, but which ultimately lead to disaster because they are unsustainable. One example would be - going right back into the old stone age - the time when our ancestors were hunting mammoths. They reached a point when their weaponry and their hunting techniques got so good that they destroyed hunting as a way of life throughout most of the world. The people who discovered how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made real progress. But people who discovered that they could eat really well by driving a whole herd over a cliff and kill two hundred at once had fallen into a progress trap; they had made too much progress."

- Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

A 2011 documentary produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks (The Corporation) called Surviving Progress was aired by the BBC over the weekend and for the next week is available on BBC iPlayer to UK residents (others can try here). Drawing on a wide range of interviewees including David Suzuki, Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood, Marina Silva and Jane Goodall the 82-minute documentary was inspired by a book by Ronald Wright called A Short History of Progress and investigates the reasons that our attempts at progress are sometimes tragically short-sighted. Are our attempts to catch more mammoth doomed to failure? Thought-provoking and beautifully if sometimes indulgently shot (with Scorsese as producer, I don't think they were short on money), the conclusion packs a slightly larger punch than the usual five minutes of feel good "we can change the world", though is still likely to leave you frustrated and wanting more. Two personal highlights are the rant by Vaclav Smil (starting at 69:40) and the great one-liner from David Suzuki: "Conventional economics is a form of brain damage." (which appears at the end of a speech starting at 53:45.) The final shot is nicely ambiguous, though to appreciate the full implications, you have to watch from the start. I doubt you'll regret doing so.

Looking back on collapse: another documentary

The Romans, the Maya, the Anasazi, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Norse Greenland and many more: dozens of previous civilisations have reached a point where they have undergone more or less rapid and irreversible transition from high to low social complexity, usually known as societal collapse. I've blogged before about two of the best-known theorists of societal collapse, Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond and have just come across a recent documentary called 2210: The Collapse? in which the ideas of Prof Tainter and Prof Diamond are quite usefully summarised into a 93 minute presentation. Some of the documentary's framing, with 23rd century archeologists trying to piece together the causes of the collapse of our present global industrial society (à la Age of Stupid), gets a little repetitive and gimmicky, but the ideas are important and the presentation lucid. We are not exempt from the brutal logic that placed temporal limits of previous civilisations. But we are in a unique situation: with a global economy, any future collapse will likely be global and with seven billion or more now alive, that's a lot of eggs in one basket. Put it on your "to view" list.

The Cove: would you eat a dolphin?

Continuing my recent run of excellent documentaries (see Food Inc and Inside Job), I also recently saw The Cove. For what it's worth, all three were nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, and two won. All three currently receive over 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Unlike the other two, however, The Cove has a more local focus. Focussing on a small cove on the Japanese coast, the film is paced as an mystery thriller in which the dark secrets of a place are gradually brought to light. The film's heart and central voice is Ric O'Barry, a former dolphin trainer turned activist. O'Barry was responsible for catching and training the five dolphins who played the title character in the popular 1960's TV series Flipper. Yes, you now have the music stuck in your head. It was catchy. Yet when his favourite individual committed suicide (this is how O'Barry describes it), he was forced to reconsider the ethics of keeping wild dolphins in captivity. By the next day he was being arrested for attempting to liberate other dolphins from the marine park where he worked. O'Barry's years of marine animal activism led him to Japan, the premier supplier of dolphins for the multi-billion dollar marine amusement park industry. And from there to a single small cove where most of the wild dolphins for sale are caught. However, apart from the cruelty and stress experienced in captivity by these intelligent creatures, the darker secret of the place, initially only hinted at and deliberately concealed by local fishermen and police, is slowly revealed to the viewer as the film crew risk arrest to get footage. Hidden cameras placed under cover of darkness record the grisly fate of the ten thousands of dolphins who are rounded up annually and yet are not suitable for exploitation as marine entertainers. The film's denouement is not for the queasy or faint of heart.

This is a film that deliberately seeks a significant emotional engagement with the viewer. Our sympathy for the dolphins is carefully cultivated and righteous outrage stoked. The perspective of the fishermen is noted, yet there is no attempt at impartiality here. We are called upon to take sides. The role of villain is left to the Japanese, and there is significant danger of being invited into an all too easy condemnation from a distance. The violence and cruelty done to animals in our name closer to home is only passingly noted. Nonetheless, this film is worth seeing as another step in developing a deeper affinity for creatures beyond the human, and for thinking again about how we treat other members of the community of creation.

For those in Australia, it is freely available on ABC's iView for the next two weeks.

Inside Job: what's the deal with the credit crisis?

Yesterday we finally got around to watching Inside Job (despite having recommended it all the way back here). If you, like me, often feel out of your depth in discussions of banking, finance, stock markets and the global economic instability of the last few years, then this is the film for you. Bringing dry and complex details into vivid comprehensibility, this film cuts through the bafflement factor and, via a series of fascinating and jaw-dropping interviews with key players, lays out many of the key threads that that led to the headline-grabbing events of 2008 and its aftermath (which continues to play out today).

The film won best documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards and currently sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is easy to see why. Tackling an important subject with insight, emotion and sensitivity, this film is pure outrage mixed with damning evidence of systemic problems in the US financial industry from traders to CEOs, from regulators to investors, from president to ratings agencies, from academic economists to congress. There is plenty of blame to go around. And yet, somehow, no one is in gaol for the greatest inside job in history.

And very little has changed.

Are all foods clean? A review of Food Inc.

"The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand."

- Food Inc., opening line.

"'Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?' (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, 'It is what comes out of a person that defiles.'"

- Mark 7.18b-20 (NRSV).

Jesus' words were a radical challenge to the Jewish practice of his day, overturning the Old Testament food laws and the traditions that had grown around them. Jesus' redefinition of purity as a matter of the heart and what comes out of it rather than the mouth and what goes into it has left an important mark on our eating habits; we don't think twice about tucking into a crab soup or creamy bacon pasta.

But perhaps sometimes, as a result of this very passage teaching us to see food as a non-issue, Christians can miss the ways in which our hearts may be deceived even as we eat food that Christ declared clean. In particular, there are ways of eating that fail to love our neighbour and fail to adopt a properly human, humane and humble attitude towards the rest of the created order. Our hearts may be defiled, even as we consume delicious feasts.

For anyone who is largely ignorant of contemporary industrial agriculture and its practices, Food Inc. is a good place to start to investigate where our food comes from. It is primarily a US perspective, and some of the details do differ elsewhere in the industrialised world, but not always by a great deal. Most urban dwellers are unaware of the social, ecological, animal and economic realities that get our typical diet into the supermarket. And most are surprised to find just how far we have departed from the stereotypical pictures of rural life still found in children's books and on food packaging. As in all kinds of other ways, the last fifty years or so have been truly revolutionary in this regard. I will not attempt here to summarise the various threads followed by the film, tracing the damage done to workers, animals, soil, waterways, other nations and farmers themselves by contemporary methods of industrial food production, though I was a little surprised to note that there were significant points still left unsaid, even after a string of unpalatable revelations.

But the film is not all ugliness and disgust. Having lifted the lid on the true cost of our cheap food, it moves on to explore two somewhat contradictory approaches to an alternative. On the one hand is an attempt to fight fire with fire, to build an organic and ethical food industry that can compete with factory farming by building a market for organic products in mainstream distributors at a competitive price. On the other is the pursuit of regenerative farming that moves beyond merely being organic to question the broader economic and political structures that govern the whole business. One asks us merely to change our consumption patterns and has faith in the market to deliver the goods that we demand; the other questions the very forces that help to (de)form those demands. The former, more pragmatic, approach is making significant inroads when measured by market share, but does it represent a form of greenwash, a slight improvement that actually serves to dull the necessary critique of a deeply flawed economic and political system? Or is the latter too idealistic and risks missing out on making small but real gains that are actually available for the sake of goals too radical to ever gain widespread acceptance?

This tension is a frequent one in ethical thought, where compromise needn't always be a dirty word, but where the possibility of self-deception via superficial changes is also ever present. This documentary is worth seeing, whether you are blissfully unaware of the origin of your next meal or already struggling with the ethical questions raised by contemporary food practices.

Jesus, who taught us that all foods are clean, also taught us to pray "give us this day our daily bread", and identified his body and blood with elements we take into our mouths. He was not seeking to remove food from the realm of faithful living before God, but to deepen our perception of what joyfully wholesome food might look like. It cannot be identified merely by its flavour or appearance, but depends on the relationships with our neighbours (human and otherwise) that it represents.

Can you give thanks for what will be put in front of you today?

Tax dodging: Barclays paid 1% corporate tax last year

After asking "who are the real cheats?" a while back and pointing to figures that claim up to £120 billion in tax is avoided, evaded or deferred in the UK each year (enough to make a very sizable dent in the budget deficit and hence in the public justification for the vandalistic cuts currently being implemented), the campaign against tax dodgers has been gaining momentum. Another day of protest actions is planned for today.

And with perfect timing, we get this story, which illustrates this concern all too well. In 2009 Barclays Bank made £11,600,000,000 in profits and yet paid only £113,000,000 in corporate tax - less than 1% rather than the legislated rate of 26%. Under such circumstances, the commonly expressed fear that closing loopholes and chasing tax dodging companies might make them up and leave, taxing their tax revenue with them, starts to look like a very small fig leaf. It was always a poor argument, akin to avoiding legal confrontation with the Mafia because they keep the local economy flowing.

"Pay to all what is due to them — taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honour to whom honour is due."

- Romans 13.7 (NRSV).

And in other news, the documentary Inside Job was released in the UK yesterday, investigating the role major banks played in fuelling the global financial crisis. It is currently at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Climate Nation: why conservatives can love climate action

Here's a new film that is trying to bridge the abyss of the US culture wars. Focussed on the fringe benefits of climate change mitigation, it speaks in the voices of a CIA director, an army colonel, an airline executive, a Christian minister, a Texan farmer and a wild Alaskan: patriotic, God-loving, gun-toting, meat-eating, small town, red state Republican neoconservatives. It claims to be a "climate change solutions movie that doesn't even care if you believe in climate change". Rather than showing us how climate change is already fuelling conflict in Africa or projecting the extinction of millions of species in coming decades, this effort simply highlights the various advantages of taking actions that also happen to mitigate climate change.

Rather than saying climate action is a painful duty we cannot avoid, this film presents it as an opportunity to save money, reduce pollution, increase national security and reduce military casualties. One approach focuses on push - avoid this stick - and the other on pull - chase this carrot. Perhaps elements of both are necessary and different approaches will speak to different audiences.

Watching the trailer led me to ponder again how divisive this issue is, particularly in the US. Much has been written about the various causes of this: historical, psychological, political, cultural and economic (and I would add, theological). Some are put off by the commonly proposed responses, which clash with their ideological commitments. This film seems to be particularly addressing such people.

However, amongst all the other reasons, I think there is a very personal reason that some people resist the scientific understanding of the issue. For many people, acknowledging the existence and severity of the threat of anthropogenic climate change involves a reassessment of significant parts of our life story. It can mean realising that some of our most cherished experiences and dreams have a terrible cost associated with them. For those who have earned a livelihood from carbon intensive activities, it can threaten the virtue of some major life achievements and raise the question of whether one's life may have done more harm than good. To put it in Christian terms, acknowledging the reality and significance of anthropogenic climate change can require repentance. And that is too high a bar for some, who would rather reject the science than reassess their lives.

That is why it is important that grace precedes repentance. We don't repent in order for God to be gracious to us; we repent because when we were still far off, he has already seen us, run to us and embraced us.
H/T Sylvia Rowley.

Making Scotland's Landscape

I previously recommended a five part BBC documentary series by Prof Iain Stewart called How Earth Made Us. Unfortunately, I only got around to mentioning it when it just about to disappear from BBC iPlayer. So this time, I would like to recommend a five part BBC documentary series by Iain Stewart with a little more time to spare (it's available for the next three weeks). Called Making Scotland's Landscape, it is a fascinating look at Scottish history through the human fingerprints all over Scotland's famed "natural" beauty. The first four episodes have already screened and are available on iPlayer: Trees, The Land, The Sea and Water. The final episode Climate is coming soon. I particularly enjoyed the second episode and the fourth was obviously shot during the cold snap last winter. Unfortunately, BBC iPlayer is only available to UK residents.

The central idea of the series is nothing new, being but an application of Bill McKibben's thesis in The End of Nature: that human activities have so colonised the natural world that "untouched" nature no longer exists. But it is beautifully shot, coherently narrated and brought home to landscapes with which I am increasingly familiar and of which I am increasingly fond.

This series may be of particular interest to those who think that it is arrogant to believe that our puny species could possible affect something as robust and enormous as the planet.

Corporations: psychopathic individuals or totalitarian regimes?

The 2003 documentary The Corporation outlined a critical history of these institutions that have so pervasively shaped modern society. The narrative briefly outlines the historical process through which corporations gained many of the same legal rights as natural persons before asking the illuminating question: if the corporation is indeed to be considered a person, then how might we characterise the psychology of this "person"? To answer it, the film compares the track record of corporate behaviour against a widely accepted list of symptoms of psychopathy from DSM-IV: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law. The conclusion (and the film's punch line): corporations frequently exhibit psychopathic behaviour.

A second comparison I came across recently juxtaposes transnational corporations with nation states. Large corporations encompass more employees and generate more turnover than the population and GDP of some nations. We consider it valid to evaluate the form of government, economic system and the political and civic freedoms of nations. What would it be like to make the same considerations of many large corporations?

• The right to vote does not exist except for share holders (analogous to land owners) and even there voting power is in proportion to ownership.
• All power issues from a central committee.
• There is no balancing division of power. There is no fourth estate. There are no juries and innocence is not presumed.
• Failure to submit to any order may result in instant exile.
• There is no freedom of speech.
• There is no right of association. Even romance between men and women is often forbidden without approval.
• The economy is centrally planned.
• There is pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication.
• The society is heavily regulated, to the degree many employees are told when, where and how many times a day they can go to the toilet.
• There is little transparency and something like the Freedom of Information Act is unimaginable.
• Internal opposition groups, such as unions, are blackbanned, surveilled and/or marginalized whenever and wherever possible.

- From here.

So, are large transnational corporations more like psychopathic individuals or totalitarian regimes? And is anyone aware of insightful theological analyses of corporatism?

Top Ten Documentaries I

As with my recent list of top ten films, these are not my all time top ten, just my top ten for the last twelve months or so. I might have missed some, since we watch some programmes on BBC iPlayer, and there is no easy way to access a list of old viewings.

10. Fog of War
9. My Kid Could Paint That
8. The Box that Changed Britain
7. Waltz with Bashir
6. The End of the Line
5. Man on Wire
4. Home
3. Rivers and Tides
2. Life (BBC series)
1. How Earth Made Us (BBC series)

The box that changed Britain (and the world)

I confess. I love a good doco. And we saw a fascinating one recently, called The Box that changed Britain. Unfortunately for UK residents, it has now expired on iPlayer (I should have mentioned it earlier).

In any case, the box in question is not, as you might have expected, the idiot box that has changed our recreational patterns, language, economic expectations, cultural awareness, attention spans, visual literacy and waistlines.

No, the box that changed Britain (and the world) is the humble shipping container (technically, an "intermodal container"). Prior to the invention of this now ubiquitous stackable steel box, loading and unloading ships' cargo was constrained by human muscle power and the vicissitudes of heavily unionized industrial relations. But when a US trucking owner came up the idea of standardised containers able to be mechanically manipulated, it caused nothing less than a shipping revolution. Within decades, the number of dockworkers in the UK dropped from about 130,000 to 11,000, while the volume of cargo shipped skyrocketed. The ease, security,* flexibility and simplicity of the design dropped transport costs and speed to a fraction of their former levels and so enabled a massive increase in world trade: more than a fivefold increase in global shipping volume in the last thirty years. In turn, this displaced much primary manufacturing from the developed to the developing world and was a very significant contributor to the process of globalisation and the consumption habits of the developed world.
*One curious statistic was that prior to containerisation, over a third of whisky shipped would be "damaged" in transit. With the advent of sealed containers, this dropped to almost zero. As my scare quotes indicate, this was less about freight stability and more about security.

It was an eye-opening narrative, though I thought they could have spent less time on the effect on docklands (significant though this was in many coastal cities) and more time on the cultural effects of boosted consumerism from the massive increase in world trade, not to mention the ecological effects of displacing production from consumption. Mass shipping effectively enabled developed nations to export much of their environmental degradation. In order words, shipping containers are one of the primary reasons why most estimates of developed nations' ecological footprint is too small, since they rarely take into account the effect of all the goods purchased in the developed world but made in the developing world.
I have just realised that a book was published in 2007 called The Box that changed the World, and another one came out in 2008 called The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger.

New(-ish) evidence of early Jesus worship

It seems that it was unearthed back in 2003-05, but I've only just heard about the discovery of a third-century Christian prayer hall in Megiddo, a town in Israel. The remarkable thing about the site (apart from being discovered under a high-security prison still in use) is that it contains well-preserved mosaics complete with inscriptions. In one, a benefactor, Gaianus, is described as a centurion and in another a woman called Akeptous is said to have "offered this table in memorial of the God Jesus Christ".

This is remarkable physical evidence of the beliefs and social composition of early Christian communities in Palestine (more discussion here). In particular, it is yet another refutation of the ludicrous idea (made popular through The Da Vinci Code) that Jesus' divinity was a novel idea pushed on the church by Constantine at Nicea.

This find was brought to my attention by the work of John Dickson and Greg Clarke from the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX), who are putting together a documentary called The Life of Jesus, looking at evidence for the historical Jesus and early Christianity and filmed on location in the Middle East. They are posting short pieces about their experiences on the road here.
Image by N. Davidov, IAA, taken from here. H/T Moffitt for pointing out the SydAng article.

Sicko

Last night I went to see Michael Moore's new(-ish) doco Sicko on the US Health system (amongst other things). As usual for Moore, there were more stories and stunts than statistics, more emotion than evidence, more amusement than analysis. Nonetheless, this film is worth seeing and talking about. Not only is it less bitter and nasty than his other work that I've seen, it also raises issues more directly relevant to Australia than Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11. With a health system more privatised than the UK, but far more public than the US, debates about the direction of Australian health care continue.

Since being diagnosed with cancer in December, I have received thousands of dollars worth of consultation, treatment and drugs, at almost no cost (a few dollars for the drugs). I give thanks for the public health system and taxation that has enabled this. Yet thoughout the process, I noticed many encouragements towards private health cover, with some messages advising that to do so would help the public hospitals by giving them more funds.

While this may be true in the short term, I am very hesitant about doing my little bit to encourage us closer to the US system. The more patients on private cover, the easier it is for the government to justify health cuts, thus downgrading the public system and giving more incentive for people to switch to private cover. And the losers are those who can't afford it. Though as Moore points out, this means we all lose.

I realise this is a very complicate issue and that I only have a very basic grasp of it, but I'd love to understand more.

Do you have private insurance? If so, why? Do you think this makes any difference to the system as a whole for you to 'vote' this way? Any opinions from those who work in the health system?
Dr Perseus performs a tricky piece of surgery. Twelve points for the first to guess the city in which this work is found.