Persistence of Vision

The New York Times reports that 2006 was a year of cinematic sorbets -- that the American people, sated by the heavy political messagework of such 2005 films as Syriana, Crash, and Brokeback Mountain, opted for lighter visual fare:

They showed no appetite for a critique of their eating habits in “Fast Food Nation.” They weren’t ready to fly along on “United 93,” no matter how skilled its expose of homeland insecurity. They didn’t care to see combat or suffer its after-effects in “Flags of Our Fathers.” And even Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t interest them in touring the ravaged Africa of “Blood Diamond.”

While Al Gore’s prophecies in “An Inconvenient Truth” produced a respectable $24 million for Paramount, it was the message-movie exception that proved the rule. The big money was to be made making people laugh, cry and squeeze their dates’ arms -- not think.

“What worked was classic, get-away-from-it-all entertainment,” said Rob Moore, Paramount’s marketing and distribution chief. “What didn’t was things that were more challenging and esoteric.”

The Times contrasts these draws with the comparatively small showings of such films as All the King's Men and Babel, Sean Penn and Brad Pitt vehicles whose star power flagged in the face of audiences eager not to be taxed with serious themes. The message of the article seems to be that American audiences evinced an unwillingness to bring their brains with them to the movies. But what the article avoids asking is whether, in an era when Hollywood has shown a distinct tendency to preachiness and didacticism, spending the price of admission on less intellectually ambitious films isn't the truly smart thing to do.

At the recent Future Environmental Trends conference in Bangalore, India, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen challenged the commonly held belief that economic development must inevitably and inexorably threaten the environment. Calling this "extraordinarily confrontational" view "fundamentally erroneous and misconceived," Sen went on to outline a subtle chain of interconnections between economies and environments that many Western NGOs overlook in their preservative zeal. Narendar Pani reports on Sen's presentation:

Much of his argument on the environment and development being interdependent is built into his conceptualisation of these terms. Since he sees development as freedom, all elements that improve that freedom are components of development. The freedom to have access to good air and clean water can only be provided by the environment. Even as environmentalists would cheer this concept, the way he perceives the environment could leave some of their extreme fringe somewhat unhappy. Amartya Sen insists that protecting the environment is not just a matter of leaving nature as it is.

He believes there are parts of the environment, like the smallpox virus, that are better destroyed. He looks at the environment largely in terms of what it does to humans. He does, of course, take a broad view of what is in human interests, which he believes includes the protection of endangered species.

He also insists protecting the environment is not just a matter of passive preservation. While development would change the environment, it can also lead to constructive intervention. Greater female education and women's employment can help reduce fertility rates. And a slower growth in population in the long run will reduce the pressure on global warming as well as the destruction of natural habitats.

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Amartya Sen's conceptual framework can help put things in perspective. There is great merit, as many NGOs advocate, in supporting the local initiatives. It tends to be cost effective mainly because it makes efficient use of local material. At the same time there is a risk of romanticising the local. There could be a temptation to support local initiatives at the cost of more modern alternatives. And yet there is little doubt that some relatively modern technologies could be more effective. A proper boat, for instance, should be a better alternative to a banana-trunk raft. The Amartya Sen framework reminds us that development improves our ability to deal with the environment.

There is of course the risk of shifting conceptually to the other extreme. Just as development and the environment is not always an either-or issue, it is also true that all areas of conflict between the environment and development will not simply disappear. The choice between protecting a forest and allowing it to be submerged under a hydel project will remain. What Sen’s framework does is to introduce the possibility of the development created by a hydel project improving female education, which would in turn lower fertility rates and reduce the future pressure on the environment.

As Sen makes clear, informed debate must refuse the seductive but simplistic idea that economic progress always conflicts with environmental preservation, accepting instead that economic development can often sustain the environment by improving indigenous peoples' quality of life. As such, Sen's arguments dovetail with those of MPI fellows Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney in their hard-hitting documentary film Mine Your Own Business.

Exploring opposition to Gabriel Resources' planned $900 million open-cast gold mine in central Romania, McAleer and McElhinney uncover Western environmental groups that have fallen into the precise trap that Sen notes above -- of "romanticising the local," of "support[ing] local initiatives at the cost of more modern alternatives," and of refusing to acknowledge fundamental links between economic progress and human freedom. With Romania's accession to the European Union yesterday, debates about change, development, tradition, and preservation in that country will surely only intensify. It is our hope that films such as Mine Your Own Business will help place those debates within a framework that respects the complex, delicate nexus of environmental protection, economic expansion, and human dignity, recognizing not only when those factors oppose one another but acknowledging when they can work together to create a better future for all.

On the front page of today's business section, the New York Times publishes Craig Smith's article about Rosia Montana's gold-mining controversies, "Fighting Over Gold in the Land of Dracula." In his title, Smith conjures a ghastly image resonant to any movie-goer's mind -- that of the legendary Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula.

First imagined 110 years ago by fin de siècle Irish novelist Bram Stoker, Dracula and his grisly fangs have left their indelible cultural mark on twentieth-century literature and cinema, filling pages and screens with images of fog-shrouded castles, open graves, punctured throats, and terrified young women. For decades, Dracula and the mythography of vampirism have refused to pass into anachronism, imaginatively renewing themselves just when they seemed most depleted. But why does the venerable count make his first public appearance of 2007 in the New York Times's business section? Just follow Craig Smith's subtle extended analogy: The modern vampire prowling through central Romania, sucking its lifeblood and destroying its communities, is the spectre of globalization. And in the case of Rosia Montana, globalization takes the shape of the multi-billion-dollar Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources.

For Smith, this "powerful and sophisticated adversary" follows the imperial Roman precedent set two millennia ago, greedily seeking Rosia Montana's gold "to provide lucre for the rich, status for the everyman and hidden stores of wealth for nations." Its machinations are orchestrated by "savvy mining executives, many of them highly experienced from cutting their teeth [a telling metaphor!] building the Barrick Gold Corporation, the largest gold mining company in the world." But these savvy executives face an unexpected antagonist. Forty-one-year-old peasant farmer Eugen David has managed to coordinate local activists, to harness a global network of environmentalist NGOs, and even to recruit the support of movie stars and financiers such as Vanessa Redgrave and George Soros -- all to thwart the mining company's efforts to evacuate Rosia Montana and build its open-cast mine.

Smith thus paints a compelling picture of a small farmer heroically rallying allies to resist a wealthy corporation's rapacious claims on his beautiful homeland. "But the mining industry doesn't easily back down," he tells us:

Hoping to extract an estimated 300 tons of gold and 1,200 tons of silver from the mine, Gabriel Resources introduced a public relations campaign with Madison Avenue-style television commercials and community sponsorships to win over 960 Rosia Montana families that it needed to relocate. It cast itself as an economic savior. It even countered a critical documentary with its own film, "Mine Your Own Business."

Smith conveniently represents the MPI-funded documentary Mine Your Own Business as mere public relations propaganda for Gabriel Resources, a move that both annuls that film's integrity and excuses the New York Times from grappling seriously with its contrarian views. However, the truth is more complex than Smith would have us believe. Respected journalist Phelim McAleer first became interested in Rosia Montana not as a stooge for Gabriel Resources' PR department but as the London Financial Times's foreign correspondent in Romania. A self-professed liberal, he was shocked to discover well-funded NGOs espousing environmental ideals that effectively put the kibosh on economic development, and thus denied impoverished Romanians the prosperity, education, medical care, and basic human dignity most Westerners take for granted. When he and his wife Ann McElhinney decided to make a documentary film about the darker side of environmental politics, they chose to accept funding from Gabriel Resources -- but only after the company guaranteed their editorial autonomy.

While filming Mine Your Own Business, McAleer and McElhinney found impoverished people on three continents consistently longing for good jobs, cars, decent schools, and quality health care. And yet they just as consistently found Western environmentalists declaring that local residents neither wanted nor needed investment from mining companies -- that they would rather preserve their traditional lifestyles and their humble homes. "I have come across a lot of tragedies and hard-luck stories as a journalist," McAleer has remarked, "but I had never covered a situation where the solution to poverty is being opposed by educated Westerners who think that people really are 'poor but happy.'" The truth of McAleer's observation can be seen in the photograph accompanying the New York Times story, in which peasant-activist Eugen David leads his horse and cart along a dirt track, honorably turning his back on Western-style "progress." The irony of David's posing in such a manner for the prestigious, influential, and wealthy Western media should not escape our notice.

Smith notes that Gabriel Resources will invest more than $2 billion in the Romanian economy if their mine goes ahead. But while he devotes much space to the anticipated environmental side-effects of the planned mine, he neglects to explore how such unprecedented investment could benefit an area where unemployment exceeds 70 percent, where housing is dilapidated and inadequate, and where previous communist mining projects have left both the air and the water heavily polluted. Smith also neglects to interview a single villager who believes the mine will improve his life and create better futures for his children -- even though, as McAleer and McElhinney discovered, such views are by far in the majority. Such skewed reporting serves only to illustrate anew the dissonance between Rosia Montana's impoverished peasantry and Manhattan's comfortable intelligentsia. "How blessed are some people," wrote Bram Stoker, "whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams...."

French channel ARTE will broadcast Hammer & Tickle, Ben Lewis's acclaimed documentary about the history of humor under communism, on Monday, January 8th at 11:10 p.m., and again on Thursday, January 11th at 3:15 p.m. The film's French title is Humour aux pays des soviets.

Lewis's May 2006 article in Prospect magazine gives background information to the film, discussing the communist joke in its cultural, political, and sociological contexts. "Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience," he writes, "because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism." To learn more about this intriguing intersection of humor and politics, tune in to ARTE next week.

In Australia, Mine Your Own Business continues to anchor important public discussion about not only environmental activism, but also about the value of vibrant, informed debate.

In an op-ed at On Line Opinion, Max Rheese, executive director of the Australian Environment Foundation, responds to an earlier piece by Leslie Cannold about how the public tends to ascribe value to ideas not by objectively assessing them, but by looking at who is propagating them.

Rheese agrees that in order to preserve the integrity of debate in a democracy, advocacy groups seeking to influence public opinion have a moral obligation to reveal their support base:

Influence of public opinion, facts and credibility of those commenting or seeking to influence public opinion are raised in a thoughtful article by Leslie Cannold (On Line Opinion, December 28, 2006), where she lays bare the need to expose those who are supporting groups commenting in the public arena.

The article is timely in that many groups are seeking to influence public opinion on various issues. Their credentials to do so and their support base should be subject to public scrutiny.

A healthy democracy is strengthened by diverse and informed debate; the task of public interest groups is to have their message distributed to the public in the most effective manner. The task of the media or others who may have a differing opinion is to “keep those bastards honest” and the debate balanced.

Ms Cannold somewhat lauds the honesty and integrity of journalists, but at least in relation to environmental matters, it is the failure of the media to give a balanced coverage - or put another way, their preference for emotional rhetoric over and above evidence-based commentary - that has driven the formation of the AEF.

AEF's most recent response to this sorry state of affairs? A public screening of Mine Your Own Business, co-hosted with Australia's Institute of Public Affairs. The film, he notes, brings "an important story about the dark side of environmentalism to the Australian public." In making the film available to the public, he further observes, AEF and IPA did what no one else would.

In so doing, AEF has helped make it possible for members of both the media and the public to adopt a more informed opinion not only of environmental matters, but also of the extremist techniques sometimes undertaken by environmental advocacy groups. Whether either journalists or the public will take up the challenge AEF has implicitly posed remains to be seen.

With the advent of electronic hypertext, circa 1994, academics, authors, and readers began debating the fate of the printed book. As the traditional literary establishment delivered impassioned eulogies to glue, ink, cloth, and paper, postmodernists celebrated the signifier's triumphant liberation from Gutenbergian imprisonment, utopian technologists envisioned a day when any book could be accessed from anywhere via a few clicks of a computer's mouse, and students looked forward to "going to the library" in their pajamas. Librarians began updating their CVs.

Although many of these predictions, fears, and hopes proved premature, debates about reading from paper versus reading from screens still rage on today. When dominated by the institutional vested interests of academics, authors, librarians, technologists, publishers, and lawyers, exchanges often grow hostile and repetitive. But beyond the polemics and canned arguments lie genuine, serious, and intriguing questions about how different textual media and technologies help determine what we read, how we read it, and what we think of it.

In his recent New Yorker article, David Denby focuses not on the reading experience but on the movie-viewing experience, asking how technology is changing what Americans watch, where we watch it, and how we feel about what we see. With innovative companies such as Apple now encouraging customers to download and watch movies on its video-capable iPods and recently announced iPhone, what will become of the big-screen theater experience? And if the theaters are competed out of existence by smaller, flexible, demand-driven viewing technologies, what, if anything, would we lose? Quite a lot, Denby suggests, recounting his own experience of watching Pirates of the Caribbean on a video iPod:

The device was as elegant as an old cigarette case and not much larger than a child's palm. I was holding a video iPod, poised at the frontier of a new digital age, a new platform for movies, a new convenience that will annihilate old paradigms. Last spring and summer, when I visited a number of executives and tech guys in big-studio Hollywood, I kept hearing disdain for the mall cinemas and the multiplexes--the theatres in which most Americans see movies. And I heard a new mantra: "Content on demand--when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it." By the end of the summer, movies were beginning to flow into homes and portable devices through the Internet. In September, Apple began offering previously released Disney movies through its iTunes Store. I downloaded the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" onto my hard drive, then put it onto a video iPod. The screen was only two inches across.

If you are sitting down, the natural place for an iPod is in your lap; that way, your arms don't get tired. At that distance, however, I couldn't focus on the image. So I rested the iPod on my stomach. And there it sat, riding up and down every time I took a breath. I was on the Black Pearl, all right, standing on her foredeck like a drunken sailor as she plowed through heavy seas. The horizon line kept pitching and heaving, and I had trouble seeing much of anything. "Pirates" has lots of wide vistas and noisy tumult--a vast ocean under the dazzling sun and nighttime roughhousing in colonial towns, with deep-cleavaged prostitutes and toothless drunks. What I saw, mainly, was a looming ship the size of a twig, patches of sparkling blue, and a face or a skull flashing by. The interiors were as dark as caves. My ears, fed by headphones, were filled with such details as the chafing of hawsers and feet stomping on straw, but there below me Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom were duelling like two angry mosquitoes in a jar.

In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display--at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they'll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are "platform agnostic"--that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small. Most kids don't have bellies, and they can pretzel their limbs into almost any shape they want, so they can get comfortable with a handheld device; they can also take it onto a school bus, down the street, into bed, cuddling it under the covers after lights-out.

Hollywood executives' enthusiasm for "content on demand," and thus for a range of portable and home-theater technologies, raises questions about our future affective relationship with film. At their best, films can uplift, energize, motivate, and inspire. But how many of the AFI's 100 Most Inspiring Films of All Time, which include Rocky, Apollo 13, and Lawrence of Arabia, draw much of their power from their big-screen presentation? Can a twenty-foot-high Rocky convey something a two-inch Rocky cannot? And if children are as "platform-agnostic" as Hollywood claims, will they ever know or miss the cinematic experiences of submission and mastery that Denby emphasizes here?

Denby suggests that it matters deeply, affectively and aesthetically, how we watch our movies, where, and with whom. And he hints that if the media through which we view films is to change, and especially if the balance of power is to shift away from theatres and towards "content on demand" technologies, then the way the film industry conceives, finances, makes, and distributes films must also change. How, why, and when those changes may happen is the subject of Denby's lengthy but insightful article.

That's the question Hollywood is asking, as Lions Gate Entertainment underwrites the latest attempt to bring Ayn Rand's objectivist classic, Atlas Shrugged, to the silver screen.

Over the years, so many people have tried--and failed--to convert Rand's 1200 page novel into a feature-length film that journalist Kimberly Brown can't help but make a joke of it. Noting that Rand herself was initially suspicious that the Soviets would prevent her pro-capitalism book from becoming a movie, Brown observes that Hollywood's historical ineptness with the project lends a little bit of credence to Rand's paranoid fantasy: "it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywood's mediocrity."

Brown goes on to detail the latest attempt to make a movie out of Rand's masterpiece. Randall Wallace, author of Braveheart, is working on the screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, who co-produced Ray, are managing the project. And Lions Gate is financing it. Angelina Jolie, who bills herself as a Rand fan, has been tapped to play heroine Dagny Taggart. The question of who will play John Galt, the novel's mystery man, is allowed to remain, appropriately, a mystery. (In April 2006, Variety reported that John Galt might be played by none other than Jolie's real-life love interest, Brad Pitt.)

Atlas Shrugged, long dismissed by intellectuals and academics on both the left and right, has long been a popular favorite. Since its publication in 1957, six million copies have been sold. But Rand's reluctance to relinquish control over the script prevented the book from being filmed during her lifetime, and Hollywood red tape has scuppered attempts to do so in the years since her death in 1982.

Still, the folks at Lions Gate are confident that the time has come for Atlas Shrugged to become a movie. They believe in the novel, and they also believe in the power of film to bring great stories to the public.

Although producing a screenplay for the book amounts to a major act of compression, Baldwin is confident that the result will capture the essence of Rand's work: "We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book," he says.

Wallace, who is on pace to complete his screenplay this month, is similarly confident: "I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read 'Atlas Shrugged.' And the movie has to work."

He's right--about both the challenges of translating a work such as this one into the medium of film, and about the enormous potential of film to reach audiences far larger, and far more varied, than the shrinking lengthy-book-reading portion of the public.

As a novel about freedom that finally has the chance to benefit from our most democratic art form yet, Atlas Shrugged is a perfect test case for his theory.

On January 3, the New York Times ran a singularly one-sided piece on the gold mining controversy that has been plaguing the impoverished mountain town of Rosia Montana, Romania. This blog outlined the problems with the paper of record's coverage here, and MPI board president Frayda Levy has followed up with a letter to the Times:

To The Editor:

The January 3rd article on the gold mine in Romania portrays a David and Goliath struggle between a lone individual and an evil mining company. This piece is as one sided, and inaccurate, as an article can get.

The journalist, Craig Smith, never interviews any of the townspeople who support the mining company. Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the town's abject poverty that could be alleviated by the development of the mine. Rather than discuss the 60% of people who chose to sell their property to the mining company, the article focuses on the minority who won't sell. Had the author bothered to interview those who sold, he could have learned of their much improved lifestyle - which now includes such basics as running water and indoor toilets.

Mr. Smith does get one aspect of the opposition to developing the mine absolutely correct. The article states that the project is opposed by "the most powerful environmental organizations in the world," wealthy businessmen as well as Hollywood activists. In other words, this is more of a cause celebre by elites than by the local townspeople.

Should any New York Times readers be interested in learning why the majority of the Rosia Montana townspeople support the mining project, they can come to a screening of an independent film on the subject. A screening of Mine Your Own Business, produced by New Bera Media in association with the Moving Picture Institute, will be held at 7 pm on January 19th at the Director's Guild Theater at 110 W 57th St. The directors and producers of the film will be present and will take questions about their experiences in Rosia Montana.

Such news coverage only makes the case for seeing McAleer's film that much stronger. Readers are encouraged to take advantage of two free screenings in the coming days: The first, as Levy notes, will be in Manhattan this Friday, at 7 PM, at the Directors Guild Theater. The second will take place on January 24 in Washington, D.C., at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium, at 7 PM.

Watch a trailer and learn more here.

Yesterday on FOX News, Brit Hume covered Mine Your Own Business, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney's contrarian documentary about the darker side of environmental politics. Questioning whether environmentalists should oppose mining projects that can bring prosperity, longevity, and dignity to some of the world's poorest people, the documentary raises huge ethical quandaries for organizations such as Greenpeace. View the YouTube clip here:

The Moving Picture Institute will host two free screenings of Mine Your Own Business over the coming days. The film premieres tonight at the Directors Guild Theater in New York and on Wednesday night at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, New York environmentalists have issued a rallying call to protesters, calling Mine Your Own Business "a rabidly anti-eviro film funding [sic] by the mining industry and other bad guys," and asking those with opposed interests to "raise a ruckus" at tonight's premiere.

Although we at the Moving Picture Institute uphold environmentalists' First Amendment right peaceably to protest Mine Your Own Business, we do question their portrayal of the documentary. For a start, the film's tone is hardly "rabid." Seasoned investigative journalists in Ireland and the United Kingdom, McAleer and McElhinney have made an intellectually persuasive film that works by way of tempered argument, not through rabid polemic.

Neither is the film necessarily "anti-enviro." Its filmmakers are pro-development environmentalists who find themselves unable to endorse either anti-mining groups' callous attitude towards human poverty or their illiberal, neo-colonialist desire to determine how indigenous peoples should work, live, and think. The New York activists' assumption that "pro-development" entails "anti-enviro" merely enshrines the simplistic opposition that Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen criticized at a recent conference in India. Arguing that zealously conservationist policies can be more environmentally destructive in the long run than their progressive alternatives, Sen endorsed solutions that harmoniously integrate economic growth and environmental protection. McAleer and McElhinney call for similarly pragmatic approaches.

As for "the mining industry and other bad guys" financing Mine Your Own Business, it is certainly true that Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources partly underwrote the film, which focuses largely on that company's struggle to open a gold mine in Rosia Montana, Romania. However, the filmmakers accepted Gabriel Resources' funding only on condition that they be given complete editorial and investigative autonomy. The company faithfully respected the filmmakers' independence; in fact, nobody from Gabriel Resources was allowed to view the film until it was complete.

Finally, we at the Moving Picture Institute are surprised to see ourselves labelled "bad guys" for supporting a film that champions freedom, dignity, and prosperity. Along with Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, we believe that impoverished people deserve a chance to live longer, better lives; to have proper jobs, homes, and medical care; to see their children live beyond the age of five; and to see those children grow up to become educated citizens of prospering nations. As such, the bizarre spectacle of educated Manhattanites gathering to oppose a film that opposes abject poverty makes us wonder how much they have really thought about the issues that so inflame their passions.

John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, featured prominently in Brit Hume's recent segment on MPI film Mine Your Own Business. "This movie is obviously a piece of propaganda. It's paid for by a Canadian mining company," he said on camera, conceding that "They have a right to their Madison Avenue attempts at confusing the public."

Passacantando may be willing to concede, however grudgingly and contemptuously, that Mine Your Own Business has a right to exist--but he's not so willing to admit that the public should have the right to see it.

When he learned that the National Geographic Society's Grosvenor Auditorium will host Wednesday's Washington, D.C., premiere of MYOB, he expressed surprise and disappointment that the Society--which he regards as an environmentalist organization--would make MYOB available for public viewing.

"If I wanted to rent out space at Greenpeace to show the film, my members wouldn't let me," Passacantando told Corporate Crime Reporter.

But the National Geographic Society, to its great credit, is more open to multiple viewpoints and the debate that arises from them than either Greenpeace or--according to Passacantando--its members. When asked to explain its policies on who can rent the auditorium, the Society's Betty Hudson explained that the NGS takes a content-neutral approach to facilities rental. "The auditorium is rarely available, but when it is available, we rent it out," Hudson said. "Usually, it's not available. This time it was."

The folks at Corporate Crime Reporter pressed Hudson on this issue:

Can anybody rent the auditorium?

"Yes, assuming it’s available."

Well, you wouldn't rent it out to show a pornographic movie, would you?

"I would guess we wouldnt, no” Hudson said.

What about a pro-Nazi propaganda film?

"I guess we wouldn't, no."

So, not just anybody can rent out the auditorium?

"We are not taking a position on this particular movie," Hudson said. "We did not preview the film. We looked at the trailer. It is a different point of view. It is a different perspective. We may or may not agree with it. But that is not the issue here. It is a different point of view."

Passacantando's working assumption appears to be that exposure to alternative viewpoints regarding environmental activism is damaging to the cause. And he may be right--Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney's film makes it quite clear that the environmentalist movement has a dark side. But surely suppression of viewpoints such as those expressed in MYOB is far worse--for environmentalism and for democratic process--than the viewpoints themselves. At the very least, it confirms that environmentalism's dark side is dark indeed.

Mine Your Own Business premiered in New York Friday night to a packed audience at the Directors Guild Theater, with Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney present to meet attendees and to answer questions about their documentary. Steven M. Warshawsky, who attended the premiere with his wife, writes about the event for the American Thinker blog:

The movie explores the economic and environmental issues surrounding three proposed mining projects in Romania, Madagascar, and Chile. In each case, the filmmakers contrast the local residents' desire for better jobs and a better life with the fervent opposition of rich western environmentalists who want to preserve the "quaint" atmosphere of these communities, keeping the local residents living in desperately poor and backward conditions (which are truly heartbreaking to witness).

As McAleer and McElhinney emphasized during the Q & A session after the screening, without the kind of economic development that the western world went through during the 1900s, the people living in these parts of the world have no hope for a better life, for modern housing, transportation, education, medicine, and so forth. If that means that the local environments might get a little "despoiled," so be it.

Once you see and hear the people of these local communities, and compare them to the fatuous and dishonest environmentalists who are trying to stop these projects, it is impossible to disagree. As McAleer put it in the movie, these people are entitled to dignity through development. I urge everyone to see Mine Your Own Business.

The Moving Picture Institute will host another free screening of the documentary tomorrow night at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium in Washington, D.C., starting at 7 p.m. The audience will again have an opportunity to meet McAleer and McElhinney and to ask questions. Please RSVP if you wish to attend.

Mine Your Own Busines premieres today in Washington, D.C. -- and environmental groups are not at all happy about it. Eighty NGOs across the world have signed a statement protesting the existence of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney's hardhitting account of how environmentalist groups have worked to prevent economic development in the world's poorest areas; the statement focusses on Rosia Montana, Romania, where environmental activists are keeping a Canadian mining operation from bringing money and jobs into the community, and where McAleer and McElhinney center their documentary about environmentalism's dark side.

From the statement:

The film "Mine Your Own Business," by Phelim McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney, purports that "foreign environmentalists" oppose the project and accuses them of "exaggerations and misleading claims." This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, local opposition to the mine is strong and organized. Alburnus Maior, a local association based in Rosia Montana, represents families that oppose the mine and refuse to sell their lands.

In a press release issued jointly by several of the signatory organizations, Alburnus Major's Eugen David calls Mine Your Own Business "a propaganda film paid for by Gabriel Resources which wants to make a lot of money from all this destruction." No mention is made of the fact that McAleer and McElhinney accepted funding from Gabriel Resources on condition that the company give up all claim to editorial control over the film; likewise, David was happy not to have his own activist affiliations advertised when the BBC interviewed him for a piece on the mining controversy.

The press release also quotes Stephanie Roth, who accepted the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize two years ago at Washington's National Geographic Theater--the same venue that will be screening Mine Your Own Business tonight. Echoing the censorious sentiments of Greenpeace USA's executive director John Passacantando, Roth deplored the theater's willingness to allow an alternative viewpoint on environmentalism to be shown on its screen: "It is sad and outrageous that such a renowned center of environmental research has agreed to screen this anti-environmental film. It aims to manipulate the public and does not reflect the values of the National Geographic Society," she said.

The agitation of Roth, David, and the 80 NGOs that signed the statement objecting to Mine Your Own Business is revealing in its own right--but it becomes all the more telling when viewed in light of the letter the citizens of Rosia Montana have issued to protest the way environmentalists are portraying them to the world. "Message from the People of Rosia Montana" reads as follows:

To all those interested in the fate of Rosia Montana.
To those who pretend to represent the community of Rosia Montana.

We strongly protest against the messages coming from Ms. Stephanie Roth, Alburnus Major, Greenpeace, Earthworks, Friends of the Earth, Mining Watch Canada, Rainforest Action Network, Halifax Initiative, regarding the Rosia Montana project. They do not represent the views of the community, its will and the reality of Rosia Montana.

Moreover, such messages are misleading and present a distorted view about us and our families, who support the mining project and who represent the majority of the people in Rosia Montana.

All those truly interested in our fate should come to Rosia, to see our way of life, our needs and our history.

You should not listen to those pretending to know us and who speak on our behalf!

The people of Rosia Montana can speak for themselves! You have only to listen to us!

The people of Rosia Montana can think for themselves--and so can the public. The groups that oppose Mine Your Own Business want, quite transparently, to tell people who have not seen the film what to think--and they also quite transparently do not want people to have the chance to see the film. Hence their objections to the National Geographic's decision to screen the film and let people make up their own minds about it.

Mine Your Own Business premieres tonight at National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium in Washington, D.C., starting at 7 p.m. Afterward, the audience will have an opportunity to meet McAleer and McElhinney and to ask questions. RSVP if you wish to attend--and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

Mine Your Own Business, a film about the impact of the environmental movement, will premiere tonight at the National Geographic Auditorium in Washington, D.C., despite protests, condemnations, and a call for censorship from environmental activists. The film's directors, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, fellows of the Moving Picture Institute, have called the activists' response "totalitarian" and "intolerant."

Greenpeace executive director John Passacantando was invited to be a special guest at the screening. Instead, he sent a letter to National Geographic Society expressing outrage at their showing the film. "I'm appalled by their demand to shut down the film," said MPI president Frayda Levy. "We invited them, but instead of joining us for a discussion, they display breathtaking narrow-mindedness. Regardless of whether you love or hate Mine Your Own Business, it deserves to be seen. What makes them so afraid of this film?"

The film reveals how the campaigns of global environmental activists are often exaggerated, misleading, and motivated by a desire to preserve poverty-stricken villages they view as "quaint." The focus of the film is Rosia Montana, a mining village in Romania. Mine Your Own Business takes a hard look at a controversial issue, and poses hard questions to experts and activists on both sides of the debate. However, environmental activists have compared the film to Nazi propaganda and to pornography.

Yesterday, Greenpeace's Passacantando and dozens of other officials from environmental NGOs issued a letter condemning the film and the screening at National Geographic. The letter voiced support for the people of Rosia Montana who oppose the mine. However, other residents signed a petition that condemned the continued interference of Greenpeace and other environmental groups, and invited foreign media to visit the village.

Filmmakers McAleer and McElhinney responded with their own statement that points out bitter ironies in the Greenpeace letter:

Seventeen years after the Romanian people overthrew communism in a revolution that cost over 1,000 lives, Romanians are once again being ordered how to live and work by Greenpeace and other environmental organizations. And just like the communists of old, Greenpeace now wants to control what the Romanian people see in the cinema, and are even trying to stop our documentary being shown in Washington.

McAleer and McElhinney have challenged environmental groups' leaders to a public debate in the village of Rosia Montana. "We are confident that such a debate, free from the censorship that Greenpeace and its allies wish to impose, would show the truth about the lives of the people of Rosia Montana," they write.

How should teachers handle the global warming debate? How should they present the competing prerogatives of development and conservation to their students? Who is telling the truth about these issues? And who isn't?

MPI president Frayda Levy and executive director Rob Pfaltzgraff reflect on these issues in an op-ed published this week in the The Examiner:

A Seattle-area school district made headlines recently when it placed limits on teachers who wish to assign former Vice President Al Gore’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The board ruled that teachers need permission from the school superintendent before they can show the film, and that they must balance Gore’s message with an opposing view.

The decision was met with criticism and disbelief. Laurie David, one of the film’s producers, issued a statement saying “There is no opposing view to science, which is fact, and the facts are clear that global warming is here, now.”

But the Federal Way School Board was right. “An Inconvenient Truth” does not tell the whole truth about the environmental movement, and students should not be taught that it does. For instance, much of Western environmentalism is hostile to people living in underdeveloped parts of the world.

That is the message of “Mine Your Own Business,” a new documentary by Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. The film was co-produced by the Moving Picture Institute, where we are directors.

While “An Inconvenient Truth” urges Westerners to drive less, recycle and conserve energy, MYOB describes how Western environmentalists are trying to prevent the world’s poorest people from enjoying the amenities others take for granted.

Gore’s film argues that the costs of unchecked Western consumption are more than the planet can bear. MYOB suggests that the costs of Western environmentalism are similarly high.

MYOB investigates the darker side of environmentalism. The film examines the controversies surrounding proposed mining sites in Romania, Madagascar and Chile to see how environmental campaigns have affected the world’s poorest people.

Over and over, McAleer spoke with environmentalists who declared that indigenous people neither wanted nor needed investment from mining companies — that they would rather preserve their traditional lifestyles and humble homes.

But when the filmmakers talked to the people themselves, they found overwhelming support for the mines. In Romania, Madagascar and Chile, the people longed for good jobs, decent schools, and quality health care. They understood that their villages would die without the investment mining companies would bring.

“I have come across a lot of tragedies and hard-luck stories as a journalist,” McAleer has remarked, “but I had never covered a situation where the solution to poverty is being opposed by educated Westerners who think that people really are ‘poor but happy.’”

Despite the setback in Federal Way, Wash., the producers of “An Inconvenient Truth” are working hard to get the film into American classrooms. Already, 50,000 DVDs of Gore’s film have been produced to provide free copies to any teacher who asks.

So “An Inconvenient Truth” will be making its way into American science classrooms after all. If some have their way, it will be required viewing here, just as it already is in Norway and Sweden.

There’s nothing wrong with showing Gore’s film in schools. But teachers should be making sure that students know the whole story. They should make students aware that the environmentalist movement has a dark side all its own.

There is no excuse not to do so.

Columnist Mary Katherine Ham attended the D.C. premiere of MPI film Mine Your Own Business--and was mightly impressed. "Mine Your Own Business is an entertaining, moving and sometimes humorous look at a side of the environmental movement we don't often see—the dark side," she writes.

Ham supplements her column praising the film with a wonderful YouTube clip that features footage of the protesters who gathered outside Washington's National Geographic Theater last week--and of MYOB director Phelim McAleer besting them in debate.

Well worth a look.

"Villagers, coal miners and peasants beware! Western environmental activists 'intolerantly devoted' to misguided views that stymie progress are opposing improvements to your standard of living and greater economic vitality." So writes Kevin Mooney, the Cybercast News Service reporter who saw Mine Your Own Business when it premiered last Wednesday night at the National Geographic Auditorium in Washington, D.C. Created by Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, the film questions the environmental movement's ethical conduct when it denies third-world communities the employment, prosperity, and dignity that new mining projects would bring. Mooney discusses the controversies the film explores, and then examines environmentalists' reaction to the D.C. screening:

Wednesday night's screening took place amid protests by Greenpeace activists, who gathered outside the National Geographic Auditorium and described the film as "propaganda."

Opponents also tried to get the venue to cancel the event.

"It is sad and outrageous that such a renowned center of environmental research has agreed to screen this anti-environmental film. It aims to manipulate the public and does not reflect the values of the National Geographic Society," said [environmentalist leader Stephanie Roth] in a statement.

MPI founder Thor Halvorssen said Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando had been invited as a "special guest" to attend the screening and to take part in a discussion about the film's content.

"We extended the green carpet to him," he said. Cybercast News Service also tried to get a comment from Greenpeace and to engage the protesters outside the screening to no success.

In her efforts to shame the National Geographic Society into cancelling the screening ("It is sad and outrageous that such a renowned center of environmental research has agreed to screen this anti-environmental film") Roth deliberately confuses "environmental research" with "environmental advocacy." The society was acting contra to its conservationist values, she suggests, by opening its theater to a documentary that portrays the green movement in a negative light. But how would one of the world's premier educational and scientific organizations have acted if it had helped enviromentalists suppress ugly truths about their activities in developing nations? In allowing the film to be shown in its theater, the society commendably upheld the liberal values of disinterested inquiry and freedom of the press, and thus showed that it supports "environmental research" from a variety of perspectives. In calling for its cancellation, the greens merely resorted to illiberal, censorious bullying.

Prominent environmentalists such as Roth and Passacantando should have been eager to address the criticisms the film levels. But the greens did not respond with reasoned refutation; instead, Greenpeace's executive director ducked the post-screening debate while his supporters turned up to brand the film "pornography."

To his credit, Phelim McAleer did attempt to engage the protesters in debate, as can be seen in the footage published by Townhall.com. Angry and vehemently assured of their position, the protesters nevertheless display remarkable ignorance about the Irish couple's documentary. "There are plenty of other jobs!" one woman yells, denying that Romania, Madagascar, and Chile need investment from mining companies. But anyone who has seen Mine Your Own Business knows that the villages in question are destitute and dilapidated, their people unemployed and hopeless, their children uneducated and malnourished. Another woman denies that she can be considered wealthy in comparison to people in Romania, Madagascar, and Chile. "I work for a small NGO," she objects. Did the activists even know what they were protesting?

Anyone who wishes to see Phelim McAleer in a less impromptu environmental debate should view his November 2, 2006 appearance on Prime Time, Ireland's preeminent investigative television program. There, McAleer has it out with Eamon Ryan, a T.D. from the Irish Green Party. Judge for yourself who relies on research and who relies on advocacy.

The story of MPI film Mine Your Own Business is no longer just the story the film tells about environmentalism's dark side--it is also the story of how environmentalist groups are seeking to suppress the film itself.

MYOB's premiere in Washington, D.C. last week exemplified this.

Greenpeace executive director John Passacantando--who was part of an international effort to convince the National Geographic Society to reverse its decision to screen MYOB--declined an invitation to attend the premiere, and likewise declined to participate in the scheduled discussion afterward. Meanwhile, as the image above shows, MYOB director Phelim McAleer was not only present at the screening, but actively engaged the protesters who were picketing outside.

Two distinct attitudes toward free expression and debate are exemplified here. One makes a film that tells difficult truths and asks hard questions. The other seeks to suppress the film and refuses to participate in the analysis and reassessment the film invites. It's not hard to decide which one is in good faith, and which one is not.

Phelim McAleer, director of Mine Your Own Business, an MPI co-produced film about how radical environmentalist movements perpetuate Third World poverty, has debated Greenpeace executive director John Passacantando on FOX News. The footage is below:

In the debate, we find out that Passacantando has never visited Rosia Montana, Romania, the village on which McAleer's film primarily focuses, whereas the filmmaker has been there twelve times. Nevertheless, relying on distorted second-hand information relayed from a village he has never seen for himself, Passacantando repeatedly dismisses McAleer's documentary as "propaganda." What gives?

Sending an ironic message to environmentalists, Irish director Phelim McAleer borrows a protester's placard outside the National Geographic Auditorium in Washington, D.C., where his and his wife Ann McElhinney's film Mine Your Own Business premiered last week:

When will environmentalists start telling the truth about their anti-development agenda in Third World nations?