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.