Persistence of Vision

Dimitri Vassilaros of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review gives MPI-funded film Mine Your Own Business an enthusiastic endorsement:

Two thumbs up and four stars for "Mine Your Own Business." It's the feel-good hit of the winter. The documentary exposes the elitist attitudes and stunning hypocrisy of environmentalists who treat the most wretched and pathetic souls in the Third World like dirt. Worse than dirt, actually. Much worse.

Gabriel Resources and the Romanian villagers seem to be on the verge of hitting the mother lode. The company believes there are at least 14.6 million ounces of gold and 64.9 million ounces of silver. It expects to invest $638 million (U.S. currency) and thinks the average annual production of gold could be 635,000 ounces. That could happen as soon as spring in 2009.

But environmental activists have been trying to stop the mining project, essentially saying mining would cause pollution and that the simple villagers want to preserve their way of life. The people in Rosia Montana never got the memo. Or if they did, it wasn't in Romanian.

Images of the daily grind of a minimal existence in overwhelming poverty speak for themselves, as do the villagers who cannot comprehend why anyone would prevent them from working for a living wage and $638 million from being invested in their village. They seem especially baffled why anyone would oppose such a godsend.

"I asked Greenpeace, one of the harshest enviro-critics, to identify factual errors in the film," Vassilaros writes. "The statement from Kert Davies, Greenpeace USA research director, labeled the film propaganda and said activists are not against progress and poor people making a living. There was no mention of factual error." In other words, Greenpeace can't counter MYOB's statement of the case with anything other than slurs; what Greenpeace labels "propaganda" is actually--by Greenpeace's own admission--an irrefutable statement of fact.

The buzz about MPI-funded film Mine Your Own Business continues to grow -- and the mainstream media has begun to listen.

Newsweek is the latest to cover the sensational film by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. Noting that the premise of the film "sounds like something out of the next 'Borat' movie: a Romanian miner and an Irish filmmaker hop a plane to Madagascar, and then to Chile, to make the case that racist and arrogant environmentalists are keeping poor people down," Daren Briscoe goes on to summarize the film and to tell the story behind the making of a "a new documentary being hailed in some quarters, and scorned in others, as big business’s answer to Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth'":

The film opens in the Romanian town of Rosia Montana. Gold has been mined there since pre-Roman times, and now the Gabriel Resources company is seeking government approval to build a massive open-pit mine to leach gold from ground-up rock with a cyanide solution. The proposed mine has become a cause célèbre among environmental groups, who say it would pollute the area, force thousands of locals from their homes and destroy a historic town. In 2004, Hungarian filmmaker Tibor Kocsis made a documentary called “New Eldorado (Gold—the Curse of Rosia Montana),” that made similar claims. That film won the Hungarian Film Critics award for Best Documentary and the Hungarian Film Week - Best Documentary award, among others. But when Gabriel Resources CEO Alan Hill watched “New Eldorado,” he told NEWSWEEK, “I was ragged with frustration within the first five minutes. There was so much innuendo, so many lies. I saw a movie put out by unaccountable [non-governmental organizations] and I wanted to refute it.”

Hill decided to order up a documentary of his own, envisioning a point-for-point rebuttal of the Kocsis film. What he got instead was Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, husband-and-wife filmmaking fellows at the New York-based Motion Picture Institute [sic], whose mission, executive director Rob Pfaltzgraff told NEWSWEEK, is “to use film to expand the cause of freedom and classic liberalism. We’re absolutely committed to stimulating debate and discussion.” McAleer, a former Romania/Bulgaria correspondent for the Financial Times, and McElhinney, a former journalist with the BBC, agreed to produce Hill’s documentary, “but we were categorically against [him] having any editorial control,” Pfaltzgraff told NEWSWEEK.

The movie that resulted “wasn’t what I wanted,” Hill says, but he’s more than happy with it.

That's why, as the article notes, MPI is currently working to make copies of MYOB available to teachers. "Jim Wilson, MPI’s project director, said the group would like to ship copies of 'Mine Your Own Business' to every school that's shown 'An Inconvenient Truth' to students. 'We’re looking to pattern our project off of theirs,' Wilson said."

To arrange a screening of MYOB in your community, contact jim@thempi.org.

Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn has some sharp commentary on the global warming debate--and he draws on MPI film Mine Your Own Business to make his case:

The question is whether what's happening now is just the natural give-and-take of the planet, as Erik the Red and my town's early settlers understood it. Or is it something so unprecedented we need to divert vast resources to a transnational elite bureaucrats so they can do their best to cripple the global economy and deny much of the developing world access to the healthier and longer lives capitalism brings?

To the eco-chondriacs that's a no-brainer. As Mark Fenn of the Worldwide Fund for Nature says in the new documentary "Mine Your Own Business":

"In Madagascar, the indicators of quality of life are not housing. They're not nutrition, specifically. They're not health in a lot of cases. It's not education. A lot of children in Fort Dauphin do not go to school because the parents don't consider that to be important. ... People have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family and you could count how many times in a day that family smiles. Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile. ... You tell me who is rich and who is poor."

Well, if smiles are the measure of quality of life, I'm Bill Gates; I'm laughing my head off. Male life expectancy in Madagascar is 52? years. But Mark Fenn is right: those l'il children sure look awful cute dancing up and down when the big environmentalist activist flies in to shoot the fund-raising video.

If "global warming" is real and if man is responsible, why then do so many "experts" need to rely on obviously fraudulent data? The famous "hockey stick" graph showed the planet's climate history as basically one long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end. Completely false.

That's the message of an editorial published Sunday in Indiana's Evansville Courier & Press. After reviewing the film favorably, columnist Robert Bosch notes that:

There is no morality in denying the world's poorest people the same advantages we have become accustomed to in the name of some misguided environmental cause.

Another angle environmentalists often take is that such mining projects will actually leave the local population even poorer. These beliefs are not limited only to developing countries. I once heard a reporter claim that coal mining in eastern Kentucky actually generates more poverty than it eliminates. Coal mining provides some of the highest-paying jobs in this economically depressed region, and post-mining land values are often much higher than that of pre-mining values.

This type of flawed environmentalism is not limited to the mining industry: Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," made an unsubstantiated link between the use of the insecticide DDT and thinning eggshells in birds. As a result, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 - any country that still used it was denied foreign aid. According to the World Health Organization, 93 million people have died of malaria since 1972. No other insecticide has ever been as effective as DDT in stopping the spread of malaria. Time and time again, environmentalists have been given a green light by the media to halt economic progress in developing nations. "Mine Your Own Business" is worth watching. It offers a much deserved look at the true cost of the blind support many environmental groups depend on.

To arrange a screening in your area, contact jim@thempi.org.

To MPI fellow Ben Lewis, whose documentary about communist humor, Hammer & Tickle, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Television Society Awards, in the category of history.

Glenn Reynolds refers his readers to Bill Hobbs to learn about MPI film Mine Your Own Business--and Bill Hobbs hosts a revealing discussion about the film.

Some especially telling comments:

"I'm all for being a good steward of the planet. But exactly when did we decide that absolutely everything on the planet took precedence over humanity?"

"Just watched the documentary last night, and my jaw spent a considerable amount of time on the floor. It is outstanding and necessary work, and needs to be seen by the widest audience possible."

"It's funny because I am not usually much of a prophet, but back when the Soviet Union went belly up, I remarked to a friend that environmentalism would probably become the last refuge of socialism. ... I wish I had been wrong."

Writing at National Review Online, Peter Suderman has good things to say about Mine Your Own Business, which he saw at the controversial D.C. premiere two weeks ago.

After describing the "motley crew" of protesters that gathered outside the National Geographic theater that night and noting the manner in which environmentalist groups around the world collaborated in condemning MYOB as pornography comparable to Nazi propaganda, Suderman connects the dots that the opposition to MYOB has unwittingly provided:

The rhetorical overkill of the response was telling: The environmental movement is clearly afraid of this film, and it should be. Mine Your Own Business, Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer’s clear-eyed look at the true impacts of mining and the nefarious tactics of its opponents, exposes the self-satisfied delusions of the environmental Left, putting lie to a host of deadly, anti-growth canards and revealing the smug elitism of many green advocates.

This is, perhaps, not all that surprising. The ideas espoused by many greens are farcical enough to begin with. But even for someone used to their whoppers, it’s almost shocking the lies, misrepresentations, and condescending behavior that McAleer manages to catch on film. With great care and thoroughness, the movie deconstructs the Left’s anti-growth narrative of pastoral tranquility and replaces it with something truly shocking: actual local sentiment.

That last is a crucial point. Though MYOB has been condemned as propaganda, those who are so condemning it are doing so because they hope to obscure the film's strong, ethical reporting. And strong, ethical reporting that challenges normative opinion, as MPI founder Thor Halvorssen noted at the D.C. premiere, really is obscene to those who aren't interested in the free exchange of ideas: "To people who are intolerantly devoted to their own views,” he said, “this is pornography--political pornography."

... to MPI fellow Ben Lewis, whose Hammer & Tickle will be showing at the Tiburon International Film Festival in March.

Congratulations to Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, whose Mine Your Own Business will be showing at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on Saturday. Tickets are still available.

Mine Your Own Business received special mention in the Irish Times' recent write-up of the festival, and with good reason--the film is not only an excellent documentary in its own right, but Irish filmmaker McAleer has made quite a splash in the Irish media with his spirited criticisms of certain Irish environmentalist efforts. To see McAleer in action, check out his debate with the Green Party's Eamon Ryan, which ran last November on Ireland's premiere news show, Prime Time.

Writing at FOXNews.com, junk science expert Steven Milloy has praise for MPI film Mine Your Own Business--and a few words to the wise about just how far environmental activists are willing to go in their attempts to prevent Third World development:

If anything, “Mine Your Own Business” only scratches the surface of the problem; the film depicts but a microcosm of the tyranny exercised by NGOs over the developing world.

NGOs, for example, have recently acquired the ability to veto third-world development through their influence over first-world banks.

Many banks have signed on to the environmentalist-promoted Equator Principles, which ostensibly are guidelines to ensure that third-world development projects occur in an “eco-friendly” manner. In practice, however, the Equator Principles, serve more as a means for NGOs to stop most economic development projects.

Banking giant Citigroup, for example, has implemented the Equator Principles, much to the detriment of the developing world. According to a 2005 Citigroup report, the bank denied financing to 54 of the 74 projects reviewed according to the Equator Principles – projects worth as much as $75 billion in financing and that are economically sound.

Not only do the Equator Principles deny first-world funding to developing nations, they also drive desperately poor nations to seek financing from alternative (and less desirable) sources like China – which is not known to apply first-world environmental standards to the projects it finances.

In another example, NGOs stopped what would have been the largest-ever sustainable forestry project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. The Washington state-based timber company Trillium Corporation purchased 800,000 acres in Chile and Argentina in 1993. Although Trillium could have clear-cut the forest at the time, it instead tried to work with NGOs to develop its sustainable forestry project of which it was rightfully proud.

The NGOs spent the next nine years blocking the project. One of Trillium’s key lenders fell into financial difficulty and had to auction the loans that were secured by Trillium’s land, allowing Goldman Sachs to swoop in and buy the notes, foreclose Trillium’s mortgage and then donate the land to the Wildlife Conservation Society – a controversial use of shareholder assets that has been criticized by myself and others.

Needless to say, the Tierra del Fuego land won’t be developed, Chileans won’t be employed and the world was deprived of a much needed example of the ever-elusive “sustainable development.”

Though I have looked, I have yet to find a significant development project anywhere in the world that environmentalists and their NGO allies support as “sustainable.” “Mine Your Own Business” is a terrific effort at documenting that fact.

The British slave trade was abolished 200 years ago--and now, to commemorate that, the Bristol Bay production company is launching a campaign to raise awareness about slavery today. Anchoring that campaign is Amazing Grace, a film that centers on Wilberforce, the English abolitionist who managed to convince Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Attached to the film is the "Amazing Change Campaign," which urges lawmakers to ensure that slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world. Estimating that 27 million people are enslaved today, the campaign features a petition for people who support global abolition. So far, nearly 50,000 people have signed.

That's the good news. The bad news--if we accept the assessment of the Village Voice--is that the film is just about unwatchable. Weighed down by an excessive need to show off the research that went into it and marred by an uncritical insistence on "deifying" an all-too human Wilberforce, the film is, in the Voice's judgement, "morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake":

... the movie belongs squarely in the currently blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-Skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would were Apted able to bring a little drama to the party. Just as Blood Diamond was about white men making the world safe for conflict-free earrings, Amazing Grace is the story of how England was won over to slavery-free sugar imports by William Wilberforce, a liberal member of Parliament. Only, being British, he talks--and talks, and talks--the opposition into submission. Wil- berforce, the real-life abolitionist who devoted his life to pushing anti-slave-trade legislation through a hostile Parliament terrified of waving goodbye to the British Empire, comes with grade-A hero credentials. Still, he doesn't deserve to be deified, sanctified, and so thoroughly bleached of human blemish that hardened highwaymen and exhausted horses quail before his goodness and mercy--and that's just in the first 10 minutes.

Amazing Grace opens Friday.

Via Glenn Reynolds comes the news that James Waterton has given Mine Your Own Business two thumbs up:

This movie has been billed by some as a "right-wing" counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical - and enormously more believable - than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.

This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a 'road to Damascus' scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start - I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians - yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as "rugged individualism" by statists - until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics - the world's poorest - those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production.

All great films have roots in older ones. Mine Your Own Business is no exception.

MPI film Mine Your Own Business continues to impress and engage audiences around the world.

Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney report that the film's trailer has been viewed over 100,000 times on YouTube, and that MYOB was the first film in the Dublin International Film Festival to sell out.