COCE will be entering its 10th year. This year’s conference is in El Paso, Texas, from June 25-28. Deadlines for paper proposals are March 1st. For more details, visit their website.
I have to take a moment to complain about how so many of the environmental conferences overlap. ASLE’s ninth conference is June 22-26 (see earlier post). AESS is June 23-26th. So much for encouraging interdisciplinary conversations across the fields. Grumble, grumble.
Caveat: I am a very rough-draftish and stream-of-consciousness blogger, so please bear with me.
In my ongoing research for a paper I plan to present at ASLE 2011 in Bloomington, I have been thinking a lot about the Jurassic Park films, especially the second one, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997, dir. Spielberg). While both of the first two JP films invoke themes of technology vs. nature, seeming to posit that whether or not the “nature” we humans encounter is in fact naturally occurring or human-made, it lies (dangerously) beyond our ability to control it, it is that second film that really haunts me. The main reason for this, besides its decidedly darker tone than the first JP, is that The Lost World features multiple characters whose investments are explicitly environmental.
First, there is John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who since the first Jurassic Park film has changed his exploitative ways to become a staunch defender of the right-to-isolation of the dinosaurs he created: as the film’s protagonist, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) puts it, Hammond has “gone from capitalist to naturalist in just four years.” Hammond’s preservationist attitude is ultimately valorized by the film — he is a “good guy” this time — while simultaneously (and subtly) undermined by The Lost World‘s plot: a young girl is injured by dinos on the beach in the first scene, and a T-Rex escapes the island and invades San Diego in the third act, showing (I think) that true separation of humans from dinosaurs (given the world the JP films posit) is not possible.
Another key character is the new CEO of InGen, Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), who (similarly to Hammond in the first film) wants to exploit the dinosaur creations on Isla Sorna’s “Site B” for profit. He is shown to be totally irredeemable and ends the film as lunch for the captive T-Rex and its baby. Through his treatment and horrific demise the film seems to posit that exploitation of natural phenomena for profit is bad, period.
Conversely, all of the film’s heroes – a ragtag band led by Malcolm — feel great pain upon seeing the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna rounded up and caged in an early sequence, a feeling the audience is encouraged to share via multiple shots of the suffering dinos being wrangled, intercut with indignant, pathos-laden reaction shots from the principals. When one of Malcolm’s sidekicks, an Earth Firster played by Vince Vaughan, decides to set all the dinos free again by cutting the locks on their cages, the other protagonists readily agree, and the subsequent sequence where the dinos run amok, destroying Ludlow’s camp and equipment, is presented by the film as a victory for the humane treatment of other species — note the close-ups of the faces of the stegosaurus and trike in that cage-breaking sequence to see how the film encourages us to empathize with the dinos and their liberators.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, there is Roland (Pete Postlethwaite), the big game hunter who leads Ludlow’s expeditionary force. He is the character I have the hardest time accounting for. He has a very different relationship to the dinos than the liberal, environmentalist heroes of Malcom’s group, yet he is not presented as particularly evil, nor out for profit in quite the same way as Ludlow. I would like to know more about ecocritical interpretations of big game hunting (and hunters) before I venture to say too much about Roland’s place in The Lost World‘s proceedings. I only know he is important, and his presence interests and vexes me.
Of course, many of these plot points and melodramatic plays for pathos are bound up in generic considerations: The Lost World is a monster movie, and one of the key strategies of virtually all monster movies is to elicit viewer sympathy for the monster(s) and those human characters who would defend or protect them. Further, one of the generic pleasures of monster movies is getting to see monsters destroy human cities and civilization — like most horror films, monster films revel in the destructive power of the return of the cultural repressed. One of the key arguments of my paper (and it is not a new one) is that monster films (like their slightly higher-class cousins, the disaster films) are particularly potent vehicles for environmental messages, precisely because so many cinematic monsters, from King Kong to the giant ants in Them! (1954) to the dinos of the Jurassic Park trilogy, serve as thinly veiled substitutes for real-life animal populations, happily living their lives until they are rendered monstrous due to the incursion of humans into their world. However, these generalities aside, I am especially interested in The Lost World: Jurassic Park because of its specifically environmentalist (and anti-environmentalist) discourses and its plethora of stock characters we would expect to see involved in environmentalist debates: scientists, Earth First activists, big game hunters, and unscrupulous big business CEOS. Now I just need to sort out what this all means.
(In this connection, I am grateful to Steve for pointing out that there is present-day tourism occurring at the old shooting locations for Jurassic Park.)
Monday, April 30 Harry Shearer (he of Spinal Tap and Simpsons fame), opens his new film on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, The Big Uneasy, for one night only in 150 theaters nationwide. Sadly, none in Oregon. Theater listings available at the film’s website. Just click the title to link.
James Cameron’s Avatar is making a return to the cinemas soon with 9 minutes of extra footage for the kind of double-dip that’s in the black, not the red. This repetition encouraged me to repeat my own ecocritical reflections on the film, this time to move outside of the borders of the narrative, its production, and its place within Anglo-America reception of Hollywood, expanding the scope of media ecologies within which the film circulates. If we can pull back from the “Dances with Smurfsâ€â€”white man saves the indigenous people from themselves and the bad-white-men critique as well as from the concern over fetishization of the virtual/3D world as the place to love and protect instead of the “real†world, new perspectives come into view. But let me be clear, the above are valid, crucial concerns; the point here is not to discard them, but to pull back, zoom out, for a view of other ecocritically relevant vectors that intersect in Avatar.
Specifically, let us consider the film’s performance in the People’s Republic of China, the 2nd largest economy on earth—a leader in green tech development but also in carbon emissions. Avatar enjoyed mass popularity, mass box office revenues, in China. This is unsurprising in the cultural context given the history of James Cameron’s Titanic. Then President Jiang Zemin publicly promoted that film, encouraging the people to see it—that at a time when China’s import of Hollywood films was under a strict and limited quota. From the official Beijing reception, Titanic was a great film because it articulated unflinchingly and without subtlety the levels of class separation (Jack below deck and Rose above), the impossibility of the classes ending up together, and the massive catastrophe of capitalism’s approach to domination of nature through technology. Titanic as communist propaganda! So, China was primed for the latest James Cameron narrative film. And the Chinese reception is instructive for seeing a film outside of the Anglo-American framework of disavowing our enjoyment of Hollywood through cynicism that replicates the attitudes it is meant to repudiate.
The popularity of Avatar in China was met, however, with mixed reception by Beijing. Quite possibly, the narrative of forceful liberation of indigenous populations from themselves was a little too allegorically familiar. As a result, the 2D version of the film was reduced, limiting the population who could watch the film to those able to pay the higher 3D ticket prices. In fact, the allegorical force of the Na’vi is apparent through the various cosprotests (costume protests, as in cosplay) that deployed Cameron’s story for real world struggles: Palestine, London…
The primary point here is that eco-media and ecocritique are no less susceptible to being inscribed and practiced within frameworks such as the nation-state even though the media ecologies within which they function, like global climate change, sprawl across all sorts of boundaries and are unevenly distributed.
The latest in a long list of film and television programs to shoot on location in Hawai’i, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Disney, Summer 2011) finished shooting on Oahu this past week. Aloha Today covered the wrap party. For a list of Current Productions being shot in Hawai’i see: the Hawaii Film Office. James Cameron, for example, visited clear-cutting operations while shooting location backdrops for Avatar, as covered online by Blastr. Fan related tourism, for example 4×4 jeep tours to the Jurassic Park set, raise further questions about the socio-ecological impact of film production in Hawai’i. Earlier this year, according to NPR, fans of Lost arrived on from around the world to attend the special premier of the show’s final season.
Here’s the first Pirates 4 teaser, prepared by Disney for Comic-Con.
Four years after When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee follows with his sequel If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise airing on HBO this coming Monday. David Itzkoff from the New York Times interviews Lee. HBO’s website also includes an interview:
For those interested in Robin and Joe’s ASLE CFP, this CFP might be of interest too:
Announcing the Joint 2011 Annual Meetings of the
Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (AFHVS),
Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS),
& Society for Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
June 9 – 12, 2011
University of Montana – Missoula
Call for Participation
The conference theme acknowledges the site for the meetings in Montana, which is known as Big
Sky Country because of its expansive landscapes dotted with working farms, ranches, forests, and
wild areas. The Big Sky also encompasses the broader global context linking food and agricultural systems around the world. In many ways, Montana shares characteristics with rural areas elsewhere. In their struggle for sustainable livelihoods and food security, farmers, ranchers, and their communities are
challenged by concentration of economic power and the vagaries of global markets. Yet, like in
many other areas, Montanans are cultivating place-based innovations in food, farming and
conservation. Thus, on the one hand, the industrialization, concentration, and globalization of the dominant food system profoundly influence how food is produced, processed, and consumed. On the other hand, there are also spaces of resistance and creativity in which people attempt to govern and shape their relationships with food and
agricultural systems.
Acknowledging these strategies for transformation, the 2011 theme highlights people, partnerships and policies. At the core of efforts to grow innovative food and agriculture systems are talented and dedicated individuals.
Making effective collective action possible, partnerships honor connections among people and organizations across public and private sectors. Lastly, attention to policies signals the broader context of government, trade, and legal
agreements that shape local, regional, national, and global food and agricultural politics and
practices. Join us under the Big Sky to explore the possibilities and strategies for change.
Although our organizations encourage a broad spectrum of topics at our conferences, we especially encourage papers, posters, panel sessions, roundtables, and workshops that speak directly to the theme. We welcome not only
academic sessions, but also strongly encourage activists, government staff, and those with practical knowledge of food and agricultural systems to participate. We welcome submissions on all aspects of food, nutrition, and
agriculture, including those related to:
§ Art, Media, & Literary Analyses
§ Change & Development
§ Culture & Cultural Geography
§ Environment & Climate Change
§ Agroecology & Conservation
§ Ethics & Philosophy
§ Food Safety & Risk
§ Gender & Ethnicity
§ Globalization
§ History
§ Inequality, Access, Security & Justice
§ Knowledge
§ Local Food Systems
§ Pedagogy
§ Politics, Policies & Governance in National & Global Contexts
§ Research Methods, Practices & Issues
§ Social Action & Social Movements
§ Sustainability
§ Science & Technologies
Tours (tentative):
Montana is home to many food, farming, and conservation initiatives that will make for
lively and informative tours. Our tentative plans include the following:
Journey up the famed Blackfoot River valley where ranchers rear grass-fed cattle for local markets, practice rest-rotation grazing, and participate in one of the most significant efforts at community-based watershed management, wildlife conservation and land use planning – the Blackfoot Challenge.
Explore efforts to build the infrastructure for local food markets – from the farm level, to a highly-successful growers’ marketing cooperative, to micro-processing and business assistance, and to delivery to restaurants and
cafeterias.
Visit the Flathead Indian Reservation, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, to
learn about water rights, tribal sovereignty, cultural heritage, and environmental stewardship.
Explore several initiatives working with people, partnerships, and policies to enhance community food security and to protect the fertile soils that are the basis of all food systems.
Procedures for Submitting Abstracts:
Posters, Papers, Panels, Roundtables or Workshops
Due Date: February 1, 2011
Types of Sessions: Submissions may include proposals for:
1) Research or Project Posters
2) Individual papers (can have multiple authors)
3) Panels (3-4 papers around a single theme)
4) Roundtables (informal discussion with several leaders on a particular topic)
5) Workshops (interactive session providing some training and opportunity for collective thought and creativity)
Submission: Abstracts should be submitted electronically and on-line. A web-based format for submissions will become available in late fall 2010. Watch the websites for the societies and the conference for more details.
The following contents will be required:
1) Type of submission
2) Title
3) Submitter’s name, organizational affiliation, and full mailing address
4) Submitter’s e-mail address
5) Submitter’s telephone number
6) Names and organizational affiliations of
co-authors on papers or posters
7) Email addresses for all co-authors, panelists, and/or roundtable participants
8) Abstract (250 words or less) describing the proposed paper, poster, panel, roundtable, or
workshop. For panels, please include an abstract for the panel as a whole, and an individual abstract for each individual paper. Include contact information for the moderator (name, affiliation, e-mail, and phone) and each
presenter. Other types of sessions involving more than one presenter should include name, affiliation, e-mail, and phone number for each person involved.
Notification of status of proposal
will be sent by February 28th.
Direct your submissions to one of the following:
ASFS Student Paper Committee Chair: Riki Saltzman<mailto:Riki.Saltzman@iowa.edu>Riki.Saltzman@iowa.edu
AFHVS Student Paper Committee Chair: Janet Chrzan <mailto:jchrzan@sas.upenn.edu>jchrzan@sas.upenn.edu
The Hindi film Peepli Live (Anusha Rizvi, 2010) is about two brothers in the heart of rural India who seek the help of a local politician because of fears they will lose their farm. Unconcerned the politician mockingly suggests that the brothers commit suicide and benefit from a government scheme that aids the families of indebted farmers who have done so. Peepli Live screened at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, the first Hindi film ever for the festival.