[joewp]

I just saw this film and it's haunting. It shows the Chinese industrial revolution in pictures and video, with a commentary by the subject of the film, photographer Edward Burtynsky. He mentions his epiphany about how oil is ingrained in his life, and mentions PO, but it's mostly about how humans have changed the landscape of the world, mostly for the worst. The film opens with an incredible journey down the side of workbenches in a Chinese factory that lasts a full 8 minutes that ends with a panorama of of the entire building. It's hard to digest how many people are working in this factory mostly making junk for westerners.

It makes you wonder what we humans have done, and for what?

Here's the film's website: http://www.mongrelmedia.com/films/Manuf ... capes.html

[Narz]

Looks really fascinating. I hope to see it (for free) at some point.

[eric_b]

Wow. Whoa. Phew. Yeah I saw it.

Just staggering. Burtynsky is PO aware, as he mentions in the narration. About 50 minutes in those shots of huge piles of coal and the work on the three gorges damn .. insane. Then there's the dozen or so cities in the flood plain that were being broken down and moved brick by brick - by the former residents!. Near the end those shots of Shanghai, all the new highrises.. epic. All those coal fired plants being built to keep those highrises humming. You get the sense of how quickly our exploding numbers and demand for a high energy lifestyle is carving this planet up. I heard this figure somewhere, was it here? - Something about how an area at least the size of Ohio has been paved/developed in the US.

Now that we've invested so much in this way of living I imagine there will be a frenzy of very damaging activity to desperately keep the lights on as easy energy becomes increasingly scarce.

Oh yeah, there was that part showing the recycling (in China - entire movie shot in China) of all this electonic waste from the US. Pulling every last scrap of metal from old PC boards, beating the metal legs off the ICs from old-school PCs. Yikes. Just the scale, the amount, of the waste was sickening. The entropy of our energy intensive society is remarkably ugly.

[steam_cannon]

I was just thinking today about the movie "The New World". It romanticized the story a bit too much but their recreations of native villages, an English Port town, and English Gardens were excellent. What struck me was how the English Gardens were so sterile looking, poisonous unproductive pretty looking plants in perfect rows. And just as bad was the crazy port town with buildings squeezed into every inch. All this as opposed to the more peaceful and balanced looking native villages.

I also like in "The New World" how the Chief sent an emissary to carve notches on sticks, one notch for every English man he saw. He would have come back with nothing but sawdust. Overpopulation reshapes landscapes, did back then and it still does...

By the way, there is a flash version of the preview for "Manufactured Landscapes" if you don't want to use quicktime to view it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv23xwe0BoU

[auscanman]

I was very fotunate to be able to go to a screening of this movie at the University of Toronto. The producers had a Q & A session after. Apparently the 'guides' the Chinese government sent to travel with them prevented them from filming several even more shocking scenes, and curtailed a few others. The 'guides' were particularly uneasy at the e-junk recycling village, since recycling e-waste is officially illegal in China, and also at the scene showing the villagers on the Yangtze deconstructing their village and moving it to higher ground. The producers said they were hounded by locals at that town who were going on about how they had been cheated and lied to by the Chinese government, and wanted to get to say so on screen. By the sounds of it, their filming almost intitiated a riot!

All in all I felt this was a great movie. At times the producers were struggling somewhat on whether they wanted this to be a biography of the photographer they were following, or if it was about the consequences of development. The brief 5 minute or so clip in which the photographer talks about PO could have been better integrated, but was an aspect that convinced me that the photographer had figured things out pretty well. Hopefully it will pique a few viewers interest to find out more about PO.

I particularly recommend taking cornucopians to see this movie. I would love to see the arguments they come up with against the many scenes of utter devastation. The consequences of the over 2 billion in China and India improving their standard of living even to a minor extent are going to be what takes us over the cliff IMO. Having lived in China as a young child (Shanghai from 1985-1987, when I was 3-5), I still remember the incredible number of people packed into that city (and that you could never be alone anywhere in that city at any time), and how it was still very crowded in all of the rural areas I went to. I think the memory of this is part of what caused me to be concerned with overpopulation and resource depletion as I got older. I can fully appreciate the devastation being caused as these 1.3 billion in China pursue 'the western dream'. Yet, when I try to explain to others that 1.3 billion people living a lifestyle that would use only 20% of the energy we do in the west would devastate the world... they simply can't grasp it.

[eric_b]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('auscanman', 'I') was very fotunate to be able to go to a screening of this movie at the University of Toronto. The producers had a Q & A session after. Apparently the 'guides' the Chinese government sent to travel with them prevented them from filming several even more shocking scenes, and curtailed a few others. The 'guides' were particularly uneasy at the e-junk recycling village, since recycling e-waste is officially illegal in China, and also at the scene showing the villagers on the Yangtze deconstructing their village and moving it to higher ground. The producers said they were hounded by locals at that town who were going on about how they had been cheated and lied to by the Chinese government, and wanted to get to say so on screen. By the sounds of it, their filming almost intitiated a riot!

[I_Like_Plants]

Wow, I'd like to see it too, if it's possible to get ahold if it in the Empire.

I remember realizing years ago, maybe decades, that wow, everything around me is manmade.

When we got away from being hunter-gatherers (the fall from Eden) we've lived like this ever since - afraid of the natural world and living in our own little manufactured world like bees in a hive.