The plot of Hollywood’s ‘blockbuster’ Armageddon proposes that a group of roughneck oil-well drillers armed with nuclear weapons and a spaceship will save the planet from an asteroid. As plausible as that might seem, perhaps it is worthwhile considering climate change and environmental degradation as more immediate threats. In 2006, a report did that and highlighted Hollywood’s impact on the environment.

The report estimated that Hollywood can classify its emissions among the largest in California. Exploding vehicles, diesel generators and other special effects amount to 127,000 tonnes of diesel and ozone emissions annually. Hollywood’s carbon emissions are second only to petroleum industries. In addition, 34,015 tonnes of waste are produced on movie and television sets each year. 

The entertainment industry has received little criticism for its environmental record and virtually no limits placed upon its emissions. This is unsurprising as the industry defines California and its governor is a product of action films. Hollywood’s summer ‘blockbusters’ are anticipated throughout the world and generate huge profits.  

Environmental funding is generous in California but is only a fraction of the entertainment industry’s revenue. For example, the Bush administration funds $287 million annually to California for environmental initiatives. Still, Armageddon generated over half a billion dollars, and is just one of numerous Hollywood hits.  

Fortunately the industry has been making strives to reduce its ecological impact. Several films have blazed the zero emissions trail in Hollywood including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. More recently Evan Almighty was the first comedy to go zero emissions by planting trees to offset its carbon pollution. However, zero emission movies are the exception rather than the norm. 

Hollywood’s business is to create a fantasy world, but that should not negate its responsibility to environment. In a society that is increasingly becoming media literate, perhaps more questions should be asked when we see unnecessary waste created by entertainment.  

August 22, 2007

The agricultural landscape of Canada is often analyzed critically within the environmental community. Corporate agriculture absorbs the majority of ridicule, justifiably so. Corporations promote chemicals, genetically modified organisms and the mechanization of farming. Undesirably, this criticism has trickled down to any farmers that use agribusiness products. This approach has lead to an adversarial position between farmers and environmentalists, though this mentality may be shifting.

Those that work closest to the land have the most interest in protecting it. Rather than an intellectual or idealistic concept, farmers are immersed in nature and understand it on an intimate level. However the reality of food production in Canada has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Inputs into agriculture have become intensive and costly, while the amount of money received has declined.

Family farms have gone broke and banks now dictate farm production using loan application plans. Corporate agriculture could not be happier as the bank ‘assisted’ plans often focus on the use of agribusiness products. This new system has been responsible for the demise of small towns throughout Canada; the Prairie Provinces have been particularly hard hit. Many of the Prairies small towns at first declined, but have now disappeared.

Resilience lives on in the pockets that remain. The village of Clearwater, Manitoba, (population just over 60 people) has innovated to maintain their way of life. The community has opened its doors to teaching urbanites about the little spoken of values of farm life. They teach how to garden, can tomatoes, bake bread and most importantly, how to take pride in their community. These skills, once held by the majority of Canadians, are becoming an endangered knowledge.

As a young environmentalist I visited Clearwater and was struck by the wealth of knowledge that is lacking in the environmental movement. While criticisms have become honed, we often lack essential traditional knowledge. The protection of land needs to be hand in hand with the ability to work it. Should the worst ecological predictions become a reality, criticism will not sustain us, but canned tomatoes might.
 

Dave Vasey is an Environmental Technologist who graduated from Durham College in 2001. Currently Dave is studying at the Faculty of Earth, Environment and Resources at the University of Manitoba.