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Attacking the Pandora oil sands
Opinion | National Post | Peter Foster | March 05, 2010
Read the full article on the originating site
One of the almost flogged-to-death human interest stories of this Sunday’s Oscars is that the two leading candidates for Best Picture — Avatar and The Hurt Locker — were made by directors who were once married to each other: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. Rooters for the bomb disposal underdog thus include both those who would like to see a woman win Best Picture for the first time, and the vast cohort of Hollywood ex-wives.
However, there are plenty of other reasons to hope that Canadianborn Mr. Cameron fails to own the podium, including the fact that his film was this week cited approvingly as part of a vicious ongoing campaign against the Alberta oilsands.
Perhaps Avatar’s most outspoken critic is Ann McElhinney. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington two weeks ago, Ms. McElhinney noted— to Tea Party cheers— that Avatar might be both beautiful and compelling, but it was also an “anti-American, anticapitalist, anti-mining rant.”
Despite Avatar’s boffo box office (well over US$2-billion worldwide, and counting), the movie has also been slammed by critics ranging from the Vatican through the Marine Corps to liberals who don’t like its white-man-saving-the-natives theme.
The film’s hero, Jake Scully, takes the reverse-schizophrenic form of single brain with two bodies — one crippled human, one bounding native Avatar. In the course of the movie, Jake’s Avatar evolves from being the most annoying alien since Jar Jar Binks to the Ultimate Freedom Fighter. Of his handicapped human military veteran status, The New Yorker noted wryly that it was 2154, and Obamacare still hadn’t passed!
The redoubtable Ms. McElhinney is one half of a still-married filmmaking team, along with Phelim McAleer. This Irish duo knows whereof they speak when it comes to mining and environmental issues. They have made two excellent films: Mine Your Own Business, on the campaign by big, well-funded NGOs to prevent mining development whatever the cost in jobs and development prospects for poor countries; and Not Evil Just Wrong, about Al Gore’s brand of climate change hysteria.
Mr. McAleer has achieved YouTube fame by fearlessly asking inconvenient questions of the Green Elite, including Mr. Gore. He was interviewed from the Copenhagen Climate Change conference dressed as a polar bear and under missile attack from outraged True Believers!
Avatar’s polarizing effect was moved up another notch this week — strengthening Ms. McElhinney’s case— when a bunch of Usual Suspect NGOs and native groups took a full-page ad in the Hollywood magazine Variety (see it below) to praise the film and hijack its already eco-hysterical meaning. The ad’s heading is “James Cameron & Avatar… You have our vote!” Below is an aerial shot of the Alberta oilsands and the less-than-imaginative legend “Canada’s Avatar Sands.”
The ad claims that indigenous people are being endangered by toxic pollution and “future oil spills;” that Shell, BP and Exxon are synonymous with Avatar’s invading “Sky People,” and that the heavy equipment used to mine the oilsands equate to the movie’s Hell trucks, which “are used to mine the most polluting, expensive and unobtainium oil to feed America’s addiction.”
The ad claims that Mr. Cameron knows all about this. After all, he was “born and raised near the majestic boreal forest.” True, but that was in Ontario, more than a thousand miles from the oilsands. This reminds us that the boreal forest is in fact vast — around thirteen times the size of California — and that the area affected is micro-minuscule, and subject both to recovery and obsessive legal attention, as this week’s trial of Syncrude for inadvertently allowing ducks to alight on a tailings pond indicates. Although an easily-chilled Globe and Mail reporter might describe a video of an oil-soaked duck being attacked by a raven as “chilling,” it hardly ranks with interplanetary genocide.
The Variety ad looks like another fevered brainchild from Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence. According to Mr. Smith, “We want Hollywood, and the powerful thought leaders there, to know Avatar does a great job of exposing the Tar Sands.”
Mr. Smith is himself an award-winning thought leader. Last year, the National Post presented him with the first Rubber Duck Award for junk science. The awards were in fact named after Mr. Smith’s book, Slow Death by Rubber Duck, “a shoddy compilation of unproven science scares and junk science gimmicks.” The award was not in fact presented for the book, but for turning Environmental Defence into “a fountainhead of junk science agitation, chemophobia and government lobbying.”
Not that the Variety ad necessarily misrepresents Mr. Cameron’s own green posturing. He has said of his movie (which was produced by evil, right-wing, capitalist corporate giant Fox) “If you have to go 4.5 light years to another, made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of the world that we have right here, well, you know what, that’s the wonder of cinema right there, that’s the magic.”
Mmm. A bit garbled, but he seems to be saying that we mere Earthlings lack his ecological insights.
Mr. Cameron has also said “I think science fiction is a way of making history exciting by putting it in the future and taking you to a new planet and showing you exactly the same s—-that’s been happening for the last 2,000 years.”
But which s—-would be what? Hypocritical anti-commercial posturing, even as you’re raking it in?
Go Hurt Locker!
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