This documentary centers around the commercial development of the land around Austin, Texas, particularly Barton Springs, a natural spring that locals have used for recreation for years. The future of the aquifer beneath, which waters cities like San Antonio as well as Austin, is also problematic. Whence the water for the sprinklers on the golf course? Where does the weed killer from all those lawns settle?
We hear the guy, Gary Bradley, who sounds reasonable enough, nobody's notion of a greedy, reckless money monger, who bought up the land and intended to put a planned housing development on it -- almost identical new houses, golf course, a green belt right out of Lewis Mumford, and the rest. It was opposed by Austin's considerable community of activists and was stymied -- after Bradley had put money "up front" for sewers and some infrastructure -- stymied by limitations on the number of houses he could build on the land. He then teamed up with a notorious mining outfit that hired a lobbyist. The result, however one wants to twist it, was a victory for the developers. There is a Wal-Mart Supercenter in their future.
"Land developer." That's an interesting concept. A land developer is someone like Bradley who buys a great area of land then chops it up into smaller parcels and sells them at a profit. In that sense, a butcher is a "cow developer." Robert Redford reminisces about the summers he spent at Barton Springs as a boy. Willie Nelson is around to make a few comments. Bradley is articulate and intelligent and frustrated. The lobbyist is smooth and patient, musing on his work as he paints and builds model warplanes. But the most articulate commentator is a redneck farmer whose corn field are disappearing, engulfed by urban sprawl. "All houses," he says. "Ain't no more farms. Farmin' is out. . . . What they gonna eat when there's no more farms? That's what I want to know." He echoes the Reverend Thomas Malthus who saw this dilemma coming two hundred years ago.
Malthus is thought of as discredited because his predictions didn't materialize as soon as expected. (The industrial revolution came as a surprise.) But the proposition remains the same. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man" The environmentalists we see, some of whom sound a little kooky, have a point when they argue that developers think in terms of "cost" and others think of "value." We can measure and, to some extent, like Bradley, predict how many dollars we may make in profit or lose by taking the wrong chance. But one of the environmentalists states that she is turned off by golf courses because they are too perfect, too manicured, an artifact, but not God's artifact. What is the dollar value of, say, the Grand Canyon? Why not build forests of motels, souvenir shops, and fast food places along both its rims? And lush gated communities at the Sonoran bottom? The value may be completely lost, sold down the river, but think of the profit.
The environmentalists will lose in the long run if things don't change dramatically -- and soon. In the last forty years the population of the United States has grown from 200M to more than 320M. The earth's population in 1950 was about 2B. Today it's more than 6B. By 2050 it will approach 12B. It's a familiar trajectory to anyone who's studied population irruptions and the crashes that follow, yet the Chinese seem to be the only nation on earth that recognizes the problem, let alone tries to do anything about it. I said "soon" before because there is a lag time of about two generations between doing something about the problem and realizing the effect. In other words, if you wait until the dimensions of the problem are self evident, it may be too late.
The film is slanted towards this point of view without attacking the explosion of human beings directly. I'm not sure the producers themselves, including Robert Redford, understand where the root of the problem lies. Making money the way Gary Bradley has is, as Redford points out more than once, making short-term profits at the expense of long-term values. But he also notes that the problem goes beyond Barton Springs. The point is not merely to save the springs and the Austin countryside from developers. It's that we must save the earth from ourselves.
There's a challenge for environmentalists and developers both, and neither seems ready to meet it. It's not always easy to interpret Malthus. ("Improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections" may be a reference to abortion.) He suggested that if we didn't check our appetites for reproduction, nature would, in the form of "vice" and "misery." Vice, left undefined, probably means crime. Misery I think most ethologists would define as stress-related disorders like ulcers or the complete breakdown of social organization, like that found in Calhoun's "behavioral sinks." Judging from this movie, the way it circumscribes itself, our capacity for over-reproduction is only exceeded by our capacity for denial. Pretty gloomy stuff. I guess that's why Malthus's notion is called the dismal theorem.
We hear the guy, Gary Bradley, who sounds reasonable enough, nobody's notion of a greedy, reckless money monger, who bought up the land and intended to put a planned housing development on it -- almost identical new houses, golf course, a green belt right out of Lewis Mumford, and the rest. It was opposed by Austin's considerable community of activists and was stymied -- after Bradley had put money "up front" for sewers and some infrastructure -- stymied by limitations on the number of houses he could build on the land. He then teamed up with a notorious mining outfit that hired a lobbyist. The result, however one wants to twist it, was a victory for the developers. There is a Wal-Mart Supercenter in their future.
"Land developer." That's an interesting concept. A land developer is someone like Bradley who buys a great area of land then chops it up into smaller parcels and sells them at a profit. In that sense, a butcher is a "cow developer." Robert Redford reminisces about the summers he spent at Barton Springs as a boy. Willie Nelson is around to make a few comments. Bradley is articulate and intelligent and frustrated. The lobbyist is smooth and patient, musing on his work as he paints and builds model warplanes. But the most articulate commentator is a redneck farmer whose corn field are disappearing, engulfed by urban sprawl. "All houses," he says. "Ain't no more farms. Farmin' is out. . . . What they gonna eat when there's no more farms? That's what I want to know." He echoes the Reverend Thomas Malthus who saw this dilemma coming two hundred years ago.
Malthus is thought of as discredited because his predictions didn't materialize as soon as expected. (The industrial revolution came as a surprise.) But the proposition remains the same. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man" The environmentalists we see, some of whom sound a little kooky, have a point when they argue that developers think in terms of "cost" and others think of "value." We can measure and, to some extent, like Bradley, predict how many dollars we may make in profit or lose by taking the wrong chance. But one of the environmentalists states that she is turned off by golf courses because they are too perfect, too manicured, an artifact, but not God's artifact. What is the dollar value of, say, the Grand Canyon? Why not build forests of motels, souvenir shops, and fast food places along both its rims? And lush gated communities at the Sonoran bottom? The value may be completely lost, sold down the river, but think of the profit.
The environmentalists will lose in the long run if things don't change dramatically -- and soon. In the last forty years the population of the United States has grown from 200M to more than 320M. The earth's population in 1950 was about 2B. Today it's more than 6B. By 2050 it will approach 12B. It's a familiar trajectory to anyone who's studied population irruptions and the crashes that follow, yet the Chinese seem to be the only nation on earth that recognizes the problem, let alone tries to do anything about it. I said "soon" before because there is a lag time of about two generations between doing something about the problem and realizing the effect. In other words, if you wait until the dimensions of the problem are self evident, it may be too late.
The film is slanted towards this point of view without attacking the explosion of human beings directly. I'm not sure the producers themselves, including Robert Redford, understand where the root of the problem lies. Making money the way Gary Bradley has is, as Redford points out more than once, making short-term profits at the expense of long-term values. But he also notes that the problem goes beyond Barton Springs. The point is not merely to save the springs and the Austin countryside from developers. It's that we must save the earth from ourselves.
There's a challenge for environmentalists and developers both, and neither seems ready to meet it. It's not always easy to interpret Malthus. ("Improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections" may be a reference to abortion.) He suggested that if we didn't check our appetites for reproduction, nature would, in the form of "vice" and "misery." Vice, left undefined, probably means crime. Misery I think most ethologists would define as stress-related disorders like ulcers or the complete breakdown of social organization, like that found in Calhoun's "behavioral sinks." Judging from this movie, the way it circumscribes itself, our capacity for over-reproduction is only exceeded by our capacity for denial. Pretty gloomy stuff. I guess that's why Malthus's notion is called the dismal theorem.