Boring and unimaginative but undeniably massively influential. Teaching right-wing Americans science is a tough job… but someones gotta do it!

9. The Day the Earth Stood Still

“If the Earth dies you die. If you die the Earth survives.” An alien visits earth dressed as Keanu Reeves and judges us for harming the species we share the planet with; so far so good. Unfortunately, retribution is inexplicably curtailed by gratuitous sentimentality by two of the offending species.

8. Sky Blue

This beautiful, post-apocalyptic Korean anime took 7 years to make.  It is 2142 and the planet’s atmosphere is destroyed. The elite minority live in high-tech city – Ecoban, served by the rest of humanity who toil beyond in the wasteland. The stage is set for some sexually-charged redistribution of wealth.

7. The Age of Stupid

Bold, punchy, non-compromising and powerful, Pete Postlethwaite stars as the last human stranded on a ravaged planet in 2055. He has access to servers from now and whiles away his time pulling up pertinent footage and asking the question on everyone’s lips - why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? This film is remarkable for how it was made and what it achieved. It was crowdfunded, pioneered a new distribution system, changed millions of minds and spawned the now global 10:10 climate campaign.

6. Moon

Moon is weird, disturbing and brilliant. Sam Rockwell is stranded alone on a remote mining outpost clocking in to his corporate overlords when he starts really freaking out. He is not alone. The ecological theme is not explicit but director Duncan Jones (Zowie Bowie) shines a fierce light on corporate appropriation of the individual. His bigger-budget follow up (Source Code) wrestles with the same themes. Ingenious and thrilling and seriously makes you long to get back to the nourishing embrace of a living biosphere.

5. The End of the Line

If footage came out of hunters with giant machines going on safari and rounding up every living thing on the savannah – elephant, deer, hippos, lions, cheetah, warthogs and killing everything – we would be horrified and demand they stopped. Yet this is what happens every single day on our oceans. Giant, industrial fishing fleets are going out and killing EVERYTHING. Don’t sit placid in front of another hollywood film with a heterosexual white guy running around with a gun shooting people before winning some docile girl. You are better than that. Watch this instead. The Real Story is corporations killing the natural world. This film is your invitation to get mad. Don’t kid yourself that individually buying less fish will make any difference. We need to get organised and stop these boats, the corporations doing this sick shit and the governments pumping them tax dollars. The film ends on a remarkably positive note. This is one problem we know how to fix. Saving the oceans requires us to make a global network of marine protected areas. Properly policed this would cost about $15 billion a year and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. The global fishing industry is currently subsidised by exactly that amount. What we need is political pressure to shift the subsidies from extraction to preservation. The oceans are ours. The time is now. Lets do this!

4. Wall E

Imagine the early pitch to hollywood producers: “we are going to make a children’s film about a robot left alone to clear up earth after it has been ransacked by humans that have now grown so fat they sit in floating chairs on a spaceship plugged into digital devices .”  A lengthy pause might have been followed with the question: “how are you going to make that enjoyable” The answer is with beauty and grace.

3. Samsara

Spearheading a new genre of cinema called Planet Porn the makers of Baraka have raised the bar again with this extraordinary visual feast. If you need reminding our home planet is where it is at – this ones for you.

2. The Cove

Yeah – it made me weep but not just because I love dolphins. It is clear humans will wreak havoc on the world in appalling and barbarous ways. Worst of all is institutionalised barbarism defended by bureaucrats. Slaughtering whales and dolphins is unpopular in Japan and the meat is dangerously high in mercury yet the government subsidises it and its partly funded by the ticket prices of animal lovers wanting a dolphin experience. A complex knot binds down the horror. This sort of madness and cruelty cannot be combatted with logic and reason. It takes the passionate intervention of determined people to create change in the world. This may be a totemic issue, not least because of the immense intelligence and sensitivity of our close cousins but we gain insight into other monstrous stupidities like European fisherman paid to toss fish overboard, the destruction of rainforest and the relentless acidification of oceans. One protagonist says “you are either an activist or you are inactive.” This film urges us to make a choice.

1. Avatar

Cameron creates a remarkable and vast alien world in which we can study ourselves. His genius subversion was to make a US-marine-like army in the pay of extractive mining corporations the baddy and indigenous, tribal people, who connect to the living fabric of their world, the heroes. That the film was watched by billions worldwide is perhaps the greatest push yet received for Gaia-consciousness. Who could bear to see the mighty tree fall at the hands of the vicious and greedy, militarised corporate forces and who could fail to see the same thing happening on our world? Eco, short for ecology, is about the connection of living things, to each other and to the planet. The last wild places on our planet are about to get torn apart by the machine. Watching films is fine but the time has come to take action.

The post The Top 10 Eco Films of All Time appeared first on EcoHustler.

The scenes of slaves being flayed and branded reminds us how barbaric and awful this recent historical episode was. Have we dealt with it properly? Not only have we not dealt with it properly – the vestiges still shape society.

The USA has by far the world’s biggest prison population at 3 million and over 75% of that population is non-white. The slaves may have been granted their “freedom” but many of their grandkids still rot in jail.

If you are poor and lack opportunity you are more likely to commit crimes to survive. This is not due to a moral defect, it is a fact of life.

As the TV show The Wire so dramatically explored the black market in drugs is about the only viable means for poor communities in the USA to make some money. Ensuring it remains black market enables an army of police to herd the non-white entrepreneurs into penitentiaries.

The War on Drugs is revealed to be simply the most effective tool of racist oppression for today’s legal framework.

Tarantino isn’t known for his social commentary and his main concern remains great characters who whip, beat, blast and bomb the shit out their enemies. He does this better then ever. In doing so he also subverts the whole meta-narrative of hollywood. Not only is the hero a smart, sexy, empowered black man, most of the baddies are white. 

Despite the fact that in many parts of the world non-whites are still oppressed it is hard to be struck by the fact that a lot has changed since the brazen, public brutality of institutionalised slavery. It is not just the violent overseers who sicken in the film but the prim white girls standing by in their finery like the grotesque wife of Assad.

Tarantino satisfactorily administers payback but the fact remains – in recent history widespread barbarity was everywhere. Not so long before that in medieval Europe citizens could be publicly “broken on the wheel” and a campaign was waged for hundreds of years against smart, empowered women who used indigenous knowledge – they were tortured to death as witches.

By looking back with fresh eyes at the rampant violence and misery that has shaped human history we are reminded that progress should surely be measured in the reduction of suffering, the improvement of well being and the sharing of these benefits and that morality ratchets up on the back of hard-one progress fought out by the brave.

The civil rights movement drove rapid change in a short period of time. One year you could beat your slave because you “owned” them and the next year you couldn’t. Today the concept of having a slave is anathema.

Progress requires that the rights of the oppressed always be defended against dark forces of conservatism that seek to maintain high concentrations of wealth and power within their historically (and violently) established clique.

For our generation, the major threat to human well being is one unimaginable at the time of the film (1858). Back then the human population was approximately 1.2 billion and humans had released almost no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most natural systems remained pristine and abundant.

Today the human population has grown exponentially, every natural system is in decline and thousands of linked climate labs spanning the world predict global temperature changes of 4 degrees. The bitterest irony, of course, is that whilst this is bad for all of us, it will hardest hit less developed countries near the equator.

The poor black countries that have been plundered for hundreds of years are about to get their next beating from the rich white man. Bow down and take the pain!

The aggressive, male, rich white overlords who own the fossil fuel companies and the media companies and the mining companies and the armies tell us that climate change is either not real or unavoidable. More generally, they perpetuate the myth that we need their brand of endless economic growths to generate well being. But they would say that wouldn’t they.

Civil rights, equal opportunities and the gay rights movement stand out in recent human history as our greatest achievements. But this wheel of progress doesn’t roll inevitably. It is driven by the courage of people who can see beyond the confines of their own time’s limited moral context and strive for higher ground.

Today, the greatest injustice is the economic war on nature.

Not only does this war harm us all, it decimates the opportunities of the unborn humans we hope will inherit the great wheel and roll it to unimaginable new frontiers.

What to do?

We can all be inspired by Django’s grit and bravery in the face of the oppressor and get active ourselves.

The forests are being plundered, the fisheries are disappearing and the black rhino is about to go extinct. The rich white man tells us the only solution is more economic growth and maybe a war or two to get his economic machine chewing up the world some more.

Like Django, we say “D’Artagnan, motherfuckers!” drag him from his horse and set the beast free. The next big ratchet of progress is giving rights to the natural world that sustains us.

The forest is fighting back. It is time for a Climate Revolution.

The post Django Unchained My Mind appeared first on EcoHustler.

This visceral, poignant, haunting behemoth of a movie takes no prisoners. It is simultaneously an unrelenting portrait of an evil man and the documenting of a period of history in which the world changed forever.

Drilling for oil is an inherently violent business. Man build’s giant machines to invade the earth and draw out the fossilized remains of organisms that existed millennia ago. The violence of their resurrection is matched by the fearful depths the prospectors will sink to within themselves to reach the black gold. The dark, seemingly limitless wealth in the belly of the earth is like the limitless evil we can draw on should we be so motivated.

Our antihero, Plainview, is tormented and evil yet presents himself as an honest family man, an `oil man’. This draws an unbroken connection between the dark insanity of the early days of oil and the republican oil men today who also are steeped in blood whilst professing Christian family values. More than this, that these wild, violent times are the immediate foundation of our culture throws our `civilization’ into sharp relief.

Finding this cheap almost limitless source of energy under our feet propelled humanity on an expansive projection that would subjugate much of the living world. We have changed our planet using oil powered technologies. If we ever needed reminding that this happened without a master plan this film is it. It is in a frenzied state that we have transformed our society into raging fire, fuelled by fossil fuel that is consuming the rest of the biosphere.

Emerging from the misery of oil exploration, with the greed and avarice, danger and death, presented with the back drop of a changing planet, with oil wars raging, we have this starkly beautiful film. This honest work of art allows us to see not just our own story but the interior workings of the mind of the species that sits atop the apex of life on this planet. At worst, we are stupid, bald monkeys on a collision course with extinction. But there is beauty on the road to oblivion; the dark horror the film describes is juxtaposed with the creative genius of the making of the film. It is humanities creative abilities that make existence worthwhile. Maybe there is hope.

The post Oil on the Brain (Review of There Will be Blood) appeared first on EcoHustler.