Nothing Says 'Abandon All Hope' LIke A Trip To China With Director Of "Manufactured Landscapes"

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Burtynsky says he refrains from politicizing his work. He is not holding a referendum on whether industrial society on balance is good or bad. It would be too easy for people just to vote yes or no, he explains. Rather, he wants viewers to look at things they rarely see--the extractive and industrial processes that make our modern lives possible and the waste--the piles and piles and piles of waste--that result. He wants viewers to look at these things deeply, carefully, quietly, with a patient gaze.

Along on the trip are director Jennifer Baichwal and her film crew who do more than simply record Burtynsky's actions and photos. They do some observing for themselves, showing us a motion-picture version of Burtynsky's manufactured landscapes. Inside Chinese factories we are treated to repetitive manual assembly operations that make one's wrists hurt just from watching. We see young, barefoot Bangladeshi men bailing crude oil out of a half-open, beached oil tanker which is being disassembled for scrap. We get brief interviews with young Chinese factory workers who brag about their prowess, their productivity and the reputation of their employers, all without conveying the slightest awareness that their bodies (particularly their wrists) are being used up to keep costs to a minimum.

Beyond the cumulative environmental and workplace horrors of China's economic juggernaut, viewers feel themselves dwarfed by the scale of operations they witness. They are treated by turns to a seemingly endless factory assembly building; a massive shipyard; a high-rise apartment next to the squat, densely packed residences of old Shanghai; and finally to the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest. The scale is vast. But that in itself is not so troubling. It is the momentum that these places convey.

China is a society with huge built-in momentum that is everywhere on display in this film. To politically and sociologically aware eyes it does not seem possible that anything could deflect Chinese society from its current course, save a brick wall--perhaps in the form of peak oil or massive drought or plague. It is to this thought that I think I owe my nightmares. For one wishes neither for China's current course to continue, nor for the arrival of those things which seem potent enough to stop it. It is hard enough to imagine North America and Europe coming to their senses and embarking on a crash program for creating a sustainable society. After seeing Manufactured Landscapes, it is all but impossible to imagine China embarking on such a course. With a population of 1.3 billion of which tens of millions stream each year from the countryside into the cities; a hypercaffeinated growth rate of 10 percent which is necessary to create jobs for all those urban arrivals; and greenhouse gas emissions now surpassing those of the United States would it be unfair to say that as goes China, so goes the world? That is the stuff from which nightmares are manufactured.

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http://www.energybulletin.net/39105.html

[gulfcoastliberal]

1. K&R

nt

[hogwyld]

2. Sooner or later, China will come to the same industrial end

That the U.S. went through in the late '60's as labor costs rose, along with Lake Erie catching fire. One day, the ecology will bite back.

[XemaSab]

3. Methinks the ecology is already biting back

worse than ours ever did to us.

The question is which will fold first: the people, the government, or the environment. :(