The Fifth Annual Center for Environmental Policy Luncheon
2007-19
It is not surprising that many Washingtonians find themselves put off by the current rhetoric of environmentalism, which so often sacrifices economic growth and personal choice in the name of conservation.
Fortunately, alternative viewpoints are available. For Todd Myers, director of WPC’s Center for Environmental Policy (CEP), environmental protection, choice, and prosperity go hand-in-hand. Indeed, free market principles – which after all share with environmentalism a concern for the efficient allocation of scarce resources – provide many of the most effective ways to protect the environment.
These ideas provided the overarching theme for WPC’s Fifth Annual Center for Environmental Policy Lunch, held on July 19th with almost 150 attendees. Featuring a discussion with Phelim McAleer and Ann McEnhinny, producers and directors of the groundbreaking film Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism, the lunch also honored the Cascade Land Conservancy with the CEP’s Third Annual Environmental Innovator Award.
The Environmental Innovator Award seeks to recognize new ways of protecting the environment that harness economic prosperity, respect property rights, and value a broad range of viewpoints. The Cascade Land Conservancy (CLC), Myers explained to the audience, has reflected such ideals in its use of market principles to protect forest and farmland in Washington. Most notably, CLC has worked to keep large areas of Western Washington forest economically viable through selective lumber harvesting, helping to ensure their protection in the long run by preventing conversion to development.
The organization has also coordinated with developers—often depicted as the bêtes noirs of environmentalists—on business terms to consolidate areas of development and green space, an arrangement which both promotes growth and creates more ecologically sound open spaces.
All the while, the Cascade Land Conservancy has approached its work with an open attitude. As Gene Duvernoy, CLC's President, told the audience, his organization’s goal is to “build a big tent.” In doing so, he said, groups such as his must take ideology out of their thinking about the environment, and work within the marketplace in order to ensure environmental conservation in Washington. Receiving an award from an organization such as WPC, therefore, “really means a lot to the Cascade Land Conservancy. It means we are starting to get it right.”
Next, in introducing McAleer and McEnhinny, Myers raised the issue of the public’s tendency to take all environmental claims at their face value. So-called “green buildings,” for example, have been widely supported even as they in fact consume more energy than the buildings they replaced. On the international level, many have overlooked that economic growth, not subscription to the Kyoto protocols, is the factor most highly correlated with reductions in a country’s CO2 output.
In other words, there is too often an impulse to protect “green” efforts themselves, rather than the environment that they aim to conserve. What is needed, then, is greater skepticism and careful analysis of environmental claims—something that Mine Your Own Business has done well to provide.
Phelim McAleer had heard the story before: A small town struggling against a multinational corporation to preserve its natural beauty and traditional way of life. This, at least, was all the press that filtered out of the Romanian village of Rosia Montana before McAleer decided to investigate for himself the planned gold mine there. A self-described “liberal European journalist,” his first instinct was that he would be uncovering yet another story of corporate environmental irresponsibility.
What McAleer ultimately discovered, however, was not so much a battle between “indigenous peasants and big corporations,” but one that pitted villagers against aloof foreign environmentalists lacking in the grassroots support they claimed for themselves. Writing for the Financial Times, McAleer’s articles on the town quickly caused an international stir.
Soon McAleer was approached by Gabriel Resources, the Canadian firm attempting to build the mine, who offered to finance further work on the Rosia Montana story. He agreed, but with one caveat: Gabriel could have no editorial control over his project whatsoever. Surprisingly, the firm agreed, and thus was born Mine Your Own Business, McAleer’s and McEnhinny’s 2006 film that documented not only the true story of Rosia Montana, but the “dark side of environmentalism” worldwide.
As it turns out, Rosia Montana is not the bucolic paradise it is so often depicted to be by environmentalists ensconced in the more prosperous parts of Romania. Instead, it is a poor town where communist-era mining has decimated the local environment, and the planned Gabriel Resources mine is the only hope for employment, prosperity, and, ironically, ecological restoration. Indeed, Gabriel is planning to not only use modern, environmentally sound mining techniques, but has promised to help clean up the area’s highly polluted water as well.
The producers showed the audience a clip from the film in which one of the town’s young jobless miners, George, takes McAleer to see for himself the bright orange stream running through Rosia Montana’s outskirts – a product of the state-run mine. Having put up with such pollution all his life and facing unemployment, George is understandably irked that so many Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) are actively trying to keep private foreign investment in his town’s one viable industry out.
Much of Rosia Montana apparently agrees. One of the more notable things about McAleer’s work is that he actually asks ordinary Romanians how they feel about their own town, mining and development—something which foreign environmentalists have apparently neglected to do.
Many of the most powerful clips McAleer showed to the lunch audience were those contrasting the statements of prominent environmentalists—none of whom are Romanian—with footage from the impromptu interviews he conducted on the streets of Rosia Montana. In this way, for instance, McAleer puts definitively to rest the idea, forwarded by a Belgian environmentalist, that the locals would prefer to drive a horse cart rather than a car.
Indeed, in explaining the film’s popularity, the filmmakers cited the creeping suspicion among many that something was wrong with the language of contemporary environmentalism. Mine Your Own Business, above all, puts on display the anti-development, and even implicitly racist, attitudes of many prominent first-world environmentalists.
In one of the film’s most revealing moments, McAleer and George interview Mark Fenn, the World Wildlife Fund’s man in southern Madagascar, about poverty, mining and the environment there. When Fenn explains that a planned mine in Ft. Dauphin, on the island’s southeast coast, would destroy not only the local environment but the “quaint” traditional way of life, George, obviously frustrated, reminds him that the locals are in fact very poor. Fenn provides the following surprising reply:
“...how do we perceive what is rich and what is poor?… [In Ft. Dauphin] people are economically disadvantaged, people have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family, and you count how many times in a day that family smiles, if you could measure stress, and then I… put you with a family well off… and you count how many times people smile, and measure stress, and you look at how those people interact, then you tell me who is rich and who is poor.”
Even if locals do earn some money, Fenn continues,
“…they spend it… if somebody finds a sapphire and gets like… two million ariary for that sapphire, three, four days it’s gone. They’ll buy cases of beer, invite their friends, they’ll throw a party… buy their stereo, buy their jeans, three, four days the money’s gone… In Madagascar the indicators of quality of life are not housing, they’re not nutrition… they’re not health, in a lot of cases, it’s not education – a lot of children of Ft. Dauphin don’t go to school because their parents don’t consider that to be important.”
When putting together their film, McAleer and McElhinney consistently encountered such attempts by environmentalists to “infantilize” locals. McAleer said “quaint” was one word he was fed up with hearing in reference to impoverished villages.
Most importantly, however, the pair use their film to prove the basis of such chauvinism utterly incorrect. Ordinary Malagasies, when actually asked, express both a strong appreciation for their children’s education and a keen business sense. If one looks at people in the developing world in this way – as humans who want the fruits of modernity for themselves and their children just like anybody else – it makes it much harder, as McEnhinny put it, to neglect human development in favor of protecting rare animals. Nor, as Mine Your Own Business points out, are these things necessarily opposed. As the filmmakers told the audience, “The best way to preserve the environment… is to make people rich.”
The film ends with a silent shot of George and crumbling Rosia Montana fading away through a van’s rear window – a poignant reminder that even as we return to comfortable Western lives, our choices and attitudes towards environmental policy carry tangible human consequences.
Following the film clips, McAleer and McEnhinny took questions from the audience. What, one attendee asked, can an ordinary person – far from places like Rosia Montana and Ft. Dauphin – do about the injustices seen in Mine Your Own Business? McElhinny responded that things as simple as writing letters to the editor can have a significant impact. After all, with so much of today’s news premised on the idea that NGOs are inherently unbiased and well intentioned – a product of what McElhinny called “lazy journalism” – it is far too easy for the public to simply accept that which is reported by the mainstream media.
In places like Rosia Montana, as McAleer and McElhinny’s film shows, such a lack of skepticism is potentially disastrous, both for the people living there, and for the environment itself.