|
|
 |
 |
| |
The Last Stand
Joel St. Julien
The Last Stand: Ancient Redwoods and the Bottom Line
Produced by Holiday Phelan-Johnson
Trillium Films, 2002
Time and again, debates pop up surrounding that tricky ethical issue: "pricing nature." Some people feel that market economics should be applied everywhere, including the natural world. If consumers are demanding some natural resource, like lumber, business should be able to come in and provide it for them. From their vantage point, if an industry can find away to process more of a natural resource faster, that is a sign of progress.
Recently, however, more and more people have been questioning whether
it makes sense to measure progress based solely upon market concepts.
From their vantage point, you can't judge the value of—say a
tree—based only upon how much money you can get for it as timber.
Factors like biodiversity, air and water quality, aesthetic beauty
and more must be taken into account.
The Last Stand takes this rather abstract debate out of realm
of theory, and places it squarely in reality. Produced by Holiday
Phelan-Johnson, the hour-long documentary details the story of Pacific
Lumber, and its transformation from a sustainable business that created
jobs for Humboldt County, California, into an absentee-owned corporation
that tore a community apart through its unsustainable new policy of
clear-cutting old growth redwoods. The film covers the fifteen-year
struggle between environmental activists from inside and out of the
region, local residents and the business itself.
Pacific Lumber's origins are steeped in a rich history of hard-working employees and a sense of company pride. Humboldt County has the oldest redwood forest in the world, a fact in which the entire community prided itself. PL based their cutting practices on a concept called sustainable yield. This basically meant that the company never cut down more trees than the forest could produce again in the future. Not just good for nature, this innovative practice helped keep their finances out of debt, enabling them to do things like pay for the college education for the employees.
Then, Charles Hurwitz came along. When the "absentee owner" took over the lumber company, the forest went from a tree population of 2 million acres to 80,000.
The documentary is both informative, to say the least. But it's also inspiring. It tells the painful, yet wonderful story that humanity cannot simply do as it pleases when it comes to the environment. The main idea is this: we cannot treat our natural resources as if we are not interdependent; we need our natural environment as much as it needs us. Some of the most striking scenes in the film were shots of the homes of local residents literally wiped away due to flooding during a summer of torrential rainstorms. Why did this happen? Because logging roads and massive deforestation loosened the soil and created channels for the water to rapidly flow down.
One thing I truly appreciated was the amount of sound scientific data that was presented in regards to the loss of biodiversity. As opposed to just saying, "Cutting down trees is bad for the environment," the filmmakers informed us why it is bad, how those action effect the surrounding ecosystem, and the concerns they have in regards to how deforestation effects human kind. In these times of growing debate over the environment and whether or not it needs to be protected, we need scientific data to back things up. This documentary does a great job of providing the "sound science" that anti-environmentalists so often cry is missing.
The other side of this documentary covers the activism that fostered a great deal of social awareness and it brought the LP situation to some national attention. A local activist group called the Environmental Protection Information Center took on the legal battle against the Department of Forestry, as well as against Hurwitz. Outside groups such as Earth First! and the Sierra Club joined in on the struggle as well. These activist groups showed the importance of grassroots mobilization and non-violent protest in acquiring the preservation of natural landscapes.
All in all, this entire documentary brings together a call for the preservation of what we have left of nature. Activist Julia Butterfly summed things up perfectly, after climbing down from a two-year tree sit to prevent loggers from cutting down one of the forest's oldest trees: "…If we are going to have a beautiful and sustainable future for everyone, it's going to take everyone doing something. Everyone has something they can offer. Everyone has their symbolic tree to sit in and if they can find that within themselves, amazing things happen."
For more information, visit www.trilliumfilms.net.
|
|
|
|
