Tag Archives: pollution

The Deepwater Horizon Film Reminds us That Hollywood is Still a Propaganda Machine

I’m kinda furious about this:

When first watching the trailer, I tried to remind myself that it was just a movie.

But it’s never just a movie, is it?

Given enough time, I’m sure I could list hundreds of films that changed my perspective on the world. The Hours was the first time I felt challenged on my once very black-and-white perspective on LGBT rights. Hotel Rwandadespite being called “revisionist junk” by then UN peacekeeper/now senator Romeo Dallaire, was the first movie to open my eyes to the role of politics in preventing, or allowing, genocide and devastation. There are just so many movies that moved me to reconsider my stance or opinion by challenging me to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Movies do affect us, often more than we’d like to admit. Heck, that’s exactly why we talk so much about representation in movies here on the blog.

So I am a movie fan who believes that movies impact their viewers. That’s why I’m furious that there is about to be a major blockbuster that will hero-wash “the worst oil spill in U.S. History” a spill that polluted the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days and leaked approximately 3.19 million barrels of oil. Continue reading

This is What Environmental Racism Looks Like

Environmental racism was one of the most surprising concepts I encountered during my undergrad. It had just never occurred to me that where and how we polluted our environment would be intentionally arranged to affect some racial communities more than others.

In the States there have been several famous instances of environmental racism.

After the Second World War, for example, Chicago kindly provided African American veterans the opportunity to live in a housing community built atop an abandoned landfill. After serving their country and surviving the war these veterans came home to Altgeld Gardens Homes, a community that would have significantly high cancer rates because of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Then, in the 1970s and 80s, there was the Warren County PBC Landfill case, when the state of North Carolina decided to bury soil that had been contaminated with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls in Warren Country, a community with primarily black residents and a much lower income rate than the rest of the state.

With the very likely possibility of their drinking water being contaminated by the toxic material, residents, civil rights groups, environmental leaders, and clergymen all joined together to protest the state’s decision…

…and then got arrested.

Continue reading

Nestlé and BC Water: Why the Problem is Much Bigger than “Not Charging Enough”

When British Columbia residents heard that Nestlé was only being charged $2.25 per million litres to bottle up our water and sell it back to us, we were furious.

I, for one, wanted to do what this panda is doing.

We weren’t just angry because Nestlé has a terribly track record in their dealings with developing nations.

We weren’t just angry because B.C. is “renting out” access to our water for far less than other provinces.

We were angry because water is a part of B.C. culture. Continue reading

Had It With Litter? [The Power Is Yours!]

You gotta get on my level before we get things started. Roughly this time last year I wrote one of my shortest Shame Days [feature to reappear in good time, never fear] ever, the gist of it being that tossing your cigarette butts on the ground is unconscionable. Those who perpetrate the act themselves stick to the defence that “doing otherwise is inconvenient” and if you don’t think that’s the pettiest, shallowest, most irresponsible front then you should probably stop reading this now.

No, I don’t have patience for any of that, or the myriad of other excuses that smokers tend to put up-

Continue reading

Cool It: A Documentary Review

So I watched this documentary last night:


Before watching Cool It I expected it to be just like Expelled, which, in my opinion, had a very strong right wing agenda I don’t want to imply that everything “right-wing” is innately propaganda, or that the left isn’t just as capable of creating its own propaganda, but I disliked Expelled‘s attempt to undermine evolution by framing all creationists as victims. So I wasn’t really watching this film with much of an open mind, but by the end was actually impressed. Just a heads up, from this point on there are spoilers galore. Continue reading

Shame Day: Cigarette Butts

I wrote about this a long time ago on a vastly inferior blog, and I’m going to state it again here in the first sentence of this post: I don’t want to see people throwing their cigarette butts on the ground.

Two weeks ago the image below popped up on imgur, and being pretty interested in where this conversation could go I clicked to see what the discussion was on reddit.

A good portion consisted of people agreeing that having cigarette butts all over the ground is unsightly, disgusting, and can have a toxic environmental impact. On the other side, however, were smokers complaining that things just aren’t that easy. Continue reading