Provender Journal, September-October 2007
Escape From Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream. Directed by Gregory Greene, produced by Dara Rowland.
$29.99
DVD Review
by Melody Carr
Director Gregory Greene and producer Dara Rowland have just released Escape from Suburbia, a sequel to the 2004 documentary End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream.
Escape from Suburbia continues the first movie's critique of the uncontrolled consumption of oil that fuels the American way of life. As the movie opens, television and film footage from the mid-20~ century show gleaming opulent cars zooming along vast visionary highways stretching into a future of endless increase and expansion. A narrator's voice heartily assures us, "no end to progress, now and in century 21!" Then the images fade away and slowly over the darkened screen these words by Rumi appear: "Sit. be still. and listen, for you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof."
And watching the words appear silently on the screen, I experienced a moment of vertigo, the sense that yes, this is the instant before the momentum of the great train of civilization hurls itself over the edge into an unknown future...
The film is showing us the moment when an American and industrial dream bump up against limits that our society has never imagined. Those endless vistas of dynamism and power seen in the footage of cars and in futuristic freeways are deeply embedded in our sense of personal and cultural freedom. This is a dream of life in which there will always be more land, more wealth, more energy. We are high on an energy fix that is about to end. Even George Bush is shown making his famous declaration, "America is addicted to oil!"
It is disturbing to contemplate what the movie points out: we may never see anything like I suburbia and the petroleum based mega-metropolises again. It's disturbing because the scope of the problem is so huge and we are running so short of time. How many millions of Americans (and other people!) live in places and work at jobs that depend on the use of their cars? What happens when we can't drive to our jobs, heat our houses, buy the food that now arrives so plentifully from all corners of the globe in every season? ! For so long it seemed our culture would provide technological means to give us whatever we wanted and needed from the material world. It's a great challenge to imagine living in a different world where environmental constraints limit our material circumstances. The film is asking us all, individually and collectively, what we plan to do about the coming challenges: how can we make a transition to lives that don't depend on plentiful oil supplies and cheap energy?
Writers and culture critics Richard Heinberg ("The Party's Over" and "Powerdown") James Howard Kunstler ("The Long Emergency", "The Geography of Nowhere"), Michael Ruppert (Crossing the Rubicon), and others appear in the film, detailing the inescapable evidence of our dwindling oil resources and the unsustainability of energy use in suburban and urban life. They outline the magnitude of shocks that will ensue, as there are no government plans in place or any real preparation to deal with the loss of the cheap and plentiful petroleum energy. Kunstler and Ruppert in particular emphasize that it is up to each of us to take personal action to prepare. Escape follows the stories of several people and community groups searching for answers to how to live more sustainabiy. At times I felt the film became a little scattered as it jumped back and forth through these stories, losing some focus in its efforts to cover and pull together a number of diverse themes simultaneously. A couple from Portland, Oregon, Jan and Carol Steinman, make the decision to move to an ecovillage in British Columbia. The eco-village is a "model demonstration sustainable village community rooted in social, ecological, and economic well being" (See http:/ /www.ourecovillage.org.) On the East Coast, Phil and Tom, a gay couple in New York City, speak of an increasing sense of crisis beginning with the events of 9/11 and their confrontation with the lack of resources to sustain the population of the city as oil runs out. Their response is to begin a transition to a more rural lifestyle and work with community supported agriculture. In contrast, Kate, in Toronto, believes that city and suburban life hold resources to enable them to become more sustainable and she becomes dedicated to helping create these changes. These personal odysseys depicted in the film are a starting point for change. They make the point that we each need to take a iong look at what is sustainable and not sustainable in our own lives. I found the stories often interesting, and I believe the choices made in them are important, but the movie didn't explore- them deeply enough to be satisfying to me.
The movie is much more successful when it zeroes in on the lack of planning of most government bodies. We see the reality of the looming change denied over and over, with footage of the failure of government officials to recognize the problem, and with the failure of local officials to deal with issues of sustainability in their community. This failure is wonderfully and graphically illustrated with animated scenes of Ronald Reagan as a giant Godzilla figure, roaring and ripping off the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed on the roof of the White House.
The most moving story of shortsightedness and political folly in the film is that of the South Central Gardens in Los Angeles. In the heart of the ghetto, fourteen acres were temporarily donated to the community as a garden, when plans for a projected city incinerator were scrapped. 350 families farmed the land, turning it into an oasis of greenery, flowers, and fruit for 13 years. But the temporary agreement to lend the land to the community came to an end when the city sold back the land to the original owner, who was suing. The farmers were served with an eviction notice. Without legal protection acknowledging the priority and value of community gardens, there was no recourse for them. Terrible scenes of their protests and the final moments of the garden are shown, with bulldozers ripping the garden plants from the ground and burying everything, emblematic of our skewed value system. In the final images we see the land reduced to torn earth, nothing alive remaining. (However, the farmers continue their struggle to bring food to the community and to find garden space, see http://www.southcentralfarmers.com).
The story that I felt offered the viewer the most hopeful and specific insights to issues of sustainability in the face of peak oil is that of Willits, a small community of 5,000 (14,000 including the surrounding area) in Northern California. The director of Escape from Suburbia, Gregory Greene, says "Willits appears to have been one of the first communities to not only recognize the coming end of a readily available and affordable oil supply, but to begin making serious plans for a post-oil economy." Residents and local officials in Willits started WELL, Willits Economic Localization, a membership organization that is building a local economy to produce the food, energy, and other essentials necessary to sustain the community. "The goal is to find creative methods to sustain and empower the local community while moving away from global (imported) resources - in essence, to 'localize' our community." (See http://www.willitseconomiciocalization.org/.) The city government and the chamber of commerce all belong to WELL, a refreshing communal cohesion. From the community members who spoke in the film it seems that there is little dissent from the focus on building a local sustainable economy, a hopeful model for other communities to learn from.
Escape from Suburbia is an interesting documentary and well worth seeing, though I think it is not as strong and coherent a film as End of Suburbia. Perhaps this is because it is easier to mount a powerful critique to a situation than to offer viable solutions and present them well. The movie's strength lies in creating awareness of how little we can depend on current social structure and governmental organizations to help us prepare. As Kunstler points out, the task is on each of us. The movie enables us to see more clearly that this is the eleventh hour: it's time to begin creating the foundations for a more sustainable life personally and in your community.
-- Melody Carr lives in Eugene, Oregon and has a passion for reading, writing, and sharing the ideas and information in good books, especially on literature, the environment, spirituality, creativity and healing.
