"A Fierce Green Fire" An Extremely Biased And One-sided American Master

Trigger

Just watched “AMERICAN MASTERS/A Fierce Green Fire” by PBS (Aired: 04/22/2014 Expires: in 9 Days (6/4/14). Asked many times before: Why do these PBS movies expire so early?)

Here is the blurb (emphasis added):

“American Masters: A Fierce Green Fire is the first big-picture exploration of the environmental movement, spanning 50 years of activism. Chronicling the largest movement of the 20th century, the film tells vivid stories about people fighting – and succeeding – against the odds, from the Grand Canyon to Love Canal, from the oceans to the Amazon. A film by Academy Award-nominee Mark Kitchell.”

Extremely Biased And One-Sided Story

This film probably covers most of the well known highlights of environmentalism and the organisations and people involved in it. This film could be considered propaganda or self-congratulatory. It is an ideological narrative divorced from inconvenient facts.

The film is full of interviews of at least of two dozen or so activists etc., but it does not show one interview of a critical or contrarian view. See e.g. Patrick Moore.

The Love Canal Touchstone

Of course, this story features prominently in this film.

However, that this tragic event was almost entirely caused by government entities (like Niagara City, the board of education of that city and so on) was not mentioned at all in this film. The film does not mention that the toxic waste content of the former dump was well known to government entities since 1953 when they purchased love canal. Apparently, the chemical company (Hooker Chemical Company) involved disposed of its waste in way that was legal at the time; followed accepted best practices of the time; and it was approved by government. Was not Niagara Falls in those days (1950s) “one of the capitals of the world’s chemical industry”?

From 1953 onwards, Niagara City built schools and kindergartens on the dump site despite the fact that the chemicals were released and disturbed. It is surprising that it took until the second half of 1970s before the scandal became notorious. In 1957, the chemical company even warned the board of education that their development plans are hazardous and irresponsible. The company even tried to prevent the selling of the land to developers in the late 1950s.

I will not go into details here as they are well documented e.g. article on Wikipedia and by a nine page article “Love Canal/The Truth Seeps Out” published in 1981 by Reason Magazine. It is astonishing that this American Master disregarded this information and misleads the audience. If you read in particular the latter article you will find out that there is a lot more to the story like a hapless chemical company that would not sue journalist Michael Brown’s book “Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals ” for libel (As an aside: Surprisingly, there is no article on this book on Wikipedia nor does the above Wikipedia article on Love Canal have much to say about this book. There is also no article on Wikipedia about this journalist.).

To Be Continued

I am sure more could be said about the other so called touchstones of environmentalism portrayed in this film, but I do not have the time for further research at the moment.