“Pity Earth’s Creatures” Edward Hoagland | “No” film by Pablo Larraín

“Pity Earth’s Creatures” By Edward Hoagland was published March 23, 2013
The author, Edward Hoagland is a longtime nature and travel writer, and the author of the forthcoming novel “Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse.”

Here are excerpts highlighted from his article:

Power to the people is a worldwide revolutionary slogan advancing democracy, but presupposes a more ancient meaning: the prehistoric conquest of every other vertebrate on earth.

There are precedents for our imperial decline but not, in written history, for climate alteration on the scale that’s looming or for gargantuan extinctions in forest and ocean — our global skin.

Kindle presents a lapful of world thought and literature on tap at a tap, but will the owners pore over it with wholehearted absorption, as book lovers used to do? And when cars drive themselves, will the operators lavish their leisure on the landscape or on a tablet in their hands?
But love is central to life, now and again overriding selfishness for a spell. Love, mercy, pity are vividly called for with respect to corals, songbirds, sea mammals, lofty trees and other majesties, not to mention endangered pleasures like eating clams and marveling at the starshine in the depthless heavens. Nature is undefended by the powers that be, having no vote or much innate appeal to the sort of “people people” who run for office. They don’t saunter (Thoreau’s favorite term) and gaze, turn off the motor and open the window when passing a pond to hear the spring peepers sing — won’t know if the frogs have all died from toxicities. They’ll jog on a treadmill for their heart’s health while scanning spreadsheets. It’s not just ponds being steamrollered for industry, but gazing itself being lost to Twitter. The attention span involved in formulating a menagerie out of cloud shapes in the sky while lax on one’s back in the grass has been eclipsed by what’s interesting on-screen 20 inches away…

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In response to his true and tragic view at what we humans have done, a woman commented on his Time’s article mentioning that rather than only honing in to the gloom, we could do a left turn by looking at the example the movie “No”, made in Chile demonstrates. In response to Pinochet’s oppressive regime, Pablo Larraín’s No dramatizes Chile’s Berlin Wall moment in 1988. Under international pressure to legitimize his government, but bathing in the support of a newly prosperous middle and upper-middle class and hugely confident of success, General Pinochet allowed a referendum on whether he would be allowed another eight years in office. This movie dramatizes the “No” campaign devised by young advertising executive René Saavedra, played by Gael García Bernal, who decided to stay away from angry political images and instead emphasize an upbeat, almost apolitical vision of happiness and the future.

http://www.takepart.com/no-movie