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On Nature Programming, the Anthropocene, and the Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2020

Lucas Hilderbrand Open the ORCID record for Lucas Hilderbrand [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

This response to Pooja Rangan’s book Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary considers the ways nature programs such as Planet Earth and Our Planet make the natural world newly visible yet imagine wildlife and ecosystems almost entirely separate from human contact or intervention, despite concurrent discourses of the Anthropocene and climate crisis.

Keywords

Planet EarthOur PlanetAnthropocenenature documentaryPooja RanganImmediations
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 2: Black Panther Special Issue , April 2020 , pp. 210 - 215
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2020

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References

1 Rangan, Pooja, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For the sake of sharing resources, I offer a number of references here that I found most insightful in teaching a new course on the environment and media. For humanities literature on centering postcolonial or racial critiques of the climate crisis, see Guha, Ramachandra, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000); Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222 and “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43.1 (2012): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gabrielle Hecht, “The African Anthropocene,” Aeon, February 6, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we; Yusoff, Kathryn, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Estes, Nick, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019)Google Scholar. On decolonizing or centering capitalism in the naming of this era, see Moore, Jason W., “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 595–630CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Davis, Heather and Todd, Zoe, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME 16.4 (2017): 761–80Google Scholar. On nature documentaries, see Vivanco, Luis, “Penguins Are Good to Think With: Wildlife Films, the Imaginary Shaping of Nature, and Environmental Politics,” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, eds. Rust, Stephen, Monani, Salma, and Cubbitt, Sean (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109–27Google Scholar. On “nature” as discourse, see Soper, Kate, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994Google Scholar). On the narratives we construct about the environment, see Cronon, William, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78.4 (1992): 1347–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On visual cultures of the climate crisis, see Dunaway, Finis, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Kaplan, E. Ann, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016Google Scholar); and Demos, T. J., Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and the Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017)Google Scholar. For an expansive overview of various environmental concepts, see Adamson, Joni, Gleason, William A., and Pellow, David N., eds., Keywords for Environmental Studies (New York: NYU Press, 2016Google Scholar). By and large, I have found the work grounded in science, history, and cultural studies more productive than the work coming out of (White) critical theory, literary studies, and cinema and media studies (my home discipline).

3 Examples of the activist mode include Food, Inc (Robert Kenner, United States, 2008), The 11th Hour (Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners, United States, 2007); Racing Extinction (Louie Psihoyos, United States, 2015), and This Changes Everything (Avi Lewis, United States, 2015). Perhaps the most empathic documentary exploring alternative consumption practices is Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (France, 2000).

4 Rangan, Immediations, 1.

5 Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation.”

6 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.”

7 Rangan works through and beyond Nichols, Bill’s foundational essay “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36. 3 (1983): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Advocacy documentaries, of course, are no less didactic or vococentric in their address to audiences.

9 Rangan raises the acclaimed film Leviathan (directed by Castaing-Taylor, Lucien and Paravel, Véréna, France, 2012Google Scholar) as one example, though I confess I was too bored to sit through the film in its entirety.

10 Rangan, Immediations, 8.

11 Rangan, Immediations, 185–90.

12 Rangan, Immediations, 177.

13 Rangan, Immediations, 177.

14 On the impact of media production, storage, and transmission, see James Glanz, “Power, Pollution, and the Internet,” New York Times, September 22, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html, and Sine, Kyle, “There Is No Carbon-Neutral Production: Cinema and the Anthropocene, Media Fields 13 (2018)Google Scholar, found at http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/there-is-no-carbon-neutral-pro/. On the impact of media technologies, see Grossman, Elizabeth, “Raw Materials: Where Bits, Bytes, and the Earth’s Crust Coincide,” High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health (Washington: Island Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

15 Basit Mahmood, “ ‘The Attenborough Effect’: 53% of People Report Using Less Plastic,” Metro, April 11 2019.https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/11/the-attenborough-effect-53-of-people-report-using-less-plastic-9156711/.

16 Gaines, Jane M. questions the efficacy of documentary films for social change in “Political Mimesis,” Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Gaines, and Renov, Michael (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 85Google Scholar.