Out walking the dogs in the early morning I wondered whether those dark clouds might bring us a Texas gully-washer later in the day, I thought about the gully-washer in which Chris McCandless of "Into the Wild" lost his old 1980 Datsun. That was shot in Arizona and if you've ever worked on a movie set (I have), you know the likelihood of the production team waiting around for sufficient rain is pretty slim.
So they brought in a bunch of water tankers. How many hundreds of gallons of scarce water did they use?
That took me to the issue of rating movies environmentally. How much was destroyed, wasted, spent, thrown away, polluted in the average $50-$150 million movie? What are the environmental costs of special effects? Isn' t this something Hollywood, for all its environmental pieties, should be reporting? In the aggregate, has Hollywood now reached and surpassed Bhopal?
And the mind travels back to Walt McCandless, Chris's father who is so utterly uncomprehending when his son rejects a new car -- the old one is just fine.
Will we outgrow the greed-and-me generation fast enough to keep the world from drying up and/or drowning in our excesses?
