The Unforeseen (2007)

the audience applauded

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This documentary centers around the commercial development of the land around Austin, Texas, particularly Barton Springs, a natural spring that locals have used for recreation for years. The future of the aquifer beneath, which waters cities like San Antonio as well as Austin, is also problematic. Whence the water for the sprinklers on the golf course? Where does the weed killer from all those lawns settle? We hear the guy, Gary Bradley, who sounds reasonable enough, nobody's notion of a greedy, reckless money monger, who bought up the land and intended to put a planned housing development on it -- almost identical new houses, golf course, a green belt right out of Lewis Mumford, and the rest. It was opposed by Austin's considerable community of activists and was stymied -- after Bradley had put money "up front" for sewers and some infrastructure -- stymied by limitations on the number of houses he could build on the land. He then teamed up with a notorious mining outfit that hired a lobbyist. The result, however one wants to twist it, was a victory for the developers. There is a Wal-Mart Supercenter in their future."Land developer." That's an interesting concept. A land developer is someone like Bradley who buys a great area of land then chops it up into smaller parcels and sells them at a profit. In that sense, a butcher is a "cow developer." Robert Redford reminisces about the summers he spent at Barton Springs as a boy. Willie Nelson is around to make a few comments. Bradley is articulate and intelligent and frustrated. The lobbyist is smooth and patient, musing on his work as he paints and builds model warplanes. But the most articulate commentator is a redneck farmer whose corn field are disappearing, engulfed by urban sprawl. "All houses," he says. "Ain't no more farms. Farmin' is out. . . . What they gonna eat when there's no more farms? That's what I want to know." He echoes the Reverend Thomas Malthus who saw this dilemma coming two hundred years ago.Malthus is thought of as discredited because his predictions didn't materialize as soon as expected. (The industrial revolution came as a surprise.) But the proposition remains the same. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man" The environmentalists we see, some of whom sound a little kooky, have a point when they argue that developers think in terms of "cost" and others think of "value." We can measure and, to some extent, like Bradley, predict how many dollars we may make in profit or lose by taking the wrong chance. But one of the environmentalists states that she is turned off by golf courses because they are too perfect, too manicured, an artifact, but not God's artifact. What is the dollar value of, say, the Grand Canyon? Why not build forests of motels, souvenir shops, and fast food places along both its rims? And lush gated communities at the Sonoran bottom? The value may be completely lost, sold down the river, but think of the profit.The environmentalists will lose in the long run if things don't change dramatically -- and soon. In the last forty years the population of the United States has grown from 200M to more than 320M. The earth's population in 1950 was about 2B. Today it's more than 6B. By 2050 it will approach 12B. It's a familiar trajectory to anyone who's studied population irruptions and the crashes that follow, yet the Chinese seem to be the only nation on earth that recognizes the problem, let alone tries to do anything about it. I said "soon" before because there is a lag time of about two generations between doing something about the problem and realizing the effect. In other words, if you wait until the dimensions of the problem are self evident, it may be too late.The film is slanted towards this point of view without attacking the explosion of human beings directly. I'm not sure the producers themselves, including Robert Redford, understand where the root of the problem lies. Making money the way Gary Bradley has is, as Redford points out more than once, making short-term profits at the expense of long-term values. But he also notes that the problem goes beyond Barton Springs. The point is not merely to save the springs and the Austin countryside from developers. It's that we must save the earth from ourselves.There's a challenge for environmentalists and developers both, and neither seems ready to meet it. It's not always easy to interpret Malthus. ("Improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections" may be a reference to abortion.) He suggested that if we didn't check our appetites for reproduction, nature would, in the form of "vice" and "misery." Vice, left undefined, probably means crime. Misery I think most ethologists would define as stress-related disorders like ulcers or the complete breakdown of social organization, like that found in Calhoun's "behavioral sinks." Judging from this movie, the way it circumscribes itself, our capacity for over-reproduction is only exceeded by our capacity for denial. Pretty gloomy stuff. I guess that's why Malthus's notion is called the dismal theorem.

Whether you support unfettered property rights on the one hand or a government's exercise of power to defend the common good on the other hand, this film will let you down. On the left, it's often unenlightening clap trap, especially when you notice the horribly sentimental background music. On the right, it points out the selfishness of those claiming to be the real Americans when they are mostly just "real loud" Americans. Someone should tell those folks that common sense says you don't shite where you eat, but as long as they're taking cash to the bank they'll apparently just do their business wherever they please. These people probably know that everything has consequences, but they plan for the other guy to bear those consequences, a guaranteed formula for social meltdown.The only admirable figures in the film were a wizened old farmer and a young boy in a new suburb. Those two seemed to possess a clarity of thought singularly missing from the property developers on one side and the ecological "Nimbys" on the other. It was nice, though, to see the late Texas governor Ann Richards again, certainly a far more lucid politician than the person who replaced her.I think neither side was well depicted in this film of the ongoing battle between personal vs. social, private vs. public. Ultimately, The Unforeseen is, unfortunately, a lightweight film on a very serious subject.

'The Unforeseen' considers the issue of land developers as a source of eco-disaster. These are the guys who come in, acquire chunks of property, subdivide them, establish access to services, water, electricity, roads, and so on, and build houses for people to live in. As a documentary this one, for which Robert Redford is an executive producer (with cultish filmmaker Terrence Malick) and also a meandering talking head, provides a worthwhile new angle, with some pungent characters and some interesting personal stories. Unfortunately this lacks some of the scope and perspective of other ecology-related documentaries and seems to get sidetracked more than once. It has a certain built-in balance since one of its main characters is a failed developer whose tears evoke sympathy. But in view of the magnitude of the issues involved, it would seem that those who herald 'The Unforeseen' as superior to a film of the scope and urgency of Davis Guggenheim's 'An Inconvenient Truth' have gone a bit overboard.Are developers bad? Environmentalists seem to think so. Some radicals even just set fire to a row of "green" McMansions under construction in the state of Washington. Frontier-oriented advocates of traditional free capitalism are emphatically in the opposite camp. To them, anything that enables people to exploit and own the land is good. Development is the essence of American free enterprise, a God-given right, what we're here for. Getting rich doing it is the essential American dream.. And so is owning your own little house with its garage and its lawn and its picket fence. Real estate people, and this film, give scant consideration to the issue of indigenous peoples and their relationship to the land.What this film does consider is how developers habitually disregard considerations of proper land use and future degradation, particularly of water resources. Laura Dunn's researches focus on Austin, Texas, a partial childhood home of Robert Redford (he tells us), a college town, a cultural and music center (Willie Nelson speaks for that) and a community whose obvious liberal, preservationist tendencies led its citizens to lock horns with developers in the 1980's, when growth opportunities arose for the appealing, pleasant city and its environs. At the center of the story is a developer named Gary Bradley, whose 4,000-acre Circle C Ranch luxury housing development--conceived as far back as 1980--was set to derail Barton Springs, a large creek near the city linked to the major aquifer of the region. An anti-Bradley Austin website called "Make Gary Pay" calls him "a consummate hustler" and documents how for close to thirty years he has waged war on the city of Austin in cooperation with lobbyists and Good Old Boys of the Texas state legislature.Central to the citizens' and environmentalists' objection to Bradley's project is its indifference to and damage to the regional aquifer. Wikipedia defines an aquifer as "an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, silt, or clay) from which groundwater can be usefully extracted using a water well." Describing residential land development early in the film, Bradley clearly sees big hunks of land simply as a blank canvas on which the creative real estate guy can draw a lovely new picture. He overlooks what's underneath that canvas--such as aquifers. Another factor the film reveals is that development exhausts energy sources and removes land from agricultural use.Bradley's voice, rather surprisingly, tends to dominate the film. We learn how he met with consolidated civic objections to his project when it came up for city approval. But later through the efforts of a lobbyist, whose voice we hear, his face sinisterly hidden as he methodically assembles a model bomber plane, a state law protecting projects like Bradley's--allowing them to override new laws and be subject only to ones in effect when they began (it's called "grandfathering") was vetoed in the early 1990's by the then governor Ann Richards, who had a sympathetic ear for environmental activists. But in 1995 George W. Bush became governor and the law was reinstated. And then around the same time Bradley came a cropper through debts he couldn't pay off and lost everything. He fell afoul of the late 1980's-early1990's loan company collapses. His attempt to file bankruptcy was finally defeated just a couple of years ago--right when his mother died, he tells the camera, tears streaming down his face. In fact, he's still a player and a thorn in the side of Austin.What's the lesson of all this? That real estate developers are foolish? Bradley admits in an audio of the bankruptcy trial that he was miserable at accounting. But not all developers are, though they may be prone to grandiosity--and an excessive sense of entitlement. As we see, they think they should be compensated when new laws lessen the profits they originally expected from a given piece of land. They don't all try to launch a major development right in the midst of a community as liberal and green-activist as Austin, Texas.Okay, if putting a self-serving and rapacious capitalist in charge of land development, though American as apple pie, is not a foresighted approach, what are the alternatives? Unfortunately Dunn's film doesn't provide strong enough voices in this area. We get to see concerted action of citizens both for and against development: the protectionists are impassioned; the free enterprise/property rights advocates are strident flag-wavers. But the voices for an alternative are feeble. Redford talks about how things were nicer in the past, quieter, more wholesome. 'Rolling Stone' essayist William Greider refers to the idea of reworking existing housing to accommodate new populations as a better way, but the idea's too vague. Nor does the Wendell Berry poem, "The Unforeseen" contribute more than a ringing tone of ruefulness. What we need is analysis, scope, and plans.

This film premiered at Austin's SXSW Film Festival after its initial showing a few months ago at Sundance. The Unforeseen is one of the most cinematically beautiful documentaries to appear in a long time. There are stunning sequences of Barton Springs. One could certainly feel the influence of producers Robert Redford (particularly A River Runs Through It) and Terrence Malick. The nature shots were spectacular. The story that is told is particularly powerful to those who know and love Austin, but the broader conflicts between land development and environmental protection are universal and can be well-understood, although perhaps in a less personal way, by those who have never visited Austin.While the film is clearly takes a pro-environmental stand, it is not a one-sided polemical. It presents a sympathetic and fair portrait of land developer Gary Bradley. It lets him tell his story without making him out to be a cruel unfeeling villain. It presents the history in a nuanced light that is often missing from documentary film-making. The film includes many conflicting voices and let's the audience make its own decisions. This type of film reflects the best standards of journalistic rather ideological Michael Moore-style manipulative film-making. It presents a complicated conflict of values in a way that both takes a stand without mocking those they disagree with. While some of the narrative seems a little self-righteous at times, and the title (taken from a poem used in the film) seems a little confusing and unclear, overall, the film is an excellent lesson in history and politics. I hope that it gets wide distribution, because it is a debate that the American public needs to engage over what trade offs Americans are willing to make between the environment and development. How much of our natural beauty are we willing to give up to accommodate modernity?