end_of_suburbia (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} end_of_suburbia) wrote,@ 2006-08-08 20:41:00 |
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Where are the women?
One of the most common questions that Greg and I are asked is,
"Where are the women in your documentary?" It's a reasonable
question, considering that most of the women appearing in The End
of Suburbia show up wearing an apron in one of the corny
propaganda films we that included. Not one of the interview clips
features a woman. There are a couple reasons for this.
First of all, a good number of our interviewees are people with
vast experience in the oil business. The fact that they have
accumulated so much experience means that they are elders. And being
elders, they got their start in the business at a time when it was
dominated by men. And as it turns out, at the time we shot the doc,
the most vocal individuals in the peak oil "movement" happened to be
male.
When we pitched the idea for The End of Suburbia to a
few executive producers and documentary buyers, they weren't too
enthusiastic about a program that spent over an hour delivering bad
news without offering a big salvation package to neatly wrap it up at
the end. One network buyer suggested that we would have a difficult
time selling our documentary because the people who acquire
programming for the networks live in suburbia, and certainly
they didn't want to hear that their lifestyle was in danger. The end
result was that The End of Suburbia was funded by this thing
that I found in my wallet:
As such, we were limited by our budget (that budget being the credit-limit
on my card) and weren't able to travel to all the places we would have liked.
It would have been great to talk to new urbanist Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
but we just didn't have the funds to travel to Florida. Ironically, writer Jane
Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Dark Age Ahead)
lived within an hour of us, but couldn't be reached while we were shooting.
Those who aren't satisfied with this explanation will hopefully be happy to
hear that Greg Greene's sequel Escape from Suburbia will include
more diversity than The End ever could. When it comes to solutions
to our sustainability problems, it seems that there are more women than men
involved for some reason. Draw your own conclusions, but based on my
personal experience there seems to be a recurring theme: Let the men deal
with the problems, while the women come up with the solutions.
While we're on the subject of women and oil depletion, here's a thoughtful blog
entry that you might enjoy: Peak Oil for Women, and the Men who love them
Barry
One of the most common questions that Greg and I are asked is,
"Where are the women in your documentary?" It's a reasonable
question, considering that most of the women appearing in The End
of Suburbia show up wearing an apron in one of the corny
propaganda films we that included. Not one of the interview clips
features a woman. There are a couple reasons for this.
First of all, a good number of our interviewees are people with
vast experience in the oil business. The fact that they have
accumulated so much experience means that they are elders. And being
elders, they got their start in the business at a time when it was
dominated by men. And as it turns out, at the time we shot the doc,
the most vocal individuals in the peak oil "movement" happened to be
male.
When we pitched the idea for The End of Suburbia to a
few executive producers and documentary buyers, they weren't too
enthusiastic about a program that spent over an hour delivering bad
news without offering a big salvation package to neatly wrap it up at
the end. One network buyer suggested that we would have a difficult
time selling our documentary because the people who acquire
programming for the networks live in suburbia, and certainly
they didn't want to hear that their lifestyle was in danger. The end
result was that The End of Suburbia was funded by this thing
that I found in my wallet:
As such, we were limited by our budget (that budget being the credit-limit
on my card) and weren't able to travel to all the places we would have liked.
It would have been great to talk to new urbanist Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
but we just didn't have the funds to travel to Florida. Ironically, writer Jane
Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Dark Age Ahead)
lived within an hour of us, but couldn't be reached while we were shooting.
Those who aren't satisfied with this explanation will hopefully be happy to
hear that Greg Greene's sequel Escape from Suburbia will include
more diversity than The End ever could. When it comes to solutions
to our sustainability problems, it seems that there are more women than men
involved for some reason. Draw your own conclusions, but based on my
personal experience there seems to be a recurring theme: Let the men deal
with the problems, while the women come up with the solutions.
While we're on the subject of women and oil depletion, here's a thoughtful blog
entry that you might enjoy: Peak Oil for Women, and the Men who love them
Barry
