Interesting new documentary film doing the rounds by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney.  They were interviewed on ABC Radio's Counterpoint. Transcript and audio here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2006/1791367.htm   Also article about it at spiked: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2055/  

From the spiked review:

'I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that family smile, if you could measure stress. Then I put you with a family well off, or in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile and measure stress… Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor.’

These are the words of Mark Fenn, World Wide Fund for Nature’s American representative in southern Madagascar, arguing that poverty-stricken people are often happier and more content than rich people. This jaw-dropping example of the low horizons informing the work of many environmentalists is captured very well in a new documentary, Mine Your Own Business, by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney.

McAleer, a journalist from Northern Ireland, began to question his own environmentalist sympathies when posted to Romania by the Financial Times in 2000, especially when he investigated the campaign to prevent the opening of an opencast gold mine in the village of Rosia Montana in the Transylvanian mountains. I have also been to the village and my research on the proposed goldmine and the environmentalist opposition to it echoes many of the findings of McAleer’s film (see ‘If the gold mine doesn’t happen, our village will die’).

From the Counterpoint transcript, McAleer claims to be of the left:

Phelim McAleer: Yes, it's funny, some people have called this documentary, Mine Your Own Business, a right wing documentary, and I'm a liberal leftie journalist from Europe and I'm going...how can I be right wing? I go to the poorest places in the world and talk to the poorest people in those poorest places in the world. That's the most left wing thing to do. But anyway, some people have labelled it a right wing documentary, and if that's what it looks like I'm not going to argue with them. The Wall Street Journal called it 'Michael Moore but without the smug liberal hypocrisy' which...I hope people can come to see it. It's in Melbourne tonight and in Sydney and Perth and Hobart, and I hope people will come and make up their own mind. I just go around the world talking to the poorest people in the poorest places about what people are saying they think, and very often what they think and what they believe and what they feel is very different from what middle class foreigners are telling the rest of the world what they think.

The greenies' honeymoon has lasted more than two decades but is ending - yet there's a long way to go.

Barry

It really is time to take the gloves off against these misanthropes.

Looks like an interesting documentary,
 

Unfortunately it’s not scheduled for showing in Adelaide by the IPA. 

I suppose it won’t be shown on the biased public broadcaster the ABC (in Australia) but who knows - the issue of bias is now being more closely monitored and the green avalanche is (together with the Iraq coverage),  their weakest point of obvious bias. So it might get forced through as part of the new closer scrutiny to ensure some balance!  We will see, but I doubt it. 

Here is the directors’ statement;
 

I also like the mental image I get from this interview (on an ABC radio program no less) of that lefty Vanessa  Redgrave gone totally pseudo and dripping with her own gold jewelery; 

Michael Duffy: And I understand Vanessa Redgrave...I've read this somewhere, she's opposed to the mine as well.

Ann McElhinney: She is. Actually it's quite funny. She went to a film festival in Cluj, about three hours from the mine site, and dedicated a lifetime achievement award to the villagers, as she said, to the people who are opposed to the mine, as she thought. But there's a great photograph of her, it's just priceless, with her opposing the gold mine and she is resplendent, wearing a wonderful glistening gold necklace which I'm sure is 18-carot and worth a few thousand, and it's just a beautiful image, a fantastic image of exactly where her head's at.

Priceless is right! 

the current mood of the times in the Beltway, which are about as dazed and miserablist-apocalyptophile as one can imagine.