BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
The distance between the communities "defended" by environmentalists against development and the communities themselves is often large, both philosophically and literally. Filmmakers and journalists, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have made a documentary that highlights these environmental battles and the exaggerations, fibs, and sometimes outright lies that keep some of the world's poorest cultures from developing. "Mine Your Own Business" is an entertaining, moving and sometimes humorous look at a side of the environmental movement we don't often see - the dark side.
McAleer traveled to Rosia Montana, Romania several years ago to cover a story for the Financial Times - the story of Toronto-based mining company Gabriel Resources forcing people from their homes, planning an environmentally destructive mine, and ruining the pristine countryside of that remote Romanian village, all against the wishes of its residents. Only, when he got to Rosia Montana, he found a different story. "I pretty much found that everything the environmentalists were saying was either false, exaggerated, or just a plain lie," McAleer said in a telephone interview Monday.
For more of my bloggage re Mine Your Own Business, click here.
Additional media and blog coverage: Mine Your Own Business Opens in Washington The neo-communist environmental lobby have tried to ban it in Romania, by threatening cinemas that show it: how ironic that it should be today, on what would have been Nicolae Ceausescu's 89th birthday, that Romanians are once again being told what they can and cannot watch.
More Inconvenient Truths About Environmentalism
Frayda Levy, president of the New York-based Moving Picture Institute, and MPI executive director Rob Pfaltzgraff write that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth "does not tell the whole truth about the environmental movement, and students should not be taught that it does." They suggest that students shown Gore's film also be shown Mine Your Own Business, so they know that "much of Western environmentalism is hostile to people living in underdeveloped parts of the world."
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