Who’s Really in the Way of Solving Global Poverty?

I guess this will surprise a lot of folks who haven’t visited here, but this doesn’t surprise me a bit.

Here’s the narrative from a movie trailer you really should see from a movie that deserves wide distribution (bracketed text is visual only):

Narrator: A dangerous force is denying the dreams of the world’s poorest people. There is a powerful group telling the world’s poor how to work, how to live, and even how to think.

[The truth may be inconvenient. But lies can be dangerous. And the enemy isn’t who you think.]

Narrator: The first film that takes you to the dark side of the environmental movement.

Enviro critic: The environmentalists really are against growth. They think that what people need is to keep in their traditional ways of life. They should be kept as happy peasants.

[People worlds apart. With something in common.]

Town resident: I’m not asking for much. Just a normal job.

[Hope.]

[Only one thing stands in their way.]

Narrator: Powerful environmental groups have descended on impoverished villages. Around the world, small towns teeter on the verge of economic extinction.

Town resident: I know what I need. I need a job, work.

Narrator: Often a village’s best hope is a new, environmentally friendly mine that would bring jobs, development, and many of the basic human necessities that Westerners take for granted. But environmental lobbyists are campaigning to stop the (Rosia Montana, Romania) mine. They claim it would destroy a town’s charming way of life.

Town resident (paraphrase): What’s charming about this lifestyle?

[Poverty is not charming.]

Resident: The people who are against the project, they are rich people. They are not here, like us. We have to eat, we need jobs, and we have to work.

Narrator: A continent away, activists use the same arguments.

Enviro activist: I think the quaintness of Fort Dauphin (Madagascar), the small-town feeling, will certainly change.

Town resident: But people in Fort Dauphin are very poor.

Enviro activist: How do we perceive what is rich and what is poor, who is rich and who is poor? (showing off his boat) I bought this for about $35,000, which was a good price, and it came with everything.

Narrator: Western environmental lobbyists claim to represent the interests of the world’s poorest people.

Enviro critic: Well I don’t think they care about the poor. They’re the biggest enemies of the poor.

Narrator: What if everything you thought about the environmental movement was wrong?

Enviro critic: They really don’t like people.

Previous BizzyBlog posts (here, for starters) have alluded to how the worldwide enviro movement excuses its desire to keep the world’s poor in their place, and how a surprising number of them believe that the world’s population must be drastically reduced (here and here).

More background from the “Mine Your Own Business” press kit (PDF; bold is mine):

(Irish film maker Phelim) McAleer, a former Financial Times correspondent in Eastern Europe, starts his journey in Rosia Montana, a Romanian mining village where foreign environmental activists are opposing the construction of a high tech gold mine that many villagers see as their last hope of survival.

McAleer exposes the exaggerations and misleading claims of the foreign environmentalists opposed to the development. They explain how people in the village don’t want prosperity but prefer the simple peasant life where they are “poor but happy.”

McAleer interviews the villagers who tell a very different story as they speak about their desire for development that will bring renewed prosperity to their village and clean up the hundreds of years of environmentally unfriendly mining projects.

“Mine Your Own Business is the first documentary to take a hard look at the environmental movement,” said McAleer. “And what we found was not pretty. Activists believe that people in remote areas are ‘poor but happy.’ They think that development will spoil their idyllic rural existence. But I’ve been there, and poverty is neither charming nor quaint, nor is it a lifestyle choice.”

….. Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil, and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and having what we have. We want them to stay as ‘traditional peasants’ forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.

Mine Your Own Business will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion-the religion of environmentalism.

This is sooooooo long overdue. And do you really think I care that a mining company funded it? Don’t waste my time with that; tell me where they are factually wrong — if you can.

Enviros must be forced to argue their case for continuing world poverty as the desirable status quo on its alleged “merits” — because that IS what they want. Good luck, folks.