The Unforeseen
The other night at Hollywood Video, we rented ‘The Unforeseen’ on a complete whim. We hadn’t heard of it, we hadn’t Netflixed it, we just thought it looked interesting: a documentary about the fight between developers and environmentalists. Robert Redford was one of the producers. Armed with that information, we checked it out.
Documentaries can be very hit or miss. Some are amazing: The Fog of War, Why We Fight, MurderBall. Some serve an important purpose but you leave wanting more: Food Inc., Jesus Camp. And I know that there are some that are dreadful (I just can’t think of any off the top of my head!).
The Unforeseen falls under the category of ‘shockingly moving’.
The filming and techniques used were both impressive and effective: soft light, close up shots of nature, focusing on a person’s hands and then panning out, voice-overs, old footage becoming modern day footage, and moving, often uncomfortable interviews.
The film centers around the battle against development near Austin’s Barton Springs, a completely natural source of water (in Texas, no less!) sourced from an aquifer (an underground layer of water; in this case the source of water was as big as a lake). Barton Springs are America’s largest spring fed swimming holes and have/had a mystical, soothing presence to the residents of Austin-the springs were used as a way to reconvene with nature. The documentary shows the residents’ initial, glorious ‘win’ preventing development near the Springs. Unfortunately, this victory didn’t last long, as the movie explains. The federal government and a particular ‘grandfather clause’, a new governor (one guess!), and the Texas mindset of ‘my land is MY land’ quickly overturned the ruling.
Today, Barton Springs has become a polluted body of water that while not yet dangerous to swimmers, will be if extreme efforts and measures are not put into place.
The Unforeseen uses Barton Springs to illustrate the broader picture of development versus preservation and all of the factors that must be taken into account. Development is not a black or white issue: houses need to be built, developers want to make money, and government can play a distressing role.
As Robert Redford says in ‘The Unforeseen’, when it comes to development, there is an interest for a quick return on a short-term investment that will ultimately destroy something long-term. What’s left then? A scar, a memory?
Some of the most heartrending moments of the film were of an older farmer looking in all directions at the development springing up around him; the clip of Barton Springs in the 1980s compared with Barton Springs in 2004; and the interview of a child who had recently moved to Hutto, Texas and was excited about the empty lot of dirt beside him but acknowledged that it would soon be built up (but he wished it could stay empty forever).
“Growth is not the enemy: it is in the nature of that growth, the quality of it.”
You can read Save our Springs Alliance’s follow up to The Unforeseen here.
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